Forte

I made three friends in my new town, some middle-of-nowhere place where there was no distinguishing accent, and in some square-shaped state in the middle of the country. They were Elizabeth, Savannah, and Kyle. After four months, I met Lizzie and Kyle. They lived next door to each other, and Kyle was my stand partner in orchestra. We both played viola, choosing to spend our time not with the flashy solos or the sweetest sound or the finger-killing endless pizzicato, but the art of blending in and being just another hand pushing the best to the top. Lizzie was a bassist, and she was okay, but not good enough to get in the honors program on her first try.

The second time, we both made it in. We spent the afternoons of eighth grade walking together from our last subject to the nearly deserted orchestra room, slaving over the complex music provided by our three instructors. That was when I met Savannah, a shy cellist with a big heart.

I went to the movies with her and her brother – plus his rambunctious football friends – and we ate pizza for lunch by the fountain and listened to the noon on a Wednesday chatter and the bubble of water spilling from the top tiers and falling down to the pool cluttered with coins, coins that used to be wishes but were now just spots on the bottom of the fountain, collecting whatever drifted around down there and forgotten within the next week. She told me, as she fished in her brightly colored knit purse for a stray penny or dime, that she did wish on anything and everything she could, because her mom had cancer a while back. The doctors beat it, but a year later it came back and she got a brain tumor. She had surgery, but something tiny went wrong during it, and her mom was slowly dying. Even though she would die eventually, actually pretty soon, Savannah still wished for her to get better.

We wished together for her mom to get better. A month later, Savannah didn't come to school. I went to her house, and I found out her mom had finally died in her sleep. She moved to somewhere in the northeast within two weeks to live with her aunt, uncle and cousins. I never saw or spoke to her other than a tearful goodbye through her car window. "Don't be so upset," she told me. "Yeah, we'll miss each other, but there's no such thing as a real goodbye, only a see you later."

Decrescendo

On a Monday in the February of my eighth grade year, one of my orchestra teachers didn't show up. Her name was Mrs. Browning, and she had two little girls that I knew from staying after for the honors program so many times. One of our other teachers, Ms. Finn, told us what happened to her.

"On Friday, Mrs. Browning had a really bad headache, and she hadn't been feeling well, so she went to the clinic," she began. "The nurse told her to go to the hospital because it could be really serious. But you guys know how stubborn she can be sometimes, and it was the beginning of the day, so she decided to tough it out."

"That night, it hadn't gone away, so she did go to the emergency room. The doctors did some tests, and she has a brain tumor. She's having surgery tomorrow, and we'll tell you how it went once we know. Hopefully everything will go all right, and she'll be back at school teaching once she recovers."

I was crying. Of course, I could only think of my best friend's mom. I remembered from one of the times we were over before, how she would cry out and wouldn't be able to sleep, how she lost her ability to move and speak the way she used to, of how Savannah would whisper to me in the hallway about how she wanted her mom to get better because she couldn't stand the suffering she had to go through.

And, of course, the hats that she had spent all her time knitting and crocheting. Her mom had her head shaved for surgery. Savannah never knew that she wouldn't leave the house after that, too embarrassed in her orange wheelchair that you'd try to ignore, yet you couldn't. I had one of those hats, a sky blue beanie with a tiny white flower. It was soft, and I loved it more than anything else I owned. If I knew where Savannah was now, I would get some of those hats and give them to Mrs. Browning.

That is, if she came back to school.

I wished I played bass like Lizzie, so I could hide behind something while I cried instead of letting them roll down my face and onto the viola, too busy flinging my bow across the strings to stop and dry my tears.

After a week, I asked how the surgery went. Ms. Finn just looked at me and sighed.

"Not well. Something might have happened, but they think she'll be all right," she said with a fake smile. "The tumor was right on the occipital lobe. It controls aspects of our ability to visually recognize things. So she'll be okay if anything small did go wrong, just she might be a little… off. She might not be able to play instruments, read, or put names to faces. We just don't know."

"Will she live?"

"Sweetie, nobody knows right now."

"Oh."

Stacatto

Mrs. Browning had been fine from the surgery, but she had moved to Russia to be with her sister. I missed her, and I could barely go through orchestra without just stopping in the middle of a piece, wondering what she would lecture us violas on doing right or wrong.

But in that time, around April, I started getting really bad headaches.

It was a spot above my left eyebrow, maybe an inch higher, that constantly ached and bothered me relentlessly. I tried drinking more water, taking medicine, and getting different glasses. Nothing helped. I told my mom, and she took me to the hospital. They ran some tests.

I sat alone, holding an icepack to my forehead, wondering what was going wrong with me. I fell asleep, letting the icepack fall from my face and rest on the bed beside me. I awoke and saw a doctor and my mom smiling at me in this sympathetic way. They started explaining things, how I had some kind of crazy tumor on my brain, on the frontal lobe, and that's why I had headaches. If everything went well, I would be fine, just have a small scar on my scalp for the rest of my life.

I was crying, and I was so tired, of all this death and crazy tumors and everything going wrong, so done with life and just done with everything. I didn't care if I died. I honestly didn't care at all. They did have to shave my head to get to the tumor. I donated my hair to Locks of Love.

And something did go wrong during the surgery.

"Kristen," my mom said, while she sat in my bed holding my hand, "it's so awful. And it's crazy, such a coincidence, that two people you know and then you would have a brain tumor. Life is odd like that. But sweetie, at least you lived."

"Yeah, at least I'm alive."

Who cares if I have to be in a wheelchair forever because I can't walk - or move, really – and I can't make decisions because I say some crazy, irrational things, and I no longer feel happy? I'd rather be dead. My life was like a glass vase my mom used to have, then I broke it and it shattered. There was a little space in between everything, and time seemed whacked up.

Then again, that could be the whole crazy-brain thing.

I did go back to school, not meeting anybody's eyes, this girl that used to be so amazing at everything. The girl in a wheelchair that couldn't hold a pencil to do her homework. The girl that got asked – kindly, of course – to leave the honors orchestra program because she couldn't hold her instrument. I did leave honors, but I stayed in orchestra. I couldn't play, but every day I tried to move my arms enough to place my viola on my shoulder. Every day, I just couldn't get my arms and hands and head to move the right way. I'd hum along with the music, though, since it was the best I could do.

And I rosined other people's bows for them.

Pianicimo

I never even bothered doing anything at school. I couldn't hold a pencil, my speech was broken, and I had no friends. I made D's and F's all the time.

At age sixteen, I got a job at an ice cream shop wiping down the counters. I got fired for knocking things over too often. I got a job at a bakery putting things into boxes. I got fired because I dropped a lot of things. Eventually I tried tutoring. The kids said they didn't like me, and their mothers found other tutors with a whole, perfect brain that could hold a pencil.

I did volunteer work at an elementary school, reading books in the library to the kindergarteners that didn't like me because I never showed them the pictures – it was too hard to hold the book out to them – and I read funny.

My life was over, destroyed, because of me. A tumor is made of your own body tissues. I had turned against myself and slowly, I was killing myself, but not on purpose.

The doctors said it that I might not have the emotional capacity I used to, after the surgery. But I was still feeling angrier and sadder than I'd ever been in my life before the tumor.

Legato

My mom made me try harder. Every day, she pushed me to try to wheel myself around, talk without stuttering, and hold a pencil. I tried everything for months, until I could have a ten-minute conversation without stuttering or pausing too much and I could get around better than I had before.

So I tried to push myself, and I would each day pick up my viola from the dusty case in the corner and make sure it was in tune, and I would lift it up and try to place my bow where it was supposed to go. It took two months, but one day in the living room, darkened by the clouds, I unpacked some sheet music from long ago. There was dust floating around me, and I got a paper cut in the process, but soon the snowy paper was resting on my old music stand, decorated with notes that would form a song.

I picked up my viola and held it against me for a minute.

Then, slowly and fluidly, I placed it on my shoulder, set the bow on the strings, and began to play. My mom said I was amazing.

I knew I was rusty, and I practiced until my arms ached, striving for being better, to make myself the viola player I'd always wanted to be. For the entire weekend, I did nothing but play, until by Sunday afternoon, my fingers left little bloody marks behind on the fingerboard. I had been whole, and then I unwillingly destroyed myself, like knocking down a tower made of blocks. And now, I was stacking it back up. It would never be quite the same, but I had to try. I had to repeat ninth grade, because I'd failed everything. I also had to repeat orchestra, but at the middle school level.

Every day, at 2:30, I would wheel myself two blocks over to the middle school and into the orchestra room. Then I would pick up my viola, unpack my music, and rebuild myself until I was finally whole and not another broken girl.

A/N: Like? Love? Hate? Feedback please! I tried really hard on this, and I feel like it's something better than anything else I've done. Not because of the content, but because it was something I could pour my heart into. My life isn't easy, nobody's is. My best friend's mom died just like the fictional mother in this story. My orchestra teacher did have a brain tumor, and she was in surgery on Tuesday. I don't know how it went yet, but I'm hoping with everything I have that she'll be okay. I have more problems than other people's brain tumors, but in this light, they seem frivolous and would probably bore you all to death. But trust me, it's stressing me out. My grades aren't as good as I'd like them to be – I have a B in everything except science, which is awful by my standards– and I have very few friends. I won't go on boring you guys to tears anymore. So just tell me what you think, okay? I don't care if you hated it. Tell me if you did!

And I am so sorry about that! My doc manager is screwy and I didn't realize how it made it into one paragraph. Sorry!

The title is because I was inspired by a piece of music, and how it'll have different dynamic levels. For those of you not into music, a decrescendo is when the dynamic level (volume) gets softer, but not all at once, kind of fading into it. That's how I pictured her life, but going from good to bad to worse and eventually getting smoothed over. I didn't mean to steal a title. But another word with a similar musical meaning to decrescendo is diminueto, which I could use if a lot of people have a problem with it.

Again, sorry about the doc manager! I fixed it as soon as I saw the reviews!