“Don’t you want to smoke first?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Seems like you already did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Why are you acting so weird?”
“I’m not.”
“You haven’t been the same ever since you found out about your sister.”
“I’m not the same. How could I be the same?”
He picks up his drumsticks and starts playing, and even though I try again and again to catch his eye, he won’t look up. Something about that scares me. I stand there with my fingers hovering over the keys of my synth.
“Lukas?” I say.
He stops drumming. “What?”
A dozen possible things-to-say swim nervously around the edges of my brain. A few weeks ago, Lukas knew everything about me, and now there are so many things he doesn’t know, and so many things I don’t know about him. It’s scary how a friendship can change like that, so fast, so completely. It’s like walking past your old elementary school the week after graduation: The swings and slides and buildings are the same, but suddenly, incomprehensibly, the place doesn’t belong to you anymore, and you don’t belong to it.
I want to tell him about Sukey’s rooftop, and the fact that I now have a boyfriend, and that I’ve found the perfect person for Goth Girl to date.
I want to tell Lukas all this, but the way he’s glaring at me over his drum kit—annoyed, impatient, sick of my bullshit—I feel small and queasy and not very illuminated at all.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and he gives me a quick, embarrassed shrug, and for the rest of the jam session we don’t make eye contact again.
The next day, Skunk and I are exchanging lustful embraces on the floor in the radio temple, and when I shimmy out of my jeans he notices the scabs on my knees. He springs up with a look of alarm and pulls my legs onto his lap to inspect them.
“What happened?”
I yawn and try to pull him back down to kiss me. “Oh, nothing.”
“No, seriously.”
He runs his fingers over the scabbed parts, touching the bits of gravel I never managed to pick out. Some people have such warm hands. Skunk’s feel like old pillowcases fresh out of the dryer. “I fell off my bike.”
“When?”
“Like a week ago.”
“What were you doing?”
I give him a mischievous grin. “Ridin’ dirty.”
Skunk traces his thumb over my kneecap. “What did you do, cut off a bus?”
“No-o-o. I got hit by a car.”
Skunk freezes. “You got hit by a car and you didn’t tell me.”
I swing my legs off his lap and sit up. “Whatever, homey. The Way is an invincible fortress.”
He looks at me all pop-eyed and distressed. “What color was the car?”
I reach out and smooth Skunk’s hair. He looks like he’s about to faint.
“I don’t know. It was just some car.”
“Are you sure you don’t remember what color it was?”
I lean forward and lick his ear. “Relax, Bicycle Boy. As you can see, I am alive and well.”
Skunk’s body has gone all tense, like he hears a strange noise: a mouse in the wall, or a burglar. “Was it following you?”
I sit there blinking at him. “No. Well, actually she did follow me for a while after it happened, but I think she just wanted to make sure I was okay.”
“Oh God,” says Skunk.
“What? What?”
But Skunk holds his head in his hands and won’t even start to relax until I get up, tiptoe across the room, and quietly turn on a radio.
Later that day, when Dr. Scaliteri calls me in for an extra lesson, I tell her all about my new practice regimen. I’ve been practicing constantly, I tell her. Now that I’ve realized I can do it in my head, I have basically been practicing piano twenty-four hours a day.
“How many hours does Nelson Chow practice per day? Probably just four or five, right? I can teach him my technique, if you want. It could really help him out when he’s at Juilliard. He’ll want to practice on the subway.”
I hear the front door open and Nelson Chow walk in for his lesson. I hear him stop in the hall to take off his shoes.
“Hey, Nelson,” I shout. “How many hours a day do you practice?”
No response. Nelson is the kind of person who always pretends he hasn’t heard you. “Hey, Nelson! I said how many hours?”
Dr. Scaliteri calls out to Nelson that he should wait in the hall. She leans forward so her speckled old cleavage is practically falling out of her silver blouse and hisses, “I will not have this behavior in