Page 2 of String Boys
The program had started with the choir and progressed to the band, and the little ones had endured quite enough of hesitant voices and shrieking flutes, thank you very much.
Then Mrs. Joyce, sainted woman that she was, stood up and beamed at the mothers and fathers—some of them young enough to remember when she wastheirprincipal—and everything settled down as it should. Mrs. Joyce was a bosomy woman with skin of rich dark teak, who wore her tightly kinked graying hair back in the same bun she’d worn for the last thirty years.Nobodywanted to feel the weight of her disappointment fall upon their heads.
“So our next performance is entirely unexpected,” she said warmly. “Mrs. Sheridan, our retired orchestra teacher, was given a donation of nine violins last year. She asked a friend to restore them, restring them, and tune them as a donation to the school, and then she picked nine volunteers—volunteers, mind you—who wanted to play the fiddle. The first hands that shot up were all young men, and we call them our string boys. Everybody, please give it up for Mrs. Sheridan and our string boys!”
BEFORE THEintroduction, Seth Arnold peeped through the dusty scarlet curtain surrounding the stage and surveyed the crowd with a cynical eye. His best friend, Matty Cruz, shouldered his way underneath Seth’s chin and did the same thing.
“Our mom’s here,” Matty muttered, trying to sound bored. “She had to bring the twins, but still….”
“Dad’s here too,” Matty’s little brother, Kelly, chimed in, making the curtain gap wider. “See? Leaning against the back wall?”
Matty’s shoulders relaxed. Their parents were separated, like a lot of parents, but their father was still trying.
Seth nodded at his best friend soberly. “That’s good,” he said, letting a little smile grace his lips. Matty and Kelly still believed parents could be kind. Seth was relieved his father wasn’t in the crowd. He’d gone to great lengths not to let Craig Arnold know where he’d been after school for the past ten weeks.
When Mrs. Joyce got to the part about the boys being volunteers, everybody behind the curtain let out a silent groan.
Volunteers, Seth’s scrawny ass.
They weren’t volunteers. They weresacrifices, that’s what they were! Mrs. Applegate, the new teacher, fresh and shiny and straight out of teacher school, was having such a heinous time with Seth and Matty’s fourth-grade class—the class with twenty-seven boys and eight girls—that when old Mrs. Sheridan had come piping into the principal’s office about wanting to teachsomebodythe violin, Mrs. Joyce had grabbed the first boys she could find, to give Mrs. Applegate a break.
Matty’s little brother got stuck on the end because the musicians needed after-school practices as well. Since the boys walked to and from school together, period the end, Kelly got to pick up a violin too, even though he was only in third grade.
The main reason—theonlyreason, really—they’d all been so eager to keep up with the violin was that it saved them from having to deal with Mrs. Applegate’s sorry attempts to teach long division. Mrs. Joyce had taken the boys into the computer room after their rehearsal and let them participate in online math tutorials. Even though the computers were dinosaurs and the room was freakin’ hot, even in the wintertime, the math tutorials were still better than knowing Castor Durant was beating up three kids a day just because Mrs. Applegate couldn’t keep track of the chaos.
Or ithadbeen the only reason.
Last week, Mrs. Sheridan had dismissed the other boys to math tutorial and kept Seth in the multipurpose room for a moment.
Mrs. Sheridan was an old white lady. She had gray hair in braids around her head, like white ladies in the movies, and wore antique white blouses with ruffles. She might have ended up an unfortunate victim, just like Mrs. Applegate, but she was just so danged… nice. Consistently kind. Not stupid, just… nice.
And she’d politely asked Seth to stay in the room, and asked him to hold the violin under his chin like they’d been practicing for the last ten weeks.
“Now, Seth,” she said gently. “You’ve done everything I’ve asked. Everything. I’m so proud of you. But I want you to do me a favor here—just a small one. Could you pull the bow across for the first note in ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ for me? Just once. Slowly. And I want you to close your eyes and hear the note as you make it.”
She’d asked them to do this many times, and Seth fought off the temptation to roll his eyes before he closed them.
It was such a small request, and she always got so happy when they did what she asked.
How hard would it be to do what she asked now?
He held the bow loosely in his hand, making sure his fingers didn’t brush the string, and kept the violin firmly under his chin. Then he let out his breath, and on the inhale, he dragged the bow slowly and surely across the string.
And almost forgot to breathe entirely.
For the first time since he’d come to the cafeteria, happy to be let loose from the everyday routine, he got to hear the noise he had the potential to make.
And it was lovely. Pure and perfect, beautiful in a way the music his dad played on their boom box at home had never been, the note wavered in the ancient multipurpose room with its cracked linoleum and missing ceiling tiles. And even though his eyes were closed, he suddenly saw his battered surroundings with an air of faded grace.
His bow finished its journey, and he let out his breath again and opened his eyes, stunned and in awe.
Mrs. Sheridan was beaming gently at him. “That was exquisite, Seth. Would you like to practice a little more, to see if you can get that sound again?”
Seth nodded at her, his eyes enormous. What the hell? He already knew how to do long division anyway.
So this night, the night of the winter concert, Seth was not particularly concerned that his father wasn’t in the audience. He just wanted to make that noise—the pure one—the best he could.
“You ready?” Kelly asked, pulling his attention away from the audience for a moment. “You have to do that solo thing.”