Chapter 11, Scene 4

(revised 1/5/12)

In the main room, a different kind of music was pulsing from the overhead speakers, some old REM, but it didn’t matter. My focus was on finding Bartholomew. I wove through a forest of jocks, shaking off the hand of one who reached out for my arm. “Hey, Mikhaila!”

A group of the Others were right where they had been, with Sebastian clearly the leader. He didn’t see me this time, and I slipped around the edge of the room, peering around bodies, standing on my toes to scan the crowd. It was packed.

But I did not see Bartholomew. Not anywhere. Worry started pecking at the back of my brain. He’d been in bad shape last night. Had his injuries grown worse? Was he in some hidden place, dying of wounds no one could treat?

A girl popped up in front of me, blonde and bouncy. “Hey, Mikhaila!” she cried and gave me a little wave. “How was your summer?”

“Good.” I started to move past her. “Sorry, I have to—“

“Oh, I know.” She gave a tight wave. “I just wanted to say hi.”

She melted back into the crowd.  I stared after her for a second, feeling mean. It occurred to me that Mikhaila had more friends among the regular kids than most of the Others. I thought of all those girls who’d mistaken me for her in the mall and in restaurants, the ones whod been so disappointed that I didn’t come shopping or off to smoke cigarettes with them.

She’d been trying to fit in.  Unlike the rest of her group.

In the process, she’d fallen in love.  Bartholomew had told me that much.  So where had she gone? What was she doing? Who was her boyfriend?

And how was I supposed to manage everything when school started this week? I couldn’t keep pretending to be someone I wasn’t, not even if it saved Mikhaila’s life.

More questions. Always more questions.

The most important one right now was still whether Bartholomew was all right. I was mad at him for not letting me know, for disappearing all the time. It wasn’t fair to drop these bombshells and then vanish.

Through a break in the crowd, I spied Sebastian, who was watching me. His mouth turned up in a slight, ironic smile and he raised a glass of water in a toast.

Every time I’d run into him before, I’d retreated, looked away, been afraid. This time, I stood my ground, crossing my arms and raising my chin: I am not afraid of you.

He sipped his water, elegant and urbane, his silvery beautiful hair shining like moonlight in the dark room. He appeared to be entirely whole and well, despite the fact he’d been carried off by his buddies.

Who noticed his attention, and swiveled around to look at me.  One of them made that quick, subtle gesture, prayerful hands to his lips. Sebastian smirked.

He had not told them, then. I wondered why.

By the second set, there was still no sign of Bartholomew.  As I ran through a quick rehearsal with the band, I was a big mess of warring emotions.  I was worried. I was annoyed (even though he’d never said he was going to be here tonight). I was hungry to see him. I was sick of being so moony about a guy I’d never have.  I mean, what was the point?  I needed to open myself up to others.

And not Others. Real guys.

Mortal guys.

In that mood, I took the stage with the band.  Natalie looked fabulous in her boots and jumper. The red lights played on her glossy hair and sparkled against the snaps of her jumper.  I looked toward the crowd from my seat to the right of the stage, but the lights were so bright, I could only see the first row of tables. Several of the faces there looked toward me expectantly, but I didn’t see any I recognized.
That made it easy to focus on the cello. Her body was warm against me, the wood practically humming, and I stroked her sides with a palm, half-smiling. It seemed she was saying to me, ‘Let’s do this! Let’s play!” It was irrational, I knew that, but I could feel the life in her, the exuberance. It was much the same as a horsewoman communication with her horse.  I had the strong sense that it had been a long long time since she’d been played for an audience. She could not wait.

And her excitement infected me.  My hands buzzed as we began to play. It was a traditional reel, the kind of lively dance tune that gets a crowd going. Natalie’s fiddle led and I followed and wove in with the cello, who behaved this time.  Behind us the drummer brought in the bodhran, a big full sound I have always loved.

Nothing mattered after that. The sound was so exactly right, so artfully woven that the room disappeared and the four of us keyed into each other, leaping from note to note, then song to song.  Natalie’s hair flew as she fiddled, and I felt every cell in my body dancing. We laughed, and the cello swelled to fill the whole room with a charismatic magic. I was vaguely aware of people dancing in front of the stage, heard their cries of pleasure and encouragement, but I was enraptured, surrounded and swept up into the music.

This time, it was not like the lostness I had discovered with Bartholomew, but something bigger and wilder and more exhilarating than that.  I was not disappearing into the music, I was becoming something more than I had ever been, as if music was soaking into the membranes of my body, changing my very blood and breath into something else.  The hairs on my neck and back were electrified, and the longer we played the better it got, until I was so saturated with music that I thought I might simply dissolve into a song.

By the time we finished, to a great whooping crowd, I felt I’d grown twelve feet tall, and leapt to my feet with the others, flinging out my arms.  I felt that light beamed from my skin, and in my left hand, the cello vibrated unmistakably. I wanted to kiss her.

We all left the stage at once, and in the little hallway, we laughed and high fived, all of us as giddy as three-year-olds after too much cake. “That was amazing,” Pinky said, and he wiped tears off his face.

As we squeezed into the back room, Natalie looked as if she was afire, too, her eyes shiny, her cheeks flushed and dewy. She clutched my arm. “What was that?”

I started laughing, holding the cello close. “I have no idea.” I placed the cello in a safe place by the wall and straightened. Pinky and the drummer were standing by the back room, staring at me like—well, like they might do that thing the Others did to Mikhaila, that little bow. “It’s not me, guys. It’s that cello.”
And then, as if he were standing right beside me, I heard Bartholomew.  He called my name, insistently. Urgently. “Alia!”

Still lost in the wash of exhilaration the cello had given me, I half-flew toward the door. “I have something I need to do.”