Fireworks

22

The music swells around me and I let myself lean into the crescendo, my fingers swift and like liquid over the keys. Debussy's Arabesque No 1 tinkles dreamily through the front hall of my house, the grand piano oh so elegantly positioned in the front foyer for the best acoustics in the house. I don't need my eyes to follow the music in front of me, though I glance every few measures to keep my place.

My right pinky doesn't quite reach an A and I hit a G instead. I stop with a huff, taking my foot off of the pedal. These full run-throughs are getting a little exhausting. It's 8 days until my recital and I can't stop thinking about the fact that the scholarship interviewers will be there watching.

I always get nervous before a performance, but I don't think I've ever had this type of pressure put on me before, even in audition settings.

"Why'd you stop?"

I jump a little on the bench, startled to hear my mother's voice.

She's leaning against the archway leading to the kitchen, her arms and ankles crossed.

"I messed up," I say, and she smiles a little.

"It sounded lovely to me." she compliments, uncrossing her arms and walking towards where I sit in front of the piano. "I think you have a chance at getting the scholarship."

I shrug. "Well, I have made it this far, after all."

Her eyes narrow slightly. "Never underestimate your competitors."

"No, I just meant that... You're right, I guess." I trail off, seeing as she isn't even listening. She's adjusting the sheet music on the stand, her eyes trailed outside.

"Do you work today?" she asks almost absentmindedly.

I clear my throat. Today is inspection. Liam would arrive at the tent around 1:00 to start his observation, so I need to be there around 12:00 to make sure Harriet doesn't have a mental breakdown. "Yes, I'm leaving around noon."

She nods, her lips pursed. "If you can, be home for dinner. Your father and I need to talk to you."

I feel my face pale. That doesn't sound good.

I don't really even remember the last time I saw them in a room together.

"I can be here."

"Good."

With that, she walks out of the Foyer and back towards the kitchen.

I sigh and decide to call it good for the morning. I've been up since six practicing and it's now almost ten. I pad up to my room and put on some music before picking up my book. Now that I'm finished with The Good Earth, I've been trying some other Pearl S. Buck works. Right now I'm on East Wind: West Wind, and enjoying it so far.

Ever since I was little, I've been an avid reader. There was a small period of time in middle school that I fell off of it, but once I hit eighth grade I started up with a newfound passion for every cheezy novel I could get my hands on. I could probably recite the first chapter of Twilight word for word if you asked me to at this point. Reading was always fun for me, and ever the competitors, Colton and I would participate in Book Bowls and Readathons that the public library hosted every couple of months. We were always so competitive, but Colton even more so than me. I find solace in reading, an escape, a chance to see through someone else's mind. He saw a way to absorb and utilize knowledge, retaining and analyzing every word of his psychology and biography books. He once told me books were his only moral compass. I had always preferred Fiction, but every so often I'll sneak into Colton's room down the hall and steal a book from his shelf.

I used to chastise him for defacing his books with ink and dog-eared pages, but now I'm glad for it. Picking up his battered copy of The Diary of Anne Frank and finding notes scrawled in the margins in that chicken scratch handwriting is a comfort. It reminds me of what Colton valued. I'll never forget the first time I picked his copy up. He had read the biography dozens of times, but it was the only book out on his desk, and I'm sure it was the last book he read before he died. When I flipped through, his bookmark was stuck in a random page. I had sat on his bed and cried when I saw that underlined was the quote, "It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

In the margin, he had jotted, "When all is gone and hopeless, goodness is never lost"

I had cried over that page for so long. I think about it a lot.

Colton had died in a horrific way. He was walking down the street at night on his way back from a friend's apartment. He had parked a short distance away since it had been busy when he arrived and couldn't find any street slots open. He had been alone, and it was dark. On the security footage of a nearby restaurant, you can see a black van pull up and roll down its window. The footage didn't have audio, but my brother stood there on that sidewalk with his hands up by his head for almost four full minutes before they shot him dead and sped away.

I wonder what they had talked about or accused him of in those four minutes. My brother was charismatic and kind, I bet he had probably tried to talk sense into them, tell them they had the wrong guy. I'll never know, but I wondered if while he was standing there, his knees probably shaking in fear, he had remembered what he wrote. "When all is gone and hopeless, goodness is never lost."

It was a hopeless situation, and I'm sure he knew that from the moment they stuck that Glock out of the passenger side window and cocked it in his face.

But I knew my brother. And the fact that the last words he may have ever read were 'I still believe that people are really good at heart'... it makes me think that he was trying to help them. Measure the goodness in their hearts. Maybe it was naive of me. It probably makes me a fool. But something in me, some morally intact part of my consciousness, thinks that Colton was forgiving the people in the van for what he surely knew they would do.

Maybe that's how he had stalled so long. Four minutes hadn't ever felt so long.

My eyes just skim over the words on the page in front of me, unable to focus today.