Music Makers: Epilogue thing-a-ma-jig

Chad paced back and forth nervously in the empty room. His agitated gaze flickered between one white wall and another, his stomach flipping nervously inside him. The room was small and had two doors; one on each end, and Chad glanced apprehensively toward the door that led to the stage. He wrung his hands together, bounced up and down in his tight shoes, and ran a nervous hand over his gelled hair. He was in the process of shaking himself in an effort to release his nervousness when the door opened and his friend Gary walked in.

Gary, about Chad’s height but more sturdily built, gave Chad a quizzical look. “Chad, it’s a musical concert, not basketball playoffs.”

The sixteen-year-old musician smiled at his friend, but the tension inside him didn’t ease up any. Gary approached him and clapped Chad’s shoulder. “You’ll do fine,” he tried to reassure his anxious friend. “You’re the youngest artist I know who has sold as many albums as you have.”

Chad winced. “Sure, but I’ve never done anything this big before.” He dared to peek out the tiny window of the door behind which a stage and an auditorium waited for him. “Is he there? Did he come?”

Gary’s expression took on a hint of regret. “Your mom said he got caught up in some work and couldn’t make it.”

Chad sighed, closing his tired eyes and rubbing them with his hands. “Figures.” Opening his eyes and peeking out the window again, he asked, “What if I mess up on stage? What if they hate me?”

“Don’t worry; if things get too crazy, I’ll pop out and do the macarana,” Gary said, grinning. He began to demonstrate, adding in his own moves and throwing in a few dangerous-looking poses. Chad laughed and pushed his friend good-naturedly toward the door.

“You’re funny, you’re funny, now get out. I need to focus for a moment. See you after the show, ok?” he said.

“You know it,” Gary agreed with a smile as he disappeared outside the doorframe. As soon as his friend was gone, Chad covered his face in his hands for a brief moment, his mind spinning. For the last few years, music had been his focus. It was all he ever thought about, all he ever dreamt about. And now, his dreams were becoming real, and he was drawing a blank. He pressed his fingers together as if he were praying and placed his thumbs under his clean-shaven chin. He had prepared for this. He could do this. This was his music. His life. It was time to share it with the world.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
A young woman, about twenty-three or so, slipped in to the crowded auditorium. She had just begun walking toward the front of the auditorium when she saw a plump figure stride across the stage {which was barren save for a piano and two thick, red curtains that had been pulled aside moments ago}. The figure apparently was wearing a microphone, for his voice carried over the room marvelously. “May I present to the public for the first time in live concert, the wonderful, the young… Chad William Brent!”

The young woman began to move rapidly to the front row as the lights dimmed dramatically. The applause began to die down and another figure came on stage in a sharp tuxedo and what looked like leather, European shoes. She was close enough now to see his face, and his features astounded her. Who was this young man and what had he done to her little, eight-year old friend?

His hair was slicked back, contrary to the bed head hair she remembered from years ago. A firm chin had replaced the chubby one she could see so clearly in her mind. The pudgy cheeks of the child had been replaced by this man’s well-defined bones, and he had now grown in to his ears that had previously been too big for his head. Wordlessly, she stepped closer to the stage, as she hoped to glimpse his eyes. He turned and smiled to the crowd, but his gaze passed over her blindly in the dark audience.

The woman smiled slightly to herself. He had his father’s eyes. But his father’s eyes had been shifty and uncertain, whereas this man’s hazel eyes seemed honest, and hopeful, but somehow wise. He had the face of a man, and he had the clothes of a man, but his eyes were a mixture both of childlike sincerity and mature wisdom. The woman allowed a small smile to touch her lips again. He was nervous. She could tell by the way he walked and awkwardly shuffled the papers on the piano bench after sitting down hesitantly. But he was willing. And that was enough to make the woman smile.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Chad’s experienced eyes wandered over his music for a moment, his stomach still retching inside him. He let out a long breath of air, mentally steadying himself and focusing on the papers in front of his face. He placed his hands lightly on the piano keys and sucked in a breath. And then he played.

His fingers knew where they were supposed to go. They knew the beat, the rhythm, the tune, the tone. They knew how to wrench the heart out of their listeners, and how to make their eyes shine. They began to weave the tune depicted in front of them by the sheets of music, and they were pleased and began to weave faster and faster. Chad tried to contain his excitement because he knew rushed music was hardly enjoyable. The notes he played were sure and strong, and he began to feel quite at ease performing in front of the large group of people. Soon, his fingers were playing unconsciously, and his eyes began to scan the audience he could see from his peripheral vision.

He counted face after face…and then his eyes fell on a person he had not expected to be there. His fingers nearly froze at the sight of his father, and he struggled to keep a steady rhythm. At the thought of his father there, he suddenly grew more nervous. What if he messed up? What if he failed in front of his father? His father, who expected so much of him?

The young woman in the audience was studying the young musician carefully. “Slow down, Chad,” she thought to herself. He was going to blow it. He had lost his focus. She began to move again, trying to get to the first row.

Chad stared at his dancing fingers in disbelief, wondering how they had become so out-of-line. His nightmare was coming real. As the sweat began to form on his forehead, he desperately glanced up at the audience again.

He saw her. He would know her face anywhere, but how much older and sadder it seemed! She caught his desperate look, and met it with a calm one. Her dark eyebrows were raised as if beseeching him to relax. A trace of a smile lingered around the corners of her lips.

Suddenly, a voice from the past echoed in his mind. “Just keep playing. Stop thinking. Let your fingers play without your eyes. Let your heart play without your mind.”

Before Chad could think, his fingers were playing a different tune. This wasn’t just a tune. It was a song. A plea. A feeling. An emotion. It was a living thing, and it began to circle about the room, touching people’s hearts inside them and stirring thoughts in their minds. His song spoke of hope, of life, of joy, and yet it sang without words, as it spiraled around the room gently and reached inside his audience.

Chad felt calm all of a sudden, and a sense of peace began to settle over him. He wasn’t playing from the sheets of paper in front of him. He was playing from his memory – he was playing from his heart. He gazed at his hands for a moment, a grin twisting the corners of his lips, and then he closed his eyes. His song began to soar.

The young woman’s smile softened. This was the tune he had played for her eight years ago – the tune they had made up together on the bench of an old, school piano. Its simple melody was more complicated now, and its emotion seemed more intricate, as if each note sang of a different feeling than it once had. She wrapped her arms around herself and closed her eyes, twisting back and forth as if suppressing the urge to dance.

Chad’s fingers harmonized the melody they had created, like two voices singing in unison. With a satisfied feeling, he ended the song, choosing to let the last chords ring in the air before finishing them off softly with a few notes that flowed from the instrument like water would overflow from a glass.

The moment he had finished his song, the audience awoke as if from a spell and clapped so loudly that Chad could have sworn it was thunder. People began standing up, smiles erupting on their faces – young and old, and in between. His eyes were drawn first to his father, who was clapping enthusiastically with a grin on his face. Next, Chad’s eyes wandered over to the woman he had seen.

She was standing next to the seats on the first row, her white teeth showing in a brilliant smile as she joined in the echoing applause. He smiled back at her, before waving and bowing at the audience. Quickly, the announcer came back on and showed him off the stage, introducing the following act as Chad darted off the platform and into the prep room he had started in.

The woman watched him go, and as soon as he had disappeared, the smile gradually faded from her face. She glanced around her at the smiling people, cheering and clapping and whistling. Slowly, she stepped backwards and began moving to the back of the auditorium, blending in with the people standing around her. She had seen him play. She had heard his music. She was done here. It was time to start running again. Without having spoken a word, she left the auditorium almost as quickly as she had entered it.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Chad burst through the door and into a brick wall. The brick wall turned out to be Gary, embracing him. Chad laughed into his friend’s shoulder. Gary pulled back and looked at the musician, grinning.

“Dude, where in the universe did that come from?” asked Gary, wonder evident on his face.

Chad couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. “I don’t know… it… it kind of just happened. It was like something I knew I could do. Like something I’d done before.” Chad ran his hands through his gelled hair, unconsciously wrinkling and spiking it in the process. “And I had. It was a memory.”

Gary laughed. “When did you remember that, man, cuz I’ve known you since we were two, and I do not remember hearing that ever in my life!”

“There was a woman here tonight. She was with me the first time I played that song. Except she was younger. And I was younger,” Chad began to say quickly, trying to explain to his friend.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?” Gary asked. “You’d think that would be something important one should tell one’s best friend.”

“Because I was like eight or something. All kinds of things happened when I was eight that I didn’t think were worth mentioning.” Chad shrugged. He dashed over to the other door. “I have to see if she’s still there.”

“Wait, you can’t go out there now,” Gary insisted. “There’s another guy playing. If you go out now, the crowd might swarm you and you’ll end up crowd surfing before you can say ‘Beethoven’.”

Chad sighed. “You’re right,” he admitted.

An hour later, the two young men emerged from the waiting room and mingled with the crowd. Chad’s joyful face was replaced with a confused one. People surrounded him, asking him questions, and requesting his autograph, but the one person he wanted to see couldn’t be found. Among the many faces pressing in on him from all sides, hers was not there. With a sinking feeling, he remembered the last time he had seen her. She had disappeared in exactly the same way.

Gary, who had never left his side, leaned toward Chad’s ear and asked in a whisper, “So where’s the chick who inspired your music?”

Chad’s eyes were still scanning the crowd, but he wasn’t hopeful. “I don’t know.”

“Are you sure she’s even real?” Gary attempted to tease.

Chad didn’t catch his friend’s cheerful tone. It felt like his heart was plummeting downwards into his stomach. In a bewildered voice, his muttered half to Gary and half to himself, “I don’t know.”

Music Makers

*no, I didn't give up on the other story, i just wanted to share this short story wit ya. Enjoy and leave comments, no matter how critical!! Gracias, amigos!!*

Chad ran down the hallway, tears streaming down his face. The old school walls peered down at him degradingly, dismissing his childish sorrow as petty, eight-year-old nonsense. The principal’s office was the last door on the right, but Chad ran to a wall near a wooden door and leaned against it, crying. His tiny fingers felt along the splintering wood door, his mind not really focusing on what it was feeling.

Suddenly, his flow of tears subsided into a mere trickle, and he lifted his head and listened. What was that? He pressed his ear against the door. A slow tune wound its way through the door to his ears, diluted and muffled. Sniffing and wiping the tears from his eyes, Chad cautiously opened the door and stepped inside.

The room he was now in was plain, and had four ordinary white-washed walls. However, these walls were covered with lots of papers and posters, depicting how to properly hold instruments, and what certain musical symbols meant. In the small room, rows of trombones, tubas, flutes, clarinets, and drums could be seen leaning against racks or perched upon shelves on the walls. What grabbed Chad’s attention the most was the large, grand piano in the middle of the cramped room directly in front of a small window near the ground.

A teenage girl sat on the piano bench, her fingers dancing over the white and black keys, stroking them, urging them to sing. Her plain hair was tied back out of her face, revealing relatively ordinary features beneath two distracted eyes. As soon as she heard the door open, the distant look on her face evaporated and her hands froze, the music dying in the air. She stared at him for a moment, not sure what to say.

Chad wiped his hand over his nose, sniffing, and fearlessly approached her. “You’re not dressed for school,” he told her.

Her eyebrows lifted, but she smiled. “I don’t go to school here. I’m just passing through.”

Chad was now right beside her, peeking over the piano bench up at her. His bright, brown eyes shifted to the pale sheets of music resting against the piano. “That’s pretty music,” he commented.

The girl followed his gaze to the papers. “Oh, I wasn’t playing from those.” As if to prove it, she shuffled the papers together and flipped them over so only their white backsides were showing. “I’m not very good at reading music.”

Chad clambered onto the bench beside the girl, as she scooted over to allow him to sit on her right. “Music can be read?” he asked in a disbelieving tone.

“Mhm,” the girl replied. She reached into her hoodie pocket and pulled out a wad of paper. She unfurled it and straightened it to the best of her ability, then held it in front of the little boy. “See these marks?” she asked, gesturing. “Each one is like a word of a story.”

Chad’s eyes widened. “Can you read them?”

The girl nodded. “These I can read. I wrote them.”

The boy traced one little finger down the wrinkles in the page, his mouth slowly opening at how many confusing lines and dots he counted. Curious, he asked, “What do they say?”

The girl smiled again, and rubbed the wrinkles smooth. Then she placed them upon the piano and positioned her fingers lightly upon the keys. A gentle sound emitted from the piano, and slowly a song began to grow inside the tiny music room. It started softly first, with a simple melody drifting its way through the air carelessly. Then, a series of deep, echoing notes combined with the light ones , like a skilled tango – each part weaving its way around the other, and yet each complimenting its opposite and adding to its sweetness. The tune rose high, and then dropped low, and then twisted and turned. It was sad, and then happy, and then soft and still before growing to an almost deafening volume.

As the girl played, her eyes regained their far-away look, like she was remembering something that had happened a long time ago. Slowly, the notes grew spread apart, and then they wound down to a gentle stop. Chad stared at the girl with confusion. She grabbed her music and stuffed it back into her pocket before facing her new friend again.

“The music said you were happy. And then you were sad. And then you were happy again.” The little boy tilted his head, almost like a bird – innocent and curious. “Why were you sad?”

The girl’s mind struggled to find a simple answer to his simple question. “I used to be sad because my daddy left me. That was a long time ago. I don’t remember much about it anymore. I’m happy now because I have a daddy and a mommy who love me very much.” The teenager studied the little boy’s tear-stained cheeks.

“Why were you crying?” she asked, in the same manner the child had asked her.

His forehead grew creased and his lips twisted into a frown. It was almost funny how serious he looked, but the girl didn’t laugh. “Because Tommy Blankley called my daddy a hobo.”

The girl raised her eyebrows. “Did he now?”

The boy nodded seriously, so seriously in fact that he almost fell off the piano bench. “Yes. But my daddy’s not a hobo. He’s a street musician,” Chad said in a proud tone. “And so I hit Tommy. And then Mrs. Summers told me to go to the principal’s office. She didn’t believe me that Tommy called daddy a name.”

The girl’s wise eyes examined the little boy’s, and she asked slowly, “Do you know what makes me feel better sometimes when I’m sad?”

“What?”

“Playing the piano. Making Music.”

Chad crossed his arms. “I can’t make music. I can’t read music.”

“You don’t need to be able to read music to play it,” the girl informed him. She glanced around the room for a moment, thinking. “Sit really still,” she said suddenly. “Listen.”
Chad uncrossed his arms and stuck out his neck, as if that would help his straining ears to hear. He didn’t hear anything at first, and was about to tell the girl so, when suddenly he heard the birds chirping outside. He struggled to turn around backwards on the bench to peek out the open window. There, he saw wind chimes, and as soon as he laid eyes on them, a lost gust of wind found its way to their metal pipes.

The girl watched him carefully, her small smile creeping back onto her lips. “What do you hear?” she whispered. He looked up at her, and then at the piano. One small finger reached out to the D key. He was afraid she would be mad, or tell him he was too little to touch the piano, but she smiled encouragingly and he cautiously pressed a note two keys to the right of the one he was pressing now.

“What else?” the girl asked, urging him on. Slowly, he began pressing more keys, and a halting, stuttering tune began to begin in that small, dusty, band room. “Good, good,” the girl murmured. “Keep playing that,” she said, and she reached out with experienced hands to the keys in front of her.

Deep, solemn notes began mixing with his high, cheery ones. The mixture was rich, and knowing that he helped create it gave Chad a content feeling, like letting the sun dry you after you swim, or biting into a chocolate bar. The simple melody he created was contrasted by her harmony, and the song began to swirl around in the air around them.

“Don’t worry about hitting a wrong note,” the girl said, after one of his fingers slipped. “Just keep playing. Stop thinking. Let your fingers play without your eyes. Let your heart play without your mind.” And soon, Chad stopped wondering how the tune would sound when he pressed certain keys; he found he already knew. His fingers wandered over the slick, smooth keys with purpose, and he liked the sound they made.

The minutes soared by, but eventually their heart-felt song shrank and slowly stopped. The girl and the boy stared at each other. Breaking the silence, the girl told Chad, “You got it in you, kid.”
“What?” Chad asked, alarmed that something was inside him.

She laughed. “Music.”

Chad stared at his hands, as if looking for some sign that she had seen. “My mommy says I’m too little to make music. My daddy teaches me in secret, though.”

“My dad used to teach me, too. Hey, will you promise me something?”

“What?” he asked, curious.

“Will you promise me that no matter what anyone tells you, you’ll still make music?” she requested, her kind eyes staring into his young face. He nodded solemnly. She smiled. “Good. I think you’ll be pretty good some day.”

“As good as you?” he asked in a hopeful tone.

She leaned closer to him and whispered as if confiding a secret to him. “Better than me.” He gasped. She laughed. The sound was nice to his little ears. “I think you should go to the principal’s office before you get into more trouble.”

Chad sighed and slid off the old piano bench. He walked over to the door slowly, criss-crossing his feet in a child-like waddle. “Hey, kid,” the teenager called after him. “What’s your name?”

He turned around and stated proudly, “Chad William Bent. What’s yours?”

“Denise Beasley,” she lied. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Will you come play here again soon?” he asked, hopefully.

Regret twisted the girl’s stomach. “Maybe,” she lied again. He smiled at her, revealing a hole where a tooth had recently fallen out. With a skip, he was out the door. The girl’s eyes focused on the door he had disappeared behind. “William Bent,” she whispered. Her father’s name. She stood up and walked over to the low, open window, brushing past the wind chimes and sliding into the bushes outside.

A few minutes later, Chad pulled his teacher by the hand into the old, abandoned music room. It was silent and empty now, save for the dusty instruments that had witnessed everything in the room only moments before.

“She was in here, I promise,” Chad insisted, running to the bench and peering under it as if to find his friend hiding underneath.

“Chad, there’s no one here. Now if you don’t come with me right now, you’ll be in even more trouble,” his teacher chided him. Chad wasn’t listening. At least, not to her. His eyes and ears were trained on the metal wind chimes swaying softly by the open window. They were creating a quiet, light tune, but there was no wind…