Free Dancing in the Dark by David Donnell Page A

it under his breath. Impossible of course, men are supposed to believe in miracles, because they both wore earplugs. Most of the time, they did. Stash caught his eye a few chords later, and he smiled.
    When Hayden was 15, which was a turning point, he was at a neighbourhood basement one day after school. There were some friends, older, and a couple of girls. One of the boys, Jaime, had a small envelope of white powder. Shit, there wasn’t even very much in the envelope, just a little corner.
    Four or five of them took a small snort each, and they wanted Hayden to try it. Hayden was younger, he was 15, but he had big status partly because he was such a good high school football player.
    “No way, man,” he said, “no way.”
    “Chicken, the football player’s a chicken,” one of the older boys said, and a couple of the others picked up the word, repeating it or changing it to sissy or baby.
    “It won’t bust your gut,” said Jaime, “you don’t want to do it because of your sport.”
    And Hayden had said, “No, it’s not because I’m an athlete, it’s because of my music.” He associated getting high with not being able to play as well as he wanted to play.
    Later that day, in the evening, he was at home sitting in the kitchen doing some math homework. His mother was out at a public school meeting. He had the big radio in the living room turned up loud, listening to it on and off as he worked.
    He was about half-way through his work when he heard some German soprano, he didn’t catch her name, sing Mozart’s amazing aria where the young knight, a sacrificial figure, goes off to meet his death, but first says goodbye to three different people.
    After the aria was over, he sat staring at the table. The radio was still on, it was loud, but he couldn’t hear a thing. When he looked at the sheets of paper in front of him on the table, the sheets seemed to be blank. Then he lit a cigarette, he hardly ever smoked, but his mother had left a package sitting on the table. And when he looked back down at the table, the blank sheets seemed to be alive with muscular and lazy musical notes.
    There was his friendship with Tom, for example, how they complemented each other in different ways, how these two guys, one 27, one 31, one white, Italian, the other black, from Brooklyn, both into music, Hayden much more so, but both into music, the two of them were wildly different in certain ways as individuals. But they complemented each other and were at many times, without being sentimental about this kind of thing in life between people, a bulwark for each other and a sounding board. Hayden with his street smart attitudes was very much alive and open to the world. But this openness was often closed behind a cool polite exterior as far as easy perception might be concerned. Hayden often spoke from a weight of academic courses, his exact reaching for the perfect note, speaking French, speaking, basic vocabulary, a little German, switching inhis speaking of American English from Sam Adams to southern drawl, from Boston to a New York downtown accent to a voice that was a little gruffer, perhaps, but delicately, unpredictably shaded with a French phrase.
    There was also the fact that Hayden never really got along with Stash, the player, a southern senator’s son, for Christ’s sake, he had first helped to form the Desperados, after meeting him at a party uptown somewhere; and Henner, the older guy, and ex-con, some people said, they had taken on as manager, sharp, very sharp. He didn’t like Henner very much but didn’t have anything specifically against him. And Whitney, of course, Whitney became a sort of garden of hanging flowers of Ur for Hayden, something to admire gruffly and almost indifferently from a distance, and close up, be outwardly very calm and avuncular. Like Tom’s girlfriend, Whitney, Hayden was better-educated than the other guys, although Hayden, tight end, 6’5”, solid, black, had obviously not gone to