TWENTY-FIVE

IN THE SPOTLIGHT, CHARITY HAD THE SAME DETERMINED SET TO her jaw Griff had noticed in her mother. She suddenly looked years more experienced, like she’d stepped into a brand-new version of herself, miles ahead of this stage. Griff wondered how long in this short life he’d be lucky enough to know her.

He spread his hands over the keys. He had all eighty-eight.

When Charity began to sing, the audience went still as a held breath. Sometimes in practice, it took her a while to warm up. Not tonight. Charity was fearless—went down deep, pulling up the sweet, clear sound. Her voice flew a four-octave range from a low rumble to a place so high it cracked. In ten seconds, she had the room right where she’d left them after “Wayfaring Stranger.”

Griff played his whole heart. Charity was the real thing.

When they finished the first song, the room clapped like their home team had just won in overtime. Like they’d just remembered they were alive. People in Clade City did not stand and cheer for anything without a ball and protective equipment—but some stood now. Griff clapped too, like he hadn’t been part of it. The whole place beamed golden light except one quiet cluster up front Griff could feel like a cold pocket in the ocean.

Leo, Jonesy, and Slim.

Leo and Jonesy had fresh drinks poured and sat a distance from Slim. They had a look in their eyes like kids in a parking lot about to throw rocks. Leo found Griff’s eyes right away. His face twitched. Puckered lips, bug eyes. Leo was mocking him.

Piano Face.

Hands shaking, Griff put his fingers to the keys and it didn’t matter. No one was looking at him anyway.

The second song was their most raw. Slow and challenging for a barroom crowd.

It began to sacred silence. Charity threw her voice up to the top two octaves, where it held on trembling and then broke off. Unlike the first musical exploration, this one came with words—

—Sometimes you find them, sometimes you won’t—

When she repeated the line, it came with an awful echo. Griff looked at Thomas, on the sound board. Thomas wasn’t watching the monitors. He was staring at Leo and Jonesy, who were both laughing. Griff didn’t know who had started it, but Leo went next. Griff watched his brother’s mouth wrap around Charity’s words. Right there at the front of the room, he cawed back at her—

Saaaaawwwwmtimes—

Mocking. Cruel. That face of his.

Him and Jonesy together, the audience quiet enough to hear them. Griff stared at his brother and flubbed the keys. Charity stuttered as if stirring in deep sleep, not quite awake—please don’t wake up! She sang, but Leo and Jonesy were contagious. Tables were watching them now, smiling. Shaking heads. Slim watched. He swallowed, like he’d just put down a stone.

Shhhhometimes you dawwwn’t—

He saw the understanding land behind Charity’s eyes. She’d heard it. They ended the song early to generous applause, but Charity’s voice shook when she said:

“Last song.”

In the opening, a wordless melody was meant to imitate the wind. The purposeful shake and crack of her voice—being the most beautiful—lent itself to the most brutal mockery. Leo and Jonesy did it again. Griff tried to keep playing. They’d brought along another table in the cruelty, a voice farther back in the bar.

Aiiiieieiieee—

They squealed as she sang. Laughter. It was a catching thing, mockery. Unlike Charity’s music, this was a song the whole town knew. Every time Griff had had his foot kicked into his back leg, every time he’d gotten shoved from behind, they’d been singing it to him:

You don’t belong.

This time the song was carried by Leo’s voice. They sang backup in the poisoned hawhawhaw laughter in the back booths. Smiles stretched to smirks and in the second minute of the song, near the end, people got loud. Griff could see the ugliness swell in them. Hungry eyes, desperate to chew up any beautiful thing they could. Leo had poisoned the room. Charity gave him a quick, trembling look, like someone about to tip backward off the edge of something—and he could not save her.

She climbed down from the stage. She left. Gone.

“Let’s give it up for Just Charity and Griff!” Rab howled, hustling toward the stage.

Some people clapped. A sloppy response. Confused chatter.

Griff felt a hot twist in his stomach, an eruption and shouting—his voice. He did not know his voice could sound the way it did, or how fast he could move. How strong he could be. He did not expect the table to flip so easy, the glasses to shatter. The first few sets of arms he shredded like ribbons and aimed for his brother’s throat and too many arms, he could not get to Leo so he peeled off and cut through the crowd, moving into the place where Charity’s mother had been but was no longer—

Outside.

Mist hung thick in the air and it was warm for October. Two sets of brake lights on opposite sides of the jetty. He ran until his chest throbbed and he tasted iron deep in his throat and the car was gone.

Now, on the edge of the parking lot, the Urchin looked too small to hold such a vast, ugly thing.

He’d let his wall down. He’d let them see. It was his fault, and he’d done nothing.

He tried to outrun the hot, sticky feeling—racing from the pavement to dune grass and onto the slick and stony tidal flats—but the memory filled his lungs and the final look in Charity’s eyes cramped in his stomach and beat with the ocean’s pulse and the lighthouse swung, oblivious—

WHOOMP!

Stop! He hated it tonight. Wanted to scream, break something.

Griff’s foot slipped into a stone tidepool with a deep, throaty glug and he staggered. Freezing water. His sock slurped against his boot’s interior. Cold soaked into his toes. The rippling water quieted.

Stale tidepool.

Nothing fine or feathered swam inside. Mussels clung with straw beards. A hermit crab moved with tight, spider jerks, and dozens of prickly black skeletons hunkered in the pool’s pocked, moonrock surface. Urchins. Because you had to be barbed and clawed and sealed up tight to survive. What would they all do, now that the music was gone?

He’d listened to enough police reports to know.

What happened next was the Patriots drank until they remembered they hated the Surfer Boys, and the Surfer Boys recalled they never could stand the Lumberjacks, and they’d crash one another’s heads in and spill out bloody and broken because the only song left was “You Don’t Belong” and the only ones to sing it to were each other.

He could walk back and start a fight. Throw the first bottle.

He turned back and something stopped him. A slap on the rocks, near the ocean. A small silver flash. It landed with a wet, sharp sound, like a piece of meat dropped on a stone countertop. Rockfish. The ones with big, searching eyes. Sad clown lips. They got trapped sometimes, after a full moon tide, and always tried to make it to the water. The rockfish jerked as if electrocuted.

Griff ran. He needed to bring it to the water.

His left foot plunged into another stone bowl freezing and soaked—hold on! Because it would choke on the air. It would starve or split its skull on stone. Get broken by the journey, snatched by a bird, and the whole ocean was so close.

Griff couldn’t see it anymore.

You’d find rockfish all the time on the beach, smashed up. Mottled with flies and lifeless and that’s how you got broken out here. You made the mistake of thinking you could escape.