On the way home from the restaurant, Sonata and I performed a caterwauling, screeching duet to anything I played the stereo. Sonata had a terrible voice, just like me, but she had a good ear. If she heard the chorus of a song twice, she could pick it up after the bridge and join in. She was even able to scat-sing along to the Korean and Japanese songs.
I pulled up to the same shopping center I let her off at last time, but she let me drive another block to finish the song that was playing. I pulled over and said, “So do you want to talk about this?”
“Let’s not spoil tonight. I had a great time singing and eating tacos with you. For a moment I forgot about all I’ve lost. I mean, you were right about the rest. I have no money right now and no prospects. But you made me feel normal again. Let me hold onto that tonight.”
“Of course. We’ll talk in school.”
But come seventh period each day Aria and Adagio were attached at the hip to Sonata. They gave me the evil eye all the time, and any time I tried to lean over and say something they came up with something to say to Sonata, usually a veiled insult against me. I wanted to jump in, but I’d only been her boyfriend for two weeks. These were lifetime friends. It was a delicate balance.
But Wednesday night I got some good news, and fortunately we have cell phones. I texted her: “The stars have aligned. This Friday my mother’s on a business trip, my father’s taking my sister to see our grandmother, and my brother’s got a date of his own. So we can spend the whole night talking and singing. Only chance for privacy.”
Ding. “For realzies?” Did she have it on shortcut? Ding. “You mean, alone?”
Oh, wow. I realized how it came across. My fingers flew across my phone. “Listen. I promise you I won’t pressure you to do anything you don’t want to do. I’ll stay on the other side of the room if you like. No touching.”
“None at all?” With a heart emoticon.
“We can talk about that too.”
“Well, what would we have for dinner?”
I had no emoticons for rolling eyes. “I can make tacos. I know how to brown ground beef and I'll buy the pre-made shells and we can put things together from there.”
“Can’t wait!” Kissy-face emoticon.
Friday comes and now I’m keeping my distance to put up a smokescreen against Adagio and Aria. Let them think that Sonata and I are drifting apart, and so long as they didn’t check her phone, or if Sonata was clever enough to clear her text history, we were in the clear. Ninth period bell rings, I’m running out the door, throwing my bookbag into the back seat, and peeling out (as much as a fuel-efficient car can), and reaching the head of the bus lane before the mass of people get out. The lead bus driver scowled at me, but if she reported me I’d get a slap on the wrist.
The one good thing about the rainbow-haired trio was that they were easy to spot. Feeling like some 1950’s greaser I honked my horn and leaned over to open the door. Lots of attention was drawn, but it included Sonata who broke away from the other two and flopped into my passenger seat. I had it in gear before she finished closing the door, and she put on her seatbelt while I was getting out of the parking lot.
“Nice escape,” she said.
“I keep telling you, it’s a Sonata.” But she still didn’t get my car jokes.
“So are we listening to music on the way home?”
“Moot point. We wouldn’t even have time to finish a song. I live real close to the school.”
“Oh! So that’s why you drive.”
I nodded. “I’m too close to take the bus, so before this year I had to have one of my parents drop me off or, if it was a nice day, walk. My sister still has to do that. I drop her off sometimes too.”
It was only a couple of stop signs before we entered the block of ranch houses. My parents had a two-story ranch in a no-outlet section, a real nice house that I would miss when I went off to college next year. Four bedrooms, and three of them upstairs so that all of us had privacy in every way except sound.
I let us in and spied the area out. I knew my folks weren’t home, but my brother might still be getting ready for his date. The coast seemed clear and I showed Sonata around.
“Kitchen and dining room’re in here. Mom and Dad are kind of old school and insist that we all come and have dinner every night together, no cell phones, no TV on. Can’t take food up to our rooms. Up the stairs is where the kids stay. My brother’s got the front bedroom. It’s actually a little smaller than mine but with a better view. He got first choice.”
“You’re the middle kid?”
“Yeah. My little sis has got the back room, and I have the side, which is the biggest. When my brother finishes college and moves out, I’m hoping she takes the front room so I don’t have to move.”
“Can I see it?”
“Of course.” I took her up to the end of the hall and to my room where I’d done a bit of preparation. My secondhand office chair was already facing away from the desk, and I’d taken the computer speakers which would normally just point at me and moved them to the center of the wall. Not a great sound system, but we’d hear it. In the middle was the bed, and I’d found one of the folding chairs we keep around for company and put it on the far side by the window, so Sonata would be able to keep her distance from me if she wanted.
“It’s nice. I guess a house like this is what I’ll aspire to someday.”
She took the seat and looked out the window. With her hands on her thighs, she was the picture of elegant, the proper schoolgirl. Only the spiked wristbands were out of place.
It was time to have our talk. “So, sirens.”
“Oh. You didn’t forget about that, huh?”
“No. The only thing I found when I looked up the word is the mythical creatures from Odysseus who lived on an island and lured sailors to their deaths. That’s not what you’re talking about, is it?”
“It’s not. I’m almost sure I’ve never worked from an island.” I waved my hand to invite more information. She narrowed her eyes. “I think you said something about cooking?”
“OK, fine. I’ll cook, you talk.”
We went back to the kitchen and I started getting together the taco ingredients. While I browned meat and chopped lettuce and tomatoes, she explained. She had a rambling style, and I figured it would be easier to let her finish before asking questions. Besides, I had my mind on the cooking.
When I put down the completed tacos on a plate in front of Sonata and watched her take the first bite, I said, “So, let me see if I can sum this up. You came from another world where you had the power to influence others by singing to make them want to do things they normally wouldn’t."
“Mmhm. These are good, by the way.”
“Thank you. And you were banished here where you still used your power, but were far weaker than before.”
“Yeah. Do you have any sour cream?”
I went to the fridge. “And you had a magic jewel that let you steal the negative energy you created in others and gain life force from it, but then you got in a battle with someone from your original world and it was shattered.”
“It’s hard for me to hear you talk about it so casually.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to get the facts straight. So you’re a thousand years old.”
“A little more than that.”
“But not two thousand, which is odd, because you would have to be to inspire the original legend. But set that aside. I mean…” I now wanted to phrase things delicately. “You don’t act a thousand.”
She was starting to get annoyed, I could tell. “Well, in the first place it’s not like I was paying attention or trying to learn during that time. It was all about survival. But more than that, now that I’m just a normal girl I don’t have the memory capacity I once did. I’m kind of scared, too. Sure, I’m a teenager, but I’m going to start growing old now.”
Now I had my own meal. I hadn’t minded Sonata’s breech of etiquette in starting before me. We weren’t the old school type like my parents. “So. Now I know.”
“But you don’t believe me.”
“Let’s go up to my room.”
I didn’t know why I wanted her upstairs, but I think it was because it was where I had thought of what I was going to say. She sat in her chair and I in mine, and I breathed in deep.
“Sonata, I’m really coming to have feelings for you, but it’s hard to talk about these things. So I need you to be patient with me, and let me get through this, even if I say things that might hurt you.”
“Just say what you’re going to, gosh!”
“OK. So look at it from my position. It’s possible that you’re just setting up a prank. That you’re…what’s the word? Catfishing me.”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s just like Adagio said, you really don’t believe me.”
“But then I rejected that, because it makes no sense. You wouldn’t get anything out of it. You’d have spent a lot of time and effort to get a few meals, plus while I’d be laughed at, you’d be disdained and no one else would be friends with you. So you’re not lying.”
Now she looked at me with hope.
“So now I’m left with two possibilities,” I continued. “One, that you’re telling the truth, but that means that everything I know about the world is wrong, or two, that you have genuine psychological issues. Maybe you’re a failed singer and the loss of your voice hurt too much, so you had to make a cover story to keep yourself sane.”
“You don’t think I’m lying, you think I’m crazy.”
“No, I mean…I’m trying to take you through my thought process. That’s what I came up with, but it’s not where I finished. On that level, if you just asked me to say what I thought of someone telling me what you did, that’s how I’d respond. That’s what I’d tell Aria or Adagio.
“But it’s not what I’m going to tell you, because feelings do matter, and I don’t want to hurt you by telling you you’re crazy. I’d rather believe you and see you smile than tell you that it’s not true and have you upset.”
And she did smile, and we looked at each other from across the room. And I stared into her eyes and she into mine, and as we leaned in she gave me all the sincerity she could muster and said:
“I don’t get it.”
I collapsed onto the bed face-first and struggled to my feet. “I’m not sure that I do either. So let’s just hold off all worries about you and me and just think about us. OK?”
“Can we listen to more music? I kind of figured that since we got this chance to be alone, that we could sing together without having to worry about driving anywhere or how long it would be.”
“Sure, Sonata. We can listen all night.”
She moved her chair up near the computer where mine was, and I opened my music directory. I’d never become used to having any organization software, so I just had it all dumped in one list. She looked it over. “Oh! I think I know that one.” She pointed at the title of a show tune.
Show tunes, it seemed, were what she was most familiar with. If she was being honest, then while she wasn’t working during her thousand years, she had seen plenty of movies and plays. We worked our way through most of the major Andrew Lloyd Webber songs, and I was about to go searching again, when she held up her hand.
“Can I ask you…why do you like music? I mean, for me it was all tied up in controlling other people, but you couldn’t do that. So what did you get out of it?”
The question brought me up short. Who doesn’t like music? I didn’t want to philosophize, I just wanted to spend time with Sonata. “OK, you remember a few minutes ago when I tried to give a complex evaluation over my thoughts about you being a siren?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, with music I can get away from complicated thoughts like that. I’m always overanalyzing everything, but when I can come here and listen to music or when I can drive around with the stereo on, then it calms that part of me down. I can just lean back and let go.”
Whether my answer satisfied Sonata or whether she just jumped topics, she said, “Ooh, Let it Go, that’s a good one, play that.”
She liked singers with big voices, and I could understand that, so I found it online and we screeched through that one, and then I decided to carry the theme forward and introduced her to Barbra Streisand and Whitney Houston and Celine Dion and we caterwauled and sung off key and screamed too loud and laughed and laughed.
“It’s a shame we can’t do this all the time,” Sonata said.
“Yeah. If you ask me, the Japanese have the right idea with karaoke booths. We make a spectacle of our singing. If you want to go and sing you have to do it in a bar, one at a time, with everyone watching. Over there you get your own little area for just you and your friends and you can sing away to your heart’s content.”
“I’d like to go to one of those, someday.”
“Yeah, someday.” I reached over and put on another song. We had no microphones, no lyrics, no timing mechanism other than our own memories. We weren’t going for quality, just fun. As the final chorus swelled, I looked at Sonata. I’d seen her smile, but this was the first time I’d seen the smile in her eyes. And I recalled the answer I’d just given her, about how music helped me be calm and let go, and I got that feeling doubled. Sonata was my music.
And then…
I can’t even remember what song it was. Maybe “All By Myself” or “MacArthur Park,” but all of a sudden I couldn’t hear myself sing anymore, because Sonata was overpowering me. She wasn’t even loud, rather she had just found the resonant frequency of the final note and was holding it effortlessly. She put her hand to her throat as her eyes went wide.
I even lowered the volume on the speakers just to hear her. It was beautiful, lilting, breathy, everything that a singer ought to be. She let the note fade out, and yet the echoes were still in the room.
“I can sing!” she said.
“I’ll say. What was that?”
“That was how I used to sing before I lost my powers. But how could I do that now? I don’t have my jewel.”
Great. Everything went back to the siren thing. “Can you do it again?”
She cleared her throat and let loose, but now she was back to the off-key singing I’d come to know from her. “Try playing the song again. Not the whole thing, just skip to the end.”
It took me a while, since too many popular video sites don’t let you skip around as you like, but eventually I got to the part she wanted. She led in, but still couldn’t hit the note. “I don’t know why that happened,” I said. She was straining, and I started to worry about it. “Take it easy! Don’t hurt yourself.”
“Why not? Is that all I’m going to get is one lousy note?”
“It was a beautiful note, and I’d love to hear it again, but if I can’t, so be it. I just don’t want to see you in pain. I care about you too much.”
She breathed in, and I braced myself, but she did it again, singing in perfect clarity and harmonizing with herself.
“This doesn’t make any sense. I’m going to have to ask Adagio and Aria about how this could be. I wonder if my powers came back with my voice?”
“Oh, you mean to make people do what you want?”
“Yeah. I’m going to try it out.” Sonata started to sing, but held up. “Is that OK with you?”
“Well, since you asked, sure. But I’m warning you, I’m skeptical that you can make me do anything I don’t want to.”
She sang a simple pattern, a kind of, “Ah-ah-ah, ah-ah.” It was pleasant enough to listen to, and irrespective of all this magic mumbo-jumbo, I wanted to hear her more. When she stopped, I said, “So?”
“Oh, darn, I forgot to actually tell you to do anything.” I laughed, and she started again. “Ah-ah-ah, ah-ah. Ah-ah-ah, ah-ah. Umm…go make me another taco.”
That got another laugh out of me. Somehow she had managed to make that broken improvised phrase sound melodic. But I didn’t feel any sort of impetus to follow her instructions.
On the other hand, I thought, she would feel bad if I proved her wrong, and that would just shatter her dream. What harm would it do to let her pretend, just this once. “I’ll be right back.”
There was still some ground beef in the pan, enough to make one more. I microwaved it to heat it up, then put it into the shell and brought it up to her. “Yes!” she said. “I did it. Oh, and thank you. This is awesome”
I had second thoughts. A dream was one thing, but this was a delusion. “Look, Sonata, you didn’t really make me do that. I did it for you voluntarily.”
“Don’t worry about that. That’s how it works. You think you’re doing it yourself. How did Adagio put it? ‘People have an almost infinite capacity for rationalization’.”
Well, I literally couldn’t argue with that, or I’d be proving her point. “I’m still not saying I believe you either way, but I’m glad you’re happy.”
“I am. And I don’t fully understand, but I get the feeling that it’s because of you.”
And before I could react, she pulled me up, hugged me, and kissed me full on the lips.