Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,86

the first jacket that seemed like it might fit, a faded-red Patagonia parka, slipped her feet into Daisy’s boots, and opened the door as quietly as she could.

The snow was perfect and untouched for as far as she could see; there weren’t even animal tracks disturbing it, and the air stabbed at her lungs as though she’d plunged into cold water. She crunched to the edge of the yard and then saw what looked like the beginning of a trail leading into the woods; someone had cleared the brambles and pushed logs aside, at some point. Though it was now overgrown it was far from impassable. She imagined herself being led into the woods. The warmth of sleep still clung to her and made the air seem warmer than it was, but she was still aware that it was chilly. She took out her phone to see if her weather app had been able to refresh, so that she could see how cold it actually was, but her phone blinked off as soon as she pulled it out of her pocket. Well, that was how cold it was, then. So much for texting Kayla.

She heard a distant rushing sound that could have been a road or a river. Whichever it was, she decided to walk toward it, just to have a goal in mind. She wasn’t worried about getting lost; she knew she would be able to retrace her footsteps in the snow, which would be a great plan until it started snowing again. The trail got less well defined and eventually she had to admit that it had stopped really being a trail at all. But then the rushing became louder, and she found herself walking along the edge of a stream. It was frozen at the edges but still moving in its center, and that led her to the edge of a frozen pond that stretched so far into the distance that the falling snow obscured its other shore.

It was beautiful, she told herself. There was so much beauty in the world, but she didn’t get any satisfaction from any of it; it entered her through her eyes and did nothing to fill the infinite hollowness that had opened up within her. She was tired of walking, and so she sat down in the snow, feeling the cold and wet seep through her thin pants into the skin of her thighs and calves. She took out her phone again and noticed that her body heat had managed to revive it. With a reflexive flick she tapped the button that pulled up her most recent conversation with Kayla.

“I’m sad,” she typed, a non sequitur under the last thing she’d texted, which had been about her homework assignments. Kayla responded immediately, asking where she was and when she was coming home, but her phone blinked off again before she could type anything back. She lay back and let fat flakes settle on her cheeks and trickle into her eyes. Dimly, the way you know information in a dream, she knew that she should be panicking, but somehow there was no panicky energy left in her. She closed her eyes and felt her body sink deeper into the packed crust of snow.

17

The perfect song that Laura had written as a teenager was coming back to her. Something about what she’d experienced with Leo—that flush, that wave of crush-feeling—had cracked the safe where her talent had been sitting and moldering away all these years. She was struggling to write quickly enough to keep up with her thoughts.

It was her lunch break, but she hadn’t eaten; instead, she was sitting in the burnt-coffee-smelling glorified closet that passed for a teachers’ lounge, scribbling in a college-ruled notebook she’d taken from the lost and found. Someone had previously used it to take notes in math class. She couldn’t tell whether she was remembering the words she’d forgotten long ago or making up new ones, but it didn’t matter. She summoned up a mental image of Leo, to linger in the moment that had felt so exaggeratedly good: the moment of being admired, being seen. The line of fresh-cut hair at the nape of his neck, and the idea of how it might feel under her hand. The feeling she’d been waiting to feel for so long was finally back, like it had never left; she knew this was a real song, and she could already imagine singing it over and over again.

She was so engrossed