15

They spent the rest of the first Saturday lazing around the apartment, peering at each page of the book. He listed off the basics to her, his lips occasionally brushing her ear and making her shiver. Every so often, when he described something poetically enough, she’d turn and their lips would meet again, briefly. Then they’d turn back to the book as though nothing had happened.

There were three disciplines that the Codex Canoris covered: musica universalis, the Pit Viper’s cosmic beats; musica humana, the internal music of the human body, usually expressed through singing and dancing (“SZA,” he’d said, and then he’d nodded knowingly at her arched eyebrows); and musica quae in quibusdam constituta est instrumentis, the elusive music created when player and instrument came together perfectly.

The Pit Viper figured that if his music had no effect on her—or if it had a negative effect, like the headaches and nausea she’d felt in the past—then she was adept at one of the other two. Given Fiona’s relationship with Betty, her discipline had to be the instrumentis (Fiona took a good five minutes trying to learn how to pronounce the full name, much to the Pit Viper’s amusement, before she went with the shortened title).

Sure enough, while the cosmic atlases and the anatomical diagrams had no effect on her other than looking cool, the sheet music in the back of the old book felt like a live wire when she ran her fingertips across it…though maybe it was just the feeling of his skin on hers as he guided her hand to the page.

“You sure it’s okay for me to touch this?” she said, fixated on the Canoris’s final pages. “If this book really is that old, won’t the oil on my hands harm it?”

“Maybe it would harm a normal book,” he said. “I think when something contains this much power, it’s harder to harm it by conventional means. It has a life of its own, as it were.”

“That’s pretty scary,” said Fiona.

“Oh, this book is definitely not to be messed with,” he said and gave her a quick peck on the neck, making her whole body feel the way the instrumenti music did beneath her fingers.

“You’re pretty daring for messing with it, then,” she said.

“I enjoy things of a provocative nature,” he said, and his breath crossed her ear. She pressed against him involuntarily, but then exhaled through her nose and loosed herself from his grip with an unconvincing laugh. Some part of her wanted to give in and jump on top of him—hey, a mysterious older musician who owned the floor of a building, it was what most Hamm housewives read paperbacks about while fanning themselves—but she was firm in her resolve. It was different than it had been with Horace, where she’d waited to be charmed to death. With the Pit Viper, she didn’t want him to think she was weak. Her gut had always been her rocker radar, and to deny its instructions to hold off would, in Fiona’s mind, betray the part of her that he seemed so smitten with.

As she got ready to go, he asked if she could come back next weekend. She told him she’d try but couldn’t make any promises.

“Bring your guitar,” he said. “Who knows, maybe you’ll master the instrumentis immediately and become a sonic goddess overnight.”

“You’re giving me too much credit, man,” she laughed, adding the last word to try and sound casual and not let on that she was burning up inside just looking at him. “Just because I’ve never been in a band doesn’t mean suddenly my guitar is going to shoot lightning.”

He smiled and shrugged. “True. Maybe I’m just pretty taken with you.”

“That’s fine, too,” she said. She let her body sway as she walked out, relishing the sensation of his gaze on her.

…

At school that week, Fiona pissed everyone off at once—her friends, her parents, and her teachers. They all wanted to know why she was behaving like the cat who caught the canary, and she didn’t feel like telling them. She’d never been much of a liar, but ended up doing a lot of shrugging and evading the truth, playing the Sullen Teenager card.

When Caroline asked her what the hell was going on with Calvin Hokes, she shrugged and repeated the nonsense she and Calvin had made up at the charity event. When Ms. Traubert asked her what she thought she was doing texting in class, she shrugged and said it was an emergency. When her father asked her how the band was going, she shrugged and didn’t answer. She figured she was eighteen, which gave her the easy out of just being evasive and nonresponsive, because of hormones or mood swings or whatever child-psychology bullshit the internet was most in a huff over. The idea of using such a simple excuse would’ve made her sneer weeks ago, but now she didn’t really care what it took to get them off her back, so long as they got the hell off. They all worried about how her life affected their own tiny self-centered universes, when she was living by a set of standards they couldn’t comprehend, guided by a man from somewhere light-years away from Hamm. She felt her own potential, or at least whatever potential the Pit Viper saw in her, separating her from the masses.

It was especially strong at school, where everyone was still deep in the Pit Viper’s thrall. She watched as Pit Viper mania grew in volume, causing the kind of gossip and peer pressure and clique mentality that she wasn’t even interested in anymore. By now, even the freshmen were obsessed with the Pit Viper. Weber was making T-shirts in the basement of Powerdrive, and they were selling like crack. Rumors had reached a fevered pitch—the Pit Viper had learned to DJ from the Devil Himself at a crossroads; the Pit Viper had implants in his brain that allowed him to beat match perfectly; the Pit Viper was actually the illegitimate son of Diplo and Gwen Stefani, but had been abandoned as a child to avoid scandal. The closest anyone got to the truth was the rumor that the Pit Viper was actually Fiona’s cousin Jake, who hadn’t died but had run away and brought shame to her family, a story that would have once offended her but now just sounded silly.

For all their drama-mongering and fanaticism, only she knew the truth. Only she knew his back story and his secret… not to mention the feeling of his hands resting on her hips and his lips against her earlobe.

…

That Thursday, a familiar smell hit her nostrils, and she looked up from her locker to see Horace leaning next to her, wearing the forced calm of someone about to give a presentation in front of a classroom.

“Hey,” he said.

Fiona felt annoyed, aware of the melodramatic one-on- one that was on its way. “What’s up, Horace?”

“I was hoping we could talk,” he said. “About how things ended when we last spoke, and what’s going on right now.”

Fiona knew Horace’s request was totally reasonable—but it irritated her. Already, in his careful language, Fiona sensed the presumptions that were about to be made here—that she wasn’t going to get to say her side of things until the end of a long confession, that her distance was going to be made equal to his insensitivity toward her, that she would be told that they were just going through a phase. Horace would learn nothing, and she’d either find herself bullied into stringing him along or get yelled at for saying the truth. And anyway, she had class. “Okay, can we make it quick? I’m heading to English.”

Horace blinked a few times; he obviously hadn’t expected that answer. “Actually, I think we have a lot to talk about. Any chance you can cut English, or maybe we can find time later—”

“Sorry, Horace, I’m really busy at the moment,” she said. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she knew it was the Pit Viper responding to that clever-as-hell joke she’d just made about Turnstile, which only made this clumsy interaction feel more exhausting. “Anything else? If this is an emergency, you can call me after school.”

He folded his arms and furrowed his brow. “Fiona, we have to talk about what’s going on with us.”

Her phone buzzed again. She considered going for the throat, being cruel, but she knew deep down that Horace didn’t deserve it; after all, only a month or so ago she’d been overjoyed at the idea of hearing him say that he loved her. But she was over it, big time, and there was no coming back from that. It was as though Horace was a song she used to love but now found a little embarrassing—it wasn’t that she hated him, only that she wasn’t interested in retracing the past.

In the end, she went with honesty. “There is no ‘us,’ Horace. Not anymore.”

Horace’s face fell. “That can’t be true.”

“I’ve thought a lot about it, and I think it’s best we see other people,” she said, quietly and slowly. “The last time we spoke, it became clear to me that you aren’t ready to be the kind of boyfriend I want—”

“Are you kidding me?” he cried, his eyes going pink and brimming with tears. “I screw up a couple of times, so you decide we’re broken up without telling me?”

“You didn’t think about me, Horace,” she said in the same reserved tone. “When you planned to have a party where my cousin died, when you took those pills, how I felt never once entered your mind. How I feel needs to be a priority in your life. I excused it the first time, but I’m not going to excuse it again.”

“What about Harry Suggs, huh?” he said, his nostrils flaring. “I excused that.”

“That was before we started dating,” she said, a little sharper this time to let him know how shitty this line of inquiry was. “And if you’d told me then that it was some kind of debt to you that I’d have to pay off later by putting up with your insensitivity, I might have broken up with you right there.”

She expected Horace to go all in and call her a slut—but it was like he knew that was a losing battle. Instead, he just shook his head and opened and closed his mouth, over and over.

“Just like that,” he said. “Just—” He snapped his fingers. “In an instant. It’s all over.”

“It wasn’t an instant,” she said. “It was a bunch of them. This is what I’m talking about, Horace. You don’t want to believe what actually happened.”

“I don’t believe this is happening,” he said, his voice finally cracking. “I can’t believe it.”

She sighed. This was already taking too long. She would be late for English, and she was dying to read the text messages waiting for her on her phone. She wanted to end this quickly, but without a mess. Bloodlessly, as the Pit Viper had put it.

She pulled his hoodie off the hook in her locker and held it out to him. He stared at it in horror, then took it from her, cradled it in his hands like a dead thing. After staring at it for a few seconds, his fists bunched it up in shaking handfuls, and he laughed without an ounce of humor.

“Whoever he is, I hope he’s worth it,” he said. Then he turned and walked away, the snake from the Pit Viper’s album glaring at her from the back of his T-shirt.