Free Edinburgh by Alexander Chee

opens to you. You see how you aren’t there, something else is there that belongs . . . to the music. It doesn’t belong to you at all.
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    No rehearsal that Monday. My father returns from Sweden. He has begun a consulting business. As far as I can tell, that means he gets paid to tell people how to do things and how much it will cost them. Each time he returns from a business trip he has presents for all of us, my brother, sister, and I. Teddy gets skates. Sam gets a stuffed Laplander reindeer. I get a ski sweater, of some wool from an animal so vigorous, knitted by people so powerful, I feel like I am wearing a force field and not a gray sweater. The yarn seems to add muscle to me. In the mirror, I look powerfully built, like a boy-hero. When I remember the sweater is from Sweden I never wear it again.
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    While Big Eric runs the newer altos through his spiel about head tone and falsetto, I write about How to Fill a Heart with Hate, a poem, which I title that way. I write, The Heart to become Hate removes the R, which is Rue / a witches’ brew of regret, separates the A which is Art from the E which is Eros by the T, / which was together and is now Terror. Or Time. But never loses / the H, which is Heaven, which is the way back. To the Heart.
    Peter has cut all his hair off in what he calls a fade haircut. A blond frost covers his bare head. The altos finally learn, but now we are out of time. I close my music folder and cover my poem. Big Eric announces, at the rehearsal’s close, a tour for the winter. Schools and churches, throughout Maine.
    After the rehearsal, I watch Freddy walk in a slow circle as he waits for his mom. Peter waits beside me, pulls out a jar of black fingernail polish and begins to paint every fingernail. My sister, he says to me, dared me to do it. Fifty bucks if I did every finger.
    Really, I say. Can you do that at a Catholic school?
    Mmm, no. Clashes with the uniform, he says, and giggles. But the hair is fine. I’ll just walk around with my hands in my pockets, like the rest of them do anyway. He casts a green eye my way. You want, he says, offering the bottle.
    Just the pinkies, I say, thinking of a boy I saw downtown the other day, hair spiked red, black pinkies.
    Tomorrow night, Peter asks, do you want to go to a hardcore all-ages show? Seven bands. My sister and I are going, and she’s driving.
    Yes, I say.
    On the way home, I feel like I have Peter on my fingers. I curl my hands inside my pockets, and no one sees until swim practice the next day, where the other boys only wrinkle their noses, swimmers being mild-mannered. After practice, I ride my bike over to the barbershop around the corner from the bank near the school and sit down for a five-dollar fade. Fade. Something going away slowly. Pomade? the barber asks, and I ask what is it, and after he tells me, I leave, my hair shining, straight up, like the cut end of a paintbrush. I buy the pomade. I walk out stepping on my own hair, like feathers there on the floor where someone killed a bird.
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    The next day, when I go over to Peter’s house, he says, It’s good, and traces my fade with his finger for a moment.
    What’s this group’s name, I ask Peter.
    We’re in his room, the door closed, his big old ugly stereo’s volume turned way up. New Order, he says. He’s smoking a Marlboro, blowing smoke into the sunbeam crossing his room. We are waiting to go into Portland with his older sister, Elizabeth. She’s in the bathroom spraying her hair straight up with Aquanet and drawing lines of eyeliner out to her hairline. Punk-rock pharaoh, she says when I ask her about her look. Liz Taylor Bad Hair Day.
    I like Elizabeth. She and Peter say they hate each other. She steals my butts, Peter says. He’s a twerp, she says. Elizabeth is pretty, her blue mohawk cheers me up, like a sail or a blade, the crest of a lizard. Today we are going shopping at Goodwill and then from