In Harmony (Fenbrook Academy #2)(20)
Author: Helena Newbury

Watching Connor as he played, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something. He’d obviously spent hours composing the music and then practicing it, probably up on the roof of his apartment block. He’d been big enough to apologize and come and meet me yet, when I tentatively asked if we could talk about his essay work, he just shook his head. It was beyond frustrating. We had more essays due before the recital, and if he didn’t hand something in for those, either, I was certain he’d flunk. And then all our work would be for nothing.

An hour in, coffees finished and the donuts reduced to sticky crumbs, we took a bathroom break and—against all laws of men and women—I returned first. Only to knock over his guitar case as I came in, sending it crashing to the floor.

I propped it up again, but something was sticking out of the lining at the top—a folded piece of paper dislodged by the fall. I went to tuck it back inside, but something about the writing on it made me stop.

The handwriting was normal enough, but the letters made no sense. You kissed me mad me cofy and said yor nam was Ruth.

I slowly drew out the paper and unfolded it. I recognized the lyrics from when I’d heard Connor sing them, but this version had been distorted, the words and even the sentences twisted almost beyond sense. Reading it, I could feel him trying to push what he wanted to say through a mind that wouldn’t quite comply, his frustration evident in his spiky pen strokes. I suddenly knew why he’d never handed in an essay.

Too late, I felt his presence in the room. When my head jerked up, he was standing there fuming in the doorway. He looked just as disappointed in me as I’d been in him at the gym—before I understood.

Without a word, he grabbed his guitar, case and jacket and stalked from the room. Seconds later I heard his feet pounding down the stairs. I looked at my cello, still propped up beside my chair. By the time I packed it away and got the case on my back, he’d be out on the street.

I left it, and ran after him.

I caught him in the first floor hallway, but when I grabbed his arm he just shook me off and was out of the main door before I could stop him. I wrenched it open to follow…and then staggered back in shock. While we’d been practicing, the clouds had finally let go and a full-on blizzard was in progress, the flakes flying horizontally and smacking into my face so hard they hurt. As I stumbled down the steps, freezing air filling my lungs, I realized my coat was still on the back of my chair upstairs.

I blundered after him, hair streaming behind me in the wind. Snow splattered the front of my sweatshirt, the color disappearing in seconds under a coat of white. “Connor!”

He didn’t even slow down. Shoulders hunched, guitar slung across his back, he marched on, away from me, away from Fenbrook. I had a horrible feeling that, if I didn’t stop him, he’d never come back.

I forced my legs to go faster, sneakers sliding on the fresh snow. “Connor, wait!” A blast of wind shot straight down my throat, making me gasp and turn to try to catch my breath, and he slipped further away.

I gritted my teeth and stepped into the street, where the traffic had mashed the snow down. Pounding alongside the sidewalk, trying to watch for headlights coming at me through the blizzard, I managed to get alongside him and grab his arm. “STOP!”

He turned and hauled me bodily out of the street, dumping me back on the sidewalk. “You’ve got your answer: I’m too f**king stupid to write an essay, that’s why I never handed one in. That’s why I won’t be graduating! So you can take your cello and shove it up your pretty little arse, ‘cos I won’t even be here for your recital!”

I stood there gaping at him. “Stupid?!” I asked, dumbfounded.

He just stood there glaring at me and I realized he didn’t know.

“Oh my God,” I said, half-aloud. “Oh my God, you thought…Connor, you’re dyslexic!”

He cocked his head to one side, as if suspecting a trick.

“You’re not stupid! You just have a problem with words! That’s why you’re fine with playing and composing and writing scores.” I gaped at him. “Has no one ever said this to you before?”

There was the tiniest flicker in his expression, as if he could see a distant light and didn’t trust it to be real. He looked away and then back to me. “I thought that was just an excuse. What people say when they’re bone idle.”

I felt something twist inside me. His assumptions were no worse than mine; I’d taken him for lazy without bothering to find out the real reason. “No,” I told him. “No, it’s not. It’s been holding you back—it’s like trying to play without being able to hear properly.” I stepped closer. “I can help you!”

He looked at me doubtfully. “You think you can fix it? In the time we have left?”

“We can figure something out. I can help you get through the essays.” I was very close to him now. “If you’ll let me.”

He gave me a long look, and then his hard expression finally melted. “Jesus, put something on before you freeze,” he told me, whipping off his jacket and pulling it around my shoulders. His hands were warm, even through the leather.

***

We were back in the practice room minutes later. Save for me shivering, it was as if the whole thing had never happened, and yet I knew nothing would ever be the same again.

“I can’t believe they never helped you with it when you were young,” I told him quietly. “You should have had a helper in the classroom, assistance during exams….”

He wasn’t looking at me, his focus turned inward and to the past. “Not in this school. If you got out with some maths and English, you were doing well. The teachers didn’t care as long as you weren’t trying to burn the place down. And my parents…well. They didn’t have any expectations to shatter.”

I studied him as he sat there, hunched over in his chair, his body closed even as he opened up to me. He’d gone so long without talking about the problems he was having, had worn his reputation as a bad boy like a suit of armor to disguise what was really going on. I could see it on his face—humiliation, at finally admitting to someone that there was a problem. And hope—the faintest possibility that maybe it wasn’t his fault. That maybe he finally had some control over his future.

I started to worry that I’d promised something I couldn’t deliver. Sure, if he’d had help from the start, back in high school, he could have achieved much more. But we had less than two months until the recital and graduation. Could I really turn him around?

“Let’s play for a bit,” I told him, to try to break the tension, and he nodded eagerly. I played my second part again, so alien to me with its confidence and force, that theme of suppressed rage running underneath.

It must have burned at Connor all those years at Fenbrook to think that he was the interloper, the stupid one amongst the talented kids. I went cold inside as I wondered what he’d thought of me, when he’d seen me in class getting ‘A’s for my essays. It was a lot easier to understand his rage at the gym, now. It had always been there—maybe always would be—that deep river of anger—

I stopped playing.

It’s him!

I looked down at the cello, rewinding the music in my head. Hard and forceful, confident and even cocky. Barely-controlled anger underneath. My second section was Connor. I’d written him into the music.

I looked across at Connor and thought of his second section. Just like mine, it had been very different to his normal music. Slow, and almost timid. Oh God…he’d written me! Nervous and shy and…there’d been something else. A sort of dark rhythm underneath that had built and built, wanting—needing—to be met by a harmony. What could that—

I flushed.

Was that really how he saw me? A librarian with hidden passions? And what did it mean, that we’d unknowingly written each other into our music?

He was staring at me. “What?”

I swallowed, unable to stop the smile that twitched at my lips. “Nothing.”

We practiced our second sections again and again, but there were some parts that just wouldn’t come together. The cello, with all its somber grace, just wouldn’t do what I needed it to do. In a sense, it wasn’t him, in the same way his guitar wasn’t me. And we didn’t know each other’s instruments well enough to help.

“I have an idea,” he told me. And he put his guitar aside and held out his hand. It took me a second to realize that he wanted me to pass him my cello.

Understand, when you play the same physical instrument for years, it becomes part of you. No one played my cello but me. It wasn’t the cost—although the cost was hard to forget—it was the handing over of something so personal, so precious.

I bit my lip, turned it on its peg to face away from me and passed it across the short gap that separated us. His fingers brushed mine for a second as he gripped the neck, warm and strong.

He cradled the cello between his knees. “Like this?” he asked.

I swallowed. “More vertical. Lift her a little more.”

He looked at me. “Her?” That familiar smile played across his lips, and even though he was mocking me I somehow didn’t mind at all. I shrugged.

His hand ran up and down the slender neck, skimming over the polished wood until he found its balance. He handled its weight so easily that I was never worried about it sliding out of control—it was heavy for me, almost too big for me, but in his hands it looked almost frail.

Connor turned the cello just a little and ran a palm down its gently curving side. Out over the full swell at the top, then in at the narrow waist. Out again at the lower, flaring curve, following the smooth flank of it.

I found I was barely breathing.

He put his hand out for the bow, and I pressed it into his palm. He looked along it like a knight would a sword, then experimented with the flex of the horsehair. He gripped it—too close to one end. “Like this?”

Without thinking, I reached out and took hold of the bow in the correct position, a hand’s width further along. Our thumbs were touching. “There.”

He gripped the bow again, his fingers over mine. The warmth of his hand seemed to soak through my fingers and up my arm in a rush, coursing straight to my chest. “Like that?” he asked.

I nodded dumbly.

He started to play, very slowly, with me guiding his movements. The cello let us hear every touch he made, every slow brush of the bow on the taut strings. He was heavy where I’d always been gentle, and I had to pull his hand back to keep him from being too firm. The sensation of hearing the notes and at the same time feeling him making them, of having another person touch the strings even as I guided his touch…it was strange. And beautiful.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Do you trust me?”

I slowly slid my fingers from beneath his. They tingled, as if electrically charged. When he began to move the bow, I had to keep the very tips of my fingers brushing the back of his hand, so great was my fear of him damaging something. It wasn’t music—it was him exploring the limits, working out how he could coax what he wanted from the instrument. Free of my hesitation or fear, without all the careful grace I’d had drummed into me over the years by my teachers, he was able to make sounds I’d never heard before, things I wouldn’t have thought a cello capable of.