I haven’t seen him since Wednesday. Thank god I at least took a shower. Still, I shrink a little, as if hunching my shoulders will hide me from him—he’ll think I’m ugly like this, all swollen with sickness. I wipe at my nose in case there’s runaway snot I’m not aware of.

If he is disgusted by my sickly appearance, he doesn’t show it. He holds out a covered Tupperware bowl. “I brought you some soup.”

“Thank you,” I say, moving to the side and ushering him in. “I’m still…I mean, you’re not worried about germs?” I can’t believe he’s here. This is…sweet. He brought me soup. “How did you know which room was mine?”

“I ran into Daphne yesterday and told her I wanted to bring by some food.” He smiles, and his eyes are kind and tinged with…worry? About me? This can’t be the same guy who was so furious at me just last weekend.

I shut the door behind him, and he sits on the edge of my unmade bed. My cheese and crackers are still sitting lamely on my desk, half-eaten. The soup looks way better. “Can I eat it now?” I ask.

“Please.” He looks around the room, as if he’s trying to learn about me from my décor choices. There isn’t enough on my side to tell a person much though, unless you consider a lack of possessions telling. I suppose it is. My shoulders slump.

Garrett scoots back on my bed until he’s leaning against the beige cinder block wall. “Go ahead and eat, Malory. Mind if I flip channels?”

“Not at all.” My voice sounds stuffy and nasal. I can’t believe he wants to hang out with me when I’m like this. I touch my nose again, sure there must be a rogue drip, but feel only dry skin, cracked and raw from tissue abuse.

The soup is still warm, and it has a comforting smell that reaches me even through my stuffed-up head, like the Campbell’s I ate as a kid but with more herbs. Homemade. As if Garrett would give me soup from a can. I grab a spoon from the cutlery tray on top of the mini fridge and sit down at my desk to eat.

It’s delicious, unsurprisingly, but I can only eat half the bowl because my stomach is too small after days of not eating. I turn in my chair to face Garrett. “Thank you so much. That was incredibly thoughtful.” He’s so relaxed, leaning against the wall like he is perfectly comfortable here with me, like this was all meant to be, like we’re a real couple, and I think again how much he looks like Superman with his thick dark hair, those impossible blue eyes. I want to touch him, but I don’t want to get him sick.

He pats the bed beside him. “Come sit by me.”

“You sure?” I scrunch my nose. “I don’t want to pass my germs to you.”

“You can sit by me without breathing on me,” he says.

I laugh nervously and promise not to breathe in his direction.

He’s turned the TV to an old movie, and there’s some bucktoothed chubby kid lifting his shirt and jiggling his pasty stomach fat. By the pissed-off look on his face, I figure he’s doing it against his will, like he’s been bullied into it. I feel my forehead wrinkle. “What the fuck is that kid doing?” I climb over Garrett’s outstretched legs and sit on the other side of him, laying my head on his chest.

“You’ve never seen Goonies?”

“Um…no?”

“It’s a classic. You’re missing out.”

I snuggle down further against Garrett’s chest, warmed from the soup and languid from my flu, but I’m only there for a minute before I have to reach across him for a roll of toilet paper to blow my nose. He doesn’t react at all.

“You’re pretty brave coming near me when I’m sick like this,” I tell him.

“No big deal.”

I toss my tissue in the trash and lay my head on his chest again. He’s stroking my hair, and as the kids in the movie argue about something or other, my eyelids become heavy. I can’t believe how nice he’s being, how he’s caring for me. It’s like that day with the manatees when he knew exactly what I needed.

“Hey, Malory,” Garrett says, nudging me. “You liked the soup, right?”

“It was perfect,” I say, and it was. It’s been years since someone took care of me when I was sick. I nuzzle my cheek against him.

“I’d love for you to give me a little thank you gift.”

I raise my head a little to look at him. “Thank-you gift?”

He remains still, but his eyes flick downward, just for a microsecond, to his zipper—and it finally registers that he’s asking for a blow job. Before I can think to stop myself, the words come tumbling snippily out of my mouth: “I didn’t know there were strings attached.”

He stiffens. “No strings.” His voice is neutral. “Just a little thank you.”

“I mean…but I’m sick.” My heart accelerates. Is he fucking serious? I push up to sitting and give him an incredulous look.

“It’s a small thing, Malory.”

His smile is easy, lopsided, but my chest is on fire. I sit back a little more. “Garrett, I’m so congested I can hardly breathe.” I thought my voice would have been enough of a clue for him. My pulse throbs in my ears, hot and defensive.

He fixes his eyes on the TV. The kids are riding their bikes. I sit staring at him for a while, waiting for him to relax, waiting for him to acknowledge that it isn’t fair to expect this of me, but he is utterly still, does not look at me once. A muscle twitches in his jaw. My nose is running again, so I tear off more toilet paper to blow it, and still he does not move. I reach over him to toss the used tissue in the trash beside the bed. Still nothing.

Understanding settles like an anchor in my mind: Garrett didn’t come here so he could cheer me up with some soup. He came here to get his dick sucked. And I, fucking naïve idiot that I am, fell for it. My head feels like it’s stuffed with Silly Putty, I can’t breathe, and now I’ve got to deal with this fucker wanting me to choke myself on his dick. Fuck him. For the first time, I am truly angry with Garrett and I don’t care if he knows. “Do you honestly think it’s fair to ask me to do that?” I say, and suddenly I’m almost shouting: “Listen to my voice, how congested I am. This isn’t a joke, this isn’t—”

His fist is coming at me now, too fast for me to duck, there is no way around this—

His knuckles hit the cinder block behind me with unbelievable force. I’m frozen in place, strung up with fear, afraid that I’m next, afraid that he’s broken his knuckles. Has he hurt himself? I want to check his hand, wrap it in bandages, get him ice. Why do I care?

He’s breathing through gritted teeth, seething wetly, his face gone red with fury or pain or both.

I look down at his hand—at his bloody knuckles. “Garrett, I—”

He grabs me by the throat and shoves me into the wall. The back of my skull cracks against the cinder block, sending lightning bolts of pain into my already-throbbing head. His fingers are tight around my neck, constricting my airway. Please. I’m begging, silently begging him to have some compassion for me, to not hurt me anymore. I hate that even with his eyes narrowed and his lip curled in anger, he is beautiful. I truly do not deserve to be with someone so beautiful. Tears run heated lines down my cheeks.

His fingers tighten. “Can’t you just suck my fucking dick?”

Something inside me ruptures, breaks apart a little, because who am I now, what am I but a girl who has to decide whether to give a blow job or…or what? What will he do to me if I don’t? I want to vomit the soup I’ve just eaten—it sits in my belly like a poison. Everything from this beautiful man is a poison.

“Okay,” I whisper, and he releases me, and right away I’m unzipping his pants and pulling him free, his penis already hard, as if terrifying me excites him. But that is exactly the case: terrifying me, belittling me, turning me into a shell of myself, that is what gets him off.

And so, though I can barely breathe, I bend over his lap, take him in my mouth and work him, somehow managing to gasp air through the little cracks at the edges of my lips. Once I need to stop to blow my nose, but he waits patiently, smirking, maybe enjoying how difficult it is for me all the more since I defied him. His injured hand is curled in my hair, dripping warm blood onto my scalp, my temples, my cheeks. I think some of it might even have trickled into my mouth, but I ignore the coppery taste, just move up and down on him, faster and faster, praying he’ll come quick so I can breathe again, so he will just fucking leave. When he finally spews in my mouth, it’s endless and disgusting, and as his fingers tighten around my hair, his hips and legs tensing beneath me, I force myself to swallow, breathe, swallow, breathe.

---

Monday morning. Professor Yarvik is sitting across from me, tightening her bow, her cello between her legs even though her knotted hands cannot skitter up and down the fingerboard as they once did. She doesn’t normally bring her cello out for lessons. If she needs to demonstrate a hand position, she borrows mine.

“Malory.” Her eyes are on me, and I have a vague idea of what she sees, because I saw it myself only moments ago in the bathroom mirror. I do not look well. My illness lingers, but it’s more than that—my eyes are sunken and vacant, my forehead tight with the strain of knowing that everything in my life is wrong but that I am powerless to undo it. My throat seizes every few minutes like I’m going to vomit. I keep hearing the sickening crack of Garrett’s knuckles hitting the wall, feeling the warm blood trickle down the side of my face as I stifled my gag reflex and tried desperately to find the air. That choking feeling is still with me.

I cannot breathe.

Yet I’ve been obsessively checking my phone for a message from him. Even now I become wet with ecstasy thinking of that first time he set me up on the counter and made me beg him to put his fingers inside me. I think of that day on the riverbank, too, my face smashed into the mud, how even then I’d known it was not a game, but I’d gone ahead and liked it anyway.

I’m a very sick person.

Yarvik is still watching me. “What will you play for me today, Malory?”

I stare blankly at her, daring her to pry. I’m not even sure why I’m here. I almost stayed in bed this morning, my back turned to Daphne as she tinkered about the room getting ready for class. I skipped my morning practice with Bethany, too—didn’t even message her. I think I’m here now because it’s easier than explaining myself. Or maybe because staying in bed would be a step closer to falling apart completely. My mom used to spend an awful lot of time in bed.

“Why don’t you play me your audition, and we’ll take it from there.” Yarvik leans back in her chair and smiles encouragingly.

So I play, using the same robotic movements that seem to take over every time I pick up the bow lately. I can’t make the notes sing anymore. I trip over my fingers when I get to the tricky parts, and then I begin shaking. I can’t pull myself together. I want to stop, but I force myself to bumble and lurch through the whole miserable movement, and Yarvik lets me, her face a mask as she watches me struggle.

When it’s over, I can’t even look at her. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say, staring down at my cello strings.

She’s quiet for a moment, and when she speaks, her voice is clear and matter-of-fact. “You obviously do not want to tell me what is happening to you, Malory, and as you are an adult, I cannot force you to talk about it. So I will try another tack: Have you tried putting whatever is going on with you into your playing?”

I chew my cheek for a long time before answering her. I think of how I got angry and attacked my instrument downtown, how I earned so much money, and what Garrett thought about that. “Maybe sometimes. When I improvise.”

“You improvise? I didn’t realize. Would you be willing to show me?”

Do not let other people hear you play that way. I want it to be just for me.

But it’s not as if Garrett will show up to my lesson, right? “I can try.” I take a deep breath, trying to recall that feeling I had downtown, that feeling I got when I played for Garrett, when the fire welled up inside and took over. I liked that feeling—it wasn’t meant to be sexual, and it isn’t fair that Garrett has tarnished it and perverted it and made it something that is just for him. And yet…I want it to be only for him. I like that he wants to possess me, or at least, to possess that part of me. It means I’m not completely nothing after all.

Yarvik nods and rests her hands against the shoulder of her cello. “Please.”

This time it only takes me closing my eyes, touching the hairs of my bow to the string, and soon I’m playing just as I played downtown, just as I played for Garrett in the music room the day he threw me against the piano. I can still feel the cold ivory digging into my forearms, can still hear the dissonance of the tinkling keys as I fell into them. God, what a sick, sick song that was. I can play it, in a way—I can let the memory of that biting pain course through my fingers and into my cello, an unsettling facsimile of that music: inadvertent, unharmonious. But it’s mine now. The pain started with Garrett, it started as his, but now I’ve transformed it and made it my own. And he might claim me as his private performer, and maybe I am, but music, even if I were willing to surrender it, is not something that can be taken. I rip a dissonant seventh chord from my cello, Fuck you, Garrett, and then Yarvik stops me. She’s looking at me sternly, eyes narrowed, and she says, “Well. You’re very, very angry, aren’t you?”

“Is that how it sounds to you? Like…anger?” My face heats. I’m relieved she didn’t see what Garrett saw, what he said everyone saw, but this music that erupts from me is so much more than anger; it is something like indignation. Pride, even.

She does not reply.

I chew my cheek some more. You just belch out a bunch of random notes that make no sense and you think you’re making music? I wonder if she thinks what I just did was anything remotely like music. Or did she hear someone ripping at her cello strings—a pathetic, cacophonic racket?

Finally she says, “So, do you think you could put…whatever that was…into the Elgar?”

So she thought it was music. I take a deep breath and nod, and though part of me is reluctant, I almost love the idea of this tiny betrayal. My back straightens, and when I set my bow on the string, my hand is shaking again. I breathe several long breaths, filling my lungs and letting my shoulders drop with each exhale. My mind teems with the rich, jarring, percussive notes I’ve ripped from my cello in those moments I lost myself downtown and with Garrett.

And yet it is not anger or indignation or pride that comes out as I begin to play those sad opening strains. It is hopelessness. I submerge myself beneath the notes, stunned by my rapid shift in mood but powerless to stop it, until soon I feel as though I am the music, like all I have to do is sing it in my mind and it will rush out. Then the hopelessness falls away, and the music turns into memories. I can almost hear the soft chords rising from the orchestra in support as I remember…

My mother. I think suddenly of her heart-shaped face, her kind eyes. She had blue eyes like mine, pretty white teeth and a broad smile that, when she laughed, made everyone in the room want to smile and laugh with her. My eyes burn, but I grit my teeth, barely stopping the tears from falling, forcing myself to keep on. I close my eyes and try to hold onto a picture of my mother at her most beautiful: when she was happy, before she gave up and let my father’s lies consume her.

But in my mind, her smile falters. She wilted like a sick plant under my father’s whispers, grew sallow and hunched and sad. She was drained of vitality long before she took her own life, though we didn’t know—how could we? In the cruel weeks before she did it, Liza and I thought she was coming back around to herself when she told our father to fuck off, that he couldn’t tell her what to do. He slapped her for it, and we crouched on the floor of the kitchen with her, proud and hissing and ready to fight. He stormed out that night.

Her smile then had been victorious, and I can see it clearly now as my bow runs across the strings, my cello singing out the image of her proud shoulders as she peeled herself from the floor. We thought she was finally going to make him leave for good. But he came back, and a week later I was stammering into the phone for someone to please send an ambulance.

How do you sing that? How do you play that? I exhale and dig my bow into the string, tear the notes from my instrument, reset the bow and tear the next, the next, the next, and then the chords turn and roll and become an elegy, and now I’m singing my mother’s death. Elgar, you wrote my mother’s death, how did you know?

I keep playing, flipping through every memory of my mother that I have, especially the parts where I should have done something, where I could have fixed it. I could have saved her. I sing the entire movement this way, and I understand now that the emotion I keep trying to identify isn’t pride or incredulity or indignation or even hopelessness, no, not even that. It’s regret. Regret that I didn’t save her. I finish the final note and let my bow come to rest on my knee. I’m panting like I’ve just finished one of Garrett’s sprints, and Yarvik is crying with her face buried in her hands.