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SINISTER

12.

I parked on the street and waited outside of Manitou High School. The school’s main doors opened onto a grassy field. A driveway was paved through the middle of it and a few yellow buses were idling, waiting for their passengers. I watched for Garren as kid’s exited. I didn’t see him, but I saw the girl, beautiful in her worn out jeans and sunglasses. She reached the sidewalk, her walk all confidence, and headed towards me. I kept watching her, thinking she looked familiar, and then I realized who she was.

I got out of my car, planning on leaning against the front fender, looking nonchalant and cool as hell, as she walked by. She was walking a little too fast, though.

“Hey, how’s it going?” My voice hadn’t cracked for years, but it did then. I cleared my throat. “How’d the pictures turn out?”

She stopped in mid gait. “Excuse me?”

“I saw you at the, uh, music store’s grand opening. You were,” I mimed taking pictures.

“Oh,” she said. “Everything came out fine.”

“Good, glad to hear it.”

“That’s a really cute schoolboy outfit,” she said.

“I go to Saint Michael’s.”

“I would’ve never guessed.”

“I’m graduating, though.”

“Wow,” she said. “That’s incredible.”

“Yeah, no more schoolboy suit.”

“You won’t believe this, but I’m graduating, too.”

I cleared my throat again. “Why is it that girls like you make me nervous and then make fun of me for sounding stupid?”

“What do you mean by girls like me?”

“The gorgeous ones.”

“Nice,” she said and took off her glasses as she smiled. Dirty blonde hair and eyes like warm honey.

She started to say something else, but Garren came up beside us and she saw him.

“Where were you today? I didn’t see you in biology.”

“Yeah, couldn’t deal with dead pigs today,” he said. “This is my best friend, Anthony. Anthony, Tory.”

She turned back to me. “Have fun at your graduation, schoolboy.”

“You, too.”

I watched her walk away for a while, long enough for her to turn around and catch us looking. She laughed and went on her way.

“What a knockout,” I said. “She must be one of the popular girls, right?”

“Would she have talked to me if she was one of the popular girls?”

“She’s pretty enough to be.”

“Yeah, but she’s way too smart for the popular crowd and besides, she just moved here this year.”

“I hope we see her again.”

“Come on, man, let’s go,” he said. “I need to get to my girl.”

“Your girl?”

“My guitar,” he said. “I dreamed about her all last night. Is that weird, or what?”

* * *

My mom’s typewriter was still on my desk. While I took it back to her room, Garren set up my keyboard. It wasn’t the best set of keys, nothing like a Roland or anything like that. My mom had bought it used from someone she’d found in the paper. It had survived all my piano lessons and had enough synth effects to remain fun. We’d played for about an hour and maybe it was the slight hangover I’d had all day or the fact that I hadn’t slept well two nights in a row, but our guitar-and-keyboard jam session gave me a headache.

“You okay?” Garren asked me.

He liked to call our musical-time together rehearsing, as if we had a band and we were prepping for some important show.

“I’m all right.”

We were just goofing around. He strummed my acoustic guitar while I played my keyboard or sang. To me, it was just experimentation. Knowing that C sharp is the relative minor of E is one thing. Hearing it blended by keyboard and strings is entirely different.

“Do you wanna take a break?”

He sucked at guitar. His timing was bad and his fingers were clumsy. He couldn’t keep a strum pattern in four-four anymore than he could make a barre chord. I made sure the songs I wrote used only open chords: A C D G and E. He fumbled the changes. He just wasn’t a musician. Most times I could deal with it. But today I was short tempered.

“It’s not coming together tonight,” I said.

“Okay.” He set my guitar against the wall, careful.

“Maybe it’s ‘cause you keep looking outside?”

“Uh…” The air outside my window was, thankfully, wasp free. I hoped it stayed that way.

“I told you, there were – .”

“I know, the wasp invasion.”

“It was like a horde.”

“You’re a girl sometimes.”

“You’re taking your guitar home,” I said and switched my keyboard off. “You’re taking it tonight, right?”

“Yeah, both my parents are workin’ so I can sneak it in before either one of them gets home. I’ll keep her under my bed or something.”

“Good.”

“I’m gonna go back to that music store and get some stuff for her.”

“Don’t forget to buy a tuning peg.”

“Why do you hate her, man?”

“What? I don’t.”

“You took an instant dislike to my guitar,” he said. “The moment you saw her, you hated her.”

“I don’t hate your guitar, weirdo.”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter if you do or if you don’t because I’ve still got a good feeling about her. I think I’m going to go in more of a musical direction, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, yeah? I thought you wanted to be a writer.”

“I did,” he said. “But playing guitar is so much cooler than writing books.”

“Anything would be cooler than writing books, delivering pizzas, a job at the video store…”

“So can I borrow this?”

He picked up my Music Theory for Advanced Students textbook. The school had made me buy it. I had a few others on music theory that were better.

“I’m done with it.”

“Cool, man.”

He got up to stuff it in his gigantic backpack. I noticed that he slid it against the black, leather covered journal that had come with the guitar.

“You know you’ll have a long way to go, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you want to be a musician you’ll have to learn a lot about music, like how to play in time and how to change chords properly.”

“Yeah, I kind of realize that.”

“I’m just saying -.”

“Thanks for the encouragement,” he said and something dark flashed in his eyes, taking them a shade cooler than usual.

“I didn’t mean anything by it, man.”

“I know exactly what you meant.”

Was he really mad at me? Garren was never mad at me. I was his only friend, the best thing he had going. How could he get mad at me for saying something that was true?

“Hey, I’m just trying to look out for you.”

He put his back to me, kneeled and bent towards the guitar.

“Garren, come on.”

He mumbled, “She doesn’t need a tuning peg.”

“What?”

He bent further forward, lifting the guitar out of her casket and turned back around, slow, as if presenting her to me. Six tuning pegs lined up along the side of her headstock. Six. One for each string. I swear she’d had only five when we’d found her in the store. Or rather, when Garren found her in the store. The repair ticket dangled off the lowest string’s peg and Garren removed it. His finger nails were caked with tiny bits of dried blood. He set the repair ticket aside and held the guitar close to his stomach. For a second, I wondered if he heard music erupting inside him.

“My mom’ll want you to stay for dinner,” I said.

“Can’t,” he said, sharp. “I’m still going to the music store, want to pick-up some strings and see if I can get one of those things that keeps time.”

“A metronome?”

“Yeah, that,” he said. “Like you said, me and her have a long way to go.”

“I’ll give you ride.”

“Nah, I feel like walking,” he said.

I watched him set the guitar in the case. He handled it with reverence as if it were a valuable antique. He lowered the case’s lid. I heard the snap of new locks securing it shut. He stood up. The guitar dragged his shoulder down.

“I’ll see you when you get back from Kansas,” he said.

“Hey,” I stood up to block him from leaving my room. “It must have come out wrong, because that’s not how I meant it. Don’t be pissed at me, all right?”

“I’m over it,” he said, eyes flashing brightness. “You’ll always be my good buddy.”

I walked him out. We got stuck in the living room when my mom saw him and gave him the third degree. She asked him about school and how his grades were. He told her everything was okay and, as he was telling lies, I realized something. Yesterday he’d told me that he’d taken the rest of the day off. Today, he hadn’t attended his Biology class. So he’d skipped two days in a row the week before finals – not smart.

When he left, my mom scolded me for not giving him a ride to the store. “You make him type your papers and don’t even drive him around,” she said, kidding me.

I went back to my room. The repair tag had fallen off my desk. I plucked it off my desk and tossed it in the plastic trash can by my chair. I was certain the guitar had had only five tuning pegs. I tried to picture how I’d first seen it in the music store. The body was so damaged, like it could break into splinters if the finish stopped holding it together, that I’d focused most of my attention there. I guess I’d only thought it was missing a tuning peg, just like I’d thought the case had been missing both its latches.

I wondered about Garren all evening, even when I was writing my final English Comp paper. I wondered why he would cut classes so close to graduation. It wasn’t straight-A, nerd-behavior at all. I wondered what he saw in that decrepit, piece of crap guitar and if he really thought he could become a guitar player on such a wreck. Then I thought about him saying that he’d dreamed about her all night…

Is that weird or what?

I wished I’d asked him about the dreams and if they involved a distorted lick of guitar music that got stuck in your head like it was trying to become a part of you. Then I heard him say again, “…That’s why it’s okay to kill them.” And I decided I needed to worry more about my friend. I was, after all, his good buddy.

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