Accidental Notes: A Novel

Chapter 12

The Way the World Looks Upside Down

Not sure what this story is? The synopsis is available here.

Catch up on chapter 11 here.

All I want in the morning is to go straight to the piano so I can warm up before breakfast and dive into the music as soon as I’m done eating. But while I drop off the sheet music on the piano, the microwave beeps and the house fills with the sweet smell of berries and granola. Dad smiles when he sees me, so big it seems plastered on. “Good morning! I hope you don’t mind I made your food for you. I thought we could eat together today.”

He has a bowl of cereal for himself that he sets across from my acai bowl at the kitchen table.

“Thanks.” I poke my meal with a fork, waiting for him to say something. But he pulls out his phone and starts scrolling, not even showing me what makes him chuckle under his breath.

I want to ditch this meal and go play piano now, but I’m already here. This breakfast tastes like California, and home, and mornings with Mom where we take our time because we’re both early risers. It tastes like conversations across our bistro table, comparing our planners for the day, and Mom’s firm but kind questions about my piano goals.

For a moment I regret Dad buying these for me. Maybe I wouldn’t miss Mom so much if I were eating Crunch Berries like he is. I finish before him and go upstairs to get dressed without saying a word about leaving. By the time I’m ready to come downstairs again, wavy hair brushed until it’s almost behaving and covered in a loosely knit beanie, wearing fleece-lined leggings and a tunic sweater, I hear music.

Scales. Then soft, dancing arpeggios. Then a movement I recognize from Bach. I hadn’t heard Dad play once in the four days that I’ve been here.

He doesn’t seem to see me. His eyes focus on the keys; his shoulders hunch so he’s as near to the music as he can be. I stand like he did last night, quiet and still and listening. Maybe if I give him his space, I’ll get my turn sooner. I rest my arms on the banister and lean toward him as I listen, enjoying the way he plays so differently than I do.

When the movement ends, I finish coming down the stairs. “I’ve missed hearing you play. That was beautiful.”

“Thanks,” he says without meeting my eyes. His hands are already feeling along the keys for a new beginning.

“Now that you’ve had a turn, do you mind if I practice? There’s only a few days before my audition and this piece is so new to me…”

“Spending all your time practicing is counterproductive. You need a break, too.”

He’s not wrong. I’ve read studies about it. But if you take a break first, it’s called procrastinating. “Not before I’ve even gotten started.” He turns back to the piano, hands ready, and begins another piece. A sonata.

I don’t wait for the end of the music this time. “There’s nothing wrong with having a goal in life and working toward it. Maybe you don’t understand.”

His sonata stops mid-measure. “Go. Outside. Now.” He recovers and takes a breath, but his upset is still there. I see it in the way his shoulders hunch with tension instead of concentration and the ligaments in his neck stick out. “You used to love the snow, Adaya. And you only got to see it in the dark last night. Bundle up.”

I roll my eyes when he’s not looking. It’s clear I have no choice, but I’m right. He doesn’t know what it’s like to have a goal. I have a new song to learn and a new audition to conquer. But I know from the way he spoke that if I’m ever going to get him to let me play, I need to obey him now.

So I hide myself in Dad’s winter gear, open the sliding glass door, and head outside without saying another word to him. He’s already playing again.

The snow is getting deeper, crunching around my ankles and making it impossible to do anything but stomp through the backyard. It takes a while to get used to the feeling again, but I make myself keep moving until I can’t hear the piano anymore. By the time that’s true, I remember everything I used to love about winter.

It’s the perfect kind of snow today, wet and pliable, huge flakes that fall onto faces like puppy kisses. Smaller, icier flakes would turn the landscape into a nightmare instead of the dreamscape it is. Since it’s perfect, I should probably build a snowman. I kneel down to form my first snowball. Dad’s gloves fit me worst of all his gear, which makes the process difficult, but soon I’m clutching a snowball. It’s the wrong shape for building a snowman, completely ovular, but that’s fixable. I smash the longer ends between my hands. Bits of snow fly away, but it will do.

Gently, I set it on the ground and crouch beside it, testing if it’s ready to roll even though it’s hardly bigger than a softball. It works. I narrow my attention until it’s all I think about. Where to roll the ball. How big it gets. Everything past the edge of my snowball morphs into colorful, insignificant blurs like the backgrounds in photographs.

I’m so focused on building my snowman that I roll my snowball right into a pair of gloved hands walking out of the trees. They waver, then wobble. I’m in the way. I grab my snowball and try to move, but I trip over the powder.

The body attached to those gloves rounds and rolls away from me, picking up snow along his back as he stands again.

“There are safer ways to get the attention of someone in the middle of a handstand,” Grayson says.

“And there are better places to do handstands than in the middle of snow-covered clearings.”

He shrugs. “Not in December.” He plops down beside me and eyes my growing snowball with a grin. “Building a snowman?”

Something about the way he says it makes me feel childish and a little stupid. “Dad basically kicked me out of the house for wanting to work on my audition song. I figured I could do something more productive than wallow.”

He plops unceremoniously into the snow beside me. “Is productivity what you live for somehow?”

The judgment in his voice throws me. It never occurred to me to be anything else. “What’s wrong with productivity?”

The look on his face is unreadable, stuck somewhere between annoyance, exasperation, and honest confusion. “Just… what time do you make for being? For daydreaming? For staring at the stars?”

I look up into the gray sheet of clouds, snowflakes falling around me, swirling until I’m dizzy even though I’m sitting still. “There won’t be any stars to stare at for a long time,” I say. “What about you, though? You compose music, but your mom is the one who enters them in competitions.”

Something vulnerable sneaks through his eyes. He stands up and walks away and I’m scared I screwed up so badly he’s going home. But he jumps into a tree instead, swings until his knees hook around a branch. He hangs there for a minute before flipping around again, landing with an unsettling thud on the ground.

“What was that for? You could have just told me if you mean parkour is your future.”

“Maybe it is, but that’s not why I did it. I needed to think, and I like the way the world looks upside down. It clears my head.”

“Is that why I found you in a handstand earlier? What happened?”

He grabs a fistful of snow in his hands and starts packing it, staring at the work he’s doing instead of me even though it’s clearly mindless. “I couldn’t sleep, so I got up early. Yesterday was the deadline for hearing back about making semi-finals in that songwriting competition, so Mom thought I couldn’t sleep because I was excited I made it through. Had this whole speech about applying myself and see what happens when you put yourself out there before she paused long enough for me to say I got cut. We fought about it. I needed away from her.”

“Oh.”

“My mom doesn’t want me ‘wasting my talent.’ If I’m going to write, I need to do something with it.”

“You say that like it isn’t what you want, but you like it, don’t you? Do you want to do it professionally one day? Or would you rather spend your life upside down?” I toss a snowball at a tree. “My whole world is upside down and there’s nothing I want more than for it to be right again.”

He looks back at me. We’re focused on each other so intensely I think we’re about to fight, though I’m not sure what about. Then he looks away, backing down from the argument. “There’s a million things I could be one day. Infinite possibilities. I’m comfortable not narrowing it down yet. Some people, it takes them their whole lives.”

“Not me. I know who I want to be.”

Once again, he’s looking at me, and the spark is back. Part of me wants to ignite it, to see what we look like when we’re on fire. “I know. You had it figured out when we were ten.” He kicks the snow nearby us, and for a split second I think he’s going to break apart the base of my snowman. But he doesn’t. Instead, he flips onto his hands and walks on them to a place where the snow is still untouched. Then he pushes with his shoulders and arches his back until he’s suddenly upright again. “I think your snowman needs a torso,” he says, and begins to roll.

He’s avoiding a place this conversation should have gone. I don’t know exactly what he doesn’t want to talk about, and that intrigue almost makes it worse. I like to know things. Surprises and mysteries are overrated. But Grayson? This Grayson, not the ten-year-old I left behind, is an enigma. Enigmas itch against my skin until I solve them, but I don’t even know how to start to puzzle him out except to stay nearby.

So I hop off the ground, make a new snowball of my own, and start to work on the head for my — our — creation. We gather the snow silently. I’m hoping giving him space to process means that when I do ask, he’ll open up to me.

Even though he has the bigger section to roll, he’s clearly made a snowman more recently than I have and he finishes his piece before me. “Time to assemble?” he says when my snowball is big enough.

I nod. Grayson hefts the middle layer onto my base, and I carry the head I’m cradling and place it on top. Still wordlessly, we kneel in some fresh snow to begin filling in the creases between the three sections, grace notes to make it smoother, until it’s something like art. Our hands brush. Even through snow gloves half a size too big, I notice. From the way he pauses and stares at our hands, and then meets my eyes, Grayson does, too.

“I know the kind of person I want to be,” Grayson says so quietly his words almost tangle in his scarf without reaching me.

“What?”

“You asked earlier if I knew what I wanted to be. I don’t know what I want to spend my life doing, but I know who I want to be. I want to be remembered with a smile. Someone who can be relied on to help out. Someone who leaves the world a little better than he found it.”

The snow at our feet has gotten dirty from our build. And I’m never going to be the kind of person Grayson already is. He nudges his shoulder against mine and I study him, trying to understand the way he looks at me. My heart beats so hard it presses against my snow overalls and into my coat. Inside my gloves, my hands are sweating.

I know who I am and what I want. I have a plan to get there, and Grayson West isn’t part of it. Entertaining whatever this is between us will only distract me from what I need to be doing. My perfect will never outshine his good. I take a step away from him, tiny at first so hopefully he doesn’t notice. Then another, and he does.

Maybe Dad’s done playing now. Maybe I can get a chance to work on my music like I planned.

“Adaya?”

“I’m cold. I should get inside,” I say. Then I turn quickly and stomp back through the snow before he can realize the cold is the last thing on my mind.

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