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She stopped and looked at him. He didn’t notice her. He was shading and whistling.
The music was beautiful, whatever it was. How did Brian know it so well? How did he know it note for note? Tibby lifted her hands from her papers. She rested her chin in her hand. Had he always been such an in-tune whistler?
She didn’t want to say anything. She was worried that if she did, he might stop, and she didn’t want him to.
She laid her head on the floor. She closed her eyes. A chill fluttered up her scalp. She felt like crying, and she had no idea why. Her papers wrinkled under her cheek.
Shading and whistling. The violins screeched and soared. The cellos sucked at the bottom of her stomach. The piano pounded away, unaccompanied by anything but whistling for a-while.
Then it was over. Tibby was unaccountably sad. It felt like she had lived in the world of the music, warm and jubilant, and now she’d been cast out of it. It-was cold out here.
She gazed at Brian. He was quietly drawing. He still hadn’t looked up. “What was that?” she asked finally.
“What?”
“That music?”
“Uh … Beethoven, I think.”
“Do you know what the thing is called?”
“It’s a piano concerto. The fifth one, maybe.”
“How many are there?”
Brian looked up at her, a little surprised by her intensity. “Piano concertos? That Beethoven wrote? Uh, I’m not sure. Maybe just five.”
“How do you know it?”
He shrugged. “I’ve just heard it a bunch of times. It comes on the radio now and then.”
Tibby’s eyes bored into his with such force, Brian sensed she wanted more.
“Also, my dad used to play it.”
Tibby swallowed abruptly. She dropped her eyes, but Brian didn’t.
“My father was a musician—a pianist. Did you know that? He died.”
Tibby gaped. No, she hadn’t known that. She didn’t know anything about Brian’s life, and this was a hard place to start. She swallowed again, poking her finger into the point of her pencil. “He did? I mean, he was?”
“Yeah.” Brian took off his glasses, and she was struck by how deeply set his eyes were. He took a lot of pains in rubbing his glasses into the hem of his T-shirt.
“He played that?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
Tibby bit savagely on the inside of her cheek. What kind of friend was she, that she didn’t even know this single most important thing? She knew Brian had had a lonely, sad life so far. She knew it, and yet she’d never bothered to find out why. She’d avoided it like she avoided so many things.
And Tibby knew, in that way you just know things sometimes, that Bailey had known. Bailey had known that Brian’s father had been a musician and that he was dead. Bailey had probably known how he died. She’d probably learned it inside the first hour she met Brian.
Tibby, on the other hand, had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with Brian striving for the comfort of not knowing.
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
—Ralph Hodgson
“Rusty is getting open.”
Billy Kline turned around and walked two steps toward Bridget. “Sorry?”
“Rusty there. Your teammate? He’s faster than you think he is.” Bridget had never been great at keeping her mouth shut on the soccer field.
He shook his head as though to confirm the reality of the strange girl sitting on the sidelines giving him pointers.
She shrugged. She was sitting in the sunshine chewing a piece of grass like she used to do when she was a little kid on this same field. She’d forgotten how much she loved watching the game, even when it was a bunch of amateurs. “Just a thought,” she said.
He was fairly cute when he scowled. “Do I know you?”
She smiled at his accent, his grown-up voice. She couldn’t help it. She shrugged again. “I don’t know. Do you?”
Her manner seemed to throw him off. “I’ve seen you on this field a few times, I guess.”
“That’s because I’m a fan,” she said.
He nodded at her as though she were most likely a stalker, and moved back onto the field.
If she had still been her old self, he would have known she was flirting with him and he would very possibly have asked her out by now. As it was, he didn’t.
During the final minutes of the scrimmage, Rusty got open, and Billy, after waiting a beat, passed it to him. Virtually undefended, Rusty scored.
Bridget cheered from the sideline. Billy looked over at her, and he couldn’t help smiling.
Carmabelle: Hey, Len. Talked to Tibby finally. Told her we’d be there when she gets home around seven. Brian’s visiting her and driving home with her.
Lennyk162: I talked to her too. She’s funny. Still has no idea that Brian’s in love with her.
Carmabelle:You think Brian loves her in that way?
Lennyk162:I think he loves her in every way.
“Tibby, turn it off.Please?”
“Fine. I’ll go film somebody else,” Tibby said.
As happy as Lena was to see Tibby, she was not happy to see her video camera. She always felt horribly awkward in front of it.
“Do you want to do a dozen more or call it a day?” Tibby’s mom asked, holding up a brown paper bag full of corn. “Up to you.”
Lena checked her watch. She had half an hour before she needed to be at work. “I’ll do it,” she offered. She actually enjoyed husking corn. She was sitting at the round table in the Rollinses’ kitchen. Tibby’s mom was making some sort of salad for the Fourth of July party the following day, and Loretta, the housekeeper, was watching Nicky and Katherine splash each other in the inflatable pool on the grass outside.
Lena took a piece of corn from the bag and gingerly pulled back the husk. You never knew when you were going to find a fat beige worm or a nasty black hole full of scurrying creatures. This one looked perfect, though. She liked the silk because it reminded her of Bridget’s hair. The way it used to be, anyway.
“So, Lena, how is your boyfriend?” Tibby’s mom asked. She wiggled her eyebrows as if to indicate that this was dishy, and wasn’t she just one of the girls for knowing about it.
Lena tried not to wince openly. She wasn’t comfortable with the term boyfriend even when she did have one, and she hated everybody knowing her private business.
“We broke up,” she said lightly. “You know, the whole long-distance thing.”
“That’s too bad,” Alice said.
“Yes,” Lena agreed. She couldn’t help feeling that the mothers were a little eager on the boyfriend issue, as if life would really start once the boyfriends were under way. Lena resented that. She waited in silence for a while for that subject to die off before she introduced a new one.
“Um … Alice?” As soon as the girls had learned to talk, Tibby’s mom had insisted they call her by her name.
“Yes?”
Lena had first had this idea a few days before. Originally she’d dismissed it as being too diabolical. The truth was, it was pretty unlike her. But now that she was presented with the perfect opportunity, she didn’t really see how she could do harm with it.
She took a deep breath. She wanted to make sure her voice came out casual and innocent. “Did my mom ever talk to you about Eugene?” she asked.
Alice paused over her potatoes. In the sunlit room, Lena could see Alice’s freckles—all-over freckles like Tibby’s but very faint. “Eugene?” Her eyes got a slightly glazed, nostalgic look. “Sure. That was the Greek boy your mom was so crazy about, right?”
Lena sucked in her breath. She had scored information more quickly than she’d expected. “Right,” she said, feeling dishonest about pretending to be the one with the information.
Alice still had a distant look on her face. “He broke her heart, didn’t he?”
Lena faced the corn. Blood rushed to her head, turning her cheeks pink. She hadnt been expecting to hear that. “Yeah, I guess he did.”
