The Rise Of A Star

The alarm hadn't gone off yet, but Andrew was already awake. He lay flat on his back, staring at the water stain on his ceiling that looked, depending on the light, like either a guitar or a broken heart. This morning it looked like a guitar. He took that as a sign. 5:47 a.m. Eleven minutes before his mom would knock on the door with her usual "You up?" Which wasn't really a question, more like a warning shot. Eleven minutes was enough. He sat up, grabbed the beat-up acoustic leaning against his desk, the one with the crack near the sound hole that his dad had glued twice and told him not to worry about a third time and eased the door shut with his foot. Not that it mattered. Sound carried in this house like it was built out of paper. His parents' room was right below his, and more mornings than not, his dad would bang on the ceiling with the end of a broom and yell up something like, "Some of us are trying to sleep, Prince!" Prince. That's what his dad had called him since he was eight, since the day Andrew stood on the coffee table in the living room and sang the national anthem so loud the neighbor's dog started howling along. His mom cried. His dad laughed so hard he had to sit down. And that was it the nickname stuck, and so did the feeling. That feeling of a room going quiet because of something he made with his own voice. He didn't sing loud this morning. He hummed low, found the chord, hummed again, adjusted it. There was a song stuck in his head that he couldn't shake had been stuck for three days now, this little four-note hook that felt like it belonged to something bigger. He didn't have words for it yet. Just a feeling. Like standing at the edge of something and not knowing if it was a cliff or a stage. By the time his mom's actual knock came three soft taps, not his dad's broom-banging he had it half-worked out. "You're up," she said, opening the door anyway, a mug of coffee in her hand that was really just an excuse to check on him. Renee Cole did this every morning: pretended she needed to walk somewhere and just happened to end up outside his door. "Of course you're up. Andrew Cole, it is not even six." "Best time to write," he said, not looking up from the fretboard. "World's quiet. Nobody's told you your idea is stupid yet." "Nobody's told you that anyway," she said, and came in, sitting on the edge of his bed like she'd done a thousand mornings before this one. "What is it? Play it for me." He hesitated he always did, right before he played something new, like it was more honest than he meant for it to be and then he played the four notes. Hummed the melody over them. It wasn't a song yet. It was barely a sentence. But her face did the thing it always did, that small, quiet stillness, like she was listening with her whole body. "That's good, baby," she said, when he stopped. "That's really good." "It's not finished." "I didn't say it was finished. I said it was good." She stood, patted his knee, headed for the door. "Breakfast in fifteen. Your father's making eggs, so brace yourself." "Is he doing the thing where he tells the eggs to 'come together' like he's Simon Cowell?" "He is always doing that thing." Downstairs, his dad was indeed doing the thing hovering over a pan with a spatula like it was a conductor's baton, muttering encouragement to scrambled eggs that had zero chance of turning out well no matter what he said to them. Marcus Cole had many talents. Cooking was not one of them. But he did it every Tuesday anyway, badly, cheerfully, because it was his thing, the way Sunday was his mom's thing with pancakes that were somehow always perfect. "Prince," his dad said, without turning around. "I heard humming. New one?" "Maybe." "Maybe he says. You've had that same look on your face for three days. Like you're constipated, but musically." "Marcus," his mom said, sliding into a chair. "I'm complimenting him." "That was not a compliment." Andrew grinned and dropped into his seat, and for a few minutes it was just this the smell of eggs that were somehow simultaneously burnt and undercooked, his dad narrating his own cooking failures like a sports commentator, his mom pretending to be exasperated while she stole the good parts off her husband's plate. Ordinary. Loud in the way that only a house with three people who loved each other could be loud. "You've got the Whitfield thing after school," his mom said. "Don't forget. Mr. Alvarez emailed me apparently he wants kids performing something original, not covers, so you've got some time pressure now." Andrew's stomach dropped a little, the good kind of dropping. The Whitfield Auditorium showcase. He'd almost forgotten it was creeping up three weeks now, not three months. His first time performing something that was his, in front of more than the twelve people who came to the community center open mic on Thursdays. "I don't have anything finished," he said. "You have three weeks," his dad said, finally turning around, spatula still in hand, a smear of eggs on his sleeve he hadn't noticed. "And you have that thing you were just humming upstairs. Sounded like the start of something to me." "You could hear that from down here?" "Son, I could hear that from the driveway." His dad set the pan down and came to lean on the back of Andrew's chair, both hands on his shoulders, the way he did when he wanted Andrew to actually listen instead of just nod. "You've got something. You've had something since you were eight years old standing on that coffee table like you owned the world. Your mother and I aren't going to pretend we don't see it just because it makes us nervous sometimes. You want this? You go get it. We're right behind you." "Every step," his mom added, quieter, but somehow it landed harder. Andrew looked down at his plate so they wouldn't see whatever was happening on his face. It wasn't sadness. It wasn't anything bad. It was just a lot, sometimes, being loved like that. Being believed like that, so plainly, so without condition, that it almost felt like too much weight to carry into a world that hadn't decided yet whether it agreed. "I should go," he said instead, because that was easier than saying any of that out loud. "Gonna be late." "Take a jacket," his mom called after him, already knowing he wouldn't. "Andrew. Jacket." "Love you too," he called back, grabbing his bag, his guitar case, the four notes still looping somewhere behind his ribs. School was school a blur of hallway noise and a pop quiz he hadn't studied for and Jayden Brooks trying, for the fourth time that week, to convince him to skip fifth period and go mess around on the basketball courts. Andrew liked Jayden. Jayden was loud and easy and didn't ask complicated questions about anything, which was exactly the kind of friend you wanted when your own head was loud enough on its own. "You still doing that showcase thing?" Jayden asked at lunch, mouth full of something that used to resemble a sandwich. "Working on it." "You gonna do that song you played me? The one that goes" Jayden attempted to hum the four notes and got approximately none of them right. "That's not it. That's not even close to it." "It's close enough" "It's not a real song yet, man. I don't even have words." "You'll figure it out. You always figure it out." Jayden said it so easily, so certain, the way people say things they've never had to doubt. "You're gonna be up there in three weeks killing it, and I'm gonna be in the crowd telling everybody I taught you everything you know." "You taught me nothing." "I taught you confidence." The last period of the day, Andrew sat in the back of Mr. Alvarez's music room during his free block, guitar in his lap, chasing those four notes into something that might, if he was lucky, if he worked hard enough, actually become a song. Mr. Alvarez the only teacher who'd ever looked at Andrew's scribbled lyrics in a spiral notebook and treated them like they mattered leaned in the doorway for a second, watching without saying anything, the way he did when he didn't want to break whatever was happening. "That's new," he finally said. "Not finished." "Nothing worth anything ever is, on the first day." Alvarez tapped the doorframe twice, like punctuation. "Three weeks, Cole. Whitfield doesn't wait for inspiration." "I know." "You've got it in you. I've heard enough of you to know that much." He turned to go, then paused. "Whatever you're chasing with that one don't let go of it. Some songs only come around once." Andrew didn't know, sitting there in the after-school quiet with the light going gold through the windows, that Alvarez was more right than either of them understood. He didn't know that in four days, this exact melody these same four notes he couldn't yet find words for would come back to him in a hospital hallway, in the worst hour of his life, and that he'd finally understand exactly what it had been trying to say the whole time. He just played it again. And again. Chasing a feeling he couldn't name yet, in a house that was, for four more days, still whole.