Count Me In

The flyer had been taped to the band-room door since Monday, and Marisol Vega had walked past it four times pretending she couldn't read.

She could read it fine. SPRING SHOWCASE — DUO DIVISION. ORIGINAL SONG. ONE PERFORMANCE. SIGN-UPS CLOSE FRIDAY 3PM. Underneath, in Mr. Okafor's small dry hand, somebody had added: Pairs drawn at random. No, you can't pick. Yes, that's the point.

The point, Marisol thought, was cruelty dressed up as fairness.

She had songs. That was the thing nobody believed, because she carried them around inside her where no one could check. She had a whole notebook gone soft at the corners, lyrics stacked three deep on a page, melodies she hummed under her breath on the bus until the words found the shape of the tune. She heard finished things. She heard the bridge before she had the verse. What she did not have — what she had never once in sixteen years managed to have — was a single instrument that would do what her head told it to. She'd quit piano at nine. She'd quit guitar at twelve, with two calluses and a chord chart she couldn't make her fingers obey. Her hands betrayed her every time. The song would be perfect right up until she tried to play it, and then it came out of the real world bent and wrong, a beautiful thing dragged through a fence.

So she wrote, and she didn't perform, and the songs stayed inside, which was its own kind of held breath.

She signed the sheet at 2:58 on Friday because she was tired of being a person who almost did things.

Then she went home and didn't sleep.

The drawing was Monday, before first bell, in the band room that smelled like valve oil and old carpet and the inside of a trumpet case. Mr. Okafor had a coffee can full of folded paper and the expression of a man who had been doing this for thirty years and had stopped expecting to be thanked.

"Twelve of you signed up," he said. "Six duos. I draw two names, those two are a pair, no trades, no appeals, no my-mom-emailed-you." He shook the can. "If you wanted to choose your partner you should have entered a different competition."

He drew. He read names. Pairs peeled off to the corners of the room — a flute and a girl with a ukulele, two boys who were already friends and groaned like it had ruined something. Marisol stood near the cymbal racks with her arms crossed and her notebook against her chest like a breastplate, and she waited, and she told herself it didn't matter who, because whoever it was, they'd play and she'd write and that was a trade she could live with.

"Marisol Vega," Okafor read.

She lifted her chin.

He unfolded the second slip without ceremony, the way you'd read a grocery list. "And Dominic Reyes."

The room kept moving. The flute girl laughed at something. A locker banged. For Marisol the whole place went underwater and very far away, and the only thing in it with any clarity at all was the back of a head three rows over — dark hair, a drummer's loose shoulders, a kid sitting behind a practice pad with sticks already in his hands because of course he'd been warming up, of course, he was always already working — turning toward her now, slow, like he'd heard wrong.

Dominic Reyes.

She watched it land on him. She watched his face do the exact thing hers must be doing — the small private collapse, the no, the recalculation. He didn't look surprised, was the thing. He looked like a man confirming a bill he'd been dreading.

"Mr. Okafor," he said, and his voice was very even. "Can I —"

"No trades."

"I wasn't going to ask for a trade." He set the sticks down on the pad, soundless, controlled. "I was going to ask how long we have."

Okafor almost smiled, because Dominic Reyes always knew the right question; that was his whole reputation. "Showcase is three weeks Friday. You write it, you finish it, you perform it. One song. Five minutes, hard cap." He looked at the two of them over his glasses, and something flickered there, because Okafor had been at this school a long time and he knew exactly who these two were to each other, even if he'd never say so. "Original. Both names on it. That means both of you in it."

"Both of us in it," Dominic repeated, like he was reading a sentence in a language he spoke but disliked.

"Figure it out," Okafor said, which was the closest that man ever came to good luck, and he picked up his coffee can and went to draw the last pair.

They got a practice room. There was no avoiding it. You couldn't write a song across a hallway.

It was the small one at the end of the music wing, barely bigger than a closet — an upright piano with three dead keys, a kit shoved against the wall, a single window the size of a textbook that looked out on the loading dock. Dominic got there first. Of course he did. When Marisol came in he was already behind the kit, not playing, just sitting, turning a stick over his knuckles in a slow practiced roll, and he didn't look up.

She sat on the piano bench. As far from him as the room allowed, which was four feet.

"So," she said.

"So."

The silence had weight. It had two years in it.

"I'll write it," she said. "You play it. You can play anything, everybody knows that, it's the only thing anybody knows about you. I'll bring you something finished and you'll —"

"No."

She stopped.

"That's not how it works." He still wasn't looking at her. The stick rolled across his knuckles, paused, rolled back. "You bring me a melody, I'll learn it in ten minutes and it'll be perfect and it'll be dead, and we'll lose. I don't write. I never write. I play what's in front of me." Now he looked up, and his eyes were flat and tired and not unkind, which was somehow worse than cruelty. "You're the one with the songs. Everybody knows that about you too. So write one. I'll keep it standing up."

It was the most generous thing he'd ever said to her and she hated him for it.

"Fine," she said. "Hand me a guitar."

He looked at her hands. He didn't say anything about her hands. That was its own little knife, because he remembered — she could see that he remembered — the last time he'd watched her try to play in front of people, and the kindness of his not mentioning it was unbearable.

"There's no guitar in here," he said. "There's a piano. Three keys are dead." He named them without checking. "F-sharp above middle C, the A below it, the high C. Work around them or don't use them."

"How do you know that off the top of your —"

"Because I've been in this room before." He set the stick down. "Sing me something."

"What?"

"You said you have songs. I can't see inside your head, Vega. Sing me one. Anything. Eight bars."

And there it was — the thing she dreaded more than the dead keys, more than the deadline, more than three weeks in a closet with Dominic Reyes. She'd have to open her mouth and let one of them out, raw, with no instrument to hide behind, in front of the one person at this school who would hear exactly how good it was and exactly how badly she'd never be able to play it.

She almost didn't.

Then she thought about being a person who almost did things, and she closed her eyes, because she couldn't do it with his face right there, and she sang.

It was a fragment she'd had for months, no chorus yet, just a verse and the bones of a melody — something about a house with the lights on and nobody home, a line she'd written on the bus and never been able to finish because she couldn't find the chord that the words wanted to fall into. She sang it small, the way she sang it to herself, and her voice wasn't trained but it was true, and when she got to the end of the eight bars she stopped, and the room was so quiet she could hear the loading dock outside.

She opened her eyes.

Dominic was not turning a stick over his knuckles anymore.

He was looking at her the way you look at a thing you didn't know was in the room. And then — before she could brace, before she could put the breastplate back up — he reached out one hand to the kit and started to play. Not the kit, really. Just the rim of the snare, soft, with his fingertips, and the hi-hat with his foot, barely, a pulse so quiet it was almost a heartbeat — and it was under her melody, it was holding the exact shape of the thing she'd just sung, it had found the place where the song breathed and it was breathing with her.

"Again," he said. "From the top. Same thing."

She sang it again.

This time when she got to the line that had no home — and nobody's home, and the porch light's on — he moved his foot and the pulse opened up underneath her, just slightly, just enough, and her voice fell into the space he'd made like water finding the low ground, and the melody she'd been carrying around for months unbroken, unfinishable, the thing she could never get out of her own head into the real world without dragging it through a fence —

— landed.

It landed clean. It landed the way it sounded inside her. For the first time in her entire life a song left her head and arrived in a room exactly as good as it had been when it was only hers, and the reason it arrived intact was that Dominic Reyes, who meant none of it, who'd told her flat-out he played what was in front of him and felt nothing about any of it, had built a floor under her without being asked and without, apparently, having to think about it at all.

She stopped singing. Her heart was going.

He took his foot off the hi-hat. The room rang and then went still.

Neither of them said anything for a second, and the second was awful, because both of them had felt it — there was no pretending in a room that small — both of them had felt the click, the uncanny ease of it, the way her words had snapped into his time like they'd been cut from the same cloth. It was the best either of them had sounded in their lives and they both knew it and they were both furious about it.

"Okay," she said finally. Carefully. "That worked."

"Yeah."

"That worked really well."

"I know." He picked the stick back up. He needed his hands occupied; she understood that, because she had her notebook clamped to her chest again without remembering doing it. "Don't make it weird."

"I'm not making it weird, you're —"

"I'm not making it anything." The stick rolled across his knuckles. "It's just a beat. It's a quarter-note pulse and a half-open hat, it's the most basic thing there is. You'd get the same out of a metronome."

And there it was. There was the Dominic she knew. The shutter coming down — the it's nothing, it's just technique, anyone could do it, I felt nothing — and the thing was, two years ago she might even have believed him, but she'd just heard him build that floor under her in real time, heard him find the breath of a song he'd never met, and you could not do that with nothing. You could not do that without listening with your whole body. He was lying, and he was good at it, and he'd clearly been lying to himself longest of all.

"Right," she said. "A metronome."

"Same Friday for both of us, Vega. Three weeks. I don't want to lose any more than you do." He set the metronome of his face very deliberately back to neutral. "We don't have to like it. We just have to win it."

"I don't like it," she agreed.

"Good."

"I don't like you."

Something passed behind his eyes — not hurt, he was too well-defended for hurt, but a kind of acknowledgment, like she'd finally said the true thing out loud and he was almost relieved to have it on the table. "I know that too," he said. "You've made it pretty clear since freshman year."

"Since freshman year," she said, and she heard her own voice go thin and cold, because there it was, the thing under the thing, the reason a coffee can full of folded paper had felt like a sentence. "You want to talk about freshman year, Dominic? You want to do that here?"

"No," he said, fast, and for the first time the evenness cracked, just a hairline, just enough to show her there was still something live under there. "I don't."

"Then we won't." She opened her notebook. Her hands were steadier than she expected. "We'll write the song. We'll win the thing. And then I never have to be in a room with you again."

"Deal."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you mean it more than the music." She found a blank page. She uncapped her pen. Out the textbook-sized window the loading dock sat empty under a flat gray sky, and somewhere down the hall the flute girl was running scales, and three weeks from Friday was no time at all to write a song with a boy she'd spent two years hating, and she was going to do it anyway, because the floor he'd built under her was still there in her chest, ringing, and she could not unhear it. "The line that has no chord," she said. "The porch-light line. We start there. That's the chorus. I've never been able to land it."

Dominic looked at her for a long moment. Then he set the stick down, and he reached over to the dead-keyed piano without getting up, and with one finger — around the F-sharp, around the dead A, working the gaps the way he'd told her to — he played four notes.

Four notes. Up, and then down, and then a step she didn't expect, and then home.

It was the chord she'd been looking for since the bus in October. It was the floor under the porch-light line. He'd found it in about a second and a half, and he played it like it was nothing, like it cost him nothing, like he hadn't just handed her the missing piece of a thing she'd carried for eight months.

"That one?" he said.

She didn't trust her voice, so she just wrote it down.

"Yeah," she managed, after. "That one."

He went back to the kit. She bent over the notebook. And in the small room at the end of the music wing, four feet apart, two people who could not stand each other began, against everything they wanted, to write a song.

She found the note that afternoon, after he'd gone.

She'd stayed to copy out the chorus in pen before she lost it, and when she pulled her bag up onto the piano bench her elbow knocked his — he'd left in a hurry, the way he always left, like staying anywhere too long might commit him to it — and a folded square of paper fell out of the side pocket onto the dead keys.

She shouldn't have. She knew she shouldn't have.

It was a setlist. Old, the creases gone soft, the kind of thing you carry so long you forget it's there. Eight songs in his small slanted hand, the way a drummer writes a chart — and at the top, underlined twice, a band name she knew, because she'd been there the night they were supposed to play it and didn't.

And under the band name, in pencil, almost worn away: for M.

Marisol stood in the practice room a long time, holding the paper, the chorus drying on the page behind her, the porch light on in a song about a house where nobody was home.

Then she folded it back exactly as she'd found it, and put it back in his bag, and told herself it didn't mean anything.

It meant something.

She knew it meant something, and she had three weeks, and she was going to have to write a song with him anyway — which was the whole trouble, and she could already tell it was going to be the kind of trouble you don't get out of the way you got in.