Wild Awake

your shifters need some WD-40.”
    He reaches for the blue can on the bench and gives the gears a one-second spray. I peer at the bass. It’s beautiful. Sleek. Curvy. Like an exotic fruit. I want to eat a slice of it.
    “Skunk?”
    “Hm?”
    He picks up a screwdriver and twiddles with a screw. He takes it out, wipes it off, and starts screwing it back in.
    “Please explain to me why am I seeing a vintage Fender Mustang bass on the floor of this shed.”
    He looks to where I’m looking and his brown eyes widen slightly, as if he never noticed the seven-hundred-dollar instrument that just happens to be lurking under his grease-rag collection.
    “Oh. Yeah. I’m trying to sell it. I was going to put it on craigslist.”
    “You’re putting a vintage Fender on craigslist ?”
    Skunk spins the screwdriver around in his hand.
    “Is that illegal or something?”
    “It should be.”
    “Why are you selling it?”
    “I’m not in a band anymore.”
    “So start another one.”
    He shakes his head. “I’m more into bikes right now.”
    “They’re not exactly mutually exclusive.”
    “There’s only so much time in the day.”
    “Are you expecting me to believe you just woke up one morning and decided you’d rather spend all day lurking in some crusty shed than playing that fabulous instrument?”
    “Pretty much.”
    I chew on this while Skunk raises my bike seat by another half inch and clamps the lever down.
    “I find this answer highly dubious.”
    Skunk gives me a look.
    “I find this bicycle highly dubious.”
    “Promise me you will not sell that gorgeous instrument.”
    “Do you play? I’ll give it to you.”
    The offer is so tantalizing, my blood momentarily freezes over with greed. I grip the edge of the workbench.
    “I play keys. Not bass.”
    “You could learn.”
    “Keep it. You’re going to play it again.”
    Skunk shakes his head. I keep at him. “Yes, you will. I know you will. At least put it in the house. If you leave it out here, it’ll get warped when the temperature changes.”
    Sigh. Now I’m the one being all fussy about someone else’s stuff. But I can’t help it: Nobody owns a bass like that unless they’re either rich as balls or they really mean it. Even if he doesn’t think so now, I’m pretty sure Skunk really means it. Or used to mean it, anyway. I eye the bass again.
    “Make you a deal. You bring that bass back inside and I’ll consider fixing my brake pads.”
    Skunk cocks his head, wrench in hand. “What kind of a deal is that?”
    “What do you mean, what kind of a deal is that? You indulge my ridiculous neurosis and I’ll indulge yours. It’s perfectly fair.”
    Skunk smiles, and when he does he looks less like a meaty thug and more like a big, shaggy bison.
    “I’ll think about it,” he says.

chapter twenty-two
    I’m sitting at the piano, listening to the metronome tick. But tonight, for some reason, I just can’t make myself practice. The piano sounds too bright, like a voice in a commercial. Instead of melting into its embrace, I chafe at it, like a hug from a relative you secretly hate.
    I remember my first-ever piano lesson with Dr. Scaliteri, a month after Sukey died. She stared at me for a long time, perched on her silver ball, and asked me a question that drove a wedge between that moment and everything that came before it: “Great art requires great discipline, Kiri. Are you ready to be disciplined?”
    She had me play nothing but scales that day, up and down the piano in every key, making me do them again and again if I fumbled a single note. My despair at getting them right was a strange sort of rescue from the larger despair clawing at my life, like wrestling with a difficult crossword puzzle when you’re alone in the wilderness with two broken legs and no hope of making it out alive.
    Great art requires great discipline .
    I lift my hands back onto the keys and grudgingly start on a scale. But tonight, it’s not discipline I need. I remember the time I asked Sukey where she went at night when she snuck out. It was the summer before Mom and Dad kicked her out, back when you could still hear music pounding behind her door anytime you walked by. I was sitting on her bed, watching her paint, her black brush flicking over a rectangular canvas, her hair pulled back in one of my fuzzy pink hair elastics because she was always losing her own.
    “I go to Kits Beach and watch the ships,” said Sukey.
    “Why?”
    She shrugged. “Because