Lutie danced even when she was sitting. Other girls talked nonstop or stared at their fingernails or played with their hair, but Lutie put every molecule of energy into everything she did. Kelvin thought Lutie could become a choreographer or a surgeon. His parents would say to him, “Could you spend one minute thinking about what you want to be?”
But Kelvin was already what he wanted to be: welcome anywhere. He had no best friend. He had no group. It seemed to him that best friends lost out on other wonderful friends, and tight groups got bogged down in status. But a friend to all, like Kelvin, was room temperature. He was never too hot or too cold. He was always just right.
Kelvin wouldn’t have minded being terrific at something, but his ambition was also room temperature. He didn’t even expend effort watching television, and couldn’t be bothered to locate the remote or rouse himself to go to the kitchen for a snack. When Kelvin found a place to sprawl, he liked to stay for a while and take in the scenery.
Chorus was outstanding in its scenery.
He wondered why his favorite scenery, Lutie, was not participating.
Kelvin had never seen Lutie sit anything out. Today she wasn’t singing. She wasn’t laughing. Her hands and eyes were not dancing. Maybe she didn’t feel good. When Kelvin felt crummy, he stayed home and enjoyed a little daytime TV and a lot of ice cream.
Kelvin spotted somebody sitting in Mr. Gregg’s office. Perhaps it was a superintendent, grading Mr. Gregg’s teaching technique. Kelvin hoped Mr. Gregg would go easy on the soprano jokes in front of a stranger. The music teacher loved to insult the sopranos, who usually had the melody, the easiest part, and failed pitifully if they were challenged.
Energy poured off Mr. Gregg like rain in a storm of excitement. Kids loved to be around him, as if they’d been thirsty all day and he was their drink of cold water. He even had extra tenors clamoring to get into concert choir. In most schools, tenors would rather be dead than admit that they were tenors, never mind go sing in an actual choir.
“Got a new piece!” Mr. Gregg shouted. He always raised his voice, as if his best musicians had hearing problems. “Sopranos, you actually have to work on this one.”
Without looking at her, Mr. Gregg handed the music to the pianist.
Kelvin looked, because the pianist was as lovely as Lutie. Doria Bell was elegant, always dressed in black, something lean and mature, as if she had just stepped out of a corporate attorney’s office.
Kelvin glanced at the new sheet music. The piano part had a scary-looking introduction. But Doria would sight-read it without making a mistake. She would play the piano expressively, but her face would have no expression. Kelvin wondered now and then if there was a person inside Doria or if she was just a recording.
Doria Bell sat bolt upright on the piano bench. Her posture was always vertical. It was one of her flaws: she could not unbend.
Doria had figured it was a little flaw, hardly worth thinking about. But moving to Court Hill had been the shock of her life. She had always had friends. She had never even thought about having to make friends; they were always there. Well, she’d been here three months, and every single text message she’d gotten had been from someone a thousand miles away.
She had counted on chorus to be the source of new friends. But no. The accompanist was furniture; she came with the piano.
Oh, people were nice. Courtesy ruled in the South. But she could not step into their lives. Here she was, bursting with conversations she wanted to have and laughter she wanted to share. But there was nobody to talk to or laugh with.
School had been in session for ten weeks. Doria had never moved before. Clearly her plan to have best friends in ten days—in fact, she had expected to have best friends in ten hours—was silly. Perhaps even ten weeks was silly. Maybe it took ten months. There was a hideous thought.
Her eyes fell on Lutie Painter.
Lutie was a star soloist, here and in her church. Since moving to the South, Doria had begun listening to gospel. Women who sang gospel had muscular voices that shouted down the aisle. Lutie did not need to shout. From her small frame came a voice stronger than that of a grown woman with a lot more inches, pounds and years: rich melted chocolate with no weak spots and no breaking points. Lutie could blend with the wispiest voice or produce enough volume to be heard over all eighty singers in the choir.
Doria thought Lutie probably had perfect pitch, as she herself did. It would be a statistical rarity for two kids out of eighty to have perfect pitch. But Lutie also had perfect pitch for friendship, Doria thought. How did she do it? Absolutely everybody liked her.
Reluctantly, Doria glanced at the music Mr. Gregg had not bothered to give her ahead of time. Mr. Gregg did not perform entry-level, easy-note stuff. He liked to brag about Doria, telling other music teachers how lucky he was to have this outstanding accompanist.
Doria would think, Fine, but I’m alone on the piano bench while everybody else is sitting in a row making friends.
She opened the music. A non-pianist would think the piano part was complex, but all those sixteenth notes were just chord outlines. The left hand had a fun jazzy beat, and the eight-measure intro had a few tricky accidentals, but she read them as easily as she read English.
Doria hated practicing the piano, which was not her instrument. Her theory was: get it right the first time, which saves you the trouble of practicing. She was always puzzled by slow learners in the chorus. Why didn’t they just get it right the first time too?
I bet that’s another flaw, she thought. People know that I think they should learn faster and easier. I wonder how many flaws I have that back home they didn’t notice or were used to?
Mr. Gregg lifted his arms for the downbeat. Doria forgot everything else and entered the music: brain, eyes, fingers, arms and soul. She did not surface until the last note.
“Good sight-reading,” said Mr. Gregg, meaning the chorus. He rarely made eye contact with Doria; you didn’t have to pay attention to perfection. “Baritones,” he yelled, “from the top.”
Doria gave the baritones their starting note. It was now reasonable for her to look at the boys, so she raised her eyes and studied the second row. Don’t look too long, she reminded herself.
She could not make an ordinary friend, but she was drowning in an unexpected crush. The crush was so physical. Her throat thickened when she saw him. Her lungs gave out, her heart raced, her eyes glazed, her speech stumbled.
At least she could still play the piano. She banged out the baritone part. Nobody looked her way. A pianist was wallpaper.
When she had first moved here, she might as well have been deaf wallpaper, too. She could hardly understand a word. Half the student body had also moved to Court Hill from somewhere else, and their English was just English. But the local white kids drawled, making each word mysterious and thick. The local black kids used a sort of shorthand, omitting syllables and skipping important parts of sentences.
Sometimes she wanted to scream at her parents, “How could you do this to me? I had friends at home. Now you’ve thrown me to these slow-speaking wolves. How am I ever going to have friends in this place? I can’t even tell what they’re talking about.”
Doria had given up trying to understand her classmates, and just let their speech pour over her. Their Southern lilt was like chamber music: like tiny concerts all over the place. Except for the swearing, of course. In that way, Court Hill High was exactly like her New England high school: the same four-letter words shouted down the halls. Dead words that did not vibrate or sing.
And then one day, Doria found that she understood every word. It was like being a spy. They thought they were talking Romanian and could say anything around strangers and it would still be a secret—but Doria, a Yankee stranger, was now in on it.
And so what?
Who cared about anything if you didn’t have friends?
Teaching the baritones their part was a one-finger activity. With her free hand, Doria slid her cell phone out
of her purse and texted Nell back home. Just moving her thumb, just pressing Send, knowing that Nell loved hearing from her and would answer, was strengthening.
Gazing on my crush, Doria wrote. K is perfect.
Mr. Gregg did not think Kelvin was perfect. “Kelvin!” he yelled.
“Yes, sir!” Kelvin was grinning. Mr. Gregg loved to tease him because Kelvin could take it, whereas other kids might be destroyed by teasing. Kelvin never understood that. But then, he had always laughed more easily than most.
“Kelvin, in this chorus, we sit up in our chairs. We do not lean back. We do not cross our legs. We do not daydream. What are you, anyway—a soprano?”
“Okay. Want me to switch? I can sing falsetto.”
“You can have my seat, Kelvin,” called one of the girls. “I’d love to sit with the baritones.”
Everyone laughed except Lutie. Lutie, who usually radiated happiness the way some kids radiated despair. Kelvin would corner her later on to see what was wrong.
One good thing, though: poor old Doria was laughing with the rest.
Whatever Doria consisted of—certainly Kelvin didn’t know; he had briefly been in a chemistry class with her until their teacher had said, “Wow,” and moved Doria into the honors section—she’d be better off adding laughter to her repertoire instead of Beethoven.
Kelvin gave Doria a special grin and the poor thing blushed and dropped her eyes.
Doria had been in Kelvin’s chemistry class for a short time. The teacher had scolded Kelvin continually: “Kelvin, stop talking.” “Kelvin, keep your thoughts to yourself.” “Kelvin, turn off your phone.” “Kelvin, I would like somebody else’s opinion for a change.” Kelvin would roar with laughter. His laugh lifted the whole class and broke into little laughing pieces around the room. Doria sometimes felt as if she could pick up the pieces and carry them home.
Kelvin did not even sit quietly. He and Lutie—both Class-A people persons—would do waist-up dances while sitting in class, or hand and arm dances, and sometimes just chin dances. Whereas Doria, dancing, could hardly be seen moving.
If asked, Doria would have said that when she fell in love, it would be with a boy similar to herself: quiet, contained and studious.
She would have said it would be with a boy who loved her back.
But Kelvin liked everybody. Over a thousand kids in this building, and he turned the same warmth and the same smile on everyone.
But above all, she would have expected him to be white.
That he wasn’t was a surprise she yearned to talk about. She would look at the girls in choir whose names she knew but who were not her girlfriends, and imagine having girlfriend conversations with them about Kelvin. There could be no more compelling topic. She would not immediately state her interest, which was reaching the level of obsession, but would calmly and casually ask if they’d always been in school with him.
In her desperation to make friends, last Sunday Doria had gone to Youth Group at the church her parents attended, the same church where she practiced the organ after school. First Methodist. Back home, Youth Group was for losers. Maybe a category even lower than loser.
Since having zero friends meant that Doria was already a loser, and since she had a job that marked her out as a loser, she was not eager to be in this category yet again.
Doria was an organist with her own church job in the city. Church organists might as well wear jackets embroidered “Dork.” Being an organist was not a ticket to friends, like, say, being a flutist. If you played the flute, you could join marching band, which was cool, though not very. But playing the organ was just another way of sitting alone. Nor did a pipe organ give you any sexy lines to utter. “Want to hear some Bach?” did not bring people running.
Doria gathered her courage and launched herself at the Methodist Youth Group, expecting that it too was Dork City, but willing to give it a try. The Youth Group space had foosball, table tennis and a half gym for volleyball or dances. It had great furniture for slouching on, and they had ordered every possible type of pizza, with toppings Doria would never have tested on her own, like pineapple and chicken.
To her relief, Rebecca, who was in concert choir and honors chemistry with her, was in Youth Group, and so was Jenny, another soprano.
But instead of playing games during which Doria might find a partner and make inroads to friendship, the kids were forced to listen to some woman named Miss Kendra talk about her hot meal ministry. Of course, in the South people were so polite you couldn’t tell what they really thought. They sat with their cheerful expressions and their nice posture and Doria tried to imitate them.
It seemed that every Saturday morning, Miss Kendra prepared—in her own kitchen, on an ordinary stove—enough food for a hundred people. Then she drove into poor neighborhoods and served dinner right out of her car to anybody who walked up hungry.
Doria was impressed. No soup kitchen in town? Fine. I’ll do it myself. Doria wanted to be just like that—stopped by nothing.
Miss Kendra had come to Youth Group because she needed volunteers. Everybody’s hand went up. It sounded so fun.
Except—where were these poor neighborhoods? Court Hill looked pretty prosperous to Doria. It was a difficult town to get a hold on. Everything was brand-new and weirdly identical. It was strewn with housing developments, each with a cute name emblazoned on a brick wall. Half the streets weren’t even on GPS yet. There was nothing local about Court Hill: its features were more like national currency—they could be spent anywhere and nobody would notice a difference. CVS and Walmart and Target and Rite-Aid and all the other pharmacy chains and box stores and groceries were so regularly spaced that you didn’t measure in miles; you measured by stores.
Doria couldn’t think of anyplace she would consider poor, where there were actual hungry people.
Miss Kendra beamed at all those hands in the air. But she wanted only one volunteer at a time. “We don’t go into a neighborhood like an army,” she explained. “When we serve meals, there’s me and my husband, Mr. Billy, because I don’t drive into Chalk unless there’s a man along, and then I like two other people. One has to be an adult, but one of you kids would be a great help next Saturday.”
Doria wanted to laugh when Miss Kendra referred to her husband as “Mr. Billy,” which sounded like the name of a goat in a nursery rhyme, but it was the local style. Children here grew up calling their friends’ dads Mr. Nick or Mr. Jason. They called their Sunday-school teachers Miss Joanne or Miss Katy. Doria couldn’t go there. It was like the way they called their male teachers “sir” and their female teachers “ma’am.” It didn’t sound polite to Doria. It sounded like a military academy.
She wondered what Chalk was. Presumably not the stuff with which little kids wrote on sidewalks.
When the Youth Group realized that only one of them was wanted for this volunteer opportunity, they lost interest. Only Doria’s hand was still up, making her the sole volunteer for next Saturday.
There was no way out.
She couldn’t say to Miss Kendra, I don’t actually care about you and your mission. I don’t want to do good. I just want a friend.
Now, in chorus, Doria entered the music, which was so much easier than entering a social life. The baritones were history. Now she played the alto part, the tenor part, the soprano part, and finally all four together. This stumped most pianists. It was hard to read four staves. Doria did it all the time and hardly noticed.
Lutie was so sorry she had come back to school after her shocking morning. The shadowy figure of the professor inside the music office was a threat. It tangled her mind, as if she didn’t have enough knots and shreds thinking about Saravette.
Of course when she was desperate for chorus to end, Mr. Gregg dismissed them late. The next class, Music Appreciation, was coming into the big music room before the chorus had even stopped singing.
In previous years, bored kids who needed an easy credit signed up for Music Appreciation. This year, another t
ype had enrolled. Train’s type.
Train Greene was trouble. He lived on a street where drugs ruled, and he planned to be one of the rulers, like his brother before him. His big brother, DeRade, had finally gotten the prison sentence he’d been working on for so long, and now it was Train who was preparing for prison, the way Lutie was preparing for college.
The older Greene brother had been a pit bull, a boy who should have been on a chain but instead roamed the neighborhood, biting children. DeRade developed a taste for twisting arms, and broke one or two. He not only kicked dogs, he ran after them in order to kick them. It was something when a junkyard dog was afraid of a kid.
Train had not caught up to the level DeRade had achieved at his age, but Lutie figured it was only a matter of days. Train was seventeen now and six foot two. He’d been pretty hefty for a while, well over two hundred pounds, and a football-team wannabe. Train had not made the team. Perhaps that was what had made him so angry.
Train had lost weight in the months since DeRade went to jail. He now had the thin tight look of a starving animal. His eyes blazed feverishly. Lutie figured dogs with rabies had eyes like that.
Train buzzed into the music room like a hornet. People looked elsewhere, because making eye contact with Train wasn’t good. They stepped aside quickly, because blocking Train wasn’t good.
If Train had made the football team, thought Lutie, he’d be at practice every afternoon. If they weren’t going to confine him to jail, they could at least confine him to the gym.
The professor emerged from Mr. Gregg’s office. What a contrast the two men were: blustery red-cheeked yellow-haired Mr. Gregg, his shirt untucked and his tie askew; slim trim ebony Professor Durham, looking like a guest on a Wall Street talk show. They seemed unaware of the chaos caused by the boy formerly known as Cliff Greene.