Page 6 of Our Final Encore

“Hey,” she says nervously.

“Come in.”

Her eyes ricochet back and forth from my living room to my kitchen. “Where are your parents?”

“Dad’s at work.”

Her brows arch as she hesitantly steps inside. “And he’s okay with me being here?”

I didn’t think about whether or not he would be okay with it. Probably because I don’t really care. “Yeah.” I walk down the hall towards my bedroom and she follows a few steps behind me.

She looks around curiously at my room. I guess maybe she’s never been in a boy’s room before. I wonder if she has any siblings.

“Is that your guitar?”

I look over at the corner of the room where her eyes are pointed. “Yeah,” I walk over and pick up the blue acoustic Ibanez. It’s still a little bit too big for me to hold comfortably. It was Ezra’s before it was mine. He was already seventeen when he bought it.

“Can you play it?” One of her eyebrows arches slightly before she reaches out her hand to softly graze the neck of the guitar.

“Hey! Don’t!” I flinch, twisting around so that the guitar is just out of her reach, and my outburst causes her to take a step back, her blue eyes widened in alarm. “Sorry… it’s just, it was my brother’s, I don’t really let other people touch it.”

“Oh,” her shoulders sag a bit, and her eyes fill with instant regret. “I’m sorry. Does he get mad if people touch it?”

That familiar lump forms in my throat the way it always does when someone asks me about Ezra. Obviously Opal has no clue, it isn’t her fault, but I still hate having to talk about him. I wish I hadn't brought up the subject.

“Um, kind of.” I quickly blink away the tears that start to form in my eyes. This girl is going to think I’m a pussy if I start crying like a baby in front of her, so I swallow back my emotions and put on a straight face. “And yeah, I can play it.”

I lay the strap over my neck and sit down on the edge of my bed with the guitar in my lap. “What kind of music do you like?”

She nervously twists one of her braids around her pointer finger. “Umm, I don’t know. Country, I guess. Rock, pop, folk.”

“Folk?” My brow lifts.

“Yeah,” she shrugs. “What’s wrong with that?” she asks defensively.

“Nothing. I just don’t meet a lot of people our age that like that type of music.”

“Well, my grandma listens to it sometimes. So, yeah I like it.”

Nodding, I start strumming the chords to a Bob Dylan song. Quickly I get lost in the melody, like I always do, and I closemy eyes, letting the song flow through me, my fingers delicately plucking the strings. I peek up at her and see her mouth hanging wide open, her blue eyes filled with bewilderment.

“What?” I ask.

“You’re like…really good.”

A softness pulls at my chest, and I rub it, willing the weird feeling to go away. I work really hard at guitar, harder than I work at anything else. I’m not great at school, I’ve never cared about sports, but music has always been my thing.

I’ve always felt like there was a song for every emotion, and when I couldn’t verbalize how I was feeling, music was able to fill in the words that were missing. It’s gotten me through every hard thing I’ve experienced in my life: losing my brother, my mom taking off, and now moving hundreds of miles away from my home. Without music, I think I’d be completely lost by now.

“Thanks,” I shrug, trying my best to play it cool like her compliment doesn’t affect me.

She nods, looking around my room awkwardly before sitting in the big, fluffy papasan chair that used to be Ezra’s. “So, where are you from? You just moved here, right?”

I set the guitar down on the floor and lean it against my bed. “Colorado.”

“Wow. The mountains?”

“Yep.”

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