stereo {hearts} // adele

“Ma, I think there’s something messed up in my head.”

Mom pauses in her progress across the kitchen, eyes concerned as she peers at me over her cup of coffee. “J, if this is about what the doctor said, you know that it’s –“

“I know, Ma. It’s not about the doctor.” Despite the statement my gaze finds its way to the little orange plastic bottle perched on the counter, the same place I slammed it down yesterday when I came home from yet another doctor’s appointment, yet another upped dosage of pills that I’ll never take my world moves too fast for me to function but those pills make it too slow and too foggy and they hold me down and turn my world of color into a monochrome just like everything else here anyway. But the sight of it makes something like revulsion paint itself thick along the backs of my teeth, so I turn away before I can get distracted i can never stay on one thing for too long because i have to go run move by it, focusing instead on the odd curiosity etched into my mother’s face as she folds herself into a chair across the table from me, clearly ready to listen. That’s one of the great things about her. The rest of this District might think that nothing I have to say is important, but Mom knows that I really do have something under all these words, if you listen long and close enough. “I’ve been having weird dreams… well, dream. The same one, over and over, and I don’t know what it means.”

“What about?” she asks serenely, taking another sip of coffee and doing one of those mom-things passed down through maternal figures since the beginning of time where she brushes my hair into place even though I like it this way. Even though she’s been underground for more years now than she lived Above, she still carries with her the knowledge of the world she grew up with in Twelve, things like how certain teas can calm your stomach down when you’re sick and how sometimes your dreams can tell you more than you think you know. She used to do it all the time when Devyn and I were little, weaving stories of the future out of our bedtime fancies, but she stopped as we grew and our skepticism grew with us, Dev finally snapping one day that we were too old to believe crap like that. I don’t know what makes me think that there might actually be something to dreams now, years after I stopped trying to analyze the warped insides of my own mind. Desperation? Sounds about right.

"Every single night for the last few weeks... l wake up, and l'm reaching out."

"For what?”

"l don't know,” I say, frustration pulling taut at the edges of my voice as I screw my eyes shut and try with every tiny bit of focus things always slip through my fingers like i’m trying to catch smoke and nothing and no one ever stays I possess to just remember what’s so important for me to get to in my slumbering consciousness. “I think... There’s always music. Violin music, actually. It’s Debussy’s sonata for violin, every time. And it’s like I’m running after whatever’s making it, and it gets louder the closer I get but I can never find where it’s coming from. And sometimes I can hear someone laughing, I think, but then I always wake up when it’s just right there, out of reach.”

"What is?"

"l don't know." It comes out in an anguished groan, fingers carding through my hair and messing it up even more than usual. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

Mom nods slowly over her coffee for a second, mulling it over. “Well, I’d say it means that something’s coming.”

“What is?”

She smiles cryptically. “I don’t know.”

“That’s so much help, Ma.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be meeting that Dempsey boy about playing the piano for Isabella’s senior recital?” I groan again, folding my arms on the table and burying my head in them. As if my Saturday wasn’t shitty enough, waking up at all hours of the night with freaky dreams, now I have to actually go out of my way to make contact with Kaelen Goddamn Dempsey and all of the egotistical snark that he hauls around with him at all times. So now, sleepy and cranky and really not in the mood to put up with anyone’s bullshit, I have to hike all the way down to the District Plaza with Isabella’s sheet music in tow (I could have had him come here to pick it up, but honestly I don’t want the creepy little fucker knowing where I sleep). The things I do for the Glee kids, I can’t even.

“Yeah. Guess I’ll be back later. Don’t wait up if I’m late, Dempsey probably killed me and stashed the body somewhere.”

Mom frowns over another sip of coffee. “He seems like a lovely boy. He was very nice to me when I brought over that casserole when he moved in.”

“He’s an egotistical douche-nozzle with a smartass complex.”

“Jace Vincent, language.”

“Bye, Ma.”

---

And of course Kaelen decides to be twenty minutes late on purpose, leaving me hovering in the plaza like an idiot, twitching five-foot-eight frame being buffeted by a crowd that is significantly taller for the most part. Trying to get out of the fray, I manage to make it up against a wall, sinking down to sit on the floor and leaf through Isabella’s sheet music while my fingers tap out impatient little rhythms some part of me always has to drum because without the beat i can’t breathe anymore against the cold cement. I lose myself in the whirling lightsoundcolor of my own head for I-don’t-know-how-long, eyes going out of focus on the music and scraping over the faces in the crowd, only half-occupied with looking for Kaelen’s ridiculous duck-butt hairdo hovering over the rest of them.

But then I hear it.

My head snaps up, my spinning brain yanked into a rare moment of clarity by the dulcet tones floating over the dull roar of the Plaza. Violin music, and it’s… I strain to listen more carefully as a chattering pack of high school girls passes right in front of me. Debussy’s violin sonata. First movement. Allegro vivo. “No fucking way.”

Clambering to my feet, I realize that I’m back in my dream, chasing music I can’t see through a thick crowd of people too tall for my stupid midget body to let me get a good look at where the sound’s coming from. Overwhelmed by the surrealism of it all, I do my best to shove against the tide of people with half-mumbled excuse mes as the rapid sequence of G minor triads spins ever louder in my ears, closer, closer until I finally break through the small wall of bodies that seem to be in search of the same thing I am.

She’s beautiful in the way that modern art is beautiful, somewhat strange and out of place but indescribably intriguing with exotic features and a forest-green cloak that’s definitely not government-regulation draped a lithe frame except for thin arms and delicate fingers that fly over the neck of the violin like she could do it in her sleep. Her hair is the color Ophelia’s was that one time when she decided to play around with household bleach, which is to say not much of a color at all, gleaming gossamer-smooth in waves around her shoulders under the harsh fluorescent lighting. The look on her face is the universal one of a musician lost in their art, eyes fluttered shut and lips pursed over the richness of the arpeggios blooming under her fingers and bow, and even though I’ve seen that expression on myself and half the glee club there’s just something different about it now, something different and fascinating and so right that it makes the world slow down to a crawl but still retain the brilliant swirls of color and light that the meds try to take away.

And I don’t notice when the rest of the crowd moves on. I don’t notice when Kaelen finally edges into the other side of the plaza with a shit-eating smirk on his face at his purposeful lateness. I don’t notice that I’m standing there looking like a total idiot, all faded jeans and black henley up against the exotic rustle of viridian velvet and eyes that maybe kind of sort of take my breath away when she stops playing and opens them, deepdeepdeep blue, like bottle glass or maybe what the night sky looks like in my imagination. I blink once, twice, clutching Isabella’s sheet music in a viselike grip, the sonata still half-playing in my head. “Hi.”

Because what else can I say when I’m talking to a dream?