“What you practice for?”
“I’m a church organist. I have a lot to play every Sunday.” She was sick of admitting this. It had begun to sound vaguely criminal. “When I’m done with all the music I need for the service, then I practice music I actually want to play, which is hardly ever the same thing.”
He nodded. “How I feel about Music Appreciation.”
She had to laugh. “Why are you taking it, anyway?”
“Can’t remember.”
Talking to somebody was better than Tylenol. She wanted to keep talking. She had only one real topic, so she used it. “I just heard some new music. Beautiful music. You know Lutie, don’t you?”
“Everybody knows Lutie.”
How affectionate he sounded. How did Lutie do it? Lutie didn’t have to worry about making friends. She just had them. If they weren’t her friends in the morning, they’d be friends by afternoon. Doria was exhausted again. “Right. Well, just now, Lutie sang three songs.”
“I heard.”
“You did?”
“I live just up from Miss Veola. I was on my porch.”
“Doesn’t Lutie have the most amazing voice in the whole wide world? And those songs! Her great-great-grandmother’s songs. I don’t know what category to put them in.”
“Category?”
“Well, for example, they aren’t rap.”
Train laughed. He seemed surprised by the sound of his own laugh and the stretch of his own mouth. “Not rap,” he agreed. “Not Renaissance either.”
“Train, you so do not look like a person who is into Renaissance music.”
“I’m not. Mr. Gregg is. It was a long week listening to that.”
They were both laughing now.
“Lutie sing the songs for you?” he asked.
“I think she sang them for God. Or Miss Veola.”
“They sort of the same,” said Train.
“I know what you mean. You know what? She prayed for me. Miss Veola.”
Train nodded. It occurred to Doria that if he had heard Lutie sing, he had heard Miss Veola pray. “I never had anybody pray just for me, holding my hand,” she told him. “Most prayers are group activities. You sit on the pew, the pastor talks to God, you all say amen. With Miss Veola, it was more of—well—I’m not sure what it was more of … I’m still thinking.”
“You let me know,” said Train.
People rarely meant what they said, especially in this courteous part of the world. Not even Miss Veola meant it when she used that Southern expression—Don’t be a stranger. It was just a way of saying good-bye. But Doria thought that Train really did want to know what Miss Veola’s prayer had been.
A school bus was approaching from the direction of the high school. Doria looked at the time. Four fifty-five. The late bus, packed with kids whose team practice or games were over.
The bus honked. Its stuttering red lights came on and a stop sign popped out. A boy who lived on Doria’s street, which was miles from here, got off. Perhaps he had a dentist’s appointment in the medical building behind them. Pierce Andrews was his name. He and Doria sometimes stood together at the bus stop in the morning but rarely spoke. Pierce was the handsome smooth blond type who seemed impenetrable, as if he were glazed, like pottery. When he didn’t bother to speak to her in the morning, it started the whole school day in defeat.
“Hey, Doria!” yelled Pierce. “We stopped for you! Come on, get a ride home!”
Pierce had gotten the driver to make an irregular stop? How extraordinary. She would have said Pierce might not even recognize her out of context. “It was nice talking to you, Train,” she told him. “I will let you know if I figure Miss Veola out.”
Train said nothing. She waited, but his face said nothing either. He did not seem to occupy his face at this moment. It was empty. He was empty.
She was suddenly afraid of him; afraid of standing there; afraid of the storm about to break. She hurried across the street. “Pierce, that was so thoughtful of you.” She climbed on the bus and he got on after her, and the driver pulled the doors shut.
“Wasn’t me. Azure Lee said to stop.”
Azure Lee Smith lived next door to Pierce, a dozen houses beyond Doria on the same road. Azure Lee was a senior, so good at basketball that she was being courted by colleges. Doria had always meant to go to a basketball game but there was never time. Well, truthfully, there was never anybody to sit with. She followed Pierce to the middle of the bus, where Azure Lee patted the seat beside her.
At the bus stop, Azure Lee always said good morning to Doria, but not in a voice that encouraged discussion. Doria sat down uncertainly. Next to Azure Lee, she felt like a pencil. Far darker than Lutie or Kelvin or Train, Azure Lee was also taller and stronger than any of them. She was beautiful in a sports warrior kind of way.
“Shove over,” said Pierce, cramming himself into the two-person bench next to Doria.
“I took one look at you,” Azure Lee told Doria, “and I yelled to the bus driver, ‘We are picking that girl up!’ ”
Doria was mystified.
“Train,” explained Azure Lee. “That boy is going off his tracks. You don’t need to mix it up with him.”
“Is Train his real name?”
“Cliff is his real name,” said Pierce. “We were in elementary school together. But he’s got a killer older brother. Probably a matter of hours before Train is too.”
Doria misunderstood the adjective killer. “He is very good-looking,” she agreed.
“No,” said Azure Lee irritably. “His older brother probably did kill somebody a few years ago. But they didn’t get DeRade for that. They got him for blinding a kid.”
Doria was horrified. What would life be like if you were blind? How would you read music or books? “But I liked Train,” she protested. “We were chatting about music.”
Azure Lee shook her head. “Sounds like you. But he’s falling apart. You don’t want to be there when it happens.”
The bus reached their subdivision, Fountain Ridge. It had no fountains and no ridges. The three of them got off. She felt Pierce’s height and Azure Lee’s strength. Walking between them was like having an armed escort.
“I heard a rumor that Train wanted your key ring,” said Pierce. “Train is seriously bad news. Was he asking about your keys, Doria? There on the corner?”
“No.”
“And you have your keys? He didn’t steal them?”
Doria was offended. She was careful with her keys. Pierce and Azure Lee were exaggerating. “I thought he was charming,” she said stiffly.
“He probably was. But it’s just a tool for him. He wouldn’t waste his time on you if he wasn’t working an angle.”
Mr. Gregg’s angle was to get the Laundry List. Jenny’s angle was to get the solo. Lutie’s angle was to add to her kindness list. There wasn’t anybody who just wanted to hang out with Doria. Why should Train be different?
“Listen,” said Pierce, “my dad’s a detective in the police force. Everything around here looks nice, but there are tough neighborhoods that somebody like you would never stumble on. Train lives in one. It’s called Chalk.”
Doria had seen Chalk. The debris and poverty. The lounging men, silent and staring.
And she had heard Chalk. The prayers, the clinking of ice in glasses of tea, the laughter of four-year-olds and the songs to God.
She looked sideways at Pierce, to see if she could share any of this, but she could read nothing in his profile.
Fountain Ridge had one long street with seven short cul-de-sacs, and four house styles. The developer had planted three kinds of trees and two varieties of hedge. All the crape myrtles bloomed at the same time in the same color. All the street maples turned wine-red the same day in the fall. The neighborhood had a prim clean look, like educational toys.
Doria’s house was closest.
Pierce said, “I don’t see why Train would be interested in your keys unless he’s interested in your house. A
nybody home right now? Your parents?”
“They both work. Nobody’s home yet.”
Azure Lee, Pierce and Doria lived in the exact same house, except that Azure Lee’s was flipped and Pierce’s had a walk-out basement. They walked carefully up her driveway with her, as if Train might be lurking in the bushes. Doria put her key into each lock. The alarm chirped. She stepped in and silenced it. In every house, the control panel was just inside the door.
Doria took them on a tour so they could see what extra-cost options had been put in the kitchen and how their window treatments compared.
“Doria, your house is beautiful,” said Pierce. “It’s so different from ours. My parents are IKEA people. We’re always going up there and finding something new.”
“I want to cuddle up on all these great chairs and sofas,” agreed Azure Lee.
“It’s kind of a sanctuary for me,” said Doria, and immediately regretted her choice of word.
“People who need a sanctuary are on the run from something,” said Pierce. “They gotta hide in a safe place.” He was smiling at her, and it was a warm soft smile, the kind anybody would want directed at them, but Doria was shocked. Was she on the run? Hiding? Was life on the piano bench actually a sanctuary from other kids?
If so, she had to quit sitting on benches. She had to move into groups, into the middle, among friends.
“You’re trying out all the chairs, Azure Lee. Like the three bears,” teased Pierce. Then his voice changed. “What is this?”
“A physics textbook,” said Doria.
“You’re not in physics,” said Pierce, who was.
“No. I couldn’t fit it into my schedule.”
“So you’re doing it on your own?”
“Well, kind of. I’m taking an online course.”
She watched their faces as they mentally clicked through what they knew of her schedule: precalc, honors chemistry, honors English, third-year Spanish, music composition … and for fun, physics in her spare time at home.
Pierce and Azure Lee practically tripped over each other getting to the door.
It was fine for Azure Lee to go beyond the boundaries in basketball. Everybody loved that she spent hours every day in her driveway, her only company the net above her garage door. Everybody loved her ambition to become a pro. But a thirst for knowledge was not the same. If you went beyond the boundaries there, you were exiled.
Azure Lee reached the safety of the front entrance. “Doria, with your grades and all this stuff you do on the side, you could probably skip senior year, graduate with Pierce and me in May and go straight to college.”
“Pick a big school,” added Pierce, “where they have everything.”
Azure Lee and Pierce reached the sidewalk. They exchanged glances, but not with Doria.
For a long time after the late bus disappeared, Train stood by the side of the road, immobilized. Prissy pale Pierce had made a school bus stop in order to remove Doria from Train’s presence.
It was several minutes before Train remembered that this was what he wanted: to be feared.
He received a text.
Stop.
It was from Miss Veola, of course. Woman didn’t know when she was beaten.
Train deleted it.
Aunt Grace’s text said, Spend the night with me?
Lutie almost always spent school nights at Aunt Tamika’s. Perhaps Aunt Grace had been delegated to tan Lutie’s hide for cutting school.
Aunt Grace lived on the other side of town. Two malls, two parks, another high school, a bunch of factories and nine miles away. Lutie texted that she’d wait at the library until Aunt Grace picked her up. Wouldn’t be a long wait. They’d killed a lot of time at Miss Veola’s.
Aunt Grace ran the local Department of Motor Vehicles, the only completely courteous DMV in the nation. The employees were polite to the public because they were afraid of Aunt Grace, not because she set a good example. Aunt Grace did not smile; she intimidated. When Lutie stayed with her, they sat silently at the kitchen table, Aunt Grace staring while Lutie did homework. If Lutie closed her books and said she was done, Aunt Grace would say, “Study is never done. It isn’t bedtime yet. Keep at it. This is your ticket out.”
A ticket out. That was what you were supposed to want if you lived in Chalk.
Yet in the laundry songs, Mabel Painter never asked for a ticket out. She asked for a way to make her own place grand. She wanted the Lord to show up in her front yard and rock on her porch.
And had he? Silently, Lutie worked her way through the songs, to see if there was one that celebrated the day the Lord showed up. At the edge of her mind a few notes wavered and a bit of melody teetered. She tried to float on the scraps of music and remember the rest of it.
It wouldn’t quite come back to her.
Lost songs, Mr. Gregg and Professor Durham had called them. And sure enough, she had lost one.
It was disturbing. Lutie was the keeper of these songs, not the loser. They do have to be written down, she thought. Or recorded. I do have to cooperate with somebody, somewhere.
She had seldom been in a less cooperative mood.
She went outside the library to wait for her aunt. Then the storm came. Lutie sheltered under the overhang and watched the lightning. A few more notes came to mind, and some of the words.
Be you still alive?
Or be you still forever?
Doria Bell never cried. It gave her a headache and accomplished nothing. She stood in her silent house, refusing to give in to the desire to weep. Her best shot at friends, two beautiful people who lived on the same street, and she had owned up to being a nutcase who studied physics for fun.
And then she heard what Azure Lee had said: graduate early.
Court Hill can be temporary! she thought. I don’t have to worry about making friends! I’m just marking time here. It’s the first week in November. School ends in May. Seven more months and Court Hill can be history.
Doria picked up the TV remote and surfed the music channels. Dance came into her feet, like a pedal part on the organ, and she danced into the kitchen, around the island and through the pantry, circled the dining table and shifted into the sunroom.
College would save her. At college, she would find exclusively kids who loved to learn.
Well, of course, Stephanie’s older brother and sister were now in college, where they made friends only with kids who loved to drink, party and skip class. And they were at colleges famous for academics. So even at college, Doria would have to hunt around. Pierce was right. Pick a big school. Forty thousand students, say. If five percent were as driven as Doria, she’d have two thousand to choose from.
“Holy smoke,” said her father, coming in the garage door. “Pop Latino? Did you put that on?” He had bought Chinese.
He set little white boxes with rich scents and strong sauces all over the kitchen counter.
Mom was right behind him. She checked out the video on the TV screen. “Did it come on by itself? Do we have a glitch? Or did our actual biological daughter put it on?”
“Research,” said Doria.
“Do I believe that?” said her father. “Or are you undergoing a personality change? Doria, you are sparkling. Something great happened, huh?”
Her mother was already separating chopsticks. Her father was already squishing rice onto his plate. Her parents came home starving, like little kids after school. Now she really wanted to weep, seeing them wash their hands at top speed, throw dishes onto place mats, shove glasses under the crushed-ice spout in the freezer door, and drop into their chairs.
A family is a specialized calendar: birthdays, landmarks, school years, Christmases, graduations. Drop a year? Just let it fall out of the family plan? Not graduate with her own class? Abandon her parents in a town and a state she barely knew? Go have her own life, whatever that was?
A year they had all counted on, without even knowing it. Her senior year. Lost.
Graduating early would be a door sla
mmed in her parents’ faces.
Doria told her parents about Miss Veola instead. Miss Elminah. The four-year-old and the glasses of tea and Lutie singing to the sky.
“Chalk sounds so charming,” said her mother. “And you’re volunteering on Saturday. Who else is going?”
“I don’t know much yet,” said Doria. “How was work today? Anything interesting happen?”
Doria’s mother thought everything was interesting, so she started right in. Updates on pesky colleagues, thoughts on intriguing romances, worry about maddening deadlines and vanished perks, photos of somebody’s new baby.
The move here had not been anybody’s first choice. Her dad, a research scientist at a pharmaceutical company, had been laid off. Her mother, a school librarian, had also been let go. Dad was crushed. He had thought he was vital to the team. He lost weight, began having chest pains and went back to smoking, twenty years after he’d quit. Her mother was so hurt that her posture changed, as if the school board had knifed her. Her shoulders got round and she gained weight and hated herself and hated her clothes and didn’t want to see anybody.
They went through their savings in half a year.
And then her father was offered a job here. Doria hadn’t wanted to move, but her parents said, “We’re out of money, there’s a job in Court Hill, get in the car.” And before they even found a house, her mother walked into a library job at an elementary school only a half hour away.
Dad loved his new job because it was a job. Mom loved her new job because she loved books and kids and libraries, but also because nobody here had known her when she was slender. No one was wondering exactly how many pounds she’d put on.
Not only did Doria Bell live in a different world now, she lived with different parents. Her parents were careful, as if there might be snipers in the area, taking out jobs, and they had to keep their eyes peeled and their sleep light. No matter how valuable you were to your employers, you weren’t that valuable.