Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [8]
I eat my dinner alone tonight, like I do every night. In our big, empty dining room. It’s not so bad. I can study my music and no one asks me about the calculus test I failed; or reminds me of my curfew; or demands to know the name, address, and intentions of the delinquent du jour crashed out in my bed.
“Eat something,” I say half an hour later as I kiss my mother goodnight.
“Yes, yes. I will,” she says in French, still frowning at Truman’s eyes. She’s French, my mother. Her name is Marianne LaReine. Sometimes she speaks English, sometimes French. Most of the time, she doesn’t speak at all.
I head upstairs, iPod in hand. I plan to fall asleep with Pink Floyd. It’s homework.
I gave Nathan some stuff a few days ago. Demos of songs I’d written. I’d used a mix of time signatures and some cool effects. I’d layered in the different guitar parts and vocals with a loop pedal. I called the whole thing Plaster Castle. I thought the songs were pretty okay. Kind of Sonic Youth meets the Dirty Projectors. Nathan did not think they were okay.
“Abominable,” he’d told me. “A noisy mishmash. You must learn to do more with less.”
“Thanks, Nathan. Thanks a lot,” I said, really pissed off. “Care to tell me how?”
His great advice was to listen to the guitar phrase about four minutes in on the song “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” He says David Gilmour wrote it and it’s only four notes long, but it sounds exactly how sadness feels. I told him I didn’t need an old stoner to tell me how sadness feels. I knew.
“That’s not enough,” he said. “My schnauzer, too, knows how sadness feels. What matters is this: Can you express that knowing? That feeling? That is what separates you.”
“Separates who? Me from a schnauzer?”
“Separates an artist from a schmuck.”
“So I’m a schmuck now? That is the last time I give you anything of mine to listen to.”
Nathan’s reply was this: “One day in 1974, a man named David Gilmour was sad, ja? So what? Who cares? I do. Why? Because of that one incredible phrase. Because it endures. When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.”
Most of the teachers at St. Anselm’s tell me I’m a genius. That I can do anything, be anything. That my potential is limitless and I should reach for the stars. Nathan is the only one who calls me dummkopf and tells me to practice the Sarabande in Bach’s Lute Suite in E Minor five hundred times a night if that’s what it takes to get it through my thick skull. And it’s such a relief I could cry.
Up in my room, I drop my jeans and belt on the floor. I sleep in my underwear. As I cross the room, I catch sight of myself in my mirror. Skinny as a boy, pale and raccoon-eyed, straggly brown hair in short, ratty braids, and so much metal on me that I clank when I walk.
Arden Tode invented this game called Switched at Birth where she IMs the whole class someone’s name and says it’s just been discovered that this person was taken home from the hospital by the wrong parents. Then everyone has to IM her back the names of the person’s real parents. She picks the two best names and posts them, and her victim’s picture, on her Facebook page. My parents are Marilyn Manson and Captain Jack Sparrow. No wonder she’s failing biology.
As I pull off my T-shirt, the key—the one I wear around my neck—gets tangled up in my hair. I tease it out and it glints at me. It shines. Even in the dim light of my room, it shines. Just like Truman did.
I remember when he found this key. The night before—a Saturday night—our parents had had a big fight. There was crying and shouting. A lot of it. I’d gone upstairs to my room and turned up the television in an attempt to drown them out. I’d taken Truman up, hoping he’d watch a Lost in Space DVD with me but he didn’t. He stood in