Page 77 of Liar Byrd
Mom and I moved around a lot. Sometimes I didn’t have time to return a library book before we had to move again. After the second time I found a library book that I’d forgotten to return, I stopped borrowing books from the library and just read them there instead of taking them out.
“What?” I ask when he keeps staring at me.
He shakes his head. “How did you learn?”
I bite my lip. “I heard a piano player in a mall, and I asked what it was. She told me, and I went home and kept playing it over and over until it sounded right.”
“How long did it take you?”
I think back. “About a month.”
He stares at me, slack-jawed.
“What is it?” I start wondering if I did something very wrong, very stupid, or a combination of the two, judging by his reaction.
“Why did you play it over and over until you’d perfected it?”
I shrug, looking away. “I just liked it. That’s all.”
But that isn’t true.
Some songs slip into my heart, and I have to feel every emotion as I press the keys. AndClair de Luneis one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard in my life. Sweet and sad and so heartbreaking, how could I not love it?
"It took me six months to learn itwithsheet music," he says, watching me intently. “Without knowing how to read music, it might have taken me years, or I might never have managed. I don’t have your persistence or passion.”
I moved around so often that I gave up hoping I would have a true friend, so I spent hours learning how to play the music I loved, practicing over and over until I could close my eyes and the music would flow from my tinny, plastic keyboard.
It was all I had other than my mom, and so I gave it everything.
When I played, I could pour my anger, my pain, and my brief sparks of happiness into the keyboard instead of struggling to tell my mom I was tired of being the adult.
I wasn’t Byrdie Sloane, the girl who was constantly bullied, dressed in threadbare clothes, dragged from town to city and from city to yet another town by her flaky mom. I felt weightless, and nothing else mattered but the music.
“What makes you think I have those things?” I ask.
“I heard you play, and I never wanted you to stop.”
His honesty surprises me. I’ve only ever played for me. He makes me want to play for him too.
I lick my lips, and he watches me, shifting his gaze from my mouth to the keyboard.
“Is it hard?” I ask.
“Reading music? No.” He stands as he speaks, pulling a thick black book from inside the bench he was sitting on. “Playing is harder. My mother taught me. Did your mother play?”
“No, she…”
She betrayed me.
She was responsible for the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I’m glad she’s dead because I could never forgive her or look her in the eye without thinking of how much she made me hate her.
“She…” Nash prompts.
I use the grand piano to refocus my mind. “She didn’t play.”
He gives me a long look, then turns away.
I watch him flip open the book, set it on the stand, and my eyes cross trying to read the sheet music he claimed wasn’t hard. It looks pretty hard to me.
