Acting Out of Character Part I

The glass fogged up with every breath Jackie took, obscuring her gaze for a moment before the opaqueness receeded again to reveal the street and people milling below.  It was so strange that she couldn't hear all the noise they must have been making out there in the spring sunshine.  It was strange enough that everything around her was so silent... and so filled with books.

Jackie had never gone to a book store.  She had been in them before of course, but she'd never really gone to one with the intent of going there.  She'd never thought that you could spend any great length of time in a book store.  It wasn't like shopping for clothes where you could try stuff on and imagine what people would think about it, and laugh about what your friends were trying on and telling them what you thought about it.  You couldn't have fun shopping for books.

Or could you?  Jackie imagined the stacks of books piled in Sean's room, and wondered if he had tried them on before buying them... taking one off a shelf and reading a bit of it to get an idea of what was inside.

It was the first Friday in as long as she could remember that Jackie hadn't been going somewhere with a friend.  When she had dropped her backpack off at home she'd told her mom she was going to spend the night at Brooke's house because they were having electrical work done, and all the power to the house was shut off and Brooke needed something to do because the TV wasn't working.

Jackie was proud of such a clever little story; it meant nobody from her house would be calling Brooke's, leaving her pretty much free to do anything she wanted until tomorrow morning.  She supposed that she might actually call Brooke in a while and see if she could spend the night... or she might just head home and say that Brooke had gotten sick.

In this state, she had no idea what she was going to do next.

Jackie knew, surrounded by the tall shelves of books, why she had come here.  She was trying, as she had been the entire week, to figure Sean out.  She didn't suppose she would be lucky enough to find a manual on antisocial teenage boys in the reference section, but Sean had to spend a lot of time in places like this if the books all over his room were anything to go by.  She could almost imagine him standing in the middle of the store and slowly turning, surrounded by innumerable possibilities.

Almost.  As far as Jackie was concerned the only good things about the store were its comfy couches and the view.

Jackie watched a skinny little girl with glasses perusing the shelves, and tried to imagine Brooke or Samantha in her place.  The thought made about as much sense as Sean trying on dresses at the Gap (she enjoyed a brief mental image of that.)  He would just find the idea preposterous.

Paper dolls playing dress-up...

Jackie frowned against the glass; Sean hadn't acted as though he had a very high opinion of her and her friends.  He clearly didn't have very many friends, but he still spoke as though people like her were the ones to be tolerated.

"You're a fragile person, Jackie.  You don't belong in this kind of world."

She fumed.  Who was he of all people to say things like that?  He was the one hiding away from the real world, not her.  He was the one who spent more time reading books than talking to real people.  He certainly had no room to talk!  She was at least trying to get to know what made him tick, while he had been too afraid even to try spending some time with her friends.  If he'd had any friends, she wouldn't even wait for him to make introductions (like he'd even do such a thing).

She watched three kids huddling in the middle of the milling mass of people down on the sidewalk below; they all looked like Sean's kind of people, sporting black shirts and baggy jeans.  Two of them (a boy and a girl) carried what looked like instrument cases; the boy gestured sweepingly with one arm and Jackie saw that his forearm sported flowery tattoos.  The girl must've been wearing at least a pound of jewelry in piercings, rings and bracelets.

She could just walk right up and introduce herself.  She wouldn't be bothered by their monochrome clothes or their black hair or the weird jewelry.  Even if they were as freaky as they looked, she could prove to herself (and Sean) that she wasn't so easily frightened away.

The third kid (whose back had been to her) turned around for a moment to survey the street behind him, and Jackie's sense of freaky traced another spike on the imaginery tape in her mind.

It was Sean; go figure.

"Hey!"  Jackie pounded on the glass in the hopes that she could somehow direct the sound down to where he was standing and get his attention.  "Sean!"  Some jerk had the nerve to hiss a shushing sound at her from across the store.  Jackie shot a look over her shoulder towards the offender and pounded on the window once more before rushing for the stairs.

Outside, she pelted around the corner and slid to a stop.  Directly across the street from her was the corner she'd seen from the upstairs window of the bookstore, backed by an open-air restaurant and too full of people to see Sean, though she could sort of make out the boy with the tatooed wrists opening up his instrument case and taking out a guitar through the crowd.

Jackie made a quick glance for oncoming cars and dashed into the intersection.  As she reached the far corner several things happened at once.  She caught sight of Sean and was lifting her hand to wave when her foot snagged on the edge of the curb, making her throw her arms out for balance and consequentially drop her bag.  As it hit the ground a high-pitched tone filled the air, and Jackie spent a full second fumbling for her cell phone before realizing that the sound was coming from the center of a newly formed crowd not two steps in front of her.  Luckily for her, they were all facing away, so nobody had seen her embarassing little topple.  She quickly composed herself and eased into the little crowd, eager now to find out what the noise actually was.

Abruptly, the single constant tone dissolved into a rapid-fire fluttering of notes, blasting their way lower and lower until Jackie could feel it in her stomach.  Past an elbow she could see the boy with the tatooed wrists standing in the middle of an open space with his eyes closed, striking those crazy plunging notes out of his guitar.  There was a tiny portable amp hanging from his hip, from which the full brunt of the noise was coming.

The boy hit the lowest tone he had yet and let it resonate, out and on.  Jackie could now see the girl with the jewellrey step forward, with a similar amp in tow.  Her guitar had a longer neck thingy, and when she struck her first note it was an octave below the one the tatooed boy was holding.  She winked at the crowd and then started slapping out a repeating series of bass notes that made Jackie bounce on her heels.  The boy, eyes still closed, let his note thrum for a few more seconds before really starting to play.

And he could really play.

Jackie had expected a series of dull and repetitive power chords trying to shock-blast their way into the minds of the crowd, knocking aside any other reaction than a kind of dazed confusion that could be misconstrued as awe.  Instead, the first few real notes fluted their way across the back of her mind like the voice of a person standing immediately behind her.  The sounds lapped at her body, begging her to sway in tandem with them.  Then another strand of music lanced in and waltzed around the first one, a kind of musical response.  This tune was higher and faster, but still smooth and clean and crystal clear.  The boy ushered in another flow of notes like the first, and then the two different melodies started to wrap around each other; it was a conversation in music.  As shapeless as they seemed, the boy's beautiful tones clung flawlessly to the scaffold built by the girl with the bass guitar.

Several people were tossing handfulls of change into the guitar cases which were now lying open on the ground, and one elderly couple that looked too conservative for such entertainment sat to listen on one of the nearby benches.  The boy kept his eyes closed the entire time, in a world of his own, shared only with the notes from his guitar.

Part of Jackie wanted to interrupt, to break the spell, to ask one or the other of these strange kids where Sean had gone, but the music kept her frozen in place, waiting to hear what would happen next.  The notes got faster and louder, building on each other from a conversation into a shouting match, scaling back up through the octaves to light on a pair of notes so close to one another that they registered as the same in Jackie's brain, but she could hear the pulsing fluctuation in volume that betrayed an impercievable dissonance.  The girl pulled out one last resounding chord and ceased altogether, silencing the strings with her fingers to leave only the warble of the boy's guitar.  Slowly, note by note, over the course of at least half a minute, he picked together an expansive chord.  All the tones stretched on and on, softer and softer.  For just a moment there was complete silence.

Then the boy's eyes snapped open.

The blast of music that followed was wild and free, and for some reason Jackie felt spontaneously compelled to laugh; two people in the crowd actually did.  The notes whistled and zinged and crackled up and down from the boy's fingers while the girl kept the key changes with resonating chords.  They played louder and faster until they both hit the same chord, held it for a few moments, and cut the power to their amps before nodding to the crowd.  It was all over so quickly that Jackie forgot to join in the applause.

As a few more bills and coins were tossed into the guitar cases, she remembered Sean and tried to locate him in the crowd.  Somehow he had managed to disappear entirely before it dissipated, leaving absolutely no clue as to where he had gone.  Jackie made an exasperated sound and considered going home right then, before taking a deep breath and turning towards the two freaky people who had mesmerized her only minutes ago.  They had packed up their instruments (money and all) and the girl was helping tattoo-wrist boy off with his amp.

Jackie took a step towards them and raised her voice, "Hey, uh, do either of you know where Sean went?"  They both turned and looked at her like she had just tried to communicate using a series of clicks and grunts.  She took one more breath and shakily smiled.