Don't hate me for this, guys. That's all I have to say.
It's been probably an hour since I got Pitch's message, and I'm still angry. I just can't find a way to calm down. I've already tried playing some classical pieces as violently as possible and kicking one of the chairs in the practice room repeatedly, but my anger is deep-seated, like when mom told me about setting me up with Jack in the first place. Maybe I've been angry for a while and just needed a good catalyst to bring it to the surface again.
Now I'm just sitting in a corner of the room, leaning against the wall, scribbling on my lined paper. Not notes, and not lyrics, although they definitely could be repurposed to fit into a song, I guess. I can hear faint, insistent buzzing from where I left my phone on the piano, but I don't get up to retrieve it. If it's my mom, I can call her later. Same with Angie. Tooth knows not to contact me while I'm at camp, I said I would get a hold of her if I needed something. And if it's Jack, well, he knows where to find me. I stop writing for a moment to stare at the words that cross the page in disjointed lines and let their message sink in, then retrace them over and over again.
This is how Jack finds me.
"Hey," he says, peeking his head around the corner of the door so it's all I can see of him.
I glance up at him for a moment, then look back down and concentrate on my words. "Hey," is my only response. I'm still mad.
"I tried texting you."
"I didn't have my phone with me, sorry. What did you need?"
He walks to the piano and frowns when he sees my phone laying on it. He picks it up and begins to lightly toss it from hand to hand. "Nothing, really. I was just gonna see if you wanted to meet a little sooner than what we planned."
"Did you think of a story?"
"Maybe."
I really do look up at him this time, and hold his gaze for a few seconds. "What do you mean maybe?"
The remnants of his frown vanish from his face as he grins suddenly. "I mean, I may have thought of a possible idea for a story in a song."
"Well enough of this lollygagging then! Let's hear it!"
"I take it then that you didn't think of anything?"
"Nothing. Unless you consider building a bookshelf song-worthy material." I'm not exactly sure where that came from, but the memory is suddenly conjured of me and Anna attempting to help our father assemble a cheap bookshelf that we got from the store. He ended up giving us the most meaningless tasks to get us out of the way while he worked, like putting all the screws and nails in order of height and color. The memory makes me smile.
"That's the only story you came up with?" Jack removes his hat and sweeps a hand through his hair. My eyes follow the action and I can't help but mourn the loss of his white hair again. He looked so good with white hair…well, he looks handsome no matter what, but he looked especially good with white hair. Stop it, Elsa.
"No," I say defensively. "But it's the only one that wasn't really cliché or anything."
He nods. "I think that's gonna be the hardest part. Finding something original."
"Definitely. Now, what was your possible maybe idea?" The more time I spend talking to Jack, the less angry I am. Even having not seen him for almost three years, he still has a good effect on me.
"Okay," he starts, seating himself on the piano bench again, "so I was thinking that instead of writing a song about a really specific thing, we should do it on something that everyone could relate to, you know? Avoiding clichés in the process, of course."
"Sounds good so far, you get any further?"
"Just vague ideas, really. Something that everyone struggles with, something that is a kind of universal suffering that we can speak to."
I snort at that. "You want to write a song about universal suffering? That sounds uplifting."
Jack shoots me a look of exasperation mixed with a strange slyness. "Not universal suffering, Clara," he answers in a slow voice, as if he's explaining something to a child, "something that speaks to universal suffering. Like, 'we acknowledge your struggle, keep going'. Good, right?"
"Oh." I shift my gaze back down to the notebook in front of me and stare at the words I've written. They're not mine, or at least, I didn't write them originally. I didn't string them together in their specific order, but I've repeated them to myself enough to take a small kind of ownership of them, I suppose.
"What did you write?" Jack asks, and in a flash he's towering over my hunched position in the corner.
"Nothing," I answer quickly, but he snatches the notebook from my hands. "Hey!" I shout, but he's not paying attention anymore.
After a short minute, he lowers the notebook and stares at me. "What?" I ask, again prepared to defend myself from him gaze. He looks at the words again and then back at me. "This is like what I was talking about. Badass encouragement." He starts to grin slowly. "I like it."
"Can I have my notebook back now?"
He returns it to me without saying anything and then goes back to shuffling my phone between his hands. I completely forgot that he had it, but I don't ask for it back immediately. Right now, Jack seems to be in a state of mind where he would be difficult about it, and I don't really want to work hard just to get my phone back.
"Read it out loud."
"What?"
"What you've written. Read it out loud. I want to hear it spoken."
I shrug. I have no self-consciousness because I didn't write it, so I jump right in.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
As I recite, Jack just puts his head down and slightly nods over and over. When I finish, he raises his head again and fixes me in his blue stare. "That's good. Who wrote it?"
"William Ernest Henley," I respond at once. I don't know when I started to retain information like this, but I remember names and words like an encyclopedia. "The poem's called Invictus," I say, "which is Latin for-"
"Unconquered." Jack finishes it for me.
"Yep."
"That's really great. Let's keep that around."
"I always do," I say, and it's true. My notebook is full of good things like that, words that make you feel something. I carry it with me so that I can add things to it if I find a quote or anything that speaks to me.
Jack starts to say something, but cuts his words off and looks down to the device he's holding in his hands. "Your phone's ringing," he says, tossing it across the room to me. I catch it easily and check the caller. Mom. I set it aside and look back at Jack. "I'll just call back later," I say, and he just shrugs in agreement. "Now, back to the song…"
When Jack and I finally go our separate ways for the night, I return to my original seat on the bench in the green space, where I listened to Queen this afternoon. It feels like seven years ago that I did that. Jack and I didn't get a whole lot further, but we did compile more good songs and poems and words in general that could help point us in the right direction. And when I say "compiled", I mean I thought of them and recited them for Jack so he could hear them, or he looked things up on his phone and read them out loud so I could approve of them.
I take my phone out of my pocket and check it, finally. I have a voicemail from my mom, plus two missed calls, one from her, one from dad – which doesn't normally happen – and a text message from my mom as well. I check the message first.
M – Call me when you get this.
How cryptic, I think to myself. Mom's not usually one to be sneaky and withhold information, so I am truly interested now. I decide to check the voicemail next, but it just says the same thing, only now I feel an anxious twisting in my stomach. Mom's voice sounded worried and maybe a bit frantic, but that might be because I didn't answer the call in the first place. I hit the call back button and wait for her to answer. She does so on the first ring.
"Elsa! Where were you? Why didn't you answer?"
"I'm at that camp, mom, you know that," I say. "I was working with my partner on songs, and then I got this text message from some creep saying that he knew who I was, and then-"
She cuts me off. "He what?"
"He knows who I am. He knows my full name. My real name."
I expect her to be shocked, but she brushes it off. "We'll have to handle that another day. Elsa, sweetie, there's been an accident."
I can feel the blood draining from my face. "An accident? Anna?"
"No, she's fine. It's…there's no easy way to say this. It's Angie and Kevin."
Angie and Kevin?! Now panic is starting to rise, I can feel it turning my former peace of mind into a whirlpool of chaos. "What happened to them?" I ask, although I'm dreading the answer.
"After dropping you off at camp, they came down to Burgess to visit for a while. On the way back to Arendelle they…"
"They what?" I almost scream into the phone.
"Their vehicle was hit by a semi-truck whose driver fell asleep and lost control."
"And?"
There's silence on the other end of the line, or there would be except for the faint sound of my mother holding back sobs. Tears automatically form in my eyes, and there's the odd sensation that my chest is caving in on itself.
"They didn't make it, Elsa."
"No…" I whisper into the phone. I can hear my mother's voice very faintly, but the pounding in my ears keeps me from making out words. I let my phone slip from my hands and land face-down in the grass, then cover my face with my hands and lose myself in the whirlpool of darkness.