Meet Sloane.
Then look at the glass.

THE PART I KEPT · LETTER ONE

The Space Between Notes

Sunday, November 1

Dear Wren,

Your desk is still empty in English. I put my backpack on it before anyone can ask, which is becoming a weird amount of commitment to a chair.

Anyway. You wanted actual letters. Here is an actual letter. You can put it beside the pictures of your new friends, preferably covering the one whose bangs look like yours.

That sounded mean. Leave it there. I’m trying to do this without deleting the parts that make me look bad.

On Friday, Mom asked whether I’d finished the Halden application while I was scraping burnt toast into the sink. The smoke alarm was still going. She had one shoe on and her work badge in her mouth.

“It isn’t due until January.”

She took the badge out. “The music takes time.”

“I know how time works.”

There. That kind of thing. It comes out of me so easily lately.

She stood with the other shoe in her hand. The heel lining had worn through to a piece of stiff white plastic. I looked at it instead of her face.

“I’m trying to help, Sloane.”

I said I hadn’t asked her to, then went upstairs for a sweater I was already wearing. By the time I came down, she’d left. My toast was on a plate, the black scraped off. She’d put the butter beside it.

I ate it standing up.

Outside school, the gutter had overflowed. Water ran down the west steps over flattened leaves and a tampon wrapper. Someone was coughing behind the portable classrooms. A boy kicked the door twice before it opened, then held it for me with a little bow that required more energy than I possessed.

Inside smelled of wet cuffs and floor cleaner. The floor cleaner never wins.

Ms. Alvarez caught me before first period. The journal’s print funding had been cut, again. She said we could still have a wonderful online edition.

Last year’s wonderful online edition links to a permission error.

The Vale Trust paid for the hosting. Their logo still loads.

“I’ll find sponsors,” I told her.

She looked relieved. That bothered me more than the funding. I hadn’t thought about it. My mouth had volunteered, and now I had to become the girl who could do it.

During study hall, she let me work downstairs. We’re cataloging the local-history collection for the library’s centennial. It smells like the inside of an old coat. Beneath the stairs is a glass-front cabinet full of notebooks, church bulletins, and things somebody’s grandparent considered too important to throw away.

One shelf holds accounts of the reservoir before they fenced it. People hearing their names called across the water. Cattle found with strange wounds. A man who walked home without remembering the walk.

Some entries are ridiculous. Some have addresses.

I was reading a woman’s account of finding her brother on the bank when the transfer student came downstairs. I’d seen him in English, sorting handouts while everyone else pretended not to look.

I keep going back to the bit after that. It stays sharp even when I try to make it ordinary.

He has dark hair, wet at the ends, and one black button among the brown ones on his coat. He stands just inside the stairwell light.

“Is that the lending shelf?”

“Nothing down here leaves the library.”

“I meant that.” He points to a cart of withdrawn paperbacks.

“Those can go.”

He comes around the table. I slide the notebook clear of the stack he’s reaching over, and the cabinet glass catches my eye.

My face. The strip light above us. His sleeve.

His sleeve moves.

Where his hand should be, the glass shows the pale edge of the cart behind him.

I look at the real hand. Long fingers. A blue pen mark beside his thumb. He picks up a paperback. In the cabinet, the book tips against an empty cuff.

I turn too quickly. My knee cracks against the table.

“You okay?”

The light clicks. I can feel the sting rising through my kneecap. He puts the paperback down and leaves both hands where I can see them. I wish he would hide them. I wish I could look at them properly.

“Fine.”

I look again. He’s moved away from the glass. The cabinet gives me back my open mouth, the ugly fluorescent color of my skin. I put my palm flat against the table until it stops shaking.

He glances at the cabinet.

“There are more books upstairs,” I say.

He nods. “Thanks.”

I count his footsteps. Six to the turn in the stairs. Then the landing creaks.

I pull my sleeve over my fist and hold it in front of the glass. A girl with a sweater covering her knuckles holds her fist back at me. When I open my hand, every finger is there.

That’s where I get stuck. My own fingers. The perfectly ordinary relief of finding them, as though I’d somehow been the problem.

When I got back upstairs, he was at our table.

Your table. Apparently I can defend a chair from people I know and surrender it immediately to somebody who may have optical problems.

“Can I sit?” he asked. “Ms. Alvarez said the other tables are for the juniors.”

I moved my backpack.

His name is Julian. He writes it with a hooked J. I know because he put it on the sign-up sheet for journal volunteers. Yes, we have one. Yes, his was the second name after mine.

I was working on the application essay. The question asks what I want to make and why. You would think I’d have something to say, considering how often I announce that I’m getting out of here.

I’d written: I want to make work that matters.

Then crossed it out so hard the page tore.

“What was wrong with it?” Julian asked.

“It sounded like I’d already won an award.”

He considered the damage. “Would that help?”

I laughed before I could decide whether I wanted to.

He kept his eyes on me while I did. Nothing showy. Just attention that didn’t wander toward the door to see who else might come in.

“You were playing yesterday,” he said.

I stopped laughing.

The practice room door had been open. The radiator gets stuck, and the window is painted shut. I’d been trying an arrangement of the song you sent me in March, before you started sending songs I had to learn to like on purpose.

“Sorry about middle E.”

“Which was that?”

“The note that sounds like someone dropping a fork.”

His mouth shifted. “I wondered.”

He’d heard me play the same passage over and over. I asked whether he’d been waiting for the room.

“No. I stopped to listen.”

There should be a way to hear that without feeling it beneath your ribs. There probably is. You’d know it.

“It wasn’t finished.”

“I noticed.”

“Great.”

“I wanted to hear what came next.”

I looked down at the paper. At my furious scribble. I’d played sixteen seconds correctly, then wrecked the next bar every time. The sixteen seconds sound clean enough to belong to somebody whose mother can buy a piano. After that, the piece comes back into our actual practice room. I keep trying to stop that happening.

The bell went. He asked if I needed the volunteer sheet back. When he handed it over, our fingers touched.

His were cold. I curled mine into my palm.

He looked at the movement. Then at the glass partition behind the circulation desk.

“Old glass does strange things,” he said.

I hadn’t told him what I’d seen.

He left before I worked out an answer.

I played badly that afternoon. Everything too fast. I kept checking the open door, then got angry with myself and shut it. The room heated until my sweater stuck between my shoulder blades. I went home with nothing recorded. Before I left, I wrote SMOOTHER over the bar that keeps breaking. Pressed so hard I could feel the word through the back of the page.

Mom had left a note asking me to take the chicken out of the freezer. I hadn’t. We ate eggs at nine. She didn’t mention the application. I wished she would, so I could have an argument I understood.

Please tell me there’s something wrong with that cabinet.

Also, don’t make a thing of this: I asked Eli which English section Julian was in. I said it was for the journal.

It wasn’t.

Love,
Sloane