Your Favourite Stranger

Chapter Three

Operation Courage

Caelis had a plan for the morning, and the plan was to avoid Elaris Solvane for the rest of his natural life. It was a good plan, simple and cowardly, and it lasted until he walked into homeroom and found her sitting at the desk beside his, her white ribbon neatly tied, her back perfectly straight, her smile perfectly in place. Nobody looking at her would have guessed that she had spent last night crying against a ribbon in an empty stairwell.

"Good morning, Caelis," she said. "Are you free after school? I booked the music room for the recording."

"I... yes. I'm free." He sat down so carefully that his chair didn't make a sound. "Are you okay? You look tired."

The words were out before he could stop them, and he saw something flicker across her face, quick as a bird crossing a window. Then she laughed softly. "Student council season. I'm always tired. Thank you for noticing."

She turned back to her notes. Caelis stared at the board and tried to remember how breathing worked. She had lied to him so smoothly that he almost envied her, and he also knew exactly where the lie came from, because he had read it in her own words at midnight. I'm so tired of being the girl who has everything together. He was the only person in the building who knew the truth, and he could never tell her so.

"Operation Courage," Nymor announced at lunch, slapping a folded paper onto the picnic table beneath the acacia tree.

Caelis looked at it. It was a hand-drawn diagram with arrows, a stick figure labeled HERO (him), a stick figure labeled DAMSEL (Elaris), and a small box labeled CLOSET OF DESTINY. "What is that?"

"A foolproof strategy. The music room has a supply closet with a lock that sticks. I lure the two of you inside to fetch a cable, I 'accidentally' close the door, and you spend forty-five minutes in the dark discovering each other's souls."

"That's kidnapping."

"That's destiny with a deadline."

"She was crying yesterday, Nymor." Caelis hadn't meant to say it, and he winced as soon as he did. Nymor's grin faded, and for once the clown in his face stepped aside to let the friend look out.

"Okay," Nymor said quietly. "Okay. Then no closet. But you're going to that room today, and you're going to be nice to her, and I'm going to be somewhere dramatic and unhelpful, like a bush."

"Please don't be in a bush."

"A bush is a very strategic position."

Caelis laughed despite himself, and the laugh loosened something in his chest that had been clenched since the night before. It didn't fix anything, but it helped him stand up when the bell rang.

The music room smelled of lemon polish and old sheet music. A black grand piano waited in the center, lid raised like an open wing, and the late sunlight through the tall windows laid long gold stripes across the floor. Elaris was already there, adjusting the bench, while Caelis set up the borrowed microphones he had carried from the broadcasting room. It was a little absurd to him that he knew precisely how to place them. He had spent two years listening to her play through the music room's thin walls, and he knew where the piano sounded best.

"Here," he said, tilting one microphone toward the strings. "Not too close, or you'll hear the pedal. And the second one over here, to catch the room."

Elaris tilted her head. "You really know what you're doing."

"It's mostly guessing with confidence."

"That's what I do when I play in front of the headmaster." She smiled, and it was a smaller, truer smile than her hallway one. "Okay. Let me warm up first. Don't record yet."

He sat on a chair near the wall, pretending to check levels. She flexed her fingers, closed her eyes, and began to play something slow and unfamiliar, a few measures at a time, feeling for her way. It wasn't a piece she had memorized. It was a melody she was picking out by ear, repeating a phrase and adjusting a note, repeating it and adjusting again.

Caelis stopped moving.

He knew that melody. It rose on the second bar, hesitated, and fell on the fourth, and in the middle of it, there was one place where the tune turned softer than it should have. That was the line he had changed last night, the single line he had altered so the song sounded like a lullaby instead of a confession.

"Sorry," Elaris said, opening her eyes. "I've had this stuck in my head all day, and I can't get the middle part right. Do you know it?"

"No." The word came out too fast. "I don't think so."

"It's from the school radio. The Boy After Midnight, have you heard of it?" She was looking at the keys, not at him, and the light caught the edge of her ribbon. "Someone sang it last night. It was meant for somebody who'd had a hard day, and I think... I think that somebody was me. Which sounds ridiculous, I know. Thousands of people listen."

"Maybe not thousands," Caelis said, because his mouth needed something to do.

"Maybe not." She laughed, quietly. "Do you listen?"

"Sometimes. For the equipment checks."

She smiled at that, as if he had made a joke, and returned to the keys. The phrase repeated, found the right note this time, and settled. Caelis felt it land in the room like a coin dropped into still water. She had learned his song in one night, by ear, from a single hearing, and she was sitting three meters from him with no idea.

A knock rattled the door. It opened without waiting, and Rhovan leaned into the room with his gym bag over one shoulder, looking like a boy who had practiced a casual greeting in the mirror and forgotten every word of it.

"Hey," he said. "I, uh. Saw the light on. Coach canceled practice, so."

"Rhovan." Elaris's hands went still on the keys. The warmth drained from her voice, and what replaced it was careful and polite, like a glass she was holding too tightly. "We're recording for the anniversary. Caelis is helping."

"Right. Cool. That's great." Rhovan's eyes moved to Caelis and stayed there a beat longer than they needed to. They were not unfriendly, only curious, the look of someone trying to place a tune. "You're the one who sings, aren't you? The guy from the talent show last spring."

Caelis's stomach dropped. "I... sometimes."

"Thought so. Your voice is kind of hard to forget." Rhovan hesitated, then turned to Elaris with a smile that didn't quite hold. "Ela, about yesterday. I didn't mean to—"

"We're recording," Elaris said, very gently. "Please close the door on your way out."

Rhovan's smile fell away. He nodded once, said "Sure," and went out, and the door clicked shut behind him with the soft finality of a page turning. The silence afterward was enormous. Elaris stared at the piano for a long moment, and then she exhaled and straightened her back, and the golden girl returned like a mask being slid into place.

"Sorry about that," she said. "Shall we begin?"

"We don't have to," Caelis said. "If you want a few minutes."

"No." She gave him a small, tired, genuine smile. "I'd rather play. It's the only time I'm not thinking."

He pressed the record button. The red light came on, and Elaris began.

She played for forty minutes, and he did not move once. It was nothing like her council speeches or her careful performances. It was raw, a little uneven, and achingly alive, as if she were telling the piano the things she couldn't tell anyone else. Caelis understood, listening, that he had been wrong about her for two years. He had thought she was a girl who had everything. She was only a girl who had learned to carry it all without dropping it.

When the final note faded, she sat with her hands resting in her lap.

"Was that okay?" she asked, without turning around.

"It was perfect," Caelis said, and then, because it was true and because he couldn't help himself, "Not perfect like a trophy. Perfect like someone was really in the room."

Elaris turned on the bench. For the first time that day, she looked directly at him, not past him, not through him, but at him, with her head tilted and her eyes searching his face as if he were a sentence she was trying to read.

"That's an odd thing to say," she said slowly.

"Sorry."

"Don't be." Her eyes didn't leave his. "It's just that... I've heard someone talk like that before."

Caelis's heart stopped.

Then she shook her head, laughed at herself, and the moment slipped away like a bird from an open hand. "Never mind. I'm exhausted, and I'm seeing patterns where there aren't any. Thank you, Caelis. Truly. I'll let you pack up."

She gathered her music and left, and the door swung shut. Caelis stood alone in the gold light with the microphones in his hands and the red light still glowing on the recorder, and he realized that his palms were damp and his pulse was running like a stray dog.

She hadn't recognized him. She had come within one sentence of it, and she hadn't.

Outside the window, something rustled in a hedge. A voice whispered, "Did it work? Did you discover each other's souls?" and Caelis put his forehead against the cold glass and said, in a voice that carried more feeling than he had intended, "Nymor, I swear, if you're in that bush, I'm going to scream."

"That's so encouraging," said the bush.

(End of Chapter 3)