The Mockingbirds (20 page)

“What do you mean? The cheating? Or the sleeptalking?”

He shrugs his shoulders. “The whole thing. Like he can’t deal with it on his own?”

“Well, maybe he feels helpless,” I say defensively.

“Anyway,” Jones steers the conversation back. “So why are
you
hanging out with the Mockingbirds?”

“Why not hang out with them?”

“You’re not answering the question.”

“What’s the question, Jones?”

“If you’re not in the Mockingbirds, then what happened to you?”

He lays the violin gently across his thighs and leans toward me. His hair falls forward, but he makes no move to push it out of the way. He just waits for me.

I should tell him. The whole school is going to know any day now when Carter is served his summons. But when I try to speak, my throat closes, as if there’s a hand on my neck, gripping tighter, choking the words into silence. I’m afraid to tell Jones for some reason. Maybe it was the way he said the math wiz was lame for going to the Mockingbirds, or the way he seems to disapprove of the Mockingbirds.

“What happened to you, Alex? If you don’t tell me I’ll go all Beastie Boys with Gershwin next week.”

“Jones,” I manage to get out before the hand clamps my throat again.

“Alex, I’m your friend. I’ve known you since we started here. You and me, we’re the same. You’re the only other person here who understands how I feel about music and I’m the only person who understands exactly how you feel too.”

The hand loosens its grip, one finger after another slowly peeling off my throat. “Do you know Carter Hutchinson?” I ask quietly.

“Water polo dude?”

I nod. “Yes.”

Jones sighs heavily. “I heard his name went into the book yesterday. Don’t tell me he…”

I tell Jones the story. When I’m done, he lets out a long breath of air. “Man, I wish you came to me.”

“Came to you?”

“I would have taken care of this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I would have bashed his head in.”

“Stop it, Jones.”

“I’m serious. I can’t believe he hurt you like this.”

“I’m fine,” I insist, and it’s strangely true. I felt fine—good, really—when Maia told me about the pool. I felt better—strong, even—when I walked through the cafeteria with my protectors. “Besides, I don’t want you resorting to violence, Jones. I don’t want you getting in trouble.”

“I know, and, look, I just meant this is crazy. There are other ways to deal with this.”

“Oh, like you attacking him?”

“No, Alex. Forget that,” he says, calming down a bit.

“You mean I should have dealt with it on my own like you think the math dude in your dorm should?”

“No! This is different, way different. That’s small-time. This is a crime. Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“Give me a break. This is not a police matter.”

“He raped you!”

“It was date rape, okay? I was drunk. I was passed out. It’s not like when someone rapes you in a dark alley with a knife to your throat.”

“It’s still a crime. And you should treat it like a crime. Why didn’t you go to the cops?”

“I didn’t want to. And you know as well as I do how these things turn out with the cops involved. It turns into a
he said, she said,
and they turn my life upside down.”

“It’s going to be
he said, she said
with the Mockingbirds.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Fine, but what about your parents? Have you told them?”

I laugh. “My parents? I’m not telling my parents. My mom is a drama queen. She’d totally freak. My dad would enlist a few key contacts and secretly hunt him down.”

“Maybe they
should
hunt him down.”

“They’d pull me out of Themis. They’d send me to school in New Haven and make me live at home. You think I want that?”

“No.”

“So that’s why.”

“I know; it’s just this is so big. I think you should at least
tell
your parents.”

I point a finger at him. “You don’t even tell your parents you play the electric guitar. I’m not telling mine I was date-raped at boarding school.”

He holds up his hands. “Fair enough.” Then he adds, “So when is the hearing?”

“It hasn’t been set yet. They’re supposed to notify him Monday he’s being charged. But I’m pretty sure he knows it’s coming.”

“Well, you know I’ll do anything for you, okay? You know that, right?”

I nod.

“I mean it. Anything. If I can help in any way, I will.”

“I know.”

“You know I asked Amy out last year,” he offers.

“You did? What’d she say?”

“Well, I’m not dating her, am I?”

“Why would she turn you down?”

“She said I wasn’t her type.”

“Her loss,” I say.

“Anyway, should we practice?”

I raise an eyebrow playfully. “You want to practice? I’m shocked.”

We settle in and play Gershwin—the normal way, not hip-hop. I’ll take all the normal I can get right now.

Carter’s getting served tomorrow—Monday morning. I do my best to keep my mind in the present by working on my spring project. Alone in my room, I sift through the research I’ve compiled for my spring project—books and articles from musicologists, theorists, biographers, and others, some debating Beethoven’s genius, others questioning whether the Ninth Symphony breaches the rules of classic composition, but none that acknowledge the central problem I’ve unearthed. The lack of a piano.

So it’s up to me and Liszt.

Liszt, who adored Beethoven but didn’t simply imitate the master. Liszt
reclaimed
Beethoven, made the piano-less work his very own. He didn’t stand for things the way they were. He changed them. He stood up and made them
better. I open a file to start the written portion of my spring project. As I write the first sentence,
At some point an artist must break with the past,
I feel a kinship with Liszt, knowing I am doing the same in my own way.

I write for another thirty minutes when there’s a knock on my door. I get up and look through the keyhole. It’s Martin. I tell myself there’s no point in applying lip gloss this time, but I still run a brush through my hair before I let him in.

“Hey,” he says. “I have dinner for you.”

He hands me a napkin. I unwrap it and there’s a sandwich inside, hummus and cheese on three-seed bread. T.S. was supposed to bring dinner back.

“Thanks.”

“T.S. and Sandeep had a project to work on together,” he says, explaining why he is the delivery boy.

“I didn’t know they were working on a project.”

He gives me an insider look.

“Oh,” I say, nodding and understanding. “I guess that means you’re out of a room for a couple hours.”

“Yep,” he says, patting his backpack. “I’m off to the library. Want to come?”

I remember last time, reading the book. I remember the time before, seeing Carter. I shake my head. “But do you want to study here instead?” I offer, gesturing to my room. I think back to when he visited a few weeks ago. I didn’t let him stay in my room then. But I’m like Liszt now, I’m reclaiming me. I’m standing up for something tomorrow, so
I can do things differently tonight. “Is that allowed?” I add.

“Allowed?” he asks curiously.

“You know,
allowed
. Are you allowed to consort with me outside of the group?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because you’re a Mockingbird and I’m a…” I pause, looking for the right word for what I am—but all I can think is I am under their wing. Is there a word for that?

“You think we have all these weird rules, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I say. Then I add, “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Like you thought we were going to make you dry your clothes without washing them.”

“Well, it’s not as if I know much about how you work.”

“Casey never told you?”

“She told me some stuff. Not details.”

“Well, I’ll tell you the details, and the details are I’m allowed to study in your room, just like I was allowed to work with you in the common room. If it’s still okay with you?”

“It is,” I say.

“Good,” he says, then shrugs his shoulders happily. He comes in and sits down at T.S.’s desk. I return to mine and begin my sandwich.

“What are you working on tonight?” he asks.

I tell him about my spring project, then ask about his.

“Barn owls,” he states.

“Interesting. How’d you get that idea?”

“I was driving this summer and I drove past this injured owl on the side of the road. I was about to call the Humane Society, but then he just died, so I took him home and I dissected him—”

I cut him off. “You dissected him?” I ask incredulously. “What, on the kitchen counter?”

“Uh, no,” he tosses back at me. “In the garage.”

“That’s weird, Martin.”

“What’s weird about it?”

“You find a dead owl and take him home to slice him open. That’s weird!” I cross my arms and lean back in my desk chair.

“He was already dead. It was a learning opportunity. It’s no different than you going off to play the piano all the time even at night. This is how I
practice
what I want to do.”

“Okay, fine. So tell me what you found when you dissected your roadside discovery.”

“His stomach was full of rodents. Mice, chipmunks, even a gopher!” Martin grows more animated; his eyes sparkle as he talks about the contents of the owl’s belly. I find myself both repulsed and curious.

“How could you tell?”

“I can just tell,” he says. “Same way you can tell which chord is a C minor if someone blindfolded you. Anyway, you know why the owl had so much food in its stomach?”

I shake my head.

“Because the common barn owl has an insanely high
metabolic rate!” He says this as if he just discovered a lost city of Aztec gold or stumbled upon buried treasure. I picture Martin in his garage in upstate New York, an old rickety wood garage with a workbench full of tools and a dead owl. He grabs an X-Acto blade and delicately, but ever so precisely, slices open the owl. Dead mice spill out of the owl’s belly, and Martin’s brown eyes crackle with delight.

“So I’m going to do my project on how the barn owl’s metabolism is the embodiment of survival of the fittest,” he says.

“Who’s your junior advisor? Mr. Christie is mine,” I say, then stick my tongue out to indicate how I feel about that travesty.

“Yeah, he’s mine too. So I know the horror.”

Martin begins his patented impression, complete with the booming, baritone voice. “How many of you,” he begins, then pauses heavily, portentously, “can write a seventeen-point-five-word essay on where our global economy is headed over the next one hundred years?”

I laugh.

Martin continues, back to his own voice now. “I can’t figure out if the dude is lazy or just a freaking genius. Like he figured out it’s so much easier to grade these essays that are the size of a molecule. Or if there actually is something to the whole idea of being succinct and being able to sum something up in ten words or less, or whatever.”

“My dad always says you have to have your elevator pitch down,” I say. “He’s a succinct man. He says little, but
it’s always
high impact,
he says. He heads up fund-raising at Yale, so he’s used to having to do the elevator pitch to hook people. He says that too.”

“You do think Mr. Christie is a genius, then,” Martin says, pointing his finger at me as if he’s caught me in the act.

“Hey, you started it! You said he might be a genius,” I fire back.

“And you agreed! I guess we’re even.”

“Even,” I say, then take the last bite of the sandwich. “Thanks again for dinner.”

“It’s not Amy’s homemade mac and cheese, but it’s the best I can do,” he says as he removes textbooks, mostly biology ones, from his backpack.

“So, were you assigned to me tonight?” I ask, because clearly the Mockingbirds share details and duties. Martin knew about Amy’s visit, after all.

“Assigned to you?”

“By the Mockingbirds. Did Amy tell you to hang out with me or something because of tomorrow?”

“Are you nervous about tomorrow?” he asks, not answering my question.

“Should I be?” I ask, not answering his. “What will it be like?”

“I’ll walk you to all your classes,” he says.

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

“Were you assigned to me?” I ask again. Now I want
the answers I don’t have, the things Amy won’t tell me, the things Casey never told me. I don’t have to be just the girl under their wing. I can speak up, like I’m doing tomorrow.