Accidental Notes: A Novel

Chapter 23

Something to Practice

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

Catch up on chapter 22 here.

The tracks Dad’s truck leaves in the driveway fill with fresh snow in minutes. I could sort through Grandma’s things, but he’s not even here to help. His reasoning of getting ready for the estate sale was nothing more than an excuse to get me away from those boxes. I don’t owe him anything.

I make my way to the piano. Dad’s left me alone in his mother’s house on Christmas. I’m going home too soon, and I’ll have to play this music I still can’t get right. So far, I’ve managed the first five pages, but the end seems literally unplayable. I play a few measures and trip up, play a few more and get my fingers tangled in yet another knot. Some chords are impossible for me to hit accurately. I look for workarounds, but I hate those. If the composer wanted me to play a C2 instead of a C/D, it would be written that way.

There’s something more to this music, a reason for it existing, but I can’t get it out of Dad. Frustrated, I pull the music off the piano and lie on the floor with it scattered around me, ready to take notes. Mark fingerings. Anything I can do to get this music out of my dad’s head and into my grandmother’s piano to prove to Mr. Gutierrez I’m good enough.

But while I’m sprawled out on my stomach, still puzzling through fingerings, a hand squeezes my shoulder. I didn’t hear Dad’s truck pull up again. Someone drops to their knees beside me.

It’s Grayson. My mind splits in opposite directions so fast I get a headache. Of course it’s Grayson; it always is. But after yesterday, I’m not sure he’ll want to be here long. I drop the pen I was holding. “Oh. It’s you.”

“Merry Christmas to you, too.”

“Sorry. I was focused. I wasn’t expecting you.”

Grayson moves from his knees to lying on his stomach beside me. “I wasn’t myself yesterday and I was worried I hurt you. I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he says.

People don’t do that, they don’t just… show up for me. “That’s all? Really? You could have texted, you know.”

“I was telling the truth about keeping my phone off on Christmas. Plus, it isn’t the same.” He traces a pattern into the carpet between us. I’m aware every time his hand moves closer, every time it gets farther away again. “And I have this thing I’ve been working on and I wanted to try it on the Yamaha.”

Of course. It takes weight off me to know I don’t have to be someone people think is worth showing up for. And mentioning composing is a white flag after yesterday. More of the worry lifts off my shoulders and I smile at him. “See, I knew there was more to it. That piano is hard to resist.”

“Yeah, it’s the piano,” he says with a breathy laugh. He eyes the music and notepad scattered in front of us. “But you look like music would distract you. What are you doing? Spending Christmas analyzing music instead of playing it?”

I roll onto my side and face him. “Easy for you to say when you can tinker at the keys and make everything sound beautiful.” I hope Grayson can tell I’m teasing. I bet it’s impossible not to notice the glimmer in my eyes. I still haven’t forgotten the last time we were this close. How his fingers traced my arm. How, for a minute, his lips were against my skin. “When you compose, do you never write down the fingerings?”

He shrugs, this half-thing like it’s not even worth committing to the shrug. “I don’t compose anything I can’t play.”

My annoyance at him blinks back as quickly as it was extinguished. “Sure. That would solve my problem. If I only wrote my piece for the audition, I’d be able to play it. It would be boring and predictable and simplistic, but I’d be able to play it.”

“I didn’t mean it would work for you. What you need to do is find your way around this music. You need a new vision for how you approach it.”

“I don’t need some kind of lofty vision. I need a pencil and a music theory book. Steps to follow. A plan.”

He tilts away from me and toward the music. “I mean you need a vision for what to do if things go wrong. Isn’t that what you said messed you up the first time?”

His words hit hard. I scoff. “You’re saying I should plan to make mistakes?”

“No. I’m saying you learn to improvise a little.”

“Improvise my way through complicated sheet music? Now you’re not making any sense at all.” I mean for it to sound teasing, but my frustration seeps through. He’s so much better than me at music. None of my preparation, nothing I’ve studied, has taught me how to be spontaneous. And as much as my way works — worked until my last audition, that is — I can’t help but be jealous of the freedom he finds in improvising.

To his credit, he notices. Edges closer to me on the carpet until my right hand and his left are touching both the music and each other. That feeling of our arms close together is a music of its own. “I could teach you, you know. How to play that way. If you wanted.”

“You can teach me to improv.”

“Of course. It’s not a guessing game, Adaya. There are rules to follow.” He looks down and traces a crescendo across the sheet music. “Music is like… kissing.”

My cheeks heat. “What do you know about kissing?”

The light in the living room shines off his glasses and I can’t see his eyes. “Uh, not much. Except what I’ve read in books. And I read a lot of books. You saw my room.”

I did. And how well-worn most of the pages were, and how his favorites definitely had kissing. “Yeah.”

Grayson won’t look at me. This is probably a good thing. “Anyway, from what I’ve read, kisses aren’t always planned, but they’re not exactly spontaneous either. There are patterns. Like… arpeggios. But it’s just a thing I’ve read about. Something, uh, something about you made me think of that comparison. Since you like books.”

His skin is now so warm I feel the heat emanating from him. I take his hand in mine, fingers loosely clasped, and lift him away from my music before he sweats on it and ruins the ink. But his weird analogy sticks. “That actually kind of makes sense,” I say. “About the patterns. About there being a place between spontaneous and planned.”

Grayson isn’t meeting my eyes. I’m not sure I want him to. “It’s beautiful outside and you have carpet marks all over your arms. Let’s go for a walk.”

“That won’t help you teach me how to improv.”

“Not at the piano, but you obviously need a break.”

He isn’t wrong, so I take his hand when he offers it. He grins. “See? Look at you improvising! Taking a break when it wasn’t even on your to-do list. I’m not sure I recognize you. You are Adaya Finley, right?”

I laugh. “My body double was busy today.” His hand gets a little tighter around mine.

Soon, we wander through the snow together as it falls on my head and beanie in huge clumps. A few days here and freezing isn’t so cold anymore. I follow Grayson, his fluorescent yellow jacket a sun in a gray world, as he leads me to where he first showed me parkour. Our snowman is still there, tilting to one side. Wind sweeps through the trees like the trill of a piccolo as snow lands on branches. Boughs bend like they’re dancing.

The crunch of Grayson’s boots stops shortly after mine does, leaving the orchestra surrounding us percussionless. “I need to do something.” He doesn’t wait for an answer, taking off into a run and flipping over sideways, hands behind his knees as he rotates. He lands in a low squat, snow spraying around him.

“What was that for?”

“Wanted to.”

Our laughter echoes through the forest. “You make coming back here almost worth it,” I say.

He comes closer and takes my hands in his. The gloves we’re wearing are too thick. I take mine off and put them in my pocket. He mirrors me. Then I reach for his hands again. I can already feel my fingers stiffening in the cold, but I can warm them up later. Right now, all I want is his hands touching mine.

“Only almost?” he says. His fingers run up and down my palms, and it isn’t the cold that’s giving me goosebumps. With a gentle tug, he pulls me closer and I rest my head against him. Snow envelops us. I take in every sensation. His hands in mine, our wrists against my stomach, my chest touching his, my head on his shoulder.

Snowflakes land and melt on his nose as I look up at him. They tangle in his hair, stick in his eyelashes.

I plan things. That’s who I am. I know what I want and how to make it happen, and I prepare accordingly. What I’m doing right now is completely improv. But it’s still music.

“There’s a way to cancel the almost,” I say, lifting my head from his shoulder and pressing my forehead against his. It doesn’t quite work like it does in the movies because our glasses get in the way, ramming into one another and bending the frames. I pull away a tiny bit.

“I’ve never done this before,” he says.

“Me either.”

But I like the idea of telling people that Grayson West was my first kiss. Even if it’s imperfect and messy and weird. So I lift my chin and tilt my head, a little too much because I’m overcorrecting from our glasses hitting. He leans in and wraps an arm around me. Snow flurries between us until we’re too close for even snowflakes to fall through.

Then our lips touch. It’s brief and cold, our lips chapped, though his are also inexplicably soft. I bury my head against his chest the moment it’s over. I pause to remember it, how I could taste his hesitation and his happiness both, how it was a single note in a longer song, a promise that it would get better if we practiced. Kissing Grayson West is something I want to practice.

But for now, we pull apart, put our gloves back on, and walk back inside with our shoulders touching but not holding hands. I wonder if there’s a flush in his cheeks, heating him from the inside, like there is in me. For better or worse, I’ve written Grayson into my life forever as the answer to my first kiss. I hope he’s the answer to a lot more than that, too. Like second and third kisses, and twenty-second. He’s a reprise I want to return to again and again.

But I’m leaving in a day and a half. Which I haven’t told him, and now I don’t know how. Not when we’ve kissed and changed everything.

So I don’t, not as we shed our outer layers or when he follows me into the family room and I gather the pieces of sheet music. But I think about it the whole time, how maybe it was a kiss goodbye.

“Did you still want a chance at the Yamaha?”

He stuffs his hands into his pockets and looks away. “My idea needs more work now.”

“I could listen.”

The way Grayson looks at me shatters the cloud I’d been floating on. “Right, and have you analyze every note when I’m just messing around? You should get back to practicing. You’re the one with a deadline you care about.”

“You have a deadline?”

He picks up my music and places it across the piano. “Come on. Practice.”

I slide onto the bench. “If you’re sure.” Ghosts of his touch against my skin tickle me until it’s impossible to think of anything else. I can’t get the music right when I’m thinking about him.

“Make room for me?” he asks when I screw up and hit yet another dissonant chord.

I scoot to the bass end and he sits at the center. I’m aware of every nerve under skin that touches his. “I know I suck at this today. You don’t have to tell me something that’s already clear.”

“You’re thinking too much. Why can’t you relax into the music?”

“Are you even looking at the page? It’s complicated! There are so many moving parts I have to perfect. How could I relax?”

The way he stares at me, chin tight, serves as such a contrast to the softness of his lips when he kissed me. Great. Now I’m going to spend every moment of the rest of my life comparing things to when Grayson kissed me. He studies the music while I count seconds in heartbeats that flutter too quickly. It takes too long, but finally he looks at me again. “I can see what your dad was doing here, and there are some techniques you can use when you get stuck. It won’t be what’s on the page, but it could be both of you combining when you play it.”

But that isn’t true. “You mean I’d combine you with Dad. If it’s your technique, it’s you, not me, I’d be inserting into this song. I play the notes the way they’re written down.”

“You said you’re auditioning to accompany a choir, right?”

I pluck at a single note. “What’s that have to do with anything?”

He won’t meet my eyes. “I’m, uh, in choir. And accompanying is about being a steady guide for the voices, you know? A foundation. You’re focusing on doing everything perfect, but that isn’t what they need from you.”

“You can’t claim to know what Mr. G wants. I have to do this right. I know I do. Doing it right means playing the notes in front of me.” How can he not understand that?

Grayson puts his hand over my palm, which is still hovering over the keys, prepared to play. He weaves his fingers between mine and squeezes gently. Only then do I realize how tight my muscles were. “I get that you’re frustrated. You’ve decided to master something ridiculously difficult in a week. But you can use that frustration — if it isn’t using you. If you let it change how you read the notes, you can find something else there.”

“The notes stay the same no matter how I feel.”

“Maybe on the page. But there should be a reason you are the one playing them. Something about you should come to life in that song.”

My jaw tenses as I glance between him and the music. I’m not convinced.

“Let me show you. See this measure? The top of page three?” He doesn’t wait for my answer. “I could play these sixteenth notes like this,” he says, demonstrating what’s on the page.

Despite having told me he couldn’t sight-read very well, he gets the measure nearly perfect. “There,” he says. “Exactly what’s written down, right?”

“Yeah,” I concede. The A in that measure is underlined, but it’s one of those slips of the pen. Grayson ignored it like I do.

“Now listen again.”

Nothing changes, except everything. The same notes, the same tempo, the same dynamic. I can’t place what’s different. The first time I felt happy and now the notes make me unsure.

“What did you do?”

He grins at me. “I thought about my mom. Try it.”

Grayson slides off the bench so I can reach the higher octaves. “Can I borrow this?” he asks, grabbing my phone from a side table. I shrug and unlock it for him before studying the same measure. It’s one I’ve already perfected and I count in my head as I play, one-e-and-ah, two-e-and-ah. I think of nothing else. The room fills with the music again, tinny from my phone. My playing sounds like his did at first. Perfect, but another word, too. Lifeless.

“You thought about the metronome,” Grayson says.

“I did. Now I’ll change everything. Nothing. We’ll see.” I’m still skeptical, but I play the notes while thinking about what it was like to kiss Grayson. The moment I finish, the music echoes around us.

He sits beside me again. “And then?”

“You. I thought about you.”

“Oh.” We’re so close and his lips are right there and I think we’re about to kiss. I wrap an arm around his waist and he pulls me against him, best he can from here. Then the bird clock in the kitchen chirps, the song of a goldfinch three times.

“Is it three already? I didn’t even look at the time — I need to be home.”

He’s already halfway across the room. “Christmas and all that?” I say to Dad’s music.

“Christmas and all that,” he agrees. “Keep playing. You’ll get there.” He stops at the threshold to the kitchen and looks back. “In case you need a hint — find the patterns. You know music theory. Find the underlying chords. You need a backup plan. One that gives you a chance to improvise. To feel.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Merry Christmas, Grayson.”

“Merry Christmas, Daya.” Then he’s gone and I miss him instantly. I extract notes in fortissimo from Grandma’s Yamaha in her empty house, but even they can’t fill the silence he left behind.

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