Page 67 of Crescendo

Everythingwas okay.

Lydia stared at me. “Yeah?” she breathed, her eyes wide.

I nodded. “I don’t…” I sucked in a sharp breath. “I don’t know how to play like that in front of other people.”

“That’s okay—”

I laughed once, a sharp, spiky sound. “We’ll see if you’re still saying that when you’re stuck accompanying… crap.”

I tried not to look at her directly, but I could see it in my peripheral vision, the way she looked so frantically and vitally alive, like she’d seen something far more wondrous than me screaming at a piano, like she was barely holding onto a million massive things she wanted to say.

She downed her drink, making a small sound as she swallowed, and practically threw herself at the violin. I hadn’t seen her play that yet. She’d been placed into the advanced strings workshop, separate from the rest of us, and I hadn’t gotten to hear. A distant part of my mind thought it fascinating that it was the first instrument that spoke to her when she’d… heard me.

Maybe there was something about it that matched the screaming, desperate energy I’d been pouring out of myself. Professionals made the violin beautiful—hell, even students made it beautiful—but I could still remember primary school music lessons and concerts where a row of seven-year-old beginners lined up and scratched our way through ‘FrèreJacques’. That felt closer to whatever the mess I’d been playing was.

She nodded, positioned beside the piano. “Whenever you’re ready.”

I sighed. Would I ever be ready?

The keys stared back at me, so composed and proper and judgmental. And I had no idea how to play them. Had no idea how to do anything that was going to elicit those emotions she’d burst through the door with.

She was patient, waiting as I stared at the piano until my vision became fuzzy. I knew she was still there, of course, but the room blurred into the background, the day crashing in on me, the feeling I’d had when I’d sat myself here after running from class. And my body moved, found the keys, and they yielded to my touch. They weren’t laughing anymore, weren’t judging, weren’t anything other than vessels.

And, the more I played, the easier it became. The rage and fear flowing freely again, screaming from the keys and pounding in my head.

Nobody could ever say Lydia was a one-trick pony, that she was washed up and had lost her creativity. This composer who had broken a million hearts and put them back together, who’d made the hair on the back of a million necks stand to attention, and who’d soared above the greatest triumphs, took a boiling, breaking mess, and put something beautiful over the top of it. A violin score like I’d never heard that howled over my messy notes, that screeched and softened, that sent us racing through a song I hadn’t even known I knew.

Once I let it all go, the song found itself, and I hated it but Ineededit. It was wind whirling past a young man’s body as he sped down a motorway. It was the sound of tyres on asphalt, the pounding music of the cars going by, the looping CD the onlookers had reported to newspapers as the sirens had hurtledto the scene, everyone else at a standstill. It was the frozen, frigid moment the police had shown up at the house. My tiny holdall by the door, waiting to go up to my childhood bedroom. How smug I’d been that I’d beaten him home that night—one of a thousand weekends we’d agreed to both be home for family time and he usually arrived before me. It was a funeral I couldn’t remember, hundreds of awkward condolences. It was the memory of his laughter—the big, bright way his whole face smiled. Crinkled brown eyes and a face full of freckles that it was a coincidence we shared. And it was that picture of his bike strewn across a motorway I now refused to drive on, plastered across every report about it.

I heaved and threw myself from the piano, collapsing to my knees on the floor.

“Ella!” Lydia’s frantic voice called as she knelt beside me, her arm wrapping over my shoulders. It was so warm. I was so cold.

I shook my head.

“I’m here, you’re safe,” she said. Just like my dad.

The doorbell buzzed and a screaming sob tore itself from my body. “No! No more.”

“It’s okay. We’ll ignore it.” She stroked my hair back from my face. “It’s just you and me.”

I didn’t have anything left to give. Tears ran down my face, dripping towards the floor, and I followed them down, folding myself into the fetal position and concentrating only on the warmth of Lydia’s crossed legs pressed against my back, protecting me, and her hands—one brushing my hair, the other my arm. And she let me cry it out, didn’t say a word, didn’t rush me. Just waited and held me until the whole world went dark and my body didn’t hurt.

∞∞∞

She was still sitting beside me when I woke up.

I’d probably pay for falling asleep on the floor later, but I’d needed rest, my body had needed to shut itself down to deal with everything. I guessed that was worth the physical pain in exchange.

“Hey,” Lydia whispered when she realised I was awake again. Her voice was so soft.

“I didn’t mean to…” I dragged a shaky breath through my teeth. “You didn’t need to stay on the floor with me.”

The only sign she’d moved at all was the blanket that lay over me. I was grateful for it, my body still freezing.

“I wanted to.” She watched me as I slowly rearranged myself into sitting position. “Do you want to talk about… what happened?”

My head buzzed. “I don’t know.”

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