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Damn. This dude is good.
“The violin,” I add and I’m sure that Dimitris says something smart in response and insists that I’m holding out on him, but I can’t hear him anymore.
I’m thrown into a wave of memories so fierce it knocks the breath out of me. They say that the more you suppress memory, the bigger it grows within you, until you confront it. If that’s true, this one is about to bury me alive.
…
I’m hurtling back to the past again, but this time it’s worse.
It’s the day I first met Eden.
Six and a half years ago, almost to the day.
It was October and already I was bored out of my mind.
I was excelling in everything but music. And I didn’t care about anything but music. I felt empty all the time.
I was taking a break from my tedious boarding school schedule in the woods at the back of the dorms. I was sitting with my back against a tree, my shoes buried in yellow leaves, my head tipped up to the clouds. As always, I was thinking about my dad.
Missing him.
Trying—and failing—not to cry.
A sudden flash of movement distracted me and I sat up, forgetting my pain.
Someone was running across the trees behind the school’s back fence. Curious, I ran up to see who it was. It was a girl.
‘Hey, are you lost?’ I called out to her, because she wasn’t wearing a school uniform. She stopped, a look of terror in her eyes. I lifted my hands in the air.
And then I saw that her knee was bleeding.
A thick ribbon of blood was spilling down her bare calf, then her sock.
I dropped down to my knees then and there and I bandaged it up for her. I don’t even remember what with; I only remember how she was trembling while I touched her skin, how my hands shook. How the urgent need to touch her had overtaken my entire body but I resisted it with everything I had.
As soon as I was finished, I got up and ran away.
But the next morning… The next morning, I woke up in my dorm, dressed without looking what I was putting on, picked up my violin, and ran because I was late for class. I was stopped by one of my professors, who had a couple of things to say to me. First, I had buttoned my shirt wrong and I had forgotten to put on my blazer—it was mid-October. Second, I was carrying my violin without its case. And third, I wasn’t late, as there were no classes yet, the bell had only rung for breakfast. And there was a fourth point.
I wasn’t allowed to leave the school property, I knew that, right?
Right.
Of course, I knew.
So I went back to my room, put my violin in my case and put my blazer on. I went down to breakfast; I couldn’t swallow a bite. The hours went by agonizingly slow. The minute class was over, I ran to the back fence, climbed it, and sprinted into the darkening woods, stupidly looking for her.
It turned out that she’d been stupidly looking for me too.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked her over the distance, shaking all over with excitement and terror. I was feeling things for the first time, things that made it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to exist. I looked at her and looked and looked.
Her hair was long, black and messy and her nose was tiny and freckled. I took one step towards her, then another. My heart beat in my ears and my legs nearly melted under me, making me stumble, but I kept going until I reached her. I touched her white wrist, traced the outline of a delicate bone there with trembling fingers. This. This. This was more powerful than music. Who would have thought anything could ever be?
‘Don’t laugh,’ she said, and I thought that laughing at her was the last thing I wanted to do. ‘I have two names. My name is Eden. But my dad calls me ‘Pet’.’
‘Pet,’ I whispered. ‘Cute.’
‘Is it.’ It was weird and kind of bitter the way she said it, as if it wasn’t a question.
