Beginners Welcome Page 3

  Today I was reading The Book of Three. It was the best kind of book, because it was about a different time and a different place and it wasn’t anything at all like my life. It was made even better by the fact that it had been Daddy’s, and every now and then I’d come across a little note he’d made to himself in the margins, and the sight of his handwriting would be fire and ice all at once.

  I had just gotten my lunch tray situated and opened the book to where I’d left off, where the Assistant Pig-Keeper has run away to find his missing pig, when someone sat down in the empty seat across from me.

  “Hey. Reader girl.”

  It took me a minute to realize that she was talking to me, because nobody had ever, ever talked to me in the lunchroom before except to say, “Enjoy your lunch, dear” or “You dropped your napkin,” and those had always been adults.

  “Well? You gonna answer me, reader girl?” It was the skater girl, Mitch Harris, who’d made such a stir riding her board up the front steps railing on Tuesday. I’d heard plenty about her in the last four days. Like how she’d already racked up three lunch detentions—one for the skateboard stunt and the other two because she’d gotten a bunch of dress code violations for refusing to take off the white-colored beanie she wore over those wild curls, even though indoor hats were against the school rules.

  Sure enough, that hat was sitting on top of her hair right now. Had the teachers finally given up?

  “Can’t you talk?” There were a lot of different accents at this school—people who talked a little bit Southern, like me and Mama; some whose voices carried the memory of Spanish or another language when they spoke; others whose parents had moved to Durham from some other place and spoke in those neutral TV accents that didn’t sound like much of anything. Mitch was in the last group, her gruff voice giving no hint about her history.

  “Yeah.” It was a little mouse of a word, more squeak than anything. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I mean, yeah.”

  “Huh. Okay.” There were sparkly little diamond studs in Mitch’s pierced ears. I wondered if they were real. Even before Daddy had died and pressed pause on everything, leaving me and Mama waiting and waiting for that life-insurance payment, we’d never had the money for real diamonds. I was pretty sure even Mama’s wedding ring was fake.

  “Well,” Mitch said, “I’m sitting here today. All the other seats are taken.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  “I’m Mitch. You got a name?” Nobody in school knew if Mitch was really the name on her birth certificate, or if it was short for something, or a nickname. I’d heard some of the eighth-grade boys in the hallway yesterday, though, calling her something that rhymed with Mitch and laughing like hyenas with a cornered antelope. Mitch hadn’t seemed to notice or care, just pushed her way past them like she was tough enough to take all three at once but couldn’t be bothered to try it.

  A few years back Daddy and I had read Pippi Longstocking together at bedtime, and it struck me now that that was who Mitch reminded me of—she may have been just a girl brand-new to the sixth grade like me, but it wouldn’t have surprised me at all to learn she could lift a full-grown horse over her head.

  Mitch snapped her fingers in front of my face. “I asked if you had a name.”

  I started. “Annie Lee Fitzgerald.”

  “Ooh, fancy,” said Mitch, but her eyes were crinkled like she was laughing inside. “Good book?”

  “It’s one of my favorites.”

  “So. You read a lot.”

  I nodded, not sure what to answer. If I said, My daddy loved books, it would just open things up to questions I didn’t want to answer. So would saying, I used to sit with my two best friends at lunch every day and we called ourselves the Three Musketeers, but they’re at a different school now, and they’re not even my best friends anymore, so it probably wouldn’t matter anyway.

  I slipped my fingers into my pocket, feeling the comfort of that shiny two-headed lucky quarter, rubbing it with my thumb.

  “I read a lot, too,” Mitch said.

  “Yeah?” Mitch didn’t exactly seem the reading type.

  “Sure. My mom’s a journalist and my dad teaches political science at Duke. Our house is practically made out of books. Once my little brother got lost in the office and we didn’t find him for a week because the books were stacked up taller than him. A lot of them are pretty boring, though. I mostly like the ones where people die or figure out that magic is real.”

  I was pretty sure that story about her brother wasn’t true, but Mitch said it with such a straight face I half believed her.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “is there some law against a girl who skates and reads?”

  “No,” I said with a shrug, and Mitch’s eyes crinkled up again as she smiled.

  I smiled back.

  Mama worked late that evening—which meant it was just me all afternoon until after dinnertime, with the stacks of moving boxes that still sat, taped up and untouched, where they’d been put when Mama and I moved more than a month ago.

  I finished all my homework but stayed on the computer, scrolling through my news feed, looking at start-of-school pictures from all my old friends: sassy selfies in front of lockers, big posed smiles underneath Welcome Back banners. Off in Oregon, where Daddy’s only sister lived, my cousins were still on summer break, posting photos of pedicures and writing that they’d slept in till ten in the morning.

  My finger paused when it got to one picture—two girls, one with wavy red hair and one with shining black, arms around each other, faces smooshed close together, holding up a package of M&Ms.

  Monica and Meredith.

  It was Mer’s account. So glad to be starting the year with my BFF, the caption underneath the picture read. M&M forever!!!! My drama class is a-MAZE-ing and tryouts for the fall musical will be soon. Eek! Wish me luck!

  I reached forward and pushed the computer’s off button, watching as the screen sparked into nothingness.

  I lay in bed for a long time after Mama got home, holding a pillow over my ear so that I couldn’t hear her crying while she hand-washed clothes in the bathroom. I thought about the man I’d seen at Brightleaf on Monday and the way his hands had flown like birds on the keyboard. That music stayed with me, somewhere deep inside and close to my heart, like it was whispering that if I just looked hard enough, I could find the key to fix all the broken things in my life.

  That night, I dreamed about Daddy. He was in a place where the sun and sky sparkled like glass, and dozens of colorful umbrellas—cherry red and popping pink and key-lime green—hung suspended in the sky so that it felt like we were wrapped up in a rainbow. The air itself was full of music, the kind of music the piano man at Brightleaf Square had played, the kind that sank deep into your heart and threaded itself right into your soul.

  Daddy sat at a piano, his fingers flying over the keys, colorful light pouring from his hands, just like the man at the mall. The air in that rainbow place smelled like Daddy—like aftershave and Hole Shebang donut glaze and the dusty scent of books.

  I watched him for a long time, watched while he played fast and then slow and then fast again, the way he never could play when he was alive, just waiting for him to turn and look at me. I knew that when he did, his face would be filled up with so much love that it would light the world more than that glitter-glass sun and those rainbow umbrellas ever could.

  But he didn’t turn. Even when I called out to him, shouted his name over and over and over, he just kept on playing and playing some more, like he was all alone in that strange bright place, like he couldn’t hear me over the sound of the music he’d always wanted to be able to play.

  7.

  Mama left early the next morning, the way she always did on Saturdays. When she’d first started working full-time, before she’d sold our house in the suburbs and we’d moved downtown, I’d spent most Saturdays and plenty of weekdays too at Monica’s house, feeding cockatiels and cuddling with kittens and helping Monic
a walk their pony-size yellow Lab. Monica’s daddy, Dr. Hsu, was a veterinarian, and their house was better than visiting a pet store. They had a bunch of their own pets, and sometimes Dr. Hsu would bring home an animal from the Hsu Zoo Veterinary office if it was in really bad shape and needed around-the-clock care.

  On days I wasn’t at Monica’s, I’d gone to Meredith’s. The two of us would lay on her bed and talk about what middle school would be like and if the boys would be cute while we listened to Les Misérables and Hamilton. Sometimes, Monica and Meredith and I had all gone somewhere together.

  But those days had slowed down to a trickle as the summer dragged on, and then they’d dried up altogether, like the water in the little creek in the woods behind Monica’s house.

  Now I had Saturdays to myself, and they stretched on and on.

  By afternoon, boredom had set in. The apartment was too small, too hot, too unfinished-feeling, and so I got my scooter and locked the door behind me. The apartment next door was open, too, and our neighbor, Mrs. Garcia, was coming out with a bulging trash bag in one hand. Mrs. Garcia was the only other person in the apartment complex that we’d ever really talked to, mostly because she loved to talk to anyone who would listen and also because it made Mama feel better to know that another grown-up was keeping an eye out for me while she was gone. When we’d first moved in, Mrs. Garcia had even offered to let me come over to her place when Mama was gone at work.

  It gets so quiet there, Joan, she’d said. I have to put talk radio on all day just to make it feel like my thoughts have some company. Annie Lee would be welcome.

  Hanging around all day with Mrs. Garcia was about the last thing I wanted. No offense—she was nice enough—but the only thing worse than spending the days by myself while Mama was working would have been making small talk with my elderly neighbor. Lucky for me, Mama had just smiled her tight smile and said, No, thank you, we’ll be fine, but we appreciate the offer.

  The couple of times I’d snuck out in the afternoon before, I had tiptoed past Mrs. Garcia’s apartment, praying she wouldn’t open her door and ask questions I didn’t want to answer. Her offer to watch me was always hovering right there on the edge of my thoughts. I knew that if it came down to leaving me with a neighbor or leaving me to go all over Durham by myself in the afternoons, Mama wouldn’t take a hot minute to decide.

  “Hi, Annie Lee. You going somewhere?”

  “Just for a walk,” I said, clutching my scooter. Please don’t ask anything else. Please don’t ask anything else.

  “Nice day today,” Mrs. Garcia said, looking up at the cloudless sky. She had grown up in Ecuador, and her accent made everything she said sound extra interesting. “Stay safe, mija.”

  I nodded. As soon as we both got to the bottom of the stairs and she headed off toward the trash can, I unfolded my scooter and zoomed off as fast as I could, trying not to think about what Mama would say if she knew what I was up to.

  You know what the crime rate is in Durham, honey?

  You know why they put bars on the shop windows?

  Every evening during dinner, Mama would ask me what I’d done that afternoon while she was at work. And every evening, I’d make up some lie. Just homework. Read a new book, yeah, it was pretty good. Played on the computer most of the time. Listened to music.

  The summer heat was finally slacking off, the sun backing away from the Carolinas and dipping the temperature down into the low nineties, sometimes even cooler on a nice day. There was a breeze in my hair as I rode, the little kind that carried the tiniest hint of the autumn that was still a month or two away here in the South. Brightleaf was busy when I got there—people talking and laughing as they strolled around the redbrick avenue between the two sections of the mall.

  But the second I opened the glass door, I couldn’t hear anything but the music.

  The piano man’s fingers were laughing today, tripping in light, funny notes up and down the keyboard—giggles, chuckles, guffaws, the kind of music that had a smile creeping up onto my face before I even realized what my lips were doing. The atrium that had been so empty Monday was busy now. People hurried back and forth, toward shops and restaurants, talking in voices that echoed off the high rafters above us. The glass door on the far side of the space swung open and shut every few minutes, carrying with it the smell of the heat and the restaurant next door.

  Mostly, though, people crowded around the piano, smiling just the way I was, leaning forward like if they got close enough maybe the music would swallow them up and remake them as bigger, braver, more beautiful versions of themselves. Some of them had put coins or bills into the piano man’s baseball cap, which was upside-down on the floor at his feet.

  Nobody but me seemed to notice the lights floating up from the piano man’s fingers, winking and twinkling today in pinks and yellows that perfectly matched the laugh of the notes. I’d never seen anything like it. He didn’t have sheet music in front of him; the notes poured from his fingers, out of somewhere deep inside. I could’ve watched him play all day—maybe all night, too—without feeling tired or hungry or thirsty, unable to look away.

  On the pillar beside me, a white brochure fluttered in the breeze made by somebody walking past. I turned my head just a tiny bit to look.

  HOLIDAY EXTRAVAGANZA! it shouted in boldfaced capital letters, with smaller ones beneath: Durham Piano Teachers Association will be hosting its yearly competition December 14. Compete against pianists at your level for cash prizes in performance, accompaniment, and composition. Beginners welcome.

  Underneath, in even smaller letters, the first-place prizes were described. Junior A and B: $100. Senior A and B: $150. Young Artists: $200.

  On the bottom the paper had been cut into neat little slices that all said DPTA HOLIDAY EXTRAVAGANZA! and an email address to send in applications.

  Not even quite knowing why, I slipped my fingers up and tore one of those little strips off.

  Cash prizes. Beginners welcome.

  A hundred dollars could buy a whole winter’s worth of clothes that fit. Shoes without duct tape on them. A backpack without a hole in the bottom.

  I had started piano lessons when I was eight. Daddy had made a big deal out of it, how I was old and mature enough to learn an instrument. He’d pulled out the record player he’d found at a thrift shop when I was in first grade and played me record after record—Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” Scott Joplin ragtime, a bunch of piano arrangements of songs by his favorite oldies singers. By the end of it, I was just as excited as he was, picturing me and him at the piano together, a golden string of music between us.

  But piano lessons hadn’t exactly gone that way. I’d taken them for two years, but I’d never gotten to the point where I could play anything as cool as those old records—barely gotten to where I could stumble through “Minuet in G Major” with both hands. I hated practicing, and every time I sat down to play it was like a spiderweb of anxiety spread over my skin, whispering that I’d never be able to make my fingers do what I wanted them to, so I might as well give up trying.

  Why don’t YOU take lessons instead of me? I yelled at Daddy one afternoon when he was getting on my case about practicing. Daddy could plunk around with simplified piano arrangements a little trickier than what I could play, and of course he’d taken lessons for a while when he was a kid, but I didn’t know why he’d stopped.

  My words had made him crumple in on himself. He’d sat down next to me on the piano bench and put his arm around my shoulders, planting a kiss on the top of my head. Al, he’d said, sounding like an old man, I’ve struggled my whole life with following through on things. Don’t be like me, baby girl, okay?

  When I’d quit piano a year ago, right after a recital where I forgot the whole second half of the piece I was supposed to be playing and just sat there on the bench until I finally burst into tears and ran off the stage, Mama had hugged me tight and said it was okay. But later that night, when I was falling asleep, I’d overheard her and Dadd
y in the kitchen.

  I wish she hadn’t quit in the middle like that, Daddy had said, and Mama had been silent for a long minute before asking, Do you mean you wish she hadn’t quit in the middle, or that you hadn’t quit, honey?

  Now I closed my fingers around the piece of paper with the competition email address on it and stuck it into my pocket. Cash prizes. Beginners welcome.

  A minute later, the song filling the atrium ended and the magic lights winked out.

  The piano man straightened up, shaking his hands out and then rubbing them, like his hands hurt him. All the smoothness and speed he’d had while playing was gone. Now there was only the pain that I could see sitting on his shoulders, running through his fingertips, and bending his neck. He coughed once, a cough that rattled deep inside him. For the first time, he didn’t seem like some wise ancient guy who knew the answer to everything—just like a regular old man who could’ve been a rougher, scragglier version of Gramps Fitzgerald down in Florida, dressed in clothes that looked like they’d all seen too many trips to Goodwill.

  “Real nice, Ray, like always,” said Queenie Banks from across the atrium, where she was leaning up against the wall of the hallway with a grin on her face. “Wish Margie could’ve heard it. She would’ve loved to hear you play like that.”

  Ray put a curled, painful-looking hand to his heart. “You and me both, Queenie. Hope you and Elijah will come to dinner at my place soon. Things have been too quiet there lately.”

  “Mm-hmm,” said Queenie. “Let me talk to him and I’ll let you know.” Queenie gave a little wave before she headed back into her salon.

  I was still standing by my pillar when Ray picked up his hat, poured the change inside it into his pants pocket, put the hat on his head, and turned around to look straight at me. Just like last time.

  He smiled. It was a nice smile, even if some of his teeth were gray and uneven.

  “You again,” he said, getting up off the piano bench, slow and steady like his legs and back hurt him. “You enjoy that song? What’s your name? I’m Ray Owens.”