Sun Damage (The Sunshine Series) (14 page)

The notes swirl around me, only adding to the chaos of endless sounds. I float here for minutes, hours, days, it doesn’t matter.
Maybe if I play long enough, if I stay here a while, I’ll hear the sound of dark waves in a vast sea. Maybe I could go back for a little while without worrying about whatever this life means anymore. I hear someone talking, but I can’t tell if they’re in the room with me or if they’re here, outside, or in a different practice room.

“
Sophie?” Their tone is strained, like they’ve been trying to get my attention for a while. My shoulders ache because the fingers are digging into my collarbone. Right next to my mark. Myles’ mark. That’s what makes me jump and the music stop. I’m filled with the instant and unwavering thought that no one should be touching me there. No one but Myles, not that it’s even a far off possibility for him to do that.

Though the music has stopped, the other sounds haven
’t. They’re only intensified by the beating of another heart. The air whistling through another set of expanding lungs. I’m slightly aware that my head and hands are shaking now too, not just hot. I can’t stop any of it. Not the lies, not what’s happening to me, not any of the thoughts or emotions. None of it is going to stop.

Some rational part of my brain is still working, though I have to dig past all of the noise to find it. This is part of adjusting. It has to be. There
’s no other logical explanation. Maybe it’ll stop happening when I just wake up one day wanting to drink blood. Maybe after my brain and body have been turned for a certain amount of time, it will all stop; at least the things going on with me physically. I don’t think I can ever stop wondering about Myles and me. Us. When everything is clear again, will I ever be able to wipe the smudge off of our relationship?

“
Sophie,” The voice is closer now. There are arms wrapped around me and my head is against something that’s hard yet soft at the same time. “C’mon. Open those eyes.” I recognize the voice now, but I can’t move on my own just yet.

“
Can you talk to me?” Manny asks. “Even just a little bit?”

“
No,” I say. I want to move away from him. He’s too close.

Manny
laughs and his chest moves up and down. The sound of it is also loud. It’s a lot like the sound that lungs make; only it stops and starts rapidly. “That’s real good, Pinky.”

“
Shh,” I say. “Too loud.”

He obeys, keeping
silent until I can get a better hold on myself. After a few deep breaths, the noise starts to quiet down as well. My own beating and breathing fades into the others, which have become nothing more than distant, white noise. After waiting a few more minutes, it’s gone entirely.

Finally, I open my eyes, and Manny is still sitting next to me, his arm around my shoulders, no longer touching Myles’ mark. I gently push him away, not w
anting to look him in the eye.

“
You okay?” he asks. “You went completely somewhere else, man.”

I stare down at my fingers, surprised they
’re not burned, or at least a little red, with how hot they were. “I–” I can’t finish the thought or the sentence.

“
Something’s been bothering you since you came back,” he says, folding his hands in front of him, making the space on the bench between us even more pronounced. I’m grateful for this. “You haven’t played in a while, have you?” he asks.

I blink
a few times and shake my head.

“
How long would you say?” His finger lightly traces one of the keys, then one of the jack-o’-lantern lights hung above them. “A few weeks?”

“
Since...” I start. “Since before I...left.”

“
Well, there you go,” he says, as if this is the only explanation. It’s solved so simply, just like that. “You’re creatively backed up.”

“
Backed up,” I echo the words. “I don’t think that’s what’s wrong.”

Manny forms half of a smile.
“Probably not all of it,” he says. “I don’t know much about turning, but I do know that it tends to take over your life for a while, right?”

I don
’t say anything.

“
Yeah,” he continues. “So...having something so crazy happen and not having some kind of an outlet to express it–you can talk until your lips fall off about it, that’s not what your soul needs. You get backed up.” Manny lets his hand rest in his lap. “So when you finally
do
get to sit down and hash out all of the crap, you get swept up in it. Unreachable.”

“
Maybe,” I say, more for his benefit than mine. Maybe that’s how it started, but my gut tells me that’s not the reason why it grew into something else. “Did it ever happen to you?”

Manny waves a hand.
Like I didn’t just go into some crazy, deep trance in front of him. “Tons of times,” he says. “No biggie.”

“
It is to me,” I say. Sure, I’ve gotten lost in my piano. Millions of times. That’s the reason why I began playing in the first place. But never like that. Never with all of that noise along with it. Never when I couldn’t decipher where I was in space and time. I always knew that I was sitting at a piano. I always knew I could be snapped back to the world in an instant. Usually, I never wanted to come back once I was in my own world that I designed but with this...I’m scared. I’m scared of the one thing that’s always provided me with comfort.

Manny stands now.
“Well, I just heard you pounding away and decided to come and see if you were alright,” he says.

I try to put him at ease by sounding casual and making a joke.
“Did it sound like music at all or just random noises?”

Manny laughs as he starts toward the door.
“You’re talking to the wrong person about that,” he says. “I can never separate the two.”

He gives me one last smile before he f
inally exits the practice room and the door makes a dull click when it finally shuts. I decide that going back to my apartment, though scary, is less scary than being alone here.

When I grab my notebook off of the music stand, a wave of anger hits me, hard and unexpectedly in the chest.
It’s like hitting a wall of fire where everything in front of my eyes turns red and then purple. I have to shut them so I don’t fall over.

But just as soon as it happened, it vanished. C
arefully, I open my eyes again.

My notebook is still in my hand, and it just so happens to be opened to the page of the beginning stages of Myles
’ song I wrote for him last winter. There’s something off about the letters and symbols written on the paper. Something makes them contort and twist until they’re completely unrecognizable. Just like everything else lately.

It smells, I realize.
Burned. Not quite like a bonfire, but close.

And
when I look up, I can see why.

The top half of my notebook has caught on fire
.

I expect the entire thing to be engulfed in seconds, but that
’s not what happens. Instead, it slowly burns, the orange and yellow flames only stay at the top of the paper, like they don’t want to ruin any of my hard work.

My legs give out under me
and I’m plopping back down on the piano bench without knowing it. I can hear the paper crackle. It’s whispering to me but I can’t figure out what it’s trying to say.

There
’s a knock on the door, making me jump, and the fire immediately goes out.

I have to clear my throat,
“Yeah?”

A muffled voice comes from the other side.
“You almost done in there?” I don’t recognize the voice. “We got the twelve slot and it’s twelve twenty.”

Shit.

I take a glance around without taking my hands off of the notebook still clamped between my fingers. There doesn’t seem to be any smoke in the room, but it smells awful. I wave my hand in front of my face to make it dissipate but I’m not sure if it helps at all. Or if anyone else will be able to notice it.

“
Hold on!” I call back, realizing I haven’t responded to the person waiting outside. I shove the burned up notebook in my bag and practically sprint out of the room past the next waiting band but I’m just slow enough to hear them complain about how no one listens to the rule of no smoking inside the practice spaces. Once I’m far enough down the hall and away from any sign of people, I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go. Outside seems like a bad idea but my apartment doesn’t look too much better.

My feet are dragging me up the steps before I can think about it for any longer. I stare at the carpet the whole way, not wanting to think for the foreseeable future. But of course, that whole
plan gets derailed immediately.

“
Sophie.”

My eyes squeeze shut at the sound of Myles
’ voice. No. Not now. Not right now, please.

“
Tell me what happened,” he says. It takes me a second to realize that my head is resting against his chest and he doesn’t move.

I shake my head. Despite how badly I want to pull my head from his chest, I can
’t find the strength anywhere within me to do so.

“
Let’s go inside,” he suggests.

I nod this time, fumb
ling in my pocket for my keys.

The door turns under my warm hand and for a second, I
’m afraid that I’ll set it on fire too. If that’s what I did to the paper. If it was real at all.

Myles follows me inside and I
’m oddly comforted by the fact that he’s here, despite how badly I’ve been trying to avoid him the past few days.

I scan the room an
d Jade is nowhere to be found.

“
He’s still out,” Myles says. “At the convenience store around the corner.”

He’s been gone for over an h
our but then again, so have I.

“
Sit down,” Myles says quietly.

I don
’t want to, just to make it so I’m not doing what he wants, but my legs are so weak and my head has started pounding so I don’t have much choice.

My attention is drawn to my bag thrown over my shoulder. Without thinking, I reach inside of it and pull out the notebook, still opened to the page with his song on it.
Still singed around the top half. I toss it on the ground far enough so it’s between us but not so far that it looks like I tried to throw it at him. Myles kneels down without taking his eyes off of me and scoops up my notebook.

Suddenly I remember him helping us practice when we first came here, writing things down in notes and rests as I played them so Boo and Trei could understand how to pla
y their own parts in the songs.

I
’m snapped back to the present when I hear a tiny crinkle of paper. When I look up, Myles’ fingers are tracing over the partially scorched pages. He’s no longer staring at me, but the burned words in front of him. Like there is new meaning there now.

“
Tell me what that means,” I say in almost a whisper. “Can you do that?”

Myles glances up at me, his hand still against the pages as he stands up and slowly and almost cautiously takes a few steps forward.
“Can you tell me what happened?”

My mouth is too dry to open. My throat is too sore to spe
ak.

“
Is it the same thing that happened over there?” Myles asks, placing the notebook down next to my knee and pointing behind me, where the painting is no longer hanging. I lean over the back of the couch and take out the remnants of it. It isn’t even heavy when I place it on the ground. “Yes,” I whisper.

At the time, it felt good, tearing myself out of the frame he painted me in to. Freeing, despite how scary it was with all of the colors and sounds rushing into my body. I nod slowly, feeling the tears creep into my eyes before I can stop them. Now I feel guilty. As ugly as the destroyed image of
myself that the frame once held.

The couch dips in near me, but he isn
’t too close. I’m grateful for that.

“
You lied to me.” I wasn’t even aware that I wanted to say it until it’s left my mouth.

“
Everything you ever said to me...Anything I ever
felt
with you...” I have to clamp my hand over my mouth so I shut up.

Myles
’ hand hovers near me for what feels like minutes but he doesn’t let it land on my shoulder until he’s sure I won’t pull away.

I expect him to try and tell me it
’s okay, but he doesn’t, and I’m not sure if I should be relieved, that he’s finally accepted that this is what I don’t want to hear, or if he really believes that things aren’t that okay.

“
I can’t do this,” I say after a long time.

His fingers twitch on my shoulder.
“You can,” he says. “It’s hard for everyone at first.”

I suck in a breath
. “No,” I whisper, finally gathering enough strength to pull away from him. “This,” I clarify.