F*&! It, I Love You (Excerpt #1)

The bell spits everyone into the hall like coins from a slot machine. I cut sideways through them, head down, rings cold on my fingers. The music room smells like wood polish and dust and the glue they use to keep felt on hammers. It's quiet enough that I can hear my own breath.

The piano is old—brown, heavy, chipped at the corner where somebody carved initials years ago. I like it anyway. It doesn't ask questions. It doesn't tell me what to do. If I touch first, it listens.

I sit. Keys are cool against my skin. Middle C hums like a small engine under the floorboards. I try a scale, miss one note, and start over until the steps line up the way they should. When they finally do, something in my chest unlocks. Not a lot. Just enough air to make it to the next thing.

Ms. Alvarez stands in the doorway without knocking, coffee mug in both hands. Her lipstick is the color of a bruise. "You sneaking in again, Nisrina?"

"Door was open."

She smiles like I said a joke. "You play with good hands. You don't fight the keys."

"I fight everything," I say. "Just not this."

She nods like that made sense to her. "Winter recital in eight weeks. You should think about it."

I keep my eyes on the board. The varnish reflects a broken version of my face. "I don't like people watching me."

"They already are." She sips. "You might as well make them listen."

After she leaves, I play the first thing I learned last week, then the second thing, then something I don't know the name of that builds in me like a storm does—quiet, then louder, then loud enough that I feel it in my teeth. I stop before I give myself away.

The door opens without a knock. Of course it's Drew.

He leans against the frame like he owns it. Tall for his age, hoodie sleeves pushed to his elbows, knuckles nicked from skateboards and dumb ideas. He has that grin people mistake for friendly. It isn't. Not always.

"Thought I'd find you here," he says. "You ditch lunch again?"

"Cafeteria food makes me want to die."

"That's dramatic." He digs in his pocket and tosses me a plastic-wrapped cinnamon roll from the vending machine. "Eat or you're going to pass out on a high note and break your nose on the keys."

"Would be a good sound."

He snorts and comes closer. His eyes flick to my hands. "You get better every time."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're proud."

He shrugs, shoves his hands in his pockets, and looks around the room. "Lucy was looking for me." He says her name like something he stepped in. "She says she 'doesn't tease you anymore.' She says we should all sit together at lunch. She also says—"

"Oh." She blinks. "Didn't realize it was a private show."

"It's not a show," I say. "And it's definitely not for you."

Her mouth twitches. "Relax. I just came for Drew." She turns to him like I vanished. "We still on for—"

"No," he says.

She blinks again, slower. That's the thing about Lucy; she blinks like she learned it from TV. "You didn't even let me finish."

"I heard enough." He tips his head toward me. "We're busy."

"Doing what, exactly?" Her eyes flick to my rings, to the piano, back to me. "Super busy."

"Getting good," he says. "Some of us can."

Her cheeks go color-high. She smiles at me with all her teeth. "Break a finger," she says softly.

I smile back with none. "Try me."

She leaves. Her orbit follows.

Drew waits until the door clicks. "You know she likes me now, right?"

"She likes anything that makes noise."

He laughs too loud for the room, then quiets. "Don't let her talk to you like that."

"She barely did."

"I'll tell her to back off."

"You'll make it worse."

He looks at me like he has a pocket full of arguments and can't pick one. "Maybe I like making things worse."

"I know."

We don't say anything for a while. He drops into the folding chair by the wall, legs splayed, looking everywhere but at me. I play scales because scales don't mean anything. You can't read a person's life from a scale. When my hands are warm enough, I play the piece Ms. Alvarez gave us—Bach, the one that sounds like a hallway with a thousand doors. Drew tips his head back and closes his eyes like the ceiling has answers.

When the period ends, he walks me to class and then to the next one and then after school waits by my locker without asking if that's what I want. It is. I just don't say it out loud.

We cut across the parking lot where cars cough out the last of the day. He kicks a bottle cap down the asphalt like a puck. "You going to do that recital?"

"Probably not."

"You should."

"Why? So Lucy can throw gum in my hair from Row Three?"

"I'll sit in Row Three." He says it like a promise he's already made. "She won't move."

"Drew."

"What?"

"Stop volunteering your body for my wars."

He grins. "What if I like getting hit?"

"You don't."

"I like hitting back."

"That, you do."

We walk until the school is behind us and the neighborhood remembers itself—laundromat windows sweating, corner store bells clanging, someone's radio glued to the same station all year. The air tastes like cold and fryer oil. The leaves here don't turn pretty. They go from green to tired to ground.

My foster house is three blocks away. We slow down like those last steps are expensive.

"You coming in?" I say. I don't look at him when I say it.

"Nah." He scrapes his shoe along a crack in the sidewalk. "I'll wait till you go inside."

"You think the porch is going to attack me?"

"Just go."

So I do. I unlock the door, step into the smell of old carpet and something sweet trying too hard to hide something sour. I keep my head down. I keep my voice small. I keep my feet quick. I put my backpack in my room and I breathe into my hands twice like I'm trying to warm them, then I come back out, lock the door again, and walk to the corner where he's still there, exactly like I knew he'd be.

He looks relieved and mad about it. "You good?"

"Always."

"That doesn't mean what you think it means."

"Maybe it does." I angle my head at the street. "Come to the music room tomorrow morning. Before first period."

His face changes. "You'll play?"

"I'll try not to." I can't help it; the corner of my mouth moves. "I'll fail."

He bumps my shoulder with his, careful. "I like when you fail on purpose."

"I never do anything on purpose," I say. It's a lie. Control is just the long word for it.

The music room in the morning is better than the music room at lunch. Light slides in sideways and the dust floats like it has nowhere to be. It's just us. Drew sprawls in the second row with his feet up on the chair in front of him, hands behind his head, pretending he doesn't care so I don't have to.

I warm my fingers on the back of my neck, then on the rim of the coffee mug I stole from the teacher lounge. The first notes come out thin. I start over. I always start over until the thing stops sounding like an apology.

"Play the one with the ghosts," he says.

"They're not ghosts. It's a prelude."

"Same difference."

I roll my eyes and play it anyway. It's the one that walks up the stairs and never gets tired. When I hit the place where the left hand has to trust the right, I don't look. I feel. The room folds around the sound, and the air gets heavy in a good way, and for a minute I believe I could build a whole life out of the distance between two notes.

When I'm done, I put my hands in my lap. I don't look up yet. My heart is doing something it doesn't normally bother with.

Drew is quiet. That's how I know he liked it.

He clears his throat. "You should do the recital."

"I knew you were going to say that."

"Because I'm right."

"No." I look at him finally. He's grinning and trying not to. "Because you want to watch me win so you can punch something after."

He laughs at that, head thrown back, soft for exactly one second, then hard again. "Maybe. But also because I think the piano is the only thing you let touch you."

The words land. I don't move while they do.

I pick at a chip in the wood below the keys. "Don't be poetic," I say. "It's gross."

"Sorry. Won't happen again."

"Good."

We stay like that awhile. He breathes. I listen. The wall clock limps toward first period and the room refuses to care.

Ms. Alvarez pokes her head in, sees us, and doesn't say a thing except, "Door closes in five, lovers of noise."

"We're not—" Drew starts.

She's already gone.

He looks at me, amused and offended all at once. "We're not."

"I know." I stand. My legs forgot they belonged to me for a second and then remember. "We're—"

"What?"

"I don't know." The truth tastes like penny metal. "Stop trying to name things that aren't done becoming themselves."

He thinks about that. "Fine. But when this becomes something, I'm naming it."

"Good luck."

He follows me out, shoulder almost brushing mine but not, like he's practicing a language where almost means more than yes.

Lucy stops me after third period. She uses the trick where she leans on your locker like she owns the door. Her perfume is too young for her; it smells like a pink candy that stains your teeth.

"I'm not going to sit with you at lunch," she says, like I asked. "But I will stop talking about you if you stop talking to Drew."

"I don't talk to Drew," I say. "He talks to me."

"Same thing."

"No," I say, "it isn't." I close my locker slowly so she has to step back or lose a finger. She steps back.

"You think you're better than me because you can play the piano," she says. "It's just hitting things until they sound nice."

"Exactly." I smile. "You'd be terrible at it."

Her face twitches. She lowers her voice. "You don't even have a real family. You should learn some humility."

My smile stays where it is. "You should learn a better weapon."

She blinks again—TV blink—and walks away fast enough to make her hair complain.

Drew appears at the end of the hall like a storm you forgot you ordered. "What did she say?"

"Nothing new."

"You want me to—"

"No."

He slams his locker anyway. It echoes. People look. We ignore them.

We skip lunch. I go back to the music room; he follows. I don't play this time. I lay on the stage, breathe in dusty curtain, count the burned-out lights above us. He sits on the edge, feet dangling, looking like he wants to ask twelve questions and knows I'll answer none.

"You're doing it," he says finally.

"What."

"The recital."

I turn my head. "Am I?"

"You already said yes. In your head. I heard it."

"Get out of my head."

"I like it in there. It's loud."

I stare at the underside of the grand piano, at the dark belly where the sound lives before it comes out. "If I do it," I say slowly, "you don't wait for me by my house that day."

"What? Why?"

"Because I need one thing that's mine, start to finish. No guard dog. No audience except the audience. I walk there alone. I walk back alone. You go home and punch your pillow and tell it how proud you are."

He leans down until his face blocks the lights. His eyes are almost kind. "I don't have a pillow."

"Then punch the wall."

He laughs. "Deal."

"Say it," I say.

"Deal," he says again, softer.

We don't shake on it. We don't have to.

The final bell eats the day. We split at the corner where we always split. He points up the street like he's giving me directions to a place I already live. I go. I don't look back just because I want to. I wait till I'm at the porch. Then I do.

He's there, hands in his pockets, face up in the wind like he asked it a question it can't answer. He doesn't wave.

I go inside and the house breathes around me the way it always does—shallow, careful. I shut my door, sit on the floor, and put my fingers on my knees like they're keys and I'm deciding which ones to press next.

Winter is eight weeks away. I can learn a lot in eight weeks. I can make the whole thing listen.

I can make it mine.

About the Author

Jessica Steuer is a 24-year-old inspiring author. She hails from the Windy City of Chicago and is currently studying abroad in England.