Doria got up from the piano bench. Train stuck out a huge foot, his white sneaker filthy and his laces dangling. Doria stumbled on it, Train withdrew it quickly, smiling, and Doria lurched into the line of exiting sopranos. Her books and music—the ugly yellow plastic briefcase she always carried, and her little red purse, which she had forgotten to zip—flew out of her hands. From the purse shot coins, pencils, a cell phone, Chap Stick and keys that hung from a brass treble clef chain.
Only Lutie, stranded in the top row while the sopranos dawdled, saw that Train had tripped Doria on purpose. Rebecca and Jenny, closer to the door, just saw clumsy Doria. Sighing, they paused to retrieve Doria’s scattered belongings. Train stooped and picked up Doria’s key chain. He held it by the brass treble clef, swinging the keys too high for Doria to reach. Train loved to withhold things. “Lots of keys,” he said, in the creepy taunting voice he had begun using this year.
Train and DeRade had a nice mother, and although DeRade had never been nice, Train had been sweet when he was little. Miss Veola—whose church Train had attended until he’d gotten too big for his mama to order him around—believed that if she could just separate Train from bad influences, he would return to being nice.
Lutie did not believe that.
Kids like Train were not making choices about being nice; they were making choices about getting attention. Nice kids were noticed by their mothers. Vicious kids were noticed by everybody. DeRade Greene was famous. Train wanted the same. He too wanted some girl to say admiringly, “You the baddest.”
Train jangled the keys in the air. “You the super for an apartment building, Doria?”
Doria shook her head. “Thank you for picking up my keys,” she said, all Yankee and prim, holding out her hand.
Train kept the keys out of reach, separating two of them. “Car keys,” he identified. “The other seven?”
Lutie elbowed her way forward down the risers.
Once they had all been friends—Kelvin and Lutie and Cliff, before anybody had thought of calling him Train. They got off the school bus at the same stop near Chalk. Lutie would walk all the way to Peter Creek and hop from rock to rock across the water. Sometimes she fell in. Then she’d slime home to MeeMaw, who would say, “Girl, either improve your balance or get off at the next stop instead and use the bridge!”
Last year, after a homicide, Train’s brother was picked up by the police. Somebody had ratted on DeRade. People in Chalk did not talk to the police; it was a lapse of judgment on the part of a kid who thought he was helping society. The police didn’t have enough evidence to keep DeRade. He was out in a day and went straight for the kid who’d ratted on him. Poor Nate got himself packed in barbed wire one night and lost an eye.
The barbed wire had been cut right out of the fence in DeRade and Train’s backyard. Nobody had mended it. The big rectangle was still there, sagging on both sides. Since DeRade boasted about getting Nate, it was easier to put him in jail this time, and eventually he got the years in prison he’d been hoping for.
Everybody knew that Train had been along. But DeRade didn’t give his brother up, and Nate, who had learned a hard lesson, told the police it had been very dark out and he hadn’t seen his attacker.
He really couldn’t see now.
Lutie thought of Saravette, who hung twenty-four hours a day with people like DeRade. Who might be a person like DeRade.
“House keys,” said Doria, so brainless that she pointed them out to Train. “And church keys.”
Train looked repelled. “Church keys?” Then he laughed. “Which church?”
Lutie didn’t like this. Churches had terrific music equipment—high-quality electric keyboards and guitars, drums and microphones. Recording gear. In church offices were computers and printers, and in old Sunday-school rooms, air-conditioning units.
If you planned to steal, you wanted a building to be empty. But if you were looking for entertainment, which was more up Train’s alley, you might want to enter when somebody was there. Somebody like Doria.
Alone.
Jenny handed over Doria’s fallen cell phone and said in her high, carrying soprano, “Doria, is it true that you practice the organ in that big old church every day by yourself? You’re alone in the dark with the music?”
Telling Train that here was a girl who stayed alone and unsafe in the dark of an empty building? And by the way, you’re holding the key?
Finally Lutie arrived on the scene. She plucked the key ring from Train’s hand, tucked it into Doria’s purse, zipped the purse closed, hooked her arm in Doria’s and said over her shoulder, “She’s never alone, Jenny. What idiot would be alone in a big empty building? Come on, Doria, we’re late for lunch.”
Kelvin believed that Train needed to be on strong medication.
Of all the boys who had dropped out of school—this was a school system where less than two-thirds of kindergartners would be onstage to receive a high school diploma twelve years later—what a puzzle that Train still attended. Even more amazing that he remained at large in a neighborhood like Chalk, where a quarter of the young men either had been or were now in juvenile detention or jail, and his own brother was serving a prison sentence. You would have expected him to drop out in eighth grade, go straight to drug-dealing and die young.
When Kelvin and Train—Cliff, back then—were little, they had gone to the same church. Kelvin had memories of them both getting Sunday-school attendance pins.
Every Sunday, Miss Veola prayed for her young men: Lord, keep them in school. Keep them righteous. Keep them safe. Keep them from doing bad things. And if they do bad things, keep them from harming others.
She was a realist, Miss Veola. She didn’t pretend there was no evil in the world. She didn’t pretend there was no evil in Chalk.
African American ministers made a great effort to get their teenage boys off the road to prison and onto the road of ordinary lives, but the trouble was—who wanted to be ordinary? Jobs, mortgages, lawn mowing? What was the attraction?
Even Kelvin didn’t want those.
Kelvin’s parents felt that most evil came from drugs. Every day of Kelvin’s life, his parents would demand to know who his friends were. “Pretty much everybody,” Kelvin would say.
“And Quander? You friends with Quander?” his mom asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he would tell his mother. “I like Quander. I know he’s into stuff, but I’m not doing it with him. I promise.”
Kelvin’s father was an administrator at the hospital, where he ran the public clinics for things like AIDS and detox. He knew the world at its saddest and roughest. “I love that you love everybody, Kelvin,” his daddy would say. “But be careful. It’s easy to fall into step with people you shouldn’t even be near.”
Kelvin felt insulated by his own personality. The easygoing types of this world didn’t have to be careful.
When Lutie linked her arm with Doria’s, Kelvin’s heart turned over. Lutie was the nicest person in the world. It was no small thing to take Doria Bell to lunch. Doria was like the subject of a nasty jump rope rhyme: Loser, loser—how you gonna use her?
But Lutie did not plan to use Doria. She was just being kind.
Kelvin fell madly in love with her.
Of course, he did this daily.
Kelvin too slouched off to lunch.
Doria was elated. Lutie was taking her to lunch! Just as surprising, Rebecca fell in step and walked on Doria’s other side, making them a trio.
Lutie set a fast pace, which was unusual. Popular girls sauntered so friends could catch up. Popular girls traveled in groups.
Rebecca spoke first. “Listen to me, Doria. Stay away from Train. As for church, if you do practice alone in the dark—stop.”
Doria despised being given advice, but she nodded as if she were grateful. As it happened, there were few things she liked more than being alone in the dark with the music.
A pipe organ could make a serious racket. When Doria practiced, a Scout troop
could set up camp in the church and she wouldn’t hear. She had to learn prelude, offertory and postlude every week, plus hymns, choir anthem and responses. She concentrated better in an empty church. When there were people around, she became a performer, showing off instead of practicing.
She hadn’t meant to be a church organist. She’d never come across anybody who had. You got drafted when your church found out you played the piano well and they could turn you into a Sunday substitute on that somewhat similar instrument, the organ.
There were two bonuses to being a church organist. You had an audience every week; Doria loved an audience. And they paid you; Doria loved earning an income.
Rebecca, Lutie and Doria reached the cafeteria. Three sets of double doors were propped open. Kids from all four grades were entering and leaving, talking and laughing, yelling and shoving. The three girls were separated by the motion of the crowds.
Although every class and activity at Court Hill High had black, white, Hispanic and a sprinkling of Asian students, at lunch the races tended not to mix. Doria struggled to get through the cafeteria door, while Lutie joined a crush of noisy laughing black girls and Rebecca glided across the room to share a chair at a table of white girls.
Lunch was now exactly what it was every other school day: Doria standing alone without a place to sit.
She could have pretended Lutie had meant it when she said, “Come on, we’re late for lunch,” and walked over to that table. Doria would be the only white girl there. Southerners were courteous, and Doria doubted that anybody would be rude, but they would be surprised, and the fact was, Lutie was looking in the opposite direction and did not seem to be extending an invitation.
Doria was not insightful, but it occurred to her suddenly and painfully that Lutie had not been seeking her company: she had been separating Doria from Train. Nor had Rebecca been launching a friendship: Rebecca was just giving orders.
Around Lutie, girls talked loudly and laughed even more loudly. Sometimes Lutie thought the whole point of lunch was not to eat food, but to let kids make noise.
In the far right corner lounged boys who were bigger, burlier and more tattooed than most. In fact, they were men who happened to attend high school: Train and his rivals. Sometimes allies, sometimes at each other’s throats. Literally.
The teachers on cafeteria duty had arranged themselves on the opposite side of the large room, hoping distance would save them from having to deal with that bunch.
On her cell phone, Lutie went to the Internet and looked up the Ten Commandments, even though she knew them by heart. She read them slowly. She could not imagine Saravette caring about most of them. Saravette had probably taken the Lord’s name in vain, for example, a million times.
But maybe even Saravette was bothered by breaking the Do Not Kill rule.
Saravette had turned her infant girl over to her own mother straight from the hospital and never once pretended that she was anybody’s mother. Instead, Lutie had had four mothers in her sixteen years: MeeMaw, Aunt Grace, Aunt Tamika and Miss Veola.
But Saravette was a mother.
Lutie’s.
Lord, don’t let my mother be a killer, she thought. Tell me Saravette just broke nine of those commandments.
Doria was still frozen in the doorway when Rebecca waved.
Doria was embarrassed by how grateful she was. In a moment, she was next to Rebecca and across from Jenny. How safe a person felt, sitting between other people. Alone on a piano or organ bench, Doria had a job and a purpose. But alone anywhere else, Doria felt like a stick, a piece of kindling about to be thrown into the fire. She could go up in smoke and nobody would notice.
“You’re not eating, Doria?” said Rebecca. “You didn’t buy any lunch? Here. Have some of my apple slices.”
Doria had written Rebecca off after getting marching orders about practicing alone. But here she was being kind and thoughtful. “Thank you,” said Doria humbly. She nibbled an apple slice. It was crisp and sugary and made her want to cry.
Jenny leaned across the table. “Last Sunday evening? When Miss Kendra spoke? You were so brave to volunteer, Doria.”
“Brave?”
“Well … Chalk,” said Jenny, making a face. “I mean, the police are down there every five minutes. There’s a shoot-out every weekend.”
I’m going someplace where there’s a shoot-out every weekend? thought Doria.
Jenny sniffed. “We wouldn’t even have a homicide rate in Court Hill if it weren’t for Chalk.” She looked irritated. Like, homicide rates are so annoying.
“Chalk?” repeated another girl, sounding astonished. “You couldn’t pay me.”
She’s telling the truth, thought Doria. If I gave her money, she wouldn’t go to this place called Chalk. So back at Youth Group, the other kids didn’t lower their hands because only one person could volunteer. They backed out because they would never go to Chalk either.
What was Chalk? And where?
All these months, Doria had failed to encounter the Old South. There were differences between New England and here, but fewer than Doria had expected. Her new town had the same houses, with the same cars in the same driveways and the same people with the same lives, joys and worries. Some of the flowers and trees were different, and it was hotter in summer, and yes, restaurant service and traffic were slower—but nothing seemed to be “old.” In fact, everything here was brand-new. It was the North that was burdened by old stuff.
Across the room, Doria saw Kelvin. Her crush seemed to come out of the floor and envelop her. She had a sudden fear that she would leap up from the table and cry, “Kelvin! Over here! It’s me!”
Kelvin was using his cell phone. She could see his thumb move. She was just pretending the text was for her when she really did receive a message. Her heart leaped with hope. Kelvin! Maybe he too had fallen in love across the music room!
She fumbled like a person who had never used a phone.
Rebecca laughed. “For the first time, I can tell you’re a soprano, Doria.”
But the message was from Mr. Gregg. Doria flushed. She had actually let herself believe that Kelvin would text her. The girls leaned forward to see, texts being public property.
Come see me ASAP.
Who cared what a music teacher in his forties wanted? And what was up with “As Soon As Possible”? There is no such thing as a music emergency. Doria was not walking away from her first chance at making friends, even though one of them seemed to think murder was simply an annoyance.
“I bet it’s about the musical,” said Jenny. “I know you’re working on it with him.”
Mr. Gregg had been trying for years now to write his own high school musical. He insisted that this spring it would actually be performed. Doria doubted it. He had played his songs for her more than once. The music was derivative and dull and she thought that in his heart, Mr. Gregg knew. How painful that must be. To dream and dream and dream, knowing deep down that you didn’t have what it took. Doria felt weirdly protective of Mr. Gregg. It would not be from her that he learned the truth.
“Is it true he’s writing the lead for Lutie?” asked Jenny. “Or is there a chance for other people?” Jenny looked around, obviously hoping somebody would nominate her as the best possible lead.
But Rebecca said, “You should try out, Doria. There’ll be a pit band for the performance, so you won’t have to play the piano. You have a beautiful voice, more soprano-y than Lutie’s. Lutie is an alto who happens to sing high.”
Doria could not imagine a worse description of Lutie’s extraordinary voice. “Nobody could compete with Lutie,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Go see Mr. Gregg right now,” urged Jenny.
“I haven’t even bought my lunch yet.”
“Go. There’s time. Then come back and tell us,” said Rebecca. “I bet two Girl Scout cookies that you are going to do something special on that musical.”
Doria laughed. “What kind of Girl Scout cookies? I would only make an
effort for Thin Mints.”
Rebecca held up Thin Mints.
The music room could be approached by a quiet back hall lined with stage entrances, a prop room, a scenery room, bathrooms and, of course, the storage room. Doria loved that room—crowded and messy and full of music books and CD collections and sheet music and the school-owned tuba in need of repair and the old electric keyboards, not worth using but worth too much to toss.
Doria received another text. It was from Nell.
She and Nell had met when they were six, their piano lessons scheduled back to back. Nell dropped piano in middle school when she began violin, and dropped violin when she began high school, because orchestra just didn’t compete with all the other great stuff she could do in high school. The orchestra teacher almost wept. There are never enough violin players, and Nell was good. Nell shrugged. “I don’t have time for everything,” she said dismissively.
But she always had time for Doria.
Nell would change her class schedule to be in Doria’s section. Coax the whole basketball team to attend Doria’s recitals. Drag Doria shopping, and force her to buy clothing in colors other than black. Phone her on a school-day morning and demand a view via cell phone so she could judge what Doria had draped on her body and whether it was acceptable.
Doria pressed View to read the text message.
She was sure that by now Nell would have gone to the Facebook page for Court Hill High’s concert choir and identified the only “K” in chorus. Now that Doria had shared the big event in her life—well, actually, the big nonevent—she and Nell could have some real girl talk about a really great guy.
But Nell’s text, mostly abbreviations and smiles, was an update on her own situation, involving teachers and kids Doria had never met. The message could have been meant for anyone.
Doria brought up Nell’s last few messages. They were all like that. She’s texting me out of habit, thought Doria. I could move back there and we’d be friends again, but I’m far away, in another place, and I’m getting smaller and smaller in Nell’s life.