AN HOUR EARLIER
An hour earlier
About thirty miles outside of Caldwell, we pick up the last set of passengers. An elderly Asian couple and a teenage boy who looks about my age—seventeen. The couple sits in the second row closest to the doors, but the boy keeps walking through the aisle, rubbing his palms together and breathing on his hands to warm them.
He scans the bus as he enters the aisle, surveying the seating options. There are five or six other passengers, a small enough number that we’re not wrestling for armrests or invading each other’s personal space, which is the single worst thing about public transportation, especially on Saturdays. I’m near the back of the bus, just in case we get a surge of people.
The boy passes the drowsy-looking college student on the left whose jet-black hair flops down over his eyes. He stops a few rows from my seat, on the right side of the aisle.
Behind me, a mother shushes one of her two elementary-school-age kids.
I watch as the boy peels his backpack off his shoulders and places it on the seat closest to the window. The backpack is half unzipped, the short metal legs of a tripod sticking out. He glances up at me, catching my eye, just as I’m about to look away.
“God, it’s cold,” he says, rubbing his palms over his shoulders.
“I know, it’s freezing,” I say back disappointingly. Uninterestingly.
I notice that he’s completely underdressed for this cold. His hair is tucked under a black wool beanie, but he’s wearing a thin cotton shirt pushed up at his elbows. No coat, no scarf. How has he not frozen to death?
“Jackets help,” I blurt out, past the acceptable response time. Then add in a slightly more normal voice, “Or so I’ve been told.”
The boy assesses me and breaks into a grin that takes up his whole face as he looks down at how he’s dressed. “Hmm. I might have to try that one of these days.” His smile makes a funny feeling slide through my stomach. He hesitates a moment, then sits with his back to me, three rows ahead.
I pull out my phone to check the time and see three texts from my mom, asking how the trip is going and what time the bus arrives so she can pick me up from the station. I send her a quick response before sticking the phone back in my pocket.
“What do you play?” the boy asks a few minutes later, turning his entire upper body around to face me. He nods at the case occupying a seat next to me. The bus to Caldwell this morning got me there four hours before the concert started, so I’d brought my viola in case I found somewhere to practice and kill time while I waited.
“The viola,” I say. Why do I always spend so much time hoping someone will talk to me, only to have absolutely nothing to say when they do?
Presumably just to witness my verbal ineptness, Goth College Guy rouses a little and turns back to look at me. He blinks a few times, then turns around again.
“I don’t know one thing about the viola,” the boy says, grinning at me. I know I’m on a concert high—“outside my lane,” as my pilot father might say—because something about the grin elates me. His smile is so easy, his face so open, that I feel like he must do it a lot—which, of course, ought to put me back inside my lane. He probably smiles like this at everyone.
But staying firmly in the wrong lane, I smile back and speak a little more quietly, in case anyone is trying to sleep.
“Well, they look a lot like violins but they’re not.” I hear myself quickly going down the path of many Violas Are Not Violins activists who have gone before me, so I change directions. “Rumor has it that Jimi Hendrix started off playing the viola.”
“Really,” the boy says, and, God bless him, pretends to be interested.
“Yeah. I actually just came from watching a concert,” I say, wanting to keep the conversation going. “Not Jimi Hendrix. Obviously.”
“Obviously,”the boy repeats, teasing, and something flutters inside me again.
“Pretty sure dead people don’t have concerts.”
I might be rambling, but he is playing along. “I’venever been invited to one,” he says.
I laugh. It slips out quickly, without permission, and Goth Guy rouses again to glare at me. But the boy looks pleased he’s made me laugh.
I drop my voice to a whisper. “Unless it’s just that they’re exclusive. Think how many people would pay to see a Ghost Mozart concert,” I joke. Then, sobering up, I add, “It was actually this orchestra at Samberg Auditorium.”
“Were they any good?”
“They were incredible,” I say.
My mind swivels back to the performance, especially to the second movement of that Bach orchestral suite. I could see why it had become famous as “Air on the G String.” Through that dark, echoing auditorium, the sound stretched across all the empty space and reeled me in closer. A long musical finger, crooked at me.
I’d heard it before, but there was something about that piece. Something different and powerful. I’d clung to the armrests until the very last note ended.
