Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [2]
“You’re good,” he says.
“Thanks.”
“You in a band?”
I keep playing, head down, so he takes a bolder tack.
“What’s this?” he says, leaning over to tug on the red ribbon I wear around my neck. At the end of it is a silver key. “Key to your heart?”
I want to kill him for touching it. I want to say words that will slice him to bits, but I have none. They dry up in my throat. I can’t speak, so I hold up my hand, the one covered in skull rings, and clench it into a fist.
He drops the key. “Hey, sorry.”
“Don’t do that,” I tell him, tucking it back inside my shirt. “Ever.”
“Okay, okay. Take it easy, psycho,” he says, backing off.
I put the guitar into its case and head for an exit. Front door. Back door. Window. Anything. When I’m halfway across the living room, I feel a hand close on my arm.
“Come on. It’s eight-fifteen.”
It’s Vijay Gupta. President of the Honor Society, the debate team, the Chess Club, and the Model United Nations. Volunteer at a soup kitchen, a literacy center, and the ASPCA. Davidson Fellow, Presidential Scholar candidate, winner of a Princeton University poetry prize, but, alas, not a cancer survivor.
Orla McBride is a cancer survivor, and she wrote about it for her college apps and got into Harvard early admission. Chemo and hair loss and throwing up pieces of your stomach beat the usual extracurriculars hands down. Vijay only got wait-listed, so he still has to go to class.
“I’m not going,” I tell him.
“Why not?”
I shake my head.
“What is it?”
Vijay is my best friend. My only friend, at this stage. I have no idea why he’s still around. I think he sees me as some kind of rehabilitation project, like the loser dogs he cares for at the shelter.
“Andi, come on,” he says. “You’ve got to. You’ve got to get your outline in. Beezie’ll throw you out if you don’t. She threw two seniors out last year for not turning it in.”
“I know. But I’m not.”
Vijay gives me a worried look. “You take your meds today?” he asks.
“I did.”
He sighs. “Catch you later.”
“Yeah, V. Later.”
I head out of the Castle van Epp, down to the Promenade. It’s snowing. I take a seat high above the BQE, stare at Manhattan for a bit, and then I play. For hours. I play until my fingertips are raw. Until I rip a nail and bleed on the strings. Until my hands hurt so bad I forget my heart does.
2
“When I was a kid I believed everything they told me,” Jimmy Shoes says as we watch a little boy toddle past clutching a Grinch. “Every damn thing. I believed in Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. The bogeyman. And Eisenhower.” He takes a slug from a beer bottle in a paper bag. “How ’bout you?”
“I still am a kid, Jimmy.”
Jimmy’s an old Italian guy. He sits with me on the Promenade sometimes. He’s not all there. He thinks LaGuardia’s still mayor and that the Dodgers never left Brooklyn. He wears these old shoes. That’s how he got his name. They’re hepcat shoes from the fifties, all shiny and red.
“How ’bout God? You believe in God?” he asks me.
“Whose?”
“Don’t be so smart.”
“Sorry. Too late.”
“You go to St. Anselm’s, right? Don’t they teach you no religion there?”
“It’s just a name. They sent the saint packing, but they kept his name.”
“They did that to Betty Crocker, too, the sonsabitches. So what do they teach you there?”
I lean back on the bench and think for a minute. “They start out with Greek mythology—Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, those guys,” I say. “I still have the first thing I ever wrote. In preschool. I was four. It was on Polyphemus. He was a shepherd. And a Cyclops. And a cannibal. He was going to eat Odysseus but Odysseus escaped. He poked Polyphemus’s eye out with a stick.”
Jimmy gives me a look of utter disbelief. “They teach you that crap in nursery school? Get outta here.”
“I swear. After that, we learned Roman mythology. Then the Norse myths. Native American deities. Pagan pantheistic traditions. Celtic gods. Buddhism. Judeo-Christian backgrounds. And