This was the whole world, this moment. The wind beat the golden grass to the ground and back up again, and above us, the deep, pure blue of the sky was the only thing that pressed us to the earth. Without the weight of that clarion sky, we would’ve soared into the towering white clouds and away from this imperfect place.
Nuala dropped her arms from mine and stepped back.
I let the pipes sigh to a stop and turned to face her.
I was this close to saying, Please give me the deal. Don’t let me say no. Don’t let me be a shooting star burning out in a cubicle somewhere. But her expression stopped me cold.
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “I take it back. I won’t make a deal with you.”
Nuala
This is my fall, my autumn, my end of year,
My desperate memory of summer
This is how I tell her who I am.
This is how far I am from the beginning
This is how I want everything, this is how I want what I was, this is how I want her
This is my fall, my stumble,
my descent into this darkening fling.
—from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter
I was brilliant as a flame when I was first born, this time around. I didn’t quite remember my first pupil, but I remember that his paintings were huge and yellow, and that his death was violent and very fast.
The second guy lasted a little longer. I thought maybe almost six months, but maybe I was just trying to make myself feel better now, remembering. He had wanted me so badly; he had been so tormented by the dreams I sent him and the words I whispered in his ear, he’d not even waited for his body to give up on him. I just sort of felt—hungry—in the middle of the night, and when I found him, he was hanging like a dead pig in a butcher’s.
And then there was the first one who I could remember really well. I had better control then, and I knew how to make them last. Jack Killian was his name, and he had been a brilliant fiddler. He made me think of James now, recalling how much he’d wanted more. He didn’t even know what more was, he just knew he wanted to be more, that there must be more to life, that if he didn’t find this more, life was only a terrible trick played on him by nature.
Two years. I made his fiddle sound so lovely that onlookers wept. The tunes he wrote had a stranglehold on tradition but reached out to grab what they needed from contemporary music. He was dy***ite. Killian toured and toured and sold albums and wanted more more more more and I took more more more more until one day he looked at me and said, “Brianna”—I’d told him my name was Brianna—“I think I’m dying.”
That was a long time ago. Now, I sat in the theater seat the way they told you not to at the beginning of every reel, my feet resting on the seat in front of me, trying not to think about it. There weren’t enough people in the theater to care about my feet being up; it was only a matinee in tiny Gallon, Virginia after all.
The movie was an action adventure that swept across three different continents. It bristled with action scenes and tension and all kinds of crap that should’ve held my attention, but all I could think about was James looking at me on the hill, about to beg me for the deal.
I closed my eyes, but I saw Killian’s face. I thought I had forgotten it long ago. I thought I’d forgotten all of them long ago.
“Let’s blow this place,” said the ruggedly handsome hero on the big screen, and I opened my eyes. He had his finger on some sort of detonator; he didn’t realize that somewhere offscreen, his dewy-eyed love interest was trapped inside the building he was about to blow up. She was calling him on his cell phone, and the camera angle showed that it was set on vibrate so that he didn’t hear it over the legions of helicopters floating around him. Idiot. Morons like that deserved to die alone.
I wasn’t supposed to care about my marks. How could I care about them and live?
In front of me, the Rugged-Faced Hero pushed the red button on the detonator. The screen filled with a giant fireball that took out two helicopters in an intensely unrealistic way.
If I’d been directing, I would’ve cut back to the heroine’s face one second before the explosion, just as her muscles tensed, right when she realized I’m trapped. There’s no way out of this.
I was so hungry. I’d never gone this long without making a deal before.
In my head, I thought of Killian again, looking at me, and I heard his voice—I thought I’d forgotten that too. But this time, when I saw the scene, it was me, and I was looking at James.
“James,” I said, “I’m dying.”
James
“The inner sanctum,” Paul said, voice reverent, as I knocked on the door to Sullivan’s room.
I gave Paul a withering look but the truth was I was curious as hell. First of all, to find out what Sullivan wanted. And second, to see what a teacher’s room looked like. I’d always sort of figured they came out during the day to teach classes and then got stored in shoe boxes under someone’s bed until they were needed again.
“What do you think he wants?” Paul asked for the hundredth time since we’d gotten the note on our door.
“Whoever knows what Sullivan wants?” I replied.
Sullivan’s voice sounded from inside. “It’s unlocked.”
Paul just looked at me, eyeballs round, so I pushed the door open and went in first.
Being in Sullivan’s room was … weird. Because it looked like our room. The same old, high ceilings painted in white-that-was-not-really-white (“bird-poop white,” Paul had called it, but I’d ignored him, because I was supposed to be the sarcastic one) and the little bunk with the drawers underneath it and the creaky, pitted wooden floors. One drafty window looked out on the parking area beside the dorm.
The biggest difference between our rooms was that Sullivan’s had a tiny kitchen area tucked next to a bathroom all his own. And unlike our room, which smelled sort of like Doritos and unwashed laundry and shoes, Sullivan’s smelled like cinnamon from a candle on his nightstand (very Martha Stewart) and like flowers. There was a big vase of daisies sitting on his miniature kitchen table, which I guessed was the source of the floriferous odor.
Paul and I looked at the daisies and then at each other. Dude. Flowers were awfully … pretty.
“Do you want an omelet?” Sullivan asked from the kitchen area. It was weird to see him without his teacher uniform on. He was wearing a black hooded Juilliard sweatshirt and jeans that seemed suspiciously trendy for an authority figure, and he was holding a spatula. “I can’t cook anything but omelets.”