Before Goodbye

Author:Mimi Cross [Cross, Mimi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Young Adult, Romance, Music
ISBN: 9781503951280
Google: 1DMlswEACAAJ
Amazon: 1503951286
Barnesnoble: 1503951286
Goodreads: 25828753
Publisher: Skyscape
Published: 2016-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

STATIC

CATE

Over the next few days and nights I practice so much that even my parents are worried.

Sometimes they knock on my door. I ask them, nicely, to go away.

I blow off my homework. Blow off my life. Still, my guitar sounds like a stranger.

Some nights I get high before bed. When I give in to sleep, I dream about Cal. I wake up with songs in my head.

Sometimes I don’t know it’s a dream, and I think Cal’s in the room with me—is he? Those times, it’s like a chess game—I can only plot so many moves ahead, can only see so far behind. So I don’t ask Cal a million questions, like, “What happened after the crash?” “What happens when you die?” Instead, I cling to this moment. My move. I want to play music.

Except once, I ask him, “What’s it like?”

It’s like buzzing inside. Like static.

“L-like a TV screen, when the picture goes bad? Like the Internet dropping, is that it?”

He shakes his head. Tucks his hair behind his ears.

Nervous laughter bubbles up from somewhere inside me then—but it’s from the wrong place. It’s from the place that produces screams, I think. It’s a strangled, choking sound.

The wind lifts my hair and I reach up to smooth it—

Waking myself up. I’m in a sitting position already. Sleep-sitting. Thoughts muddled. Wind in my bedroom.

I spin toward the windows— they’re both closed. Cal, of course, is not here.

And—he is not at Carnegie Hall.

This time it’s me who’s onstage, at the Weill Recital Hall. (And straight as an arrow for the occasion.)

This isn’t a dream—though it feels surreal—the date has finally arrived.

Weill Hall is an intimate place, not like Stern Auditorium where Cal played. It holds two hundred and fifty people or so, not two thousand, but still, I’m all tingly.

Tonight Weill Hall holds my dad and my mom, and Laurel and her mother. It holds the other participants’ parents, and possibly the founders of Strings with Wings, and definitely the president and administrators of its child company, Pupils with Promise. Most important, Weill Recital Hall holds a handful of men and women from the audition panel of Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Music, and several other conservatories, including Eastman.

Laurel told me tonight that I look luminous, and I believe her. In the mirror I’d been black-and-white, all dark gown and pale shoulders, nude lips, hair in a low bun, wound tight.

And now, straight-backed, feet flat—jaw slack (lips together, teeth apart)—I begin.

My guitar is in my arms, as close as the lover I’ve never had. Fingers arched, hands hovering, really, I’ve already started. Before the first note slips from the sound hole, I’m playing the music.

See me now, a statue: dress draping, neck swanlike, left foot on a folding stool like every classical guitarist the world over. This is me, who I am.

Where I go, what I do—it may all depend on this single performance.

The first of Leo Brouwer’s Estudios Sencillos—simple studies—spins out quickly from beneath my fingers, then ends abruptly after only a minute.

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