Nine
Adina
APPARENTLY I HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW to play the viola. I fuck up my beloved Debussy prelude for the eighteenth time in a row. I have ogre fingers that cannot find the right notes. The piece is meant to be played très calme et doucement expressif: calmly and gently expressive. There is no gentleness in me today.
“Try again.” Arjun flips the sheet music back to the beginning. He taps a pen on the music stand with staccato clangs. “From this measure.”
The prelude starts quiet, gets loud.
Crescendo.
The conversation at the clinic rings in my ears, warring with my prelude.
Decrescendo.
Soon there will be sessions and experimental medication and research studies. I might never be independent again.
Crescendo.
“Focus.” Arjun’s voice slices up my thoughts, juliennes them like vegetables. There is an edge to it. I’ve never played this terribly.
My bow slips out of my fingers, falls to the carpet. Silent tears burn behind my eyes, and I ball up one fist tight, tight, trying not to break down.
“Adina, are you all right? Is something wrong?”
Not something. Everything. The tremor in my fingers spreads up my arms, earthquaking my shoulders. What if it’s starting already? No. No. That’s ridiculous.
Sinking into the chair, I shield my face with my hands, hiding from Arjun, from the portraits of Beethoven and Dvořák and even Claude Debussy himself, who is disappointed I’ve botched his prelude.
Footsteps. Arjun is coming closer. Something touches my right shoulder—his hand. Oh. He rubs it tentatively at first, back and forth, then in circles. Everything in me becomes acutely aware of the few square inches of acrylic his fingers are stroking. My skin is electric beneath it. He has never touched me quite this way before, this intimate, this deliberate.
“Adina,” he says softly, pianissimo. “Adi, please talk to me. I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s the matter.”
I drop my hand from my face to find he’s kneeling in front of me. Concern has widened his eyes, and all his earlier harshness has disappeared. He is the Arjun I love again, the Arjun who gave me a cartoon character Band-Aid when I skinned my knee. I wish I could melt off this chair and into his lap.
The tension in my shoulders eases the tiniest bit, and he moves his hand away.
I’ve never wanted to tell anyone about this family heirloom of a disease. But I’ve always been able to talk to Arjun: when school is unbearable, when I’m frustrated with Tovah, when I’ve had a bad day.
I inhale, filling my lungs completely. “My mom . . . she’s sick.”
“Sick how?” He sits back in his chair and turns it toward me. Our legs are almost touching. He is wearing striped socks.
“Do you know what Huntington’s disease is?”
“I’ve heard of it, but I’m not sure how much I know.”
“Most people don’t.” Leaving out my own genetics, I explain what the disease is, how there is no cure. And then: “My mom has it. She was diagnosed four years ago.”
“I’m so—”
“I have it too,” I blurt, then backtrack. “I mean, I will have it. It’s genetic, and I took a DNA test. A few weeks ago. I—I tested positive. I found out today.” I stare at the floor. “And my sister tested negative.”
Arjun blinks a few times. He lifts an arm as though to reach for me, but then drops it, as though hugging is crossing a boundary he’s already made clear he won’t cross.
“I . . . I had no idea.” He shakes his head. “Sorry doesn’t seem to encompass it, but I’m sorry. So sorry. That’s . . .”
“Shitty. It’s shitty, and there’s no other word for it.” There isn’t enough air in this room either. I will never get enough air into my lungs.
“They find new cures for diseases every day,” he says. “You’re still so young.”
There is the word I hate again: “young.”
“It’s not fair,” he continues. “God, you’re so talented. It’s not fair at all, not to anyone.”
“I know it’s not fair. But—it’s happening.”
Silence for a few moments. I become more aware of how close his chair is to mine, and that nearness distracts me from everything else. Delicate black lashes frame his eyes, and I ache to run my fingers through his neatly combed hair, to mess it up.
I am not some vulnerable fawn, and I won’t let my result turn me into one. I want to be a girl he cannot resist. So I scoot my chair a centimeter closer to his and say, “What happened that day I tried to kiss you?”
“Adina—”
“I’m serious. Why did you stop me?”
He sets his jaw, which is shadowed with stubble. “I told you. I’m your instructor. And you’re only seventeen.”
What he doesn’t say: that he stopped me because he doesn’t like me.
“I’m not seventeen. I turned eighteen three weeks ago.” The age of consent in Washington is sixteen, anyway. I have looked it up.
“What?” A crease between his brows vanishes almost as quickly as it appears. Then he shakes his head like my age doesn’t change anything. “It’s not a question of whether I like you or not, or how old you are. This is—I don’t do things like that. I can’t do things like that.”
“Kiss people?” Even when I am not talking, I part my lips, painted with an extra layer of Siren red, in the hopes he won’t be able to look away from my mouth.
The forehead crease reappears. I’d like to iron it out with my lips. “Even if you weren’t my student, it’s still . . .” He gropes for the right word. Wrong. Inappropriate. “Unprofessional,” he finishes.
I love seeing him flustered like this. I already feel more like myself. “You still haven’t told me you don’t want to.”
“Adina.”
He has to stop saying my name like that. Like a growl. Neither of us dares move for a long time. The power I discovered with Eitan, I want it with Arjun. I want to tell him all the ways I’d touch him, with my hands, with my mouth, how I’d make him feel so, so good. How he’d make me feel good too. How I’d wrap my legs around him in his chair and scrape my nails down his back . . .
“I think about you so much,” I say. “I think about touching you all the time.”
He grips the arms of his chair, skin stretching tight across his knuckles. My breath catches in my throat, my heart going more allegro than the final movement of a Brahms sonata. It’s going to happen. It’s finally going to happen. Then something changes in his face, and he gets to his feet, rolls up his shirtsleeves. Paces.
I get to my feet and follow him, weaving a few fingers through my wild hair, hoping he will imagine what it would feel like for him to do the same thing. He is only a couple inches taller than I am, and we are nearly eye to eye. There’s half a foot between our chests. If we exhaled at exactly the same time, we’d be touching.
“I see how you look at me. How you’re always finding ways to touch me. It’s not accidental. I know it. Haven’t you—haven’t you thought about us? Together?”
I let my gaze drift toward his belt buckle so he understands what I mean by “together.” Rest-two-three-four, rest-two-three-four.
He shoves his sleeves up even more, past his elbows, showing more of his bronze skin. “You’ve had a lot of stress today,” he says slowly. “You should be spending this time with your family. Not here.” He adds more distance between us, stands beneath Beethoven. “I’m so sorry.”
I wish he’d stop apologizing.
“You want me to go.”
“I think that would be for the best.”
I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek, so hard I taste metal. “Arjun. Don’t you find me attractive?”
He pauses, and for a second I’m certain he won’t even answer me, considering he’s skirted all my other questions. Instead he does something I’ve never seen him do: he rakes a hand through his hair and makes this sound halfway between a grunt and a sigh, this action that seems at once frustrated and flustered. It’s not something Arjun the teacher would do. His hair is sticking up, but he doesn’t seem to care.
He puts his back to me, so I can’t see him when he speaks. “You need to go, Adina. Please. I’m not going to ask you again.”
Somehow I buckle my viola back into its case and shove my arms through my jacket sleeves. Somehow I find my way to the door. Somehow I stumble down the hall and into the elevator, where I punch-punch-punch-punch-punch the first-floor button five times in a row.
Age seems to matter so much when you’re young, but to me it’s a meaningless number. I should be able to relate more to the kids at school than to my twenty-five-year-old teacher, but I don’t. I can’t tolerate any of their insipid conversations about who cheated on who and who asked who to homecoming and who drank so much they threw up at whoever’s party last week.
This, with Arjun, isn’t going to happen. I have a finite number of minutes before I start dropping plates the way Ima did at the beginning, before I lose coordination in my fingers, before I can no longer stand in front of an audience and do the only thing I’ve cared about for years. Despite all that, I cannot have what I want.
I hate him for sending me away.