“The way you play sounds real to me.”

I meet Flynn’s eyes. “Yeah, but . . .” I’ve opened the door, but I’m not ready to step through it. I force one toe over the edge. “What about earning it? Isn’t something you earn more yours than something that’s just given to you?”

Flynn’s eyes flick, sharp, to the calluses on my fingertips. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t practice like a maniac?”

“No. I practice. But that’s what I’d be doing anyway. It’s not work. It’s not pain. It’s just me.”

“You think you need pain?” Now his eyes move to my knuckles. “You need to be the suffering artist?”

I breathe in hard. The room smells like rust.

Maybe that’s all this is. Maybe I’m only trying to hurt myself. Maybe the thing I’m so afraid of, the thing I think I have to hide, doesn’t even matter. Maybe, as usual, Flynn understands even more about me than I do.

Flynn puts his elbows on his knees and leans in. “I see you, kid,” he says softly. “I see you. Your commitment to this. Maybe it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice, because you want to do it, but you’re still giving it everything you have.” He turns up his palms. “And even if talent is just something that’s given to certain people and not to others, what’s wrong with that? I mean . . . they call it being gifted for a reason.”

I look down at the guitar strings. I feel myself start to smile. “You know, sometimes coming here feels like going to confession.”

Flynn laughs. He makes a sloppy sign of the cross in my direction. “Bless you, my son. Now give me five Hail Marys and ten B-minor scales.”

And then we go back to lesson stuff.

There’s not much that I can’t tell Flynn. This makes the things that I can’t tell him seem worse.

I’ve never told him about that night in the woods beyond the Crow’s Nest.

I’ve never told anybody. It’s been long enough, almost two years, that I can tell myself different versions of the story, shifting things around until it’s all totally meaningless. I mean, what actually happened? A conversation. Two people talking. That’s it.

If things started to change afterward—the songs, the way my hands could move, things with girls like Frankie Lynde—it could all be a coincidence.

That’s what I’ve told myself, over and over and over.

I wish I could believe it.

Thea

They’re going to tear the school down.

Someday. Soon. Whenever the town finds the money to replace it.

The building is unsalvageable, all mismatched brick and leaky latticed windows and hardwood floors that groan and sag. It stands five blocks from Main Street, two blocks from the entrance to the park, not far from the leafy ravine with the old swinging bridge above the river. It’s just far enough from the woods to be safe. Mostly.

At school I have three classes with Anders and one without. There aren’t that many options, and there aren’t that many seniors, so our having most classes together isn’t strange. We don’t speak to each other, of course. Most days no one speaks to me at all, so that isn’t strange, either. But I know exactly where he sits. In the commons. At lunch. During every class.