Free Rainey Royal by Dylan Landis Page A

Rainey, she’ll be wearing black. Leah turns back in the mostly lace blouse, and Rainey says through her fingers, “You’re beautiful. I bet you had no idea.”
    Howard turns, too. He presses his fingertips to his lips, then opens his hands wide. The gesture is packed with irony, but Rainey wonders if Leah can tell. Leah is the totteringlamb who cannot see the altar. “Daughter, you have said it. She has no idea. It is the source of her beauty.”
    Tina doesn’t wait for Leah to even blush. “I can’t go out tonight,” she says, as if she has spent the past five minutes submerged. “You should wait for me.”
    Rainey looks at the clarinet case. It is a pebbly black box that hunkers by her dressing table. With sugary innocence she says, “We won’t go anywhere exciting. Maybe we’ll hang out here.” She gets a hooded look from Tina.
    “Fine,” says Tina. “If they play again, I’m going down to listen.”
    “In that case,” says Howard, “why don’t we have a brief lesson.”
    Don’t
, thinks Rainey.
    “Have fun at the museum.” Tina picks up her pack and the loaner clarinet.
    “Always carry your ax,” says Howard approvingly. He puts a hand on Tina’s shoulder.
    Rainey looks away. She senses that Leah, demoted now to merely the girl in the lace blouse, seems altered by what she saw in Howard’s eyes.
The source of her beauty
. She sits straighter. She feels, Rainey decides, shinier.
    Rainey can be a mirror, too. A better mirror. She will finish the French braids and teach Leah the Pearl Drops toothpaste move, and they’ll steal some of Howard’s pot. Maybe Leah will sleep over. She will teach her how to dance.
    “You should take off Paul’s watch,” says Rainey.
    “You should quit using Estelle’s photos in art,” says Tina coolly.
    “Who’s Estelle?” says Leah.
    Howard makes an arch in the doorway with his arm. Tina ducks under it without looking back.
    T HEY ARE, IN FACT , having an actual lesson.
    From outside Howard’s closed door Rainey hears clarinet scales, clumsy, with mistakes and do-overs. She walks into the bathroom and listens through the narrowly open door. For a moment there’s silence from the bedroom, then fluid, mournful scales pour from the clarinet—that would be Howard, of course. She’s never really thought about clarinet till now, the way its private, throaty unhappiness underlies even its lighter notes. She thought oboe had sole claim to musical grief.
    Silence again, then Tina’s laughter.
    She listens through ten more sets of scales—Tina’s—punctuated by murmurings and bursts of laughter. Lessons should not be this much fun. An ache opens in her stomach and spreads to her chest. From the third floor, Leah calls, “Rainey?” and Rainey makes her own inelegant music, creaking across the floorboards and back up the stairs.
    T INA, CARRYING HER PACK and the loaner clarinet, walks to the subway at Union Square and takes it uptown, like crazy far. Rainey watches her from between the cars, swaying.Leah, still wearing the lace blouse, hangs back. Tina stays on till Ninety-Sixth, where all the white people disappear off the face of the planet. “God, let her walk downtown,” says Rainey, but she follows half a block behind as Tina heads north on Lex. They pass Spanish people and tough-looking kids just out of school. Tina walks without apparent fear.
    “Are we safe?” says Leah. In fact people are staring at her, a girl two inches shy of six feet, hair braided tight but flaming in color, lace revealing her navel.
    “We’re cool,” says Rainey. Toughness is her métier, but she does not carry a knife like everyone knows kids do up here, so she is feeling a little freaked. She turns her mother’s ring around on her finger; now the diamond and rubies won’t flash.
    “She’ll see us,” says Leah. “She’ll kill me.” She considers. “She’ll try.”
    Rainey’s not sure who knocks her out more, this pretty shiny brave Leah, born in her pink room