As I walked away, I knew that Kristen was a bit more than disappointed. I wondered what I could have done to avoid doing that to her. I was still a bit new to this girl friend/boy friend thing. However, Kristen had admitted that she had some sort of secret that she was keeping from me, and I now had my own secret idea for Kristen, one that I hoped she’d really like. I just needed some private time to put things together. I truly hoped that Kristen would understand.
Once I got home, I went straight upstairs. I was looking for a 45 single that I had purchased a while back. Of course, it was nowhere to be found.
Knowing that Merry sometimes "borrowed" some of my singles, I found her in the laundry room. I asked her if she had that particular forty-five, and she said it was in a stack on the turntable in her room.
"I’m going to borrow it back," I told my step-sister. "You can have it tomorrow."
"Sure. I was starting to get sick of the song, anyway."
I found the record where Merry had said it would be, and took it into my room. I had a pair of Senheiser headphones and plugged them into my receiver. I put the 45 center adapter into the turntable and programmed the automatic mechanism to repeat the song continuously.
I looked among my school supplies and found my loose leaf binder that had fifty or so blank pages of music staffs on it, a gift from my music teacher last year.
I was considered a sort of music prodigy as a kid. My mother had taught me how to read music before I could even read fairy tales. I played the old upright piano that was in our den, which I still doodled on occasionally, especially when trying to figure out the notes to a song.
In elementary school, I had taken up a few instruments, but found that my piano training served as a disadvantage at first. You see, most orchestral instruments are tuned to different keys. When a trumpet plays a middle-C note, for instance, the actual pitch that comes out is a B-flat note. Expecting the sound of one note and hearing a different pitch was very disconcerting.
However, I persevered, and managed to learn to train my ears to transpose the "expected" sound of the notes I played, and I managed to get quite good on the trumpet. Not wanting to sit on my laurels, I tried other instruments, eventually doing well enough to be considered pretty versatile.
In junior high, I became a jack of all trades in music class. My music teacher stayed with me after school to teach me things that they normally don’t teach in music class, like arrangements, the basics of conducting, sight transposition (looking at, say, music written for trumpet — which is a B-flat instrument — and having it play in the correct pitch for, say, an E-flat instrument like an alto sax), and other advanced subjects.
During some high school special events, like musicals, I was "loaned out" from the junior high to play some specialized instruments, or even a regular instrument, like the trumpet or the piano. The high school teacher had dealt with such "prodigies" before, but I managed to impress even him.
Anyway, I was determined to listen to this one song, over and over, and get it down on paper. Then, I’d transpose it for a few instruments. I only had the rest of the afternoon and this evening to complete my work.
After a couple of hours, my mom called me down to supper, and I ate quickly, wanting to get back upstairs to my music work.
"What are you doing up there?" Mom asked.
"Scoring something."
"You have a girl up there?" my step-father asked.
My mother looked daggers at him.
"No. I meant that I’m trying to capture a song from a record onto music paper."
"Sounds weird," my step-father said, having little interest in music.
My mother actually smiled. The two of us shared a love for music. "Getting a head start in music class already?"
I grinned. "Something like that."
Merry offered to do the dishes for me in return to allow her to come into my room later and watch me "score" a song.
"Sure, Shortcake. You may need to knock loudly, since I’ll have the headphones on."
"Okie dokie," Merry said, happy as a clam.
When I got back upstairs, I found a headphone Y-adapter that I had once used with Jack to listen to "forbidden" albums ("The First Family" and an album by Lenny Bruce are still ingrained in my memory). I found a pair of studio monitor headphones that I knew would impress Merry — I preferred the lightness and the better sound reproduction of the Senheisers — and hooked the studio monitors into the Y-adapter as well. I had to turn the volume up a bit to compensate for the dissipation of the signal.
I got back to work.
I heard Merry’s knock, and invited her in. I put the monitors on her, and showed her what I was doing.
"You mean, rock musicians can actually read music?" Merry asked.
"Well, in reality, probably not very many of them," I grinned.
Merry didn’t interrupt me, but eventually got bored watching me put what appeared to her to be useless circles and lines on my score sheets. The only part that interested her was when I put the words underneath the vocal notes. In fact, the two of us had an argument on how the first two words were to be spelled. She loved the first few lines of the song. Merry was yawning after about an hour of this and excused herself.
I finally managed to get the song completed. There was more work to be done, like reducing the scores to individual parts. I figured that I would be able to do some of that at school, since it was merely copying what I had on one page onto another, and traditionally, the first day of school usually didn’t entail much work, although I wasn’t quite sure what to expect for high school.
I looked at the time, it was close to midnight.
I finally turned off the record player, wondering how much damage the diamond needle had done to the record with all the excessive playing and shrugged. It was my record to begin with, even if Merry had taken possession of it.
Patty arrived for my morning blow job, her morning back rub, and breakfast. She told my parents that she’d be staying over Kristen’s starting that night, since her mother was still away, and Kristen’s family had offered her to stay in one of the guest rooms.
In the car, Patty turned to me and said, "So, what do you want Patricia doing today?"
Oh, damn! I had been so busy scoring the song last night that I hadn’t really thought of anything.
"Um… it’s a surprise," I said, not untruthfully. If I figured something out, it would be a surprise to me!
"Cool. Kris says she’ll meet us here in the parking lot."
I smiled. I had a surprise in store for Kristen today.
Patty pulled into the school parking lot, and easily spotted Kristen’s red Camaro. Kristen was leaning against the back of her car, talking to some other girl.
"Oh, fuck," Patty said. "That’s Dale."
I had heard some things about Dale, none of them nice, mostly from Kristen and Patrice.
By the time that Patty found a parking spot, Dale had left, much to my relief. I had my bag of tickets in my attaché case that I brought with me to school. I knew that I shouldn’t use them for revenge, but it comforted me to know that I had them available.
Kristen’s face lit up as she saw Patty and me walking toward her. "Hi, Jim! Hi Patty!"
We all gathered in a three-way hug.
Kristen said, softly, "The cravings are still there, but they’re not getting worse."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"If I can go a week and they still don’t get any worse, then I can probably go any length of time. At least, that’s what I’m hoping."