Free The Golden Thread by Suzy McKee Charnas

try to practice today.”
    I saw an image of Joel clutching the phone with dried-up little bird-claw hands. It made me wince.
    â€œNot that it matters,” he added. “I mean, who am I kidding? In the first place, there are lots of people who play better than I did even when I could play. In the second place, great music has nothing to do with the real world of ozone depletion, famines, and nuclear meltdowns, which is why nobody writes anything remotely like a Beethoven quartet anymore. In the third—”
    â€œJoel, it doesn’t help anything to get all depressed about it.”
    â€œIn the third place, pretty soon nobody will be here to listen to anybody play this or any kind of music. Either we’ll all choke to death on our own poisons, or our mighty leaders will get into a stand-off they can’t get out of and somebody will push The Button. Boom. No applause.”
    I was really alarmed now. “Joel, is there anybody there with you right now? Are any of your friends around?”
    â€œNope.” He chortled. “None of them can stand me when I get like this.”
    He sounded a bit blurred, actually. A suspicion struck me. “Joel—are you drunk?”
    Silence.
    â€œJoel?”
    He sighed. “Maybe a little. I could be possibly maybe an eighth-note drunk. A sixteenth, even.” A pause. “Maybe I’ll go enlist in the Army. If I time it right, I might just make it into a drug war in Central America somewhere, or the invasion of Libya. I could be Joel of Arabia.”
    â€œDon’t be stupid,” I said sharply.
    â€œWell, why not?” he said. “If I can’t even make the world a little better the only way I know how, with music, then so what if I turn around and make it worse? Maybe I could get into developing new techniques in germ warfare. That’s a very promising field, I hear.”
    â€œI wish you’d stop talking such crap,” I said. Not very tactful, but I was pretty much at a loss about how to handle this barrage of gloom or, for that matter, someone who was even an eighth-note drunk.
    â€œLatest word is,” he said, “they’re training dolphins to carry underwater explosives. Cetacean suicide squads.”
    â€œNobody knows whether that’s true or not,” I said. “The Navy says it isn’t.”
    He laughed, not nicely.
    I held the phone a little away from me. “Listen, this is all too morbid for me.”
    â€œVal?” he said. He sounded more alert now, more focused. “Are you listening? I’d try something, anything, if I thought it might change things, actually make them better. Wouldn’t you?”
    â€œTry something?” I said. “Such as?”
    â€œI don’t know, something! Positive thinking, mass hypnosis, dancing around Stonehenge smeared with butter in a hurricane! If you had something you thought might—might give you just a little edge on the awfulness of things, wouldn’t you try to work with it even if it was risky?”
    I sat up in bed, wide awake now. “Joel,” I said, “have you done something crazy?”
    â€œMe? What could I do?” he said. “You’re the one with the magic. All I have is my dinky little musical talent. Can’t change the world with that.”
    â€œMy Gran has my family’s magic,” I said, “and she’s probably dying. So will you cut it out, please? Quit feeling so sorry for yourself!”
    He said, “Oh. Right. Fine,” and hung up on me.
    Depressed people sometimes do drastic things. Megan knew a girl at another school who had taken sleeping pills because of some bad test marks. I lay there in the dark replaying the conversation in my head to see if Joel had actually said anything seriously suicidal.
    Should I talk to Mom? That seemed like an invasion of Joel’s privacy. He had called me, not my mother or anybody else. Maybe I should try to call