The Key to My Heart by Lia Louis

Author:Lia Louis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Published: 2022-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

It’s almost four by the time Joe and I leave the canal and walk back to the train station together, hot-skinned and exhausted and sun-sapped. I wait outside the tiny supermarket for him as he ducks in for a pint of milk for home, and enjoy the wisps of icy air-con of the shop’s entranceway. The piano sits there, a few meters away, silent, empty, commuters whisking by it. I peer behind me, through the glass of the shop window. Joe is in a chaotic-looking queue with at least two people left to go before him. And—ugh, I can’t help myself. Yes, I might feel disappointed, yes, it might deflate the joy that’s puffed me up from my afternoon with Joe, like a big ol’ giant pin to the human balloon that I am right now, but I can’t not. I have to check it. I can’t ignore the tingling and sparking beneath my skin when I think about the chance of there being something there again, in that stool.

I flit across the floor, almost tiptoe, like someone unhinged, like I used to when I was a teenager, sneaking into Jodie’s room at night to sit on the end of her bed and make her psychoanalyze the texts Daniel Paphitis from biology class had sent me because “this time he said hello not hi!”

I lift the lid. Slowly.

And there it is.

Another piece of music. As usual, freshly printed, but the paper slightly thicker this time, like card. “Strawberry Swing” by Coldplay. Everyone who knows me well knows I cried along to Coldplay CDs throughout secondary school. Russ agreed once, that if I ever, in a mad turn of events, met Chris Martin, and he, in an even madder turn of events, came onto me, I was allowed to kiss him on the lips, just the once…

And as I turn, I see Joe crossing the floor toward me, looking at me like he might be regretting this—hanging out with someone who bounds toward him holding a piece of paper in her hand like Charlie Bucket waving a golden ticket. But the excitement shoots through me like a firework at the sight of it. I can’t help it.

“What is it?” Joe asks, half smiling. “Seriously, what’s going on?”

“So—this is gonna sound so weird, but—someone leaves me music.” I’m breathless, smiling ear to ear, as I speak. I definitely must look deranged. “And… it stopped.”

Joe’s eyes are unblinking, a carrier bag in his hand. Never fear, Notebook Joe, I am quite normal really. In the right circumstances.

“Anyway. Some has been left. Today. After weeks without it.”

“Seriously?” Joe still stares, but suddenly, with his free hand, he reaches up, takes the music from my hand. “ ‘Strawberry Swing,’ ” he utters. “Wow, this is so—”

“I loved Coldplay,” I jump in. “When I was a teenager. And the songs that’ve been left, they’re always sort of important to me. Poignant, you know? Like, they have meaning?”

“And this was left—today? While we were at the canal?” He turns over the page in his hand.

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