The Second Session

The chord followed her home.

It was the four notes — up, and then down, and then a step she hadn't expected, and then home — and it had gotten into her the way a song gets in, which is to say completely and against her will, looping in the space behind her sternum the whole bus ride across town. She didn't have it written anywhere she could play it; she couldn't play it anyway. But she had it the way she had everything, finished and entire and useless, ringing in a body that couldn't get it out. By the time she let herself in the back door it had laced itself to the line that had no home — and nobody's home, and the porch light's on — and the two of them together made a thing so nearly complete that she stood in the dark kitchen with her bag still on her shoulder and her keys in her hand and ached.

The house was the house. The porch light was, in fact, on, because her mother left it on whether anyone was home or not, which Marisol had never once thought about until she'd written a song with that exact image in it and now couldn't stop thinking about, the small dumb daily proof that her own life kept handing her its own metaphors and charging her nothing. A note on the counter in her mother's tired slanted hand: back by 9, soup on the stove, did you sign up for the thing. The thing. Marisol had signed up for the thing at 2:58 on Friday and her mother had remembered to ask about it on a Monday she'd be working until nine, which was the whole of their life in two lines — love that worked too much to keep up, kept up anyway, a half-beat behind.

She ate soup standing at the counter and did not text back about the thing, because the truth about the thing now had Dominic Reyes in it, and there was no version of the sentence I got paired with Dominic Reyes that she could send her mother, who didn't know what that name cost, or Cami, who did.

The keyboard was in the front room, against the wall under the window, a cheap weighted sixty-one-key her mother had bought used when Marisol was nine and quitting piano and they'd both pretended the buying would fix the quitting. It had not. It had sat there for seven years being dusted. Marisol turned it on now, in the dark, the little red power light coming up like an ember, and she sat on the edge of the couch and pulled it toward her on its stand and tried to play the four notes.

She knew where they were. That was the cruelty she never got used to — that she knew. She could see the chord laid out across the keys the way she could see the whole song, complete, hers, and she put her right hand down and reached for it, around the place a dead key would be if this were the closet, except this keyboard had no dead keys, every key worked, and her fingers still wouldn't. They found three of the four notes and fumbled the step she hadn't expected, the good one, the one Dominic had thrown in like it cost him nothing, and the chord came out of the real world bent and flat and ugly, a beautiful thing dragged through a fence. She tried it again. Slower. She watched her own hand do the wrong thing while her head played it right, the gap between them as wide as it had been at nine, at twelve, the gap that was the whole shape of her life — perfect until I try to make it real — and on the fourth try her ring finger caught the edge of the key beside the one she wanted and the chord came out wrong in a new way, and she took her hand off the keyboard and sat in the dark and breathed.

This was the thing. This was the thing she could not say to anyone, that she'd nearly let Dominic see in the closet and snatched back. She needed him. Not wanted, not chose — needed, the way you need the one tool you don't own. She could rage at that all she wanted. It didn't change the arithmetic. Alone, in her own front room, on a keyboard with all its keys, she could not make her own song stand up. With him, across four feet of a closet, it had stood up clean. That was the trap of the next three weeks in one sentence, and she hated it, and she turned the keyboard off and the little ember died and she sat there a while longer with the chord still ringing in her chest where no fence could get at it, finished and entire and useless.

She picked up her phone twice to text Cami.

The first time she got as far as you will not believe who I got paired with and looked at it and deleted it, because Cami would believe it instantly, Cami would call it a tragedy and a comedy in the same breath and want the whole story, and Marisol would have to tell the whole story, which meant telling the grudge, which she had told a hundred times and could tell in her sleep. Dominic Reyes bailed on us freshman year. He's a wall. End of story. She had the speech. She could give the speech.

She got as far, the second time, as the setlist.

That was the part she couldn't put in a text and couldn't quite leave out. The folded square that had fallen out of his bag onto the dead keys after he'd gone — the old soft-creased setlist, eight songs in his small slanted drummer's hand, a band's name she knew underlined twice at the top 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.

She typed I found something weird in his bag and stopped. Because to tell Cami about the setlist she'd have to admit she'd read it, and to admit she'd read it she'd have to admit what it had done to her, which was nothing, it had done nothing, she'd folded it back exactly as she'd found it and told herself it didn't mean anything.

It meant something.

She knew it meant something, and she didn't text Cami, and that was new — that for the first time the grudge-story, the speech, the thing she could give in her sleep, didn't quite want to be told out loud. She told herself she was just tired. She went to bed with the chord still going and the porch light still on outside her window over a house where, for once, somebody was home, and she lay there doing the one thing her hands could do perfectly, which was nothing, while her head played the finished song over and over to no one.

He was already there Tuesday, of course, and already working, of course, and she stood in the doorway of the closet for a second before he noticed her and watched him not need her.

He had a practice pad on his knee and a pair of sticks and he was running something — not loud, barely a sound at all, a tight controlled pattern of taps and the ghosts of taps, his wrists doing the small economical thing that good drummers do that looks like nothing and is the hardest thing there is. He didn't have music in front of him. He never did. He was just keeping his hands fed, the way she'd seen him do it in the band room and the hallway and once, freshman year, in somebody's basement before some other show — a smaller one, an earlier one, a good one — that — don't, she told herself, don't go there, not yet, not in here — and she made herself walk in and sit down on the piano bench, four feet away, as far as the room allowed.

"You're late," he said, not looking up.

"I'm on time. You're early."

"Same thing." The pattern on the pad resolved into a clean little fill and stopped. He set the sticks down across his knee. "You bring it?"

She had the notebook. She had it against her chest, where it lived, and she made herself put it on the piano lid instead, flat, open to the page where she'd copied out the chorus in pen before she lost it. The porch-light line. The four notes she couldn't play, written above the words in her own private shorthand because she didn't know how to write real music and had never let anyone find that out.

"I want to build the verse into it," she said. "The chorus stands up. We proved that yesterday. But it's just a chorus right now, it's a—it's a thing floating in the air, it needs the ground under it, it needs the verse to climb up to it so that when the chorus hits it feels like you got somewhere." She heard herself talking too fast and made herself stop. "It should sound like coming home and the porch light's on. The verse is walking up the street. The chorus is the door."

Dominic looked at her for a second. "That's not how a song works."

"It's exactly how a song works."

"It's how you feel about how a song works." He picked the sticks back up, not to play, just to have them, and she recognized the gesture because she'd had the notebook to her chest the entire time without remembering picking it up. "Sing me the verse."

So she did. The same fragment, the walking-up-the-street part, and he listened with his head down and his eyes somewhere on the middle distance, and when she got to the end of it he said, "It's a bar short."

"It's not a bar short."

"It's a bar short. You've got three lines that scan and then the fourth one lands early, so when it hits the chorus it hits before the count's ready for it. It's not wrong. It just lands a beat soon." He tapped it out on the pad, slow, so she could hear it — one and walk and two and walk and three and walk and then the line came in and his hand stopped a beat before the downbeat, in the empty air, demonstrating the hole. "Hear it? The door's there before you finish walking up to it. Fix the line or fix the count."

And this was the thing about him she'd forgotten in two years of hating him, or maybe never known because two years ago they hadn't worked, they'd only almost-worked and then not at all — that he was right, and that he was right in a language she didn't speak. She heard songs whole. She heard the porch light and the door and the walking, the feeling of the thing, finished, and he heard bars, he heard the count, the math under the feeling, the scaffold the feeling hung on. She'd have said the fourth line was perfect because it felt perfect, it felt like arriving, and he'd just shown her, in about four seconds, tapping a rubber pad with a stick, that the reason it felt like arriving early was that it arrived early, that her feeling was correct and her count was off, that the two of them were describing the exact same problem from opposite ends and would never once use the same word for it.

"Fix the line," she said. "I'm not changing the count. The count is the porch light."

"The count isn't anything, it's a count—"

"The count is the thing, Dominic, the count is the part that makes it feel like home, I'm not—" She stopped. She made herself stop, because they'd been in the room ninety seconds and the grudge was already in it, the way it was always already in it, every sentence carrying two years on its back, and she was not going to spend three weeks fighting him about whether feelings or numbers ran a song when the answer, she already knew, was that both did, that the song needed her ear and his count or it would be exactly half of itself, which was the trap again, the whole trap, in a closet the size of a closet. "Fine," she said, quieter. "I'll fix the line. Give me a minute."

He didn't say anything. He went back to the pad, soft, keeping his hands fed, giving her the minute, and she bent over the notebook and the gray light came in the textbook-sized window off the loading dock and somewhere down the hall the flute girl — Priya, she thought her name was Priya — was running scales, up and down, up and down, the normal world doing its normal thing on the other side of the wall, and Marisol crossed out the fourth line and wrote it again one word longer, so it would land where the count was ready for it, so the door would be there exactly when she finished walking up to it, and she did it his way and hated that his way was right and felt the song get, by one word, more true.

"Okay," she said. "Try it now."

It happened in the third hour, and it happened the way it had happened the first time, which was all at once and without permission.

They'd been grinding. That was the only word for it — running the verse into the chorus over and over, her singing it small and him under it on the rim and the hat, finding the seam, losing it, finding it. He'd been right about the line; the new word landed it where the count wanted it and the chorus stopped arriving early. But landing it on time wasn't the same as landing it right, and they'd spent two hours in the gap between on-time and right, which is the gap every song lives or dies in, arguing about it in their two languages — she'd say it needed air before the chorus and he'd say that was a half-bar rest and put one there and it would be exactly the air she meant, and neither of them would admit the other had said the same thing. The room had gotten close. The gray light had moved across the loading dock and gone flat. Her voice was tired. She'd stopped, somewhere in the second hour, performing it — stopped guarding it, stopped singing it at him and started just singing it, because she was too tired to hold the breastplate up and sing at the same time.

And then they ran it once more, from the top of the verse, and the verse climbed and the half-bar of air opened up where she'd wanted it and he'd counted it and the chorus —

— the chorus came in, and stood up, and kept standing up.

Not for the eight bars they'd been fighting for. Past them. The chorus landed and the porch-light line fell into the four-note chord he'd found and the chord opened the door exactly the way she'd heard it in her head on the bus in October, and then instead of stopping, instead of one of them breaking it to fix something, the song just — went. It rolled out past the chorus into the turnaround and back toward the verse and she heard, in real time, where the second verse wanted to go, heard it before she had the words, and she sang nonsense over it, la and breath and the shape of the melody, and he caught the shape and built under it, and for sixteen bars, for the longest she had ever in her life been inside a song that was leaving her head and arriving in a room exactly as good as it was when it was only hers, the two of them just played, and it was better than yesterday, it was better than anything, it was the best thing she had ever been part of and she could feel that he knew it too because you could not be in a room that small and not feel it.

And somewhere in the sixteen bars they forgot.

She didn't notice it go. That was the thing she'd think about later, that she couldn't point to the moment, only that at some point she looked up from the notebook and he was looking up from the kit and they were both — not smiling, it wasn't that big, it was smaller and worse than that — they were both lit, both caught in the same finished thing, and the four feet between them had nothing in it for a second, no two years, no wall, no grudge, just two people who'd made something stand up that neither could make stand up alone, and she felt a laugh come up in her, helpless, delighted, the laugh of holy God we're actually good at this, and she saw the exact same thing happen in his face, the corner of his mouth going, the breath of a laugh that he was about to let out —

— and then he didn't.

She watched him not. She watched it happen, the shutter coming down, fast, practiced, the way you slam a door you've slammed a thousand times so the slam doesn't even feel like a decision anymore. The light went out of his face. His hands came off the kit. He reached for the stick on his knee and rolled it across his knuckles, once, and when he spoke his voice was back to flat, back to even, the metronome of his face set deliberately to neutral.

"That works," he said. "It's just a turnaround. We can use it."

"Dominic—"

"It's the most basic thing there is." He was already gathering — sticks, pad, the gray hoodie off the back of the chair, the movements economical and final, a man leaving a room he'd stayed in too long. "Quarter-note feel, you put a fill in the turnaround, anybody'd land it. Don't make it—"

"I'm not making it anything." But she was. She was making it something. She'd felt it and he'd felt it and they both knew it and he was packing his bag, and the high of it was still ringing in her chest, the sixteen bars, the best thing she'd ever made, and the cold of him leaving was coming up underneath it at the same time so that she was holding both at once, the way she'd held the chord in the dark front room, finished and entire and gone. "It's not nothing," she said. "You don't get to keep saying it's nothing. You found that—you heard the second verse before I sang it. You can't do that with nothing."

He stopped at the door. He had his bag on his shoulder. He didn't turn all the way around.

"Same Friday for both of us," he said. "I'll see you Thursday."

And he left, fast, the way he always left, like staying anywhere too long might commit him to it, and Marisol sat alone in the closet with the song three-quarters built and the porch light on in it and the sixteen best bars of her life ringing in a room he'd already gone out of, and she thought, with a clarity that scared her: that wasn't him being cold. That was him being scared. And she didn't know yet why the difference mattered so much, only that it did, only that the grudge had a shape she'd known for two years and this — the shutter, the speed, the leaving before the laugh could land — this didn't fit the shape, and a thing that doesn't fit the shape is a thing you have to either ignore or follow, and she was so tired of being a person who almost did things.

She put the notebook against her chest. She stayed in the closet a while, alone, where the song still hung in the air, and then she packed up too, slower than he had, and went home to a house where the porch light was on and somebody, for once, would be.

She told Cami the speech on Wednesday, and the speech fell apart in Cami's kitchen, and that was worse than if Cami had argued.

Cami didn't argue. That was the whole problem with Cami — she was the kind of best friend who let you talk yourself all the way to the bottom of a thing and then asked one quiet question that knocked the floor out, and she did it Wednesday over two bowls of cereal at four in the afternoon because Cami's mother worked nights and the kitchen was theirs and it was where every true thing Marisol had ever said out loud had gotten said.

"Okay," Cami said, "but back up. You got paired with Dominic Reyes."

"Random draw. Okafor's coffee can. No trades, no appeals, no my-mom-emailed-you." Marisol heard herself doing Okafor's voice and stopped. "It's a nightmare. It's three weeks of nightmare."

"And the song's good."

"The song's—" She'd told Cami about the song. She hadn't meant to, but it had come out, the floor he'd built, the chord, the sixteen bars, because it was the biggest thing that had ever happened to her music and Cami was the only person she could tell. "The song's the best thing I've ever done. Which is the worst part. Because I can't do it without him, and I can't stand him, and I have to spend three weeks pretending those two things aren't both true at once."

"Because of freshman year."

"Because of freshman year." And here it came, the speech, the one she could give in her sleep, and she gave it. The band. The show. The all-ages bill at the coffeehouse, the first time her writing was ever going to leave her head and reach a room full of strangers, the one time, the thing she'd trusted to happen. And Dominic — the drummer, the one who could play anything, the one who could've made it real — Dominic bailed. The night of. Froze, or got scared, or got too good for them, or decided at the last second that a freshman's songs weren't worth the risk to his reputation, and pulled out, and blew the band up, and left her writing stranded on a stage that stayed empty while she stood there and watched it not happen. "He chose himself," Marisol said. "He looked at the one chance my songs ever had to be real and he decided it wasn't worth it to him. That's who he is. That's the wall. End of story."

Cami ate a spoonful of cereal. "Did he say that?"

"Did he say what?"

"That it wasn't worth it. That your songs weren't worth the risk." Cami said it gently, not like a gotcha, like she actually wanted to know. "Did he ever actually say why he pulled out?"

And Marisol opened her mouth to say yes, obviously, he—

—and found she didn't have it.

She had the night. She had standing in the back of the coffeehouse in the clothes she'd picked out for it, watching the door, watching the empty stage, the slow horrible understanding moving through the small crowd that the band wasn't going on. She had Reggie's face — the bass player, the only other freshman in the band — and the older kids packing up gear that never got plugged in, and the long walk home alone. She had two years of cold. She had the grudge, whole and entire and load-bearing, the wall she'd built so she'd never have to stand in the back of a room like that again. What she did not have — what she went looking for, right then, in Cami's kitchen, with the spoon halfway to her mouth — was a single sentence in which Dominic Reyes had told her, or anyone, in words, why. He hadn't called. He hadn't shown. He hadn't, in two years, ever once explained himself. She'd filled the silence in herself, the way you fill any silence, with the worst available story, because the worst available story was the one that let her be angry instead of—

"He never said why," Marisol said slowly. "He just—didn't show. And then he never said anything. Ever."

"Okay," Cami said. "So you don't actually know why he bailed. You know that he bailed and that it wrecked you and that he never explained. Which is bad. That's still bad, Mar, I'm not saying it's not bad." She pointed the spoon. "I'm just saying 'he chose himself because your songs weren't worth it to him' is a thing you decided, not a thing he said."

"It's the obvious—"

"It's the obvious story if he's a wall." Cami shrugged. "Is he a wall, though? Because you just spent ten minutes telling me he built a floor under your song with his bare hands and then got scared and ran out of the room when you both laughed. That's not a wall. A wall doesn't run. A wall just stands there." She got up, put her bowl in the sink. "Walls aren't scared of anything. That's the whole point of being a wall."

Marisol didn't have anything for that either.

She went home with it. She went home with the speech in pieces and Cami's question riding her the whole bus ride — did he ever actually say why — and the worst of it, the part she couldn't put down, was the thing that the question had pried loose underneath. Because if she didn't actually know why he bailed, then the for M. on the setlist didn't have a slot to go in. If he'd pulled out because her songs weren't worth the risk, because she wasn't worth the risk, then why was he carrying, two years later, soft-creased and pencil-worn from being carried so long, a setlist of the band that was going to play her songs, dedicated — for M. — to her. You didn't carry a monument to a thing you'd decided wasn't worth it. You didn't keep, for two years, against your own ribs, the relic of a night you'd walked away from because it didn't matter. The grudge needed Dominic not to care. The setlist was a boy who'd cared so much he couldn't put it down.

She couldn't make the two of them be the same person. That was the whole trouble, sitting on the bus with the porch light getting closer and the chord still ringing somewhere under everything: she'd had one Dominic for two years, flat and even and gone, and now there were two of them, the one who left and the one who kept the setlist, and they would not fit into one body, and a thing that doesn't fit is a thing you have to either ignore or follow.

She got home. The porch light was on. She got out the notebook, because the song wasn't done and Thursday was coming, and she meant to work on the second verse, the one she'd heard the shape of when they'd forgotten to hate each other, and instead her pen wrote a line that wasn't about a house at all.

You built the floor and then you wouldn't stand on it.

She looked at it. It was about him. It was so obviously about him that she felt her face go hot alone in her own room. She drew a line through it, hard, two strokes, and went back to the second verse and the house and the porch light.

But she didn't tear the page out. And the line was still legible under the crossing-out, plain as anything, the way the for M. was still legible in pencil under two years of being carried — and she knew, putting the notebook against her chest where it lived, that she'd written a true thing without meaning to, and that she had two and a half weeks left in a closet with the only person who could make her songs real, and that the trouble she was in was not the kind you get out of the way you got in.