chapter 1
weston
I’m learning a new piece on the piano when she happens. That’s how she feels: like a Happening. One minute I’m awash in a sea of notes, the next the practice room door flies open, hitting the stopper with a dull thud, and she’s there, her saxophone dangling from its strap around her neck.
The last note I played is ringing in the air and waiting for the run that follows, when Anna James rounds the bench to stand close to my face, her brown eyes pleading with me before the words leave her mouth in a torrent.
“Look,” she says, “I’m going to level with you because I have no choice. If I screw this up, it’s literally the end of the world. My parents will be sad. The band will be sad. I will be sad. Just promise me,” she says gravely, “that you’ll agree with everything Mr. Brant is about to say.”
She might be a Happening, a tornado with feet, but she looks normal. Brown hair, brown eyes, white skin, a shirt that looks like it can’t decide whether to accentuate her curves or hide them, and …
Christmas socks? On the first day of school. In August. They’re peeking out from beneath her jeans, faded yellow pom-poms atop ornamented trees.
“Do you even know who I am?” I ask, staring at the socks.
It’s a loaded question, an accusation. In a town the size of Enfield, you can’t help but recognize everyone in the hallways of EHS. More often than not, you know the limbs of your classmates’ family trees as well as your own, the same grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles showing up at every forced singing program and school play you’ve been in since childhood.
Enfield is one of those absurdly small Texas towns, the kind that claims to be Christian and has a church on every corner. Except the biggest cathedral of all is the football field in the dead center of town where—from August to December—everyone comes to worship the god of cowhide and metal bleachers and congealed cheese nachos from the cash-only concession stand.
So, she knows me. She probably knows my full name and my GPA, and she’s definitely heard the town “scandal” that my parents divorced and the “shocking” news that I ran away to Bloom because of it.
And I vaguely know her. I know she’s first chair saxophone this year by default. I know that instead of joining band in the fifth grade like everybody else, she joined her freshman year—my sophomore year—before I went away to Bloom. I know she has parents that are still married, because most everyone in Enfield does. I think she has a little sister.
But that doesn’t mean anything, this kind of knowing. We were at band camp together two weeks ago, for Christ’s sake, and she didn’t speak to me once. Not that she was an exception; hardly anyone except Ratio and—occasionally, when he seemed to suddenly remember we were friends—Jonathan spoke to me, except to pry about why I had gone to Bloom and why I had come back. Like they didn’t know. Like they wanted me to talk about Mom and Dad’s divorce out loud, just to hear me say it.
But none of them are standing too close to me in a practice room either. Only Anna James.
She is watching me, her head cocked as she presses down her saxophone keys in a drumming rhythm, the rubber pads clicking against the metal in a strange tattoo.
She says nothing, and I feel fuzzy and hollow. Dreading what she’s about to say. Never mind. I have you confused with someone else. Or worse, Sure I know you. You’re the freak that wears the black leather jacket.
She doesn’t, though.
When she speaks, it’s almost a whisper, and chills run up and down my arms.
“I know you, Weston Ryan.”
It’s ridiculous, but I almost believe she means it, despite years of parents and teachers whispering behind cupped hands that I am “gifted but strange,” great with music but not so great at fitting in. I can almost pretend that my two best and only friends haven’t always seen me as their social pity project.
Suddenly, I wonder if Anna has heard the rumor that is still going around, a whole year later, that I’m the one who took a hatchet to the high school’s stupid Memorial Memorial Tree.
I’m sure she did. It made the front page of the Enfield weekly paper and everything: “Tree Representing Hope for Future Chopped Down.” Town police were searching for the culprit, the article said. It used words like malicious, vengeful, and pernicious, words not seen in the paper since ninety-year-old Mr. Summers refused to participate in the student-versus-faculty Thanksgiving basketball game.
The sapling, fondly referred to as the Memorial Memorial Tree by students, was planted only one month ago by the student council after the original Memorial Tree was struck by lightning last spring. The council held bake sales throughout the year to pay for the new tree and the original’s stump removal, never imagining their hard work would end in tragedy. The last Memorial Tree had a rich history, presiding over the center of the student parking lot since the days when the lot consisted of posts for horses; this Memorial Memorial Tree lasted under a month.
I didn’t touch that fucking tree. The only reason everyone thinks I did is because someone overheard me telling Ratio “Good riddance” when he told me the news, which, for the record, was only because the replacement tree looked like it wouldn’t even last the mild Texas winter. Twig is too generous a term. It probably shriveled up and died of embarrassment.
It didn’t help the rumors when I transferred to Bloom for the next school year.
But Anna isn’t looking at me like I’m a tree killer that skipped town after murdering important vegetation. When Anna looks at me, I can almost, almost, almost believe she sees through everything—the whispers, the tree accusations. All of it.
We’re interrupted by the door opening as, in a much softer fashion, our band director enters. The tiny room is now overcrowded with a piano, my mellophone case, my backpack, Anna and her saxophone, and Mr. Brant.
“Weston Ryan,” he greets me. “I’m surprised to find you here after school.”
I gesture vaguely at the sheet music atop the piano. “Practicing, sir.”
Avoiding my mom’s empty house, sir.
Mr. Brant nods, his eyes jumping between us. “Good. Anna has informed me that you’re going to help her with the duet you two share in the production number. Is this true?”
Anna scoots to stand beside Mr. Brant, and I can’t decide if it’s harder or easier to breathe now that there’s an appropriate distance between us. Her eyes are begging as she stares meaningfully at me, her hands closed in a choke hold on her saxophone, and something about the way she is looking at me—like I’m the answer to all of her questions—makes my insides shift.
I don’t have the luxury of time to decide if it’s a good or bad shift.
“Of course.” The words leave my mouth without my brain hearing what it is I’ve agreed to.
If I thought Anna’s eyes were bright before, it’s only because I didn’t know that eyes could look like hers do when she smiles at me. Luminescent. Like unexpectedly stumbling across the first fireflies of summer.
It almost makes me want to smile back.
“Excellent. Good,” he is saying. “You need to get it down. And soon, understand? Or Anna’s part goes to Ryland. He’ll need time to work it up before the regional contest.”
“Yes, sir,” Anna says. She’s trying to get me to look at her.
“Fine,” I say.
Copyright © 2022 by Ashley Schumacher