Six

Some things Gavin remembered: Her enormous headphones. Anna in the evenings cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom with her homework all around her. She liked constant music but Gavin could study only when the room was quiet so she'd put on her headphones and retreat into sound. She liked electronica, mostly '80s stuff that didn't move him, New Order singing about a thousand islands in the sea. The headphones were a shiny robin' s-egg blue, surprisingly heavy when he tried them but the sound was perfect. Sasha had bought them for her, a Christmas present.

Her extravagant charisma. Was charisma the word? He tried to analyze it sometimes. He knew there were obvious reasons why everyone liked her, why half the school was half in love— she was pretty, she was kind, she laughed at everyone's jokes and she knew how to listen— but also she was capable of drawing blood. The tension between her loveliness and her violence was captivating. Once a girl spit her gum at Anna's feet and Anna delivered a swift punch to the girl's jaw, tripped her, tore her clothes. Anna came back in after recess laughing with a bleeding lip. Gavin saw her pass by and trailed behind her, watching the way the crowds parted before her all the way to the girls' room. She was suspended twice in the tenth grade for fighting.

The tattoo story: before she transferred to Gavin's high school Anna had run away three times in search of peace and quiet or maybe in search of adventure and change, the story shifted a bit with each telling. She'd fallen in with a dangerous crowd at her old school and a police officer had brought her home at two a.m. She'd been gone for three days but her parents hadn't reported her missing. She was high out of her mind, laughing in the foyer while her parents talked to the cop, a black new tattoo bleeding softly on her shoulder, and the story Sasha told Gavin was that the cop had seen the squalor of the house and called Family Services, and it was the social worker's idea to get Anna transferred to the magnet school. Something about getting her away from her sinking friends, a new environment, the positive influence of her less-screwed-up older half-sister, but Anna never talked about any of that, Anna only smiled and touched the tattoo on her shoulder and said "Even when I'm stoned I have good taste in tattoos."

She showed him the graffiti she'd done in the park before she'd transferred to the magnet school. Pinkish tags faded by rain and sun light on the wall behind the bleachers. She went quiet looking at them. An earlier version of herself had spray-painted NO over and over again in big bubbly letters. She said it wasn't what it looked like. NO stood for New Order.

The way she went still in the presence of music. You could talk to her while music was playing but she'd only be half-listening to you because she was also half-listening to the music. She didn't play an instrument— she said she didn't want to play at all if she couldn't play perfectly— but she wanted to work with music someday, work beside it somehow. She said maybe she'd be a DJ or a music producer or something.

She listened to the Lola Quartet and liked them but it was the wrong kind of music, not electronica, her heart wasn't really in it. Gavin didn't mind. She leaned back on the sofa in the basement where they used to practice, half-lost in the shadows at the edge of the room, staring up at the ceiling, crossing and uncrossing her legs, and when he raised his trumpet to his lips he often thought I am playing for you but he never told her this.