Sullivan’s eyes dropped to my hands; I saw them flicking up and down, trying to make sense of the words on my skin. They were all in English, but it was a language only I spoke.
“I know you’re not just the average kid,” Sullivan said. He frowned, as if that wasn’t really what he had meant to say. “I know there’s more to you than you let on.” He looked at the iron band on my wrist.
I tried out various sentences in my head: I have unusual depth or The number of rooms in the house that is my personality is many or It’s about time someone noticed. But none of them seemed right, so I said nothing.
Sullivan shrugged. “There’s more to us teachers than we let on too. If you need someone to talk to, don’t be afraid to talk to one of us.”
I looked him straight in the eye. I was reminded once again, vividly, of the image of him falling to his knees, throwing up blood and flowers. “Talk about what?”
He laughed, short and humorless. “About my favorite casserole recipes. About whatever’s freaking your roommate out. About why you look like hell right now. One of those.”
I kept looking at him, kept seeing that image of him, dying, in his own pupil, and waited for him to look away. He didn’t. “I do want a good recipe for lasagna. That is a casserole, isn’t it?”
His mouth made a rueful shape that was a cunning impersonation of a smile. “Go to your next class, James. You know where to find me if you need me.”
I looked at the broad iron ring on his finger and back up to his face. “What were you when you weren’t an English teacher, Mr. Sullivan?”
He just nodded, slow, sucking in his lower lip pensively before releasing it. “Good question, James. Good question.” But he didn’t answer, and I didn’t ask again.
James
The hill where I normally practiced was strategically placed: far enough from the dorms and classrooms to keep everyone in school from knowing what reel I was playing, and close enough that if it started to rain or rabid badgers decided to attack, I could hoof it back to the school before I got soaked or eaten.
It was a gorgeous fall afternoon, the sort companies like to print on glossy paper, and my vantage point on the hill seemed to exacerbate its beauty like one of those convex mirror cameras they have at malls to watch for shoplifters. The afternoon was all scudding clouds and woodsmoke-scented wind and a brilliant blue sky so huge it closed the hill in its own cerulean bubble.
I felt like I could be anywhere in the world. Anywhere in the universe. This hill was its own planet.
Playing the pipes is a multidisciplinary activity: equal parts music, physical education, puzzle-solving, and memory training. The pipes are a study in numbers, too. Three drones, one bass, and two tenors. One chanter, eight holes, one reed in the chanter, two flaps on the reed that vibrated against each other to create a pitch. One bag, one mouthpiece to fill it, endless blow-job-joke possibilities. I took my pipes out of the case and squeezed the reed to correct the pitch before I pushed the chanter into the bag and threw them on my shoulder.
I tuned for a bit and did a few warm-up marches before I started to acquire my usual audience. Eric sitting on the edge of the hill with one of his excruciatingly thick masters thesis books in a foreign language. Megan, novel in hand. Two other students I didn't recognize, sitting at a safe distance, backs to me, homework in hand. Paul, of course, for solidarity as much as anything else. And Sullivan. That was new. He strode up the hill, his long limbs looking like a preying mantis, and stood in front of me. His eyes dropped momentarily to my T-shirt (which read The Voices Are Telling Me Not To Trust You ), and then returned to my face.
I dropped the mouthpiece of my pipes from my lips and raised an eyebrow.
Sullivan regarded me with his usual amiable smile. The wind caught the back of his hair and blew it up backwards. With his hair all screwed up and without his Official Teacher Jacket, it wouldn't have been hard to mistake him for one of us students. The CEO his wife left him for must've been either pretty damn hot or pretty damn rich for her to abandon Sullivan to his own devices.
"Am I putting you off your game?" Sullivan asked pleasantly.
If he meant, was I weirded out by him joining my retinue on the hill, yeah. But out loud I said, "You wound me greatly."
"Do I?" Sullivan sat down, cross-legged, in a single tidy maneuver. "I wouldn't want to interfere with your practice."
"Well, that's a patent untruth. I'm quite sure you're here to interfere," I said, and Sullivan grinned. "So what is this, a reconnaissance mission?"
Sullivan made a big show of wiggling into the grass and making himself at home before pulling out a small tape recorder and setting it on the ground between him and my shoes. "Just want to see what the best piper in Virginia sounds like. You know, to me, pipers always sound like they're playing the same march over and over again. What's the famous one? 'Scotland the Brave'? All the tunes sound like that one to me."
I awarded him a thin line of teeth, equal parts smile and grimace. "Mr. Sullivan," I said reproachfully. "I thought I was the funny one."
He looked back at me, mouth quirked. I stepped away to fill up the bag with air and wondered what it would take to wipe the smirk off his face. Something fast? Something aching? He'd be expecting sheer technical brilliance from my competition stats, so finger-twistingly difficult wasn't the way to go. Something to make him remember the angst of his wifely betrayal, then.
I checked my tuning and then began to play "Cronan," which is, for the record, possibly the most pathetic and miserable tune ever written for the pipes and even in the hands of a lesser piper would drive Hitler to tears. So really Sullivan didn't stand a chance.
And I threw everything I had into it too. I had plenty of angst to make the song real. Dee, who should've been on this hill but wasn't; my beautiful car, which should've been in the parking lot instead of smashed up over the summer, leaving me with my brother's car; and the fact that I was a friggin' island in the middle of a thousand people and that sometimes the weight of being the last of an endangered species crushed the breath out of my lungs.
I stopped.
The students clapped. Paul pretended to wipe a tear from his face and drop it on the grass. Sullivan pressed record on his machine.
"You weren't recording before now?" I asked him.
"Didn't know if I'd have to."
I frowned at him, and he frowned back and then I realized that my arm hair was prickling its warning.
"Don't say anything." I heard Nuala's voice a second before I saw her, walking past Eric and Paul and Sullivan to stand next to me. "You're the only one who can see me right now, so if you talk to me, you're going to look like you were retained in the birth canal without oxygen or something."