Rainey Royal (8 page)

“Here,” says Rainey. She bends over quickly, so the tie-dye scarf falls forward and the violet room swings back, grabs a thick sheaf of her own long, dark hair, and cuts.

CLARINET

“Say it,” says Rainey. She lounges against a steel countertop, scarred and waxy dissection trays lined up behind her. “
I ride the bus
. Say it.”

Lunchtime: the science lab at Urban Day School is deserted. Tina, glowing with menace, blocks the door. We’re the lionesses, Rainey thinks.

Leah Levinson is the giraffe. She stands locked by fear behind Miss Brennan’s desk. Taxi horns filter through the windows. Rainey stares with arms crossed, daring Leah to look up and escalate things.

The girl appears to be counting floor tiles. She would be so easy to fix, Rainey thinks. Her hair French-braided, some coppery eye shadow to bring out her green eyes. Tighter jeans—Rainey could stitch them. She would teach Leah to dance. She and Tina could make it a project.

Then Rainey could decide if Leah was an acolyte or a friend.

“She doesn’t know what the bus is.” Tina drops into a plié. Everyone knows what the bus is; it’s for crippled kids and poor kids who get into schools in better neighborhoods. At least this is how the insult goes.

“Say
I ride the bus
,” says Rainey, “or I’ll soak you.” She lifts a beaker off a shelf and moves toward the sink. If Leah gets wet she’ll panic and change into her gym shirt. Whereas if Rainey had the wet top, she’d laugh with fake mortification at her Sophia Loren bust. That’s what her father calls it, her Sophia Loren bust, except he uses a different word.

“All right, now you have to say
I want to give Andy Sak a rim job
.” She and Tina exchange a glance. For days they have marveled at this whirring phrase that sounds half mechanical and half obscene. Rim, lid, edges, jars—maybe it has something to do with nipples, Rainey thinks. Or maybe it is a bluff or a misunderstanding.

“Okay, Rain, do it,” Tina says.

Rainey sets the beaker in the sink, turns on the tap, and grabs a bottle of formaldehyde. “Guess which.” She blocks Leah’s view as she pretends to pour.

“I ride the bus.” Leah crosses her hands over her chest and watches warily as Rainey approaches with the brimming beaker.

Rainey gives Leah the sweet, sorrowful smile she might give a small child who’s resisting bedtime. She feels in herself
the power to make Leah trust her, to maybe drink from the beaker. Her father has acolytes—it might be cool to have one of her own.

“I ride the bus,” says Leah. “Let me out, okay?”

“Too late,” says Tina, “you were supposed to say about the rim job,” and Rainey, the word
rim
humming in her brain, approaches the girl sidling along the wall.

T
HIS IS NEW, AND
Rainey hates it: Tina has just two hours after school, and her grandmother believes those hours are for Bible study. Rainey has gone from agnostic to atheist when it comes to believing in the unseen grandmother. Tina’s real family must be drunk, mean, or naked. Don’t hide it, Rainey wants to tell her—who wants to be best friends with some normal-family chick?

After school they maneuver around the little crowd listening outside the townhouse and enter the foyer, where jazz blares from the parlor. Howard is on the Steinway, his body rocking, hair falling in his face, and Rainey, watching his hands pump, wonders not for the first time if he is pushing music into the massive piano or somehow pulling it out. Gemma, the English acolyte whom Howard found playing in the Times Square subway, whipsaws her bow across the electric violin, which Rainey thinks is the prettiest sound in the world. Her eyelids flutter when she plays. Radmila is on electric flute, and Flynn is there, waiting to play and staring at Rainey. He has a paperback
crammed into his back pocket. She has never seen another acolyte with a book.

“Ignore them,” says Rainey, because lately Tina has been lingering in the parlor doorway like a climbing vine, dribbling away precious ticks of her already diminished one hundred twenty minutes.

But the brass is glinting, the piano is brilliant, and Tina snags on the doorframe. Rainey doubles back to tug at her and sees Howard wave
cut
.

“The delectable Miss Dial,” says Howard, and Rainey watches Tina respond as if she were being tuned. Her shoulders pull back, a hip curves out, and she looks down with a shy smile.

“Come on, Teen.”

“Do you like what you hear, Tina?” Howard asks, as if the fates of his young musicians, who wait patient as horses, are in her hands, or as if, perhaps, he is talking about something else entirely.

Tina glances at Rainey. Then, almost imperceptibly, she nods to Howard. Rainey shakes her head and goes back to eye-flirting with Flynn. Howard’s daughter may be off-limits to the male acolytes, but she and Flynn have been trying without words to arrange a meeting. Every time Rainey looks up, meaning
roof
, he frowns at the ceiling, perhaps meaning,
Where the chandelier used to be?
or else,
In your bedroom, are you out of your mind?
She is not out of her mind. She is fifteen and on the pill.
A girl your age is a fully opened flower
, her father says.

“It’s still in composition,” says Howard. “But if you respond to the finished piece, let us name it in your honor. ‘The Tina Temptation.’ What think you, Gordy?”

“Tell him it sucks, Teen,” says Rainey. Howard is stealing everything: her two hours, her best friend, the light he normally shines on her.

Or maybe Tina is the thief.

“It’s not about you, Tina,” says Rainey. “He might as well call it ‘The Howard Ego.’ ”

Howard laughs deeply. Gemma raises her bow and produces a ribbon of sound, but Howard raises his hand. “One more thing,” he says, and Rainey feels his interest sweep across her like a searchlight before it returns to Tina. “How’s the clarinet coming?”

Tina inhales sharply.

“Did you forget to tell her, Miss Temptation?”

“How’s your
clarinet
?” demands Rainey.
Mistemptation
sounds to her like a yearning gone wrong. “Tina doesn’t take clarinet. She doesn’t take anything.”

“I do,” says Tina quietly. “At school. It’s coming fine.”

“You don’t have a clarinet.” Rainey swallows; this is not what she means. Howard smiles. All the acolytes are looking at them.

“I showed her the fingering,” says Howard. “She might have a nascent talent.”

He showed her the fingering—and where was Rainey? Upstairs, thinking Tina had gone home? She can see it,
how he stood behind Tina Dial, placed his hands over hers, inhaled her hair, his attention like the light from a star that has wheeled in close. Closer. Oh, Tina. No wonder she didn’t tell: she fell.

“Nascent, that’s great,” says Rainey. “Are you coming or not?”

“Five minutes.”

Howard pounds out two notes, both flat. The bass and violin start up. Rainey takes the two flights of stairs alone to her pink room with the light tread of someone whose fury is as weightless as the air she breathes and gets through an entire side of
Ziggy Stardust
before Tina, looking smug and, at least, embarrassed, appears with a clarinet case.

“Loaner,” she says. She looks helplessly around the room, cradling the case in her arms. “Where should I put this?”

W
HAT
R
AINEY
’
S DOING IN
art is developing her métier. Mr. Knecht says every artist has one, and every student must seek one, and Rainey’s is making tapestries. She uses everything: cloth, photographs, lists, snippets of lace, buttons, earrings, ribbon, even bits of flat scrap metal. Mr. K lets her go her own way while the rest of Studio Art II makes linocuts.

The other thing she’s doing in art, on this bright blue afternoon, is harassing Leah. The girl is carving a face on her linoleum block with a stiff anxiety that dulls her work. Mr. Knecht, oblivious to the hazards of placing two lionesses
with a giraffe, has seated her with Rainey and Tina. Tina can’t draw well either, but she has the advantage of not giving a fuck. Also, she has the advantage of Rainey, who leans over when Mr. Knecht isn’t looking and lightly chisels Tina’s linoleum, adding gesture and grace.

Every time Rainey starts to ask Tina to come over, she hesitates; she envisions Howard giving her breathing lessons from behind, breathing being a big deal for musicians.
Breathe from here
, she imagines him saying, his hands over Tina’s lower abdomen where—as she conceives the body—clothes tumble round in a hot dryer, and then, sliding one hand up to her breastbone,
not from here
, he would say, and it would be pure Howard to do this, and it makes Rainey sick.

She wonders if she can tell Tina to leave the goddamn clarinet at home. She is afraid that Tina might bring the loaner, swing it insouciantly, like a purse.

“You know what your problem is?” Rainey tells Leah.

Tina looks up from the worktable, interested. She is carving a deer under falling leaves. The deer stands on legs of exquisite delicacy, courtesy of Rainey.

Tina leans across the worktable, threatening Leah’s linocut with a sharp instrument. “Yeah, let’s discuss your problem,” she tells Leah. “I bet I can fix it.” Leah raises an arm to keep Tina’s gouge off her work but doesn’t look up, eye contact being a flammable act.

Rainey puts a restraining hand on Tina’s wrist. “Don’t,” she says. She likes how both Leah and her linocut-girl are
desperately in need of
style
. She thinks of Gemma, who arrived at West Tenth Street skittish and grateful, and who slid into a sensuous indolence encouraged and shaped by Howard. “Seriously,” Rainey tells Leah, not sure whether she’s talking about art or life or both, “your problem is you’re afraid to make a mistake.”

“You’re
helping
her?” says Tina, gouge still poised for damage.

Why not, Rainey wants to say, what have you learned about loyalty, hanging out at my house? She grabs a pencil and draws directly on the worktable between her and Leah: linocut-girl’s oval face, the swirling hair. “For Chrissake, would you
look
? We have fifteen minutes.” Leah, after a wide-eyed moment, watches the pencil move. “This is shading.” Rainey makes rapid straight lines to delineate cheekbones and chin.

“Next you’ll be teaching her jazz flute,” says Tina.

“Would you relax?” says Rainey. “We’re going to give her a makeover. We’re going to French-braid her hair. Look,” she tells Leah, “mistakes are okay. Look what I did. I hacked it off.” She leans forward and lifts a thick, chopped-off hank of her own hair. “If you’re afraid of something, do it,” she says. That’s what Howard tells her, anyway.

“All right,” says Leah suddenly. She starts carving cheekbone lines. Rainey thinks, I’m getting good at this acolyte business.

“We could pluck her eyebrows,” says Tina darkly. “It only hurts the first time.”

“Just braids,” says Rainey. “You’re both coming to my house Saturday.”

“I have to be with my grandmother,” says Tina.

“Sunday?”

“Grandmother.” Tina chisels a leaf with intense concentration.

“Then Friday after school,” says Rainey. “Two hours. Come on.”

Leah looks up from a place deep inside her work and says, “Am I doing this right?” It is the first sentence she has uttered to Rainey Royal on an equal footing, and Rainey, with pleasure and surprise, realizes that her powers sharpen when she opens the cage door, not when she locks Leah in. She wonders if this is what her father felt when he first put a fiddle with a piezoelectric body pickup in Gemma’s arms. Piezoelectric body pickup, she loves saying that, the way it sounds half high-voltage and half slut.

“Try some crosshatching. But yeah.” To Tina she says, “Friday, right? And listen—don’t bring the clarinet.”

Tina looks at her sharply. Leah drops her head low over her linoleum block, a tumble of red hair concealing her face. Rainey touches her arm and says, “We promise not to be bitches.”

“Speak for yourself,” says Tina. “Howard told me to bring it every time.”

L
EAH SITS FROZEN ON
the dressing-table stool in Rainey’s pink room while Rainey and Tina cross and recross the
lengths of hair they’re braiding flat against her head. If she’s breathing, Rainey can’t tell.