And he’ll keep it that way.
To be safe.
With a hoot, Joey dashes towards their sunken little house. One window is boarded, and the letterbox is a plastic bucket with a rock in it since someone actually stole theirs. Who steals letterboxes?
August peers at the house curiously as Joey wrenches open the door and disappears inside, hollering, ‘I’M HOME!’
How does he say goodbye-and-you’re-never-coming-in?
‘Well, later then,’ Beck says.
‘Don’t forget I’m at eleven Gully!’ August says. ‘If you want to drop by and work. Because you’d better believe we’re going to ace this paper.’
‘Yeah.’ Beck kicks at the footpath where a slab of concrete is missing. ‘I’m sorry, I – I am. But. It’s just not going to work. I’m sorry about your mark, but Mr Boyne won’t dock you if I suck.’
‘Dude, you could get expelled. It’s worth, like, half the grade.’
What she doesn’t say is and everyone knows you’re failing already.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ The Maestro probably wouldn’t even send him to a new school. He’d have eighteen hours a day to practise instead! Beck shudders. ‘My family – my mum – it’s complicated.’
‘Oh.’ Finally her eyes cloud and her smile slips. Her grin is so comfortable, so easy, that when wrinkles cross her brow Beck feels like a monster. Cheerfulness is irritating, but it suits some people. Some people are born for sunlight and orange peel smiles and running on the beach and wild flowers in their hair.
Other people are born for nonexistence.
‘So you’re not actually allowed people over?’ August says.
Beck is late for afternoon practice. And after this morning? This could be catastrophic. The Maestro isn’t above taking out her frustration on Joey, to punish him. ‘Something like that.’ He wants to be invisible. An invisible boy with an invisible song in his head.
He turns, tugging at his backpack like a security blanket, and heads for the house. He doesn’t look back. But he hopes her smile returns when he’s gone, because it’s a cruel person who steals smiles.
He’s doing what his mother wants. People change and betray you, but the piano does not.
Ten minutes before the Maestro’s bus is due and she’ll descend with papers to correct and curses about unmusical idiots, Beck corners Joey for a loving brotherly threat session.
‘You can’t tell about August,’ he says.
Joey sits in the middle of her floor, ‘operating’ on her stuffed animals. They take up at least eighty per cent of her floor space – the rest is littered with coloured macaroni or ice-lolly-stick art.
‘August, your girlfriend?’ Joey pulls stuffing out of a tired-looking bear with her blue plastic doctor scissors.
‘She’s not my girlfriend.’ If she doesn’t stop obsessing about this, Beck is doomed. ‘She’s like … a friend.’ If walking next to someone on the way home and insulting her counts as friendship. ‘Like you hang out with Bailey.’
‘I don’t like Bailey any more,’ Joey says stiffly. The poor bear gets an extra hard jab with the pretend needle. ‘I’m never talking to that Schwachkopf again.’
He raises his hands in surrender. ‘OK. Sorry. I didn’t know. But, please, Jo, I’m begging. I’ll do anything.’
‘Can I have chocolate?’
Of course she had to ask for that. Where is he going to get chocolate? He doesn’t even have money. ‘OK, fine,’ Beck says. ‘I’ll get you chocolate. So don’t ever mention August’s name.’ He starts to leave and comes back. ‘Or that you know a secret.’ He hesitates. ‘Or that I’m going to give you chocolate.’
Joey grins.
August is not his friend, no matter if he even wanted one. They don’t even know each other.
Beck is unknowable.
He disappears back into his room, dissolves into the piano. He has an entire folder of études to learn, and not just any études but the ones the Maestro grew up performing to international acclaim. It’s especially torturous because he can’t play them like she did. Yet she has it stuck in her mind that he must? And he has to be better than her? He has a suspicion that, since she can no longer play, her goal in life is to make him into her so the world doesn’t forget Ida Magdalena Keverich’s name and her genius playing.
Her dream is doomed to fail.
He plays like a fiend all afternoon despite the pain in his cracked knuckles. He even skips taking a shower since he’s used to smelling like coffee now, even if the sticky hair is unpleasant. He’d rather nail the étude and not hear the Maestro complaining loudly about the lack of talent as she heats up fish fingers and boils frozen peas.
Notes.
Chords.
Scales.
He floods the house with music that shook the world a hundred years ago. His fingers knot over complicated patterns and his thumbs fail when he needs them most. But, the Maestro’s wrath aside, he owes it to the music to find perfection.
But he thinks about August.
What it’d be like to have a friend.
What it’d be like to encourage her smile of sunshine and lemonade instead of cutting it in half.
What if she’d never been rejected as bluntly as that before? What if she’d skipped through the universe, somehow oblivious to cruelty, and then he came along?
Stop thinking like this. She’s not Joey. She’s his age and goes to the worst school in the state and can’t be oblivious to disappointments. Life would be unbalanced without sharp words to stick in your ribs like a thousand little knives. Beck’s here to fill the quota.
His fingers fall over the étude and he curses the piano. Curses himself.
He slams the keys and they howl with Chopin’s chaos instead of his own.
Awake at five.
Playing music until eight.
Kitchen smells of coffee and threats.
He cradles a cereal bowl in aching fingers.
Stay quiet and the dragon won’t wake.
Hate everything recreationally.
Beck thinks August has reopened a raw rift of bitterness. It’s easy to drag himself through life with his eyes closed and accept the hate – until someone bumps him and forces him to look up and realise life’s cutting him with broken shards while everyone else is dancing. It’s suffocating. It’s unfair.
Joey perches on the bench making sandwiches and wearing a dress-up chef hat and an apron that says Kill The Cook – Beck swore to her it said Kiss The Cook, but when she’s older he’ll be in trouble. She has creamed corn, stale crackers and a lot of mayonnaise.
‘Thanks, Joey.’ He wraps both sandwiches in tin foil and tries not to think about it.
‘You’re welcome, Schwachkopf,’ she says cheerfully.
There’s bitterness knowing the only reason she uses those insults and curses is because the Maestro yells them at Beck. If he played better, Joey wouldn’t be a parrot, squawking lines of acid and knives.
‘When I’m a chef,’ Joey announces, ‘I’m going to have a big pink knife. Like, a massive one.’ She makes a chopping motion. ‘Then I’ll cut things up. BAM.’