= Wands High =

Chapter 18 - 13 May 1998, Wednesday

- Hey, Regg, you have some sort of tuner, don't you? Gimme that for a moment – Ender said, still struggling to fix his guitar's tuning after carrying it back from the room where they had practiced earlier.

- Here – the drummer who was also his roommate tossed him a small object. – It's more like a tuning fork actually, I don't think it detects other tones than A. Why do you bother with traditional tuning anyway? If I played the guitar, I think I'd be too lazy to tune it the muggle way.

- Helps me keep my ear sharp – Ender responded taking a brief glimpse at the object in his hand. It looked ceramic and really old, its edges polished from long usage it seemed. Its shape vaguely resembled the number 8. – So how do you use this thing exactly ?

- Just put it somewhere near the neck of the guitar. It doesn't have to be on it to catch the tone correctly as with muggle tuners. It sounds falsely when you play an incorrect tone.

Ender pulled the first string several times; Reginald was telling the truth, the "tuner" responded with a lower pitch tone that sounded disharmonic. After a few tries he hit the perfect A and the thing responded harmonically.

- Where did you find this thing? – Ender asked after he was pleased with the sound of his guitar.

- In Berlin, during a family trip before the beginning of the school year. We went into this old trinket shop and it was there with few other ancient looking musical instruments and tools, between the tourist junk – said Reginald, digging in the commode next to his bed. – Damn, I can't find my Astronomy homework, I'm sure I put it in here before we went to practice...

- Why'd you need a tuner anyway? – Ender grinned.

- I dunno, it looked cool. And sort of out of place. As if it had waited who knows how long for a wizard to find it. – Reginald stood up, a parchment scroll in his left hand. – Finally! – He sat on his bed and unfolded the scroll, frowning. – Man, I'm so sick of this... I can't wait to graduate and put it all into music – look at that, I'm sure I don't have a single correct calculation in the charts. I suck so bad in precise sciences...

- Who cares? You know what you want to do, right? Anything else is a temporary distraction – Ender shrugged and started playing something just to relax his fingers after the intense practice. Weirdly enough, sometimes after hours of playing, even when his fingers felt as stiff as they could possibly be, he still wanted to take the guitar and just play something. Mostly covers, because usually at this point he was already tired of their original material – but not tired enough to leave the guitar in the corner of the room. And, despite he'd never admit it, even to Regg who was his best friend, most times his fingers automatically started playing a song that he and his brothers used to play over and over again long ago, because they all thought it was the coolest song ever...

Ender shook his head in annoyance and stopped all of a sudden, then left the guitar in the corner by his bed and tossed the pick on top of his nightstand, next to his wand. Sentiments wouldn't help him play his best tomorrow. Even the word "sentiment" brought a mocking smile on his face – there wasn't much space for that in his life. Only weak-charactered fools dwelled in sentiments.

Reginald was still frowning at his homework but after a moment he ended up folding it and tossed it on the floor by his bed, seemingly fed up.

- Night – he mumbled and pulled the blanket over himself, turning his back to Ender and the rest of the room.

- Mhm – the youngest Slade reacted, thinking about something, then reached to the drawer of his own nightstand and took a small hard-covered notebook out of it. It looked a bit worn around the edges from too much opening; the covers were plain, colored in dark grey.