Free The Life Intended by Kristin Harmel Page A

playing the music rather than just listening to it was an important step, because it has allowed us todevelop a common language. Sometimes it’s hard, for example, to say you’re angry. But pounding an instrument gets the point across without words. Kind of like sign language, I think: meaning without articulation. You just have to know how to communicate.
    “Anyway, I learned ‘You Can’t Do That’ this week,” Leo tells me, his eyes sliding away from mine. “I’ve been practicing on my iPad keyboard app.”
    “From the Hard Day’s Night album.”
    “Yeah. From 1964,” he says with the authority of someone who was around then. “Want to hear it?”
    “Sure.” I shuffle a few papers then grab the xylophone mallets, purposely taking a long time. “So about that bruise: You must have fallen pretty hard, I guess.”
    “No big deal.” His voice is gruff, his eyes shifty. “It didn’t even hurt anyways.”
    “Was Tyler there?”
    He hesitates, and from the way his eyes flick to mine and then dance quickly away again, I know I’ve hit upon the truth. “Maybe,” he mumbles. “Don’t remember.”
    “Did you hit him back?” I ask softly.
    He looks at his hands for a minute. “No,” he says finally. “All his friends were there too.”
    “Bunch of jerks,” I mutter under my breath. Leo is tall and slender, with the kind of shape he’ll grow into when he’s older. But for now, he’s a stick figure, and Tyler Mason, who’s a year older and forty pounds heavier than Leo, teases him mercilessly about the way he looks. His friends join in too, probably relieved not to be on the receiving end of bullying themselves.
    Tyler’s also the kind of kid who can talk himself out of situations, so when Leo began fighting back, it was Leo who was labeled the problem kid. Somehow, the teachers never saw Tylerthrowing the first punch or hissing under his breath that Leo was a beanpole. As a result, Tyler’s halo was intact, and Leo was becoming a frequent visitor to the principal’s office.
    His mother had brought him to me on his school guidance counselor’s recommendation; she couldn’t understand why her son had started acting inexplicably violent. It took me three sessions to grasp that Leo wasn’t the aggressor. He was being bullied and didn’t want to admit it. By the time I sat his parents down and explained the situation, they’d already decided to keep sending him to me on a weekly basis, because they were seeing marked improvements in his schoolwork and behavior at home.
    I hand Leo the mallets, and he grins at me—the first real smile since he’s gotten here—and begins playing the Beatles’ song. He impresses me, as he always does, with his skill. I join in on my guitar after a moment.
    “So what does the song mean to you?” I ask after we’ve finished. It’s one of my ground rules with Leo; he has to tell me why he’s picked a song. It’s another way to open up discussion between us.
    “I don’t know,” he replies, looking down.
    I’m silent, waiting patiently for him to go on.
    “I guess when the singer says ‘leave you flat,’ I was thinking about when Tyler said he’d flatten my face,” Leo finally mumbles. “And then the singer says people would laugh at him, and sometimes that happens to me too.”
    I nod, pleased that we’re at a point where he can say things like this to me. Of course the Beatles song is about a guy telling his girl that he’ll break up with her if he catches her talking to a particular guy again, but Leo has gotten something entirely different out of the lyrics. That’s one of my favorite things about music—that the same words, the same notes, can mean completely different things to different people.
    “Did you talk to your teacher about Tyler?” I ask.
    He shakes his head. “Tattletales get beat up worse.”
    “How about your mom and dad?”
    He doesn’t answer. Instead, he bangs his mallet on the xylophone for a minute before asking