A Fallen World
AT 7:00 SHARP THE next evening she left the sidewalk on College Street and went to the main doors of Hancock Library. It was a crisp, cold night, with a sky full of stars overhead, and the walk down from the converted garage left her exhilarated. That day she’d only had one class, Intro to Orchestral Arrangement at 2:30, and so she’d been able to spend the whole morning and most of the afternoon in Sho’s company. The intensity of their winter break together had faded a little, but every moment she spent away from her broodsister still felt a little like wasted time.
Once inside the library, she glanced around, uncertain, then spotted Darren at the same moment that he noticed her. He hauled himself out of the chair where he’d been sitting, crossed the room to her. “I’m glad you could make it,” he said in a low voice. “Come on.” Before she could ask any questions he led the way further into the library.
He stopped at a door marked STAFF ONLY in a quiet corner, waited until nobody but Brecken was in sight, tapped on the door once, then twice, then twice again. Moments passed, and then a lock clicked and the door opened. He ducked through it, motioned for Brecken to follow. She gave him an uneasy look—there might be good reasons, of course, not to go into an unfrequented place with a man she didn’t know that well—but she followed him anyway.
On the far side was a cluttered room with metal shelves around the edges and piles upon piles of old hardback books in the middle. Another young man, plump and smiling, with black horn-rimmed glasses and a shock of unruly black hair, closed the door behind them.
“Stan, this is Brecken, who I told you about,” Darren said then. “Brecken, Stan’s a friend of mine. He’s in the library science program, and does work-study here.”
“Did Darren say anything about this?” Stan said, gesturing at the books.
“No.” Brecken glanced from one to the other, uncertain.
“It’s like this.” He turned, walked over to the books. “The director of library services told us right before break that we have to cut our book holdings by twenty-two percent.” His smile crumpled and fell. “Eleven thousand books. This is just part of it.”
Brecken gave him an appalled look. “Why?”
“Nobody knows. We’ve got the shelf space, we’ve got the money, but we’ve got to clear away the quote deadwood unquote, no other explanation given. And the books aren’t even going to be sold. They’re going to be destroyed.”
Brecken opened her mouth, and then remembered the Woodfield Consolidated School District and the way it had gotten rid of its art and music programs, and closed it again.
“It’s going on everywhere these days.” Stan picked up a book from the pile, gave it a sad look. “University libraries, public libraries, you name it.” With a little bleak smile: “I’ve got a new theory about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. I think King Ptolemy just up and decided that nobody would ever actually need all those musty old scrolls.”
“Ow,” said Brecken.
“Yeah,” Stan said. “The one piece of good news is that some of us talked to the librarians, who are just as upset about this business as the rest of us, and they said that if books up and disappear from the sorting room nobody’s going to ask any hard questions. So we’re going to save at least some of the collection by getting it into other hands.”
“There are books on music,” Darren said. “Old books on composition. Do you want the textbook Mozart’s dad used to teach him counterpoint?”
Brecken tried to decide if he was joking. His face denied it. “Please,” she said.
He went over to the heaps of books, glanced at a few volumes, picked up a battered volume with a black cover. “Here you go. The author’s name is Johann Joseph Fux.”
She gave him a sidelong look. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.” He came back toward her, grinned his ungainly grin. “So when it comes to music, I definitely have Fux to give.” He made a florid bow, held out the book to her.
Laughing, she curtseyed and took it. A brief glance through the pages, and she was sure she wanted to take it home with her and study it for hours on end.
“You can put the ones you want there so I can scan them and mark them as discarded,” Stan said then, indicating a shelf on one wall. “Darren says you’re studying old music, right? Please take anything you can use.” All at once his voice wavered. “I went into library science because I love books. I want to get them into people’s hands, not—not throw them out.”
He turned sharply away. Darren glanced after him, then turned to Brecken and motioned to the books. “It’s all a mess,” he said, “but I think the music books are mostly on this side. I’ve been here before, with other people—Stan’s already got a couple of hundred books handed out, and we’re going to see to it that nothing worthwhile gets wasted.”
“Are you looking for anything?”
“Old books in Latin and German on music theory, especially if there’s mathematics.”
A memory surfaced. “You said you’re a mathematician.”
He nodded. “I’m finishing up a master’s in mathematics this semester.” He knelt beside the books, pulled out two. “You should look at these.” Then: “Okay, here’s one for me.”
For the next half hour or so the two of them went through the heap of books together, like archeologists searching the ruins of a fallen world. There weren’t that many books on old music, and most of them had nothing she could use, but now and then as she sorted through the volumes or considered things Darren handed her, she found treasures—a history of the fugue with hundreds of examples, three more translations of old texts on counterpoint, a century-old doctoral dissertation that translated and discussed a fifteenth-century textbook of music theory, and more. By the time they finished, Brecken had two dozen books in her stack, and was trying to figure out how best to ferry them home.
“You didn’t drive here?” Darren asked.
“I don’t have a lot of money,” she said, “and a car’s more than I can afford.”
“Okay.” Diffidently: “I can give you a ride, if you want.”
She considered that, and agreed. Maybe five minutes later, they carried four plastic grocery bags of books out the service entrance in back and got them settled in the trunk of a battered green sedan a couple of decades old. “Okay,” Darren said, climbing in behind the wheel as Brecken got in the passenger side. “Give me directions.”
The car pulled out onto Meeker Street a few moments later. “So what’s a mathematician doing taking a composing class?” Brecken asked.
“My field’s historical mathematics.” He slowed as the light at College Street turned red.
“Focusing on the math that people used back in the day to understand music, which is really different from what you get in music theory nowadays. So I’m taking classes in the music department to make sure I know enough not to talk nonsense.”
“Did you take up piano as part of that that?”
“No, I started taking lessons when I was twelve.” The light changed, and he turned left onto College Street. “Just one of those things. But it’s because I’ve played a lot of Bach that I caught onto what I’m researching.” Another left turn put the car onto Danforth Street, rising up toward the dark rounded mass of Hob’s Hill. “I’m convinced there’s a mathematical structure to Bach’s fugues—not just his, either. There’s the sort of thing they learned from Fux or Zarlino or the other writers on method, and then there’s something else, a deeper structure, that was a trade secret, the sort of thing the Baroque masters used and didn’t talk about.”
“That’s really interesting,” said Brecken. “Is that why you said the fugue you played for the class was derivative?”
That got her a sudden sidelong glance. “Good. Yeah, I used Bach’s math to compose it.”
The car pulled up in front of Mrs. Dalzell’s house. Darren got out with her and handed her the two grocery bags of books from the trunk, but made no attempt to get invited in. As Brecken headed for her door, she could hear his car’s engine as he drove away.
Later that evening, after dinner and a long while curled up with Sho on the futon, she went onto the internet and started looking for news stories about libraries getting rid of books. It took only a few moments to find plenty of details. Stan hadn’t been exaggerating: library systems had been dumping books for years, and to judge by what she read, the pace seemed to be picking up. She shook her head slowly, wondered what was behind it all.
THE NEXT MORNING JAY was in The Cave again, sitting over in one corner by himself, and though he stared at Brecken he didn’t try to talk to her. That was the busy day of her week that semester, and she gave him a wary glance and then hurried on.
He was there the next day, too. By then she had something else to worry about, though, for the same abrupt silences and unreadable looks she’d gotten when she’d come through the door on the first day of Composition II had begun to spread through the rest of Partridgeville State’s music department. She had Intro to Orchestral Arrangement that day, and startled glances and silences followed her from the moment she came in through the glass doors of The Cave, pursued by a wind with snow in its teeth, until she settled into a chair in a classroom on Gurnard Hall’s fifth floor and pulled a notebook and a pen from her tote bag.
Professor Madeline Kaufmann was thin and tense and angular, with fussy clothing and dishwater-blonde hair pulled back hard into a bun. She lectured in a staccato voice, pacing from the podium to the piano on one side of the room, now and then stopping to play a flurry of notes or chords, covering so much so fast that it took Brecken’s undivided attention to keep up with her. By the time the class session was over, four pages of Brecken’s notebook were covered with notes and Brecken herself had a head full of ideas for composition. As she stuffed the notebook into her tote back and got ready to leave, though, Professor Kaufmann said, “You’re Brecken Kendall, right? Do you have anything right now, or can you stay for a few minutes?”
“I can stay,” Brecken answered, trying to suppress a feeling of worry. “What is it?”
“There’s been quite a bit of talk recently about your compositions, you know. I wonder if you’d be willing to play me one or two.” With a thin smile: “To see what the fuss is about.”
Brecken’s heart sank. “Okay,” she said. A dozen other students in the room had stopped in the middle of their own preparations for leaving; the professor gave them a level look, and they hurried out into the hallway. No one closed the door, though.
Brecken went to the piano; a quick scale got her fingers limbered. She considered her options, and then launched into the first of her three sarabandes, the one she thought of as “Voice from a Distance.” As always, the music closed around her, holding her uncertainties and the professor’s reaction at a far distance. The sarabande sparkled and flowed, reached its end, and Brecken paused a moment and then played her new minuet. That was bright and lively enough to raise her mood even in the most uncertain moments, and she finished it smiling.
When she turned to the professor, though, the smile faltered. Professor Kaufmann was considering her with a thin frown. “Those are both very crisply handled,” she said, “but I think you’d be much better advised to put your talent to work on something a little less antiquated. Have you explored the current trends in art music?”
“Yes,” Brecken said. “They don’t do anything for me.”
The professor shook her head briskly. “Take my advice, you can’t afford that kind of thinking. If you want to get anywhere in composition you need to stay on the cutting edge.”
But I don’t want to get anywhere in composition, Brecken thought. I just want to write music. She didn’t say anything of the kind, though, and extracted herself from the room and Professor Kaufmann’s presence as quickly as she could. As she’d guessed, there were half a dozen students in the hall, all of them pretending that they’d been doing something other than listening at the door, and they stared at her as she went by.
When she got down to The Cave, more stares and silences were waiting. Brecken tried to ignore them all, went to the usual table. Donna and Rosalie were in the middle of a heated discussion about something, but dropped it the moment Brecken came into sight. She flopped down on a chair across from them, they exchanged greetings, and a moment’s brittle silence passed. “You know what, girl?” Rosalie said to Brecken then, leaning forward and propping her chin on her hands. “I talked with my cousin Rick about you. He wants to meet you. You could do a lot worse; he’s nice, he’s cute, he’s got a good job—”
Brecken managed to put on a bleak expression. “Ro, please. I’m still getting over one relationship, I’m not ready for another.”
“It’s been a whole month!” Rosalie said. “And of all the people to get torn up over, too.”
Brecken just looked at her, and after a moment she rolled her eyes. “Okay, I get it. But when you’re ready to start dating again, tell me, okay? I’ll give you Rick’s email.”
“The funny thing is,” Donna said then, “you haven’t been acting like somebody who’s getting over a relationship, Breck. You act like you’re in love.”
Brecken managed to keep her reaction off her face. “I think it’s the composing,” she said after a moment. “It’s like I had an empty place in me, and now it’s full.”
It was the right thing to say, she knew that at once, because Rosalie rolled her eyes and then started talking about something else. After a while both of them had to leave for classes. Brecken started for Hancock Library, then stopped in the middle of the plaza, reminded herself that she didn’t have any classwork that needed library time, and headed home. All the way up Danforth Street, she fretted about Donna’s words, and tried to think of some way to distract her friends from any clue that might lead them to Sho.
THAT FRIDAY WAS BRECKEN’S birthday, and true to form, Aunt Mary sent a cloyingly cute birthday card with a department store gift certificate in it. Brecken looked up the chain online, and to her immense surprise discovered that it was not only still in business, it had a store in the Belknap Creek Mall. That afternoon she played the flute in Mrs. Macallan’s memory for close to three hours, and for once it felt like a celebration of her teacher’s life instead of an elegy for a useless death. Later, though a birthday cake seemed extravagant, she baked thumbprint cookies with apricot jam in the dents, and she and Sho had their own very private celebration thereafter.
Saturday she walked out Dwight Street to the mall, threaded her way through the mostly empty parking lot, and spent a good two hours going through the bargain bins in the women’s clothing section of the store, finding everything they had in her size and then deciding which of them she could stand being seen in. By the time she got to the cash register she had a good-sized armload of practical clothing and one sheer extravagance, a lovely dark red dress with tiny gold seed beads sewn on it in a sunburst pattern.
Her route from there went back past empty storefronts to the food court where Rose and Thorn played the semester before, and as Brecken neared the court she heard music: a flute’s high voice, a cello played in a style she thought she recognized. When she reached the food court, sure enough, Walt Gardner was the cellist and the flautist was Barbara Cormyn. The music was bland and sweet, and though the two of them were capable enough, there was something hollow where the life and soul of the music should have been.
Brecken stopped for a few moments, listening, and then walked past. Walt saw her and turned scarlet, and his playing faltered for a moment. Barbara glanced at him and then spotted Brecken, but neither her expression nor the sound of her flute wavered at all. Her big blue eyes gazed at Brecken in vague surprise, and the cold mechanical thing Brecken had seen behind her eyes showed again, registered her existence, and lost interest. Brecken was glad when the doors of the mall closed behind her and the music gave way to the earnest sounds of wind and traffic.
Other than that, she had nothing to take her away from the apartment that weekend. Rosalie tried to get her to come to Admiral Benbow’s Friday night for dancing, but Brecken begged off. The promised Saturday practice sessions hadn’t yet materialized, either, so except for the clothes she wore to the mall, a flannel nightgown and a baggy sweater were the most she put on at any point from Thursday evening to Monday morning. She slept poorly and her dreams were troubled, but the daylight hours were pleasant enough that they made up for it.
Once she got home Saturday she neglected everything but Sho; Sunday she found time for music, the weekly letter to her mother, and a long afternoon working on counterpoint assignments, though the latter two also counted as time with Sho, since she’d done all of it curled up on the futon with cool black iridescence up close against her.
Toward evening, she leafed through some of the books she’d gotten, and ended up thoroughly baffled. Darren hadn’t been exaggerating the difference between old music theory and its modern equivalent. Before long she was completely lost among superpartients and superparticulars, sesquialters and sesquitertians, aliquot parts and harmonic middles, and the rest of it. It all probably made sense, she guessed, if you knew the terms, but she didn’t.
Finally, just before she got to work on dinner, she emailed Darren and asked him if he could point her to something that would explain the older music theory. After dinner and a long stint of piano practice she settled down on the futon, talked with Sho for a while, and sank into a companionable silence that ended only when a pseudopod patted her awake, just long enough to pull the futon out flat and get ready for bed.
She got an answering email from Darren the next morning after breakfast, suggesting that they meet on campus, and she spent some minutes in thought before answering. He’d shown no sign so far of trying to turn their acquaintance into a relationship, but she’d seen the thing happen often enough to be wary of his intentions. Still, she sent back a note agreeing, so long as they didn’t meet in Gurnard Hall—she was tired of the stares and silences there and didn’t want to try to talk about music theory in the midst of them. The answer came back almost at once, proposing a coffee shop in the basement of Tuchman Hall, the mathematics and engineering building on campus. Another exchange of emails settled the day and time, Tuesday at one.
By the time that was finished, she had just enough time to skin into clothes and walk to campus for her Monday classes. Walking through The Cave was far from a pleasant experience, with Jay brooding silently in a corner, and edged glances and murmurs from the other students following her all the way to the table where Rosalie sat. For that matter, Rosalie looked glum, though she forced a smile and said, “Hi, girl.”
“Hi, Ro.” Brecken sat down. “What’s up? You look like you’ve had a bad morning.”
“It’s nothing.” Brecken fixed her with a skeptical look, and after a moment she looked at the table. “Donna and I had a stupid fight. Don’t worry, we’ll get over it.”
Brecken said something more or less sympathetic, and Rosalie brightened up and started talking about a harpist she’d read about online who would be touring New Jersey a few months on. “Not with a band or anything, just her and her harp, and the article says she tours all over the country. I’m going to see if I can get tickets to one of her performances and learn a thing or two.”
“Thinking of touring solo?” Brecken asked.
That got an enthusiastic nod. “Yeah. The way the economy is these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of venues would rather have solo acts just because they’re cheaper.”
Brecken considered that. “Makes sense. Remember what you said about Barbara scooping the gigs out from under Jay?”
“Yeah.” Rosalie suddenly leaned forward. “Did you hear about what she’s up to now? A couple of people are saying that she’s doing a professor over in the English department.”
“What about Will?” Brecken asked, shocked.
“You’ll have to ask him,” said Rosalie. “Or not; she probably hasn’t told him.” She glanced at her cell phone. “Time to get going. You remember what today’s lecture’s on?”
“Modal harmonies.” Brecken got up, picked up her tote bag. “I want to see what he says about them. I may want to do some modal compositions.”
“You’re still doing the composition stuff?”
Brecken gave her a startled look. “Of course. I’m on composition track now, remember?”
Rosalie rolled her eyes, said, “Girl, get real,” and led the way to the elevators.
TUCHMAN HALL WAS A harsh soaring shape of glass and concrete, distinguishable from Gurnard Hall only in detail. The students who paced the corridors of the two buildings, though, couldn’t have looked more different if they’d come from separate planets. The engineering and math majors flaunted their geek status the way music majors flaunted their place in the cultural avant-garde. Brecken felt conspicuous as she went through glass doors to the main stair, and the looks she got from students as she headed for the basement told her that she wasn’t mistaken.
The coffee shop was as bleak as Vivaldi’s, but less crowded. Brecken got in line, bought a cup of coffee, and was looking for a table with a good view of the door when Darren showed up. A few minutes later they were sitting in one of the corners of the coffee shop, while Darren traced lines on the table with one finger and Brecken took notes as fast as her pen could move.
It took him less than half an hour to explain how the old books set out the ratios and proportions of music theory. As he finished, she began to nod. “Okay, that makes sense.” Glancing up at him: “I hope you’re planning on a teaching career.”
That got her his ungainly grin. “If I can get a professorship, yeah.”
“Well, I hope you do.” Then: “So are these ratios the mathematics you’ve found in Bach and the other Baroque composers?”
“Well, in a sense. The stuff we’ve just talked about is all based on whole number ratios, but the deeper stuff is based on irrational numbers. Do you have anything by Bach handy?”
Brecken went rummaging in her tote bag, found the piano score of the Bach minuet she’d arranged for Rose and Thorn, and handed it to him. “Okay, good,” he said. “The really complex stuff is in his fugues, so this is better to start with.” He set the score down on the table between them and launched into an explanation of the way the different voices set out a set of strange mathematical ratios. After a few moments Brecken put her chin in her hand and stared at the music, trying to follow the patterns he traced out.
“I don’t think I understand more than a little of that,” she said once Darren finished, “but I think I want to understand a lot more.”
“Seriously?” He gave her an uncertain look.
“Seriously. There’s—” She paused, tried to find words. “You know how some buildings feel uneasy, and others make you feel comfortable? Like there’s, I don’t know, something that makes sense in the comfortable ones, and it’s not there in the others? Music is like that for me. Bach makes the world make sense. The modern stuff—” She shrugged. “Not so much, and I’m wondering if there’s more to that than tonality.”
“Yes,” he said. She glanced up at him again, startled, because his voice had gone low and intent. He was smiling, but it wasn’t his big ungainly grin; it was a little smile, fragile and very private. “It’s tonality, but not just tonality. I think I’ve understood part of what else Renaissance and Baroque composers did to get that effect.”
“I want to learn that,” said Brecken. “If that’s okay with you.”
He nodded. “That’s what my master’s thesis is about, so it isn’t any kind of secret.” Then, with the ungainly grin again: “Actually, it might help with my thesis to try to explain it all to someone who doesn’t have a math background. If you’re willing to be a guinea pig—”
She twitched her nose at him, and they both laughed. “Okay,” he said. “We should swing by the library sometime soon, then. They haven’t discarded their music collection—not yet—and there are a couple of pieces that make it really easy to see how all this works.”
It was getting on for two o’clock, so they compared schedules and arranged to meet the next morning at the library. Brecken had to work hard to keep her attention on Professor Kaufmann’s lecture at her orchestral arrangement class, and spent the entire walk home turning over in her mind the patterns she’d glimpsed during Darren’s explanation.
SHE SLEPT POORLY AGAIN and had bad dreams, but the next morning began well. Between Sho’s company and a better than usual flute practice, she left for campus in high spirits, met Darren at Hancock Library, and set out for Gurney Hall twenty minutes later with a hefty volume of Bach harpsichord music in her tote bag. On the way out of the library, though, she and Darren passed Rosalie going in, and Rosalie gave them a startled glance and then looked away.
That was disconcerting, though not half as much so as the hostile stares she fielded yet again from the music students inside The Cave, or Jay’s silent but watchful presence over in one corner of the echoing space. It didn’t help that a few minutes after she’d settled at the usual table to wait, a woman she didn’t know—a senior, she guessed—came over to the table and asked, “You’re the one who’s doing some kind of rehash of Baroque music, right?” When Brecken nodded: “Hasn’t anybody told you why you shouldn’t waste your time on that sort of thing?”
Brecken gave her a long bleak look, and then said, “Yes. A lot of people seem to think it’s their job to tell me that.”
“They’re trying to help you,” the woman said, visibly ruffled. “So am I.”
That was more than Brecken could take. “Look,” she said. “I just want to write the music that matters to me, okay? You don’t think I should. Next to nobody in this department thinks I should. I understand that. I really do. Now will you please just go away?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said the woman. “You don’t have to get nasty about it.”
Brecken didn’t trust herself to speak again, just gave the woman a long steady look. “Well, I’m sorry I wasted my time,” the woman said, and walked away. Brecken pulled the book of Bach harpsichord pieces out of her tote bag and tried to distract herself with it until Rosalie finally showed up.
With that as prelude, her two classes that day and her time in the laundromat went past in a glum mood, and it took her an effort to restore her equilibrium before her piano lesson that afternoon. Even at the lesson, things felt out of joint. Mrs. Johansen was distracted and uneasy, and gave Brecken so many uncertain glances that finally Brecken asked if something was wrong. “Well, yes,” she admitted, “but let’s see about getting those staccato measures right before we discuss that, shall we?”
Only when the lesson was over and the obligatory cups of tea made their appearance would Mrs. Johansen say more. “The fact of the matter is that I’ve landed in a bit of a fix,” she said, “and I was thinking that you might be able to help.”
“Sure,” said Brecken. “What is it?”
“It’s my sister Nora up in Trenton.” The old woman sipped at her tea. “She’s got some health problems and needs to go to a hospital in Philadelphia, and she doesn’t drive, and she’s had no end of trouble trying to get there. We’re the only family either of us has left, you know, and so I’d drive her—but it’s an overnight stay, Saturday and Sunday.”
It took Brecken a moment to guess at the difficulty. “So you can’t play at the church.”
Mrs. Johansen nodded glumly. “And it’s hardly fair of me to leave poor Reverend Meryl in the lurch, you know, when she’s been so very supportive.”
The thought of going to a church ever again hadn’t been anywhere in her mind, but Brecken didn’t hesitate. “Mrs. Johansen,” she said, “do you want me to fill in for you? I don’t know the first thing about playing the organ, but I bet they have a piano.”
The old woman beamed. “Would you be willing to? I really don’t think any of my other students will do, and not too many young people want to get up early on a Sunday morning, you know. As for a piano, why, yes, they have one, but I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised about the organ. The finger technic is different, and you’ll have to learn how to use the pedals, but I think you’ll be able to adapt to it quickly enough, and a keyboard is a keyboard, you know.”
“I’ll have to talk to some people,” said Brecken, “and make sure I can fit it in my schedule, but I’m willing to consider it.”
“Thank you, dear,” Mrs. Johansen said, looking relieved. “Perhaps you can give me a call when you find out for sure.”
She left Mrs. Johansen’s place feeling a little better. The sun was already down, though, and a cold wind hissed through the old brick buildings as she walked through Partridgeville’s downtown. When she got to Danforth Street and headed through campus, Gurnard Hall loomed up before her against the darkening sky, and that sent her thoughts veering down less welcome paths. By the time she got back to her apartment she’d decided to follow Professor Toomey’s advice and see if she could transfer to another college.
Over a dinner of red beans and rice, she talked it over with Sho. ♪I will go gladly if you wish it,♪ the shoggoth told her. Then, nervously: ♪Will I have to go out under the empty sky?♪
♪I don’t think so,♪ Brecken told her. ♪You’ll have to stay hidden during the move, so we’ll figure out some way to get you there—♪ The shoggoth language had no words for cars or trucks or moving vans, so it took her several minutes of explanation and a few glances at the lexicon before Sho understood that there were things like rooms that went from place to place, things that made the roaring noise Sho heard from outside the apartment, and that she could hide in one of them while it took her and Brecken and Brecken’s things to the new place where Brecken’s songs would be welcome.
After dinner they settled on the futon as usual, and before Brecken got to work on her assignments for her classes—she had an arrangement exercise due the next day, and two demanding counterpoint exercises due Monday—she booted up her laptop, reread Toomey’s email, went to the websites of each of the three schools he’d named, and sent each admissions office a polite email asking for applications their composition programs.
She was shaking by the time she finished. Part of that was nerves, but not all. The rest—
She wanted to get out of Partridgeville. She felt that, all at once, in a great rush of dread. She wanted to scoop up Sho in her arms, if that was what it took, and run all the way to Oklahoma or Wisconsin or Massachusetts or wherever. Part of it was the hope of finding a place for herself and her music, but there was something else.
Something waited for her in Partridgeville. She could feel it, lean and thirsty, pacing in the darkness somewhere outside the little apartment, and she felt desperately afraid.