When he looked up, Starlee was gone.
Kyle leaned his guitar against the desk and wiped his sweaty face with the front of his t-shirt. Now he was the kind of kid who taught himself strange songs and slyly serenaded older girls. Maybe he always had been but hadn’t known it. Maybe his thing made him who he really was.
Kyle spent the following morning playing B flat major and F chords without any rhythm or purpose. He glanced out the window every few minutes, hoping Starlee would come out of her house to smoke or cool off or take out the garbage. He was sure that she would see him differently now and wanted to feel her eyes on him.
By that afternoon, Kyle still hadn’t been seen by Starlee, and he feared that whatever good his performance had done him was waning. To take the edge off his impatience, Kyle carried his guitar to the den, leaned it against the arm of the yarn-upholstered couch, and turned on the television. Every few minutes, he muted the sound, hoping to find that Starlee’s music had stopped. At four-thirty, it was still blaring. What can be taking so long? Kyle wondered.
Too antsy to sit any longer, Kyle walked out the back door and around to the front yard. The Camaro was still parked in front of Starlee’s house. It was painted in a matte-finish black, and two hubcaps were missing. All the driver’s money must be going into the rumble, Kyle thought. That must be his thing.
Suddenly Starlee’s music cut off right in the middle of a song, and her front door opened. Her two usual guests stepped out. The bigger one—they were both big—closed the door behind him. Kyle watched them as they walked toward the Camaro. When they noticed him and stopped, Kyle shifted his gaze to the house across the street.
“What are you looking at, boy?” the smaller one asked.
“Nothing,” Kyle said. He’d never noticed that the house across the street was peach-colored until now. He’d always thought it was yellow.
“Show’s over,” the bigger one said. He lowered the curved brim of his ball cap over his eyes and pulled a ring of keys from the left hip pocket of his jeans. “Run along now.”
Kyle didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move either. He didn’t want to run along. He was in his own yard.
The bigger one took a step toward him. “Did you hear me, boy?”
Kyle knew the two guys would have no qualms about leaping the chain-link fence and giving him hell, so he walked toward his backyard, but slowly. The bigger one said something under his breath and the smaller one laughed. Then the engine started up, and the Camaro rumbled away.
When Kyle reached the backyard, Starlee was standing at the fence holding an unlit cigarette in her hands. Kyle felt himself get scared, more scared than he’d been of her friends.
“What are you doing talking to them?”
Her tone made him wince. “I wasn’t. They were talking to me.”
“What were you doing so close to my house?”
“Nothing.” Had he been that close to her house? “I was just walking around ’cause I was bored.”
Starlee shook her head and smiled bitterly. “Well,” she said, “I bet you’re not bored anymore.” Then she stalked off, throwing open the screen door and disappearing inside her house. The thick back door thudded shut, rattling her kitchen windows.
Kyle could feel the humid air between his lips as he stared at the spot where Starlee had just been standing. He replayed the confrontation in his head, trying to figure out what he’d done. He’d been threatened and scolded in the space of two minutes and, so far as Kyle could tell, standing in his own yard had been his only offense.
He retreated to the den and lay down on the couch. Every chord he’d strummed to show Starlee how he’d changed sawed at his insides like a jagged blade. Maybe she would forget everything he’d done when school started, but Kyle knew he never would.
After a few minutes, Kyle rolled onto his feet. He wrapped his hands around the neck of the guitar and picked it up. Then he swung it slowly in front of his waist like a batter waiting for a pitcher to get a sign he liked. He imagined how it would feel to bring the body down on the arm of the couch, driving through until whatever was left in his hands had hit the floor. He wondered how many swings it would take to shatter the body like an eggshell.
Kyle sat down on the couch and rested the guitar’s curve on his right thigh. He strummed an F chord, then a B flat major. Then he started to play “Song Against Sex” at full speed, without any accompaniment. He sang, too, filling lines he couldn’t recall with words from other verses. He had to try like hell to remember the lyrics and keep the rhythm and make the right shapes with his hand, but through it all, Kyle realized that playing the guitar felt different than it had the day before. He was playing—at least in part—because of what had just happened with Starlee. But he wasn’t playing for her. He wasn’t playing for anyone else, either. He was just playing. Playing was just what he did. The realization buoyed Kyle somehow, and the buoyancy came through in his playing. He stomped his left foot on the carpet with each beat and strummed as hard as he could without losing all control. Even his head swiveled with the rhythm. And as he sang the melody of the trombone solo over the jangle of his messy chords, Kyle thought, This is what it feels like to have a thing. This must be.
Around noon, Kyle sat down at his father’s computer, determined to learn at least part of another song before school started the next day. He maxed out the speakers’ volume to drown out Starlee’s music and listened to the Neutral Milk Hotel album two times through with the guitar by his side, waiting for something to hit him the way “Song Against Sex” had. Nothing did. So Kyle picked a song that sounded simple. By Kyle’s count, the slow, plaintive, “Someone is Waiting” had only three chords. A tablature site confirmed the number of chords and named them: F, B flat major, and C. Kyle couldn’t believe his luck. Though he likely could play dozens of chords, the guitarist for Neutral Milk Hotel was partial, it seemed, to the two Kyle knew already.
The song’s tablature included diagrams for open C and barred C, which was just B flat major played two frets further up the fingerboard. But from the moment he realized that a C chord could be played without flattening a finger against a fret and bending his wrist around the guitar neck, Kyle focused only on open C. Following the diagram, he placed the tips of his index, middle and ring fingers on the strings. The shape felt natural, almost ergonomic. Kyle’s choice was rewarded again when he dragged the pick across the strings. The open C rang out in a way that even a perfectly executed barred chord, with so much flesh on the strings, could not. Kyle hadn’t known his guitar could sound that good. He played open C after open C. With each strum, the strings wobbled wildly, settled into a tight blur, and came to rest as the chord faded into Starlee’s music.
When he had the C down, Kyle played an F, a B flat major, and an open C in succession. Getting his fingers in the right places and sounding each chord once took almost half a minute. “Someone is Waiting” was a slow song, but not nearly slow enough for Kyle to play it—not today, anyway.
As Kyle sat in the rolling chair, struggling with the chord progression, a melody from Starlee’s house pierced his concentration. Starlee was listening to “Someone is Waiting.” Had she heard him listening to the song? Had she heard him butchering Fs and Cs and B flat majors? Was she sending him some kind of message? An apology, maybe?
Kyle stood up and traced the music’s path with his eyes through a dirty steel screen that made everything inside Starlee’s living room look pixilated and gray, like images read from a pirated videotape. Kyle saw those two guys kneeling on the carpeted floor, facing each other with their jeans bunched around their calves. Starlee was on her hands and knees, moving—or being moved—back and forth between them. The guys were smiling at each other, as if Starlee weren’t even there.
It took Kyle a few seconds to understand what he was seeing. Then he turned and stood with his back to the window, feeling