Free Touch Blue by Cynthia Lord Page A

live now and meet Libby and me. We could show her cool things about the island.”
    “Your parents would have to ask Natalie. I hate how everything has to go through her. It’s not like I’m a baby!”
    “Well, what if —”
    “Look, forget it! Okay?” he snaps. “I don’t even know if my mom has a TV that works. Or a computer. Or whatever she’d need to watch a video.”
    I close my mouth. I feel bad that I kept asking questions and now he’s upset. I wish I knew a good joke or something funny, to make him smile and take the anger out of his forehead. As Aaron plays the second verse of the song by himself, I glance to the stacks of boxes along the wall marked L ADIES ’ A ID S OCIETY R UMMAGE S ALE . I don’t think Aaron even sees me leave.
    The clothes in the first box have a stale, old-people smell. I find a tweed sport coat and a wide blue-and-orange-striped tie. Sorting through sweaters, shirts, baseball caps, and a pair of ladies gloves so narrow I don’t think they’d even fit Libby, I snatch up a slate-colored felt hat. The sort that snowmen wear.
    “I’m sorry, sir. You do not meet our dress code.” Holding the clothes out to Aaron, my chest seizes with panic. What if he sneers at me for acting babyish?
    Taking one hand off the piano keys, Aaron holds his palm upward. “You couldn’t pick a better tie?”
    I smile, draping it over his hand.
    Knotting the tie in place, Aaron gets up from the bench. From another box along the wall, he pulls out a knitted brown scarf with two huge, lime-green pom-poms at the bottom.
    I’m not much for style, but that scarf is dirt ugly. Aaron wraps it loosely around my neck, flipping both ends over my shoulders. The pom-poms hit me in the back.
    “Oh, how very brown .” I pose with one hand on my hip. “What do you think?”
    “Not quite.” Aaron pulls out a purple sequined hat. He drops it on my head and tips it down on one side. “Better.”
    By the time we’re done, Aaron’s decked out in the tweed coat with his hat squashed low over his eyebrows, dark sunglasses, striped tie, and a rolled-up napkin for a cigar.
    I’m wearing someone’s raspberry-satin prom dress, bunched in my hand to keep it from dragging on the floor, the sequined hat, the brown scarf, and a whole jewelry box’s worth of cheap, chunky necklaces.
    Aaron sits back on the piano bench. “I’ll play piano, you take the vocal part.”
    I smile, until I realize what he actually said. “Wait a minute! Do you mean actual words? I can’t sing!”
    “Everyone can. Some people are terrible at it, but everyone can sing.” He flickers out a few twinkly notes on the piano. “Pretend you’re someone else, then. That’s what I do when everyone expects me to be someone I’m not.” He glances at me. “The one, the only, the incredible —”
    Oh, glory. “Um. Lola?”
    Aaron grins, like I hoped he would. His left hand plays low notes, while his right hand passes me Mrs. Coombs’s Beloved Tunes of the American People . “Pick one from here, Lola.”
    I flip through the pages. “Home on the Range” would sound ridiculous on Bethsaida, unless I substituted Eben’s dog, Beast, for “buffalo.” “Auld Lang Syne” isn’t a summer song. And I don’t even know “Sentimental Journey.” “I think a better title for this book would be Beloved Tunes of Really, Really Old People. ”
    I find a hymn I know from church.
    “I don’t know this one,” Aaron says as I set the book open on the piano. “I’ll follow you.” He begins playing, slow and gentle. “You didn’t take your cue, Lola.” He begins again.
    “I’ve got peace like a river,” I sing so quiet I’m almost whispering.
    I’ve got peace like a river
    I’ve got peace like a river in my soul.
    I’ve got peace like a river
    I’ve got peace like a river
    I’ve got peace like a river in my soul.
    “Very pretty,” Aaron says. “Keep going.”
    I’ve got joy like a fountain
    I’ve got joy like a fountain
    I’ve got