Free Everyone We've Been by Sarah Everett Page A

shoes squeak against the floor as I make my way to my seat in the music room. Katy points at my fingers, wrinkly from the cold, as I flip to the right page in my binder.
Gangrene,
she mouths. Not frostbite, but gangrene.
    “Okay?” she whispers. I nod, not looking at her, pick up my viola and bow, and focus on the sheets of paper in front of me as we wait for the strings to come in.

BEFORE
Mid-July
    At the risk of sounding crazy, the great thing about being the only member of orchestra without a life is that it gives me plenty of time to practice and possibly get a leg up on everyone else when school starts in the fall.
    I’ve been practicing Bartók’s Viola Concerto for nearly an hour, trying to get the tempo exactly right. It goes from steady and lyrical,
andante,
to manic, notes tripping over each other in their hurry to burst out. Then back to calm again. Mrs. Dubois says that all good music tears down walls, shatters glass, shakes the foundations, then puts the house back together. Piece by piece. Brick by brick. Note by note. The strokes of my bow are like blows of a sledgehammer: heavy, violent. I imagine the house I’m flattening is mine—my father’s absence, my brother’s distance, the way we can’t reach each other no matter how close together we are. When I get to the second movement, I picture construction workers reassembling what’s been broken. I feel exhausted, like I’ve been working with them. After playing through all three movements once, I go back and start again. My heart moves at walking pace, then quicker and quicker, the kind of pace that takes you whirling around a corner too fast. It takes a second to slow down again, to
lumber
instead of run. I’m not happy with the first section, so I stop, preparing to start yet again, and that’s when I hear my phone ringing. I’m not sure how long it has been going, and when I reach for it on my table, I don’t recognize the number on the screen.
    I debate letting it go to voice mail, but then an image of the receipt I scribbled my number on for Zach yesterday pops into my mind. I hold my breath as I answer it.
    “Hello?”
    “Addie!” he says brightly, like
he’s
pleasantly surprised to hear me on the line. “I wasn’t sure whether this was your cell phone or not, or I would have texted.”
    “Hey! No. It’s my cell phone. So you could have texted. But it’s fine that you called, also.”
Oh my God. Shut up,
my brain screams at me. “How are you?”
    I put my viola down on my bed. What do I say? Why is he calling? Where does one buy stock in Wit and Decent Phone Skills?
    Luckily, he doesn’t seem completely horrified. “I’m good, especially since I have the day off.”
    “That’s awesome,” I say. “Any plans?”
    “Actually, that’s why I’m calling. I don’t know if this is weird or not”—he pauses, and I hear a bit of uncertainty in his voice—“but since your friend ditched you and I don’t have to work, I thought I’d see if you wanted to hang out.”
    Is he asking me out? It sounds like he’s asking me out.
    “Addie?”
    “Oh yeah, sure,” I say, trying to sound casual. My heart, on the other hand, beats in syncopated triplets.
    “We can do Completely Mundane Things with Unwarranted Enthusiasm,” he says. Laughs his joyful, uncontained laugh. I return it with one of my own; I didn’t really know I had one.
    “That sounds great.”
    “Yeah? You can say no if you want. As I said, I sense that you are cooler, and I understand if you’re not in the market for any more friends.”
    Friends.
    So maybe he’s not asking me out.
    “You can never have too many friends,” I say truthfully. Especially since I’ve capped off at one.
    He offers to pick me up so I don’t have to bike, and I give him directions to my house before we hang up. I quickly rifle through my closet for something to wear, settling on my favorite purple T-shirt, cuffed denim shorts, and flats. The real work is taming my hair, which has