Chapter 8

Buried Treasure

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Catch up on chapter 7 here.

The only other time I’ve been here was during a particularly intense game of hide and seek I played with my parents and my grandma back when we were pretending to be one family. I didn’t want to be found, so I tiptoed up the stairs and opened a door I’d never seen opened.

Inside was a room so full of boxes I wasn’t sure if there was any furniture beneath them. They piled high in every corner, some objects unpacked, but covered in so much dust I wasn’t sure what they were. Maybe dolls? I climbed between stacks of boxes and made myself small. It took both my parents and Grandma to find me. I remember thinking, as I pressed my ear to the dusty floor, that I hadn’t heard my parents work together so well for as long as I could remember.

Now I’m not playing games. I’m reveling in solitude as I click on the light and adjust. If anything, the room has gotten fuller and more dusty in the eight years since I last opened this door. Things are piled haphazardly all around the room: three in one corner, four smaller boxes lined up beneath the window.

With so many boxes here, surely I can find answers in one of them. As I think it, I realize that’s probably what drew me to this room in the first place. No one alive will give me a straight answer about the brother I might have had.

I move toward the window, where I’ll have both the light bulb and the brightness of the winter sun to see by. It’s chillier over here and I shiver in an impossible wind. I sit down, feet crossed, and dust stirs up around me. I think I hear a mouse squeak, but I try to shove the noise out of my mind and see what I can learn.

I’m surrounded by moving boxes, most of them written on in Sharpie. The ones to my left say things like: “A. Baby pictures.” Or “A. Blankets.” Or “A. Toys.” They must be my old things. That’s not helpful. I have nothing I need to learn about myself in this attic. I need to look somewhere else.

Right as I stand up, though, the door creaks open. My heart pounds even though I’m doing nothing wrong.

Grayson pokes through the doorway, his head down, moving like he’s been in here before. He smiles when he sees me, the tension he carried fluttering away from him and settling onto my forehead instead. Not fifteen minutes ago, he was pointedly ignoring me. He hasn’t earned the right to smile when he sees me.

“Why are you everywhere?”

“I heard noise coming from this room. Worried it was a rat again.”

I try not to think about an actual rat in here, or the “again,” or how right he kind of is. I feel like a rat, at any rate.

“Well, it’s not.”

“Oh. I guess I’ll leave you alone.” He turns to go. I should feel relieved. I can open these boxes without prying eyes. But maybe there’s a reason Grayson keeps showing up. Maybe it would be easier to not go it alone. I could use someone who seems to know my dad better than I do anymore. I could use a friend.

“Wait. Stay.” His hand pauses on the door, but he doesn’t turn around. “If you want to, I mean.”

He slowly makes his way toward me until only a single box on the floor is between us. “Why did you come in here, anyway?”

“I was in everyone’s way. I’m not here.”

“Of all the places in this house to choose to be alone, you pick a room stuffed with old junk?”

“Is it really junk? I hardly knew Grandma when I moved and I’m not learning anything about her downstairs. She kept boxes like secrets,” I say. My skin prickles and my stomach knots at the thought of where I’m leading this conversation. I want to trust him so badly. I wish I could stop seeing how he laughed when he clutched that trophy. “I want to know what she treasured. I want to know what she hid.”

Grayson runs a finger along a box and his hand comes back dripping dust. “Aren’t they the same thing? How much treasure do people bury?”

The knot in my stomach loosens and I grin at him. “That’s a good point.” He thinks like I do, and he knows my family. Trusting him with this is like asking for forgiveness. I swallow and break eye contact. “Right before the funeral, Pastor Clark came on stage. Told me I looked just like my brother.”

“I thought you were an only child.”

I trace a treble clef into the dust on a cardboard box. “That’s the thing. So did I.”

Grayson’s eyes dart around like we’re about to be caught. “Oh. You came in here to find out.”

“No one will tell me anything.”

He hesitates as he looks at me. Indecision is evident in the way he opens and closes his mouth. “I know that feeling.” He grabs his phone from his pocket and starts to scroll through it. I wait. It doesn’t seem like a mindless tic. I think he wants to show me something. I trusted him and now he’s choosing to trust me, too. Sure enough, he hands me his phone, open to an email dated December 19.

Dear applicant,

Thank you for sending in “Sonata in E Major” to our Next Young Composer competition. We value the time you have spent preparing this piece and your bravery in sharing it with us. There is much to admire in your composition and you are clearly talented. Unfortunately…

I stop reading. “You compose?”

“Sometimes, yeah. But I didn’t enter this competition. My mom must have entered for me without telling me.”

“You found out when you got rejected.”

He sits down, leaning back against a box and stirring up enough dust to make me sneeze. “About covers it. Typical Mom.”

There’s more I want to ask — how it’s typical of her, if that’s the real reason he came looking for Harmony an hour after that email was sent — but the conversation seems over for now. “I had an audition this morning.” I hadn’t planned on telling him about it, but maybe I should. “For the pit orchestra at school. They’re doing Legally Blonde.”

“You’re you, so I’m assuming you nailed it.”

I shrug. “I screwed up once. But the tone of his voice when Mr. G thanked me for my time made it obvious what he meant. I asked him about it, and he said something about how playing the right notes wasn’t what he was looking for in a pianist. How does that even make sense?”

“It makes about as much sense as submitting someone else’s unfinished song to a competition.”

“Or saying I look like a brother that doesn’t exist.”

“No, that makes even less sense. Negative sense.”

“Exactly.” I find a box nearby and slide it open. Grayson works beside me, not even questioning if what we’re doing is okay. We settle into a rhythm, and though I don’t know what I’m looking for, it’s easy to tell when I haven’t found it. My baby blankets. A box full of Dad’s homework from the ’70s. Nothing useful.

As I pull out a third box, I tell Grayson a little bit more about my disaster of a morning. “The director used to be my private piano instructor, before he started working at the high school. Once he made it clear he wouldn’t choose me for the pit, he told me I could audition to accompany the choir this spring, but I need a new song and he wants me to audition after Christmas. I don’t have anything else prepared. I had a plan. I was going to be in the pit with my friend Riley.”

Grayson puts a hand on my shoulder and turns me to face him. His eyes are this piercing blue that doesn’t fit his name, I notice as the sun sneaks between some clouds and shines through the window. “Are you always so focused on Plan A?”

I drop our eye contact. “When you put it that way, it sounds like a bad thing.”

A grin spreads across Grayson’s face, like he’s elated to get to mock me. It wouldn’t be the first time. “Sometimes what you need is a backup plan.”

He loops his fingers gently around my wrist. They’re cold against my skin as he leads me to the box where he was working. The dust is so thick it looks like it hasn’t been touched in a million years. “Here,” he says.

I disentangle the cardboard flaps, putting my fingers where Grayson’s prints sit in the dust. As I peel back the corners of the box, I gasp. Then my gasp turns into a laugh stuck in my throat, a sentiment of disbelief that clings to the inside of my lungs.

Because right there? On top of a pile of random objects? Is a yellowed paper covered in handwritten sheet music. And even though it’s just math, I know just from the notes on the page that this is a beautiful song.

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