-Sophomore-

Veins bulging from my forehead, lips chapped, eyes bugging out, I force out the air in my lungs in an attempt to play a B-flat. My efforts sound nothing like Ken’s. My unconditioned lungs produce a sound through the trumpet that mostly resembles an out-of-tune fart.

“It’s okay. Try it again.” Ken plays the B-flat one more time, his index finger holding down the first valve.

“I can’t. It’s pointless. I…” I’m exhausted just from trying to play one note for the past hour. It’s nine-thirty and my mom needs me back home by ten. I tell Ken as much.

“That’s okay. I had a slow start too. You’ll get it. Want me to drive you home now?”

Ken drives me home in his car, whipping through suburbia to the other side of town where I live. He slows down enough to look for my mom’s house, which I point out to him. Ken rolls up to the curb, putting the car in park.

“Thanks for the ride,” I say to him, which reminds me… 

Ken turns down his music.

“You’re welcome,” he tells me, picking his phone up out of a cup-holder and responding to text messages he received during the drive.

I unbuckle my seatbelt and open the passenger-side door, letting in the warm night air. With one foot on the curb and the rest of my body in his car, I say to Ken: “And thanks for helping me out that one time.”

Ken looks up from his phone. “Hmm?”

“When it rained on us? You didn’t have to come back and help me. I felt bad because I never thanked you. So, I thought I’d thank you…”

“Oh, okay! You’re welcome.” 

“Because that day I was feeling really sorry for myself, which is dumb, I know, and- I don’t know, you helped me get going again and we both got caught in that storm and- and- anyway- thank you!”

I trip out of his low-resting car and slam the passenger door shut behind me.

That following Monday is the first day of my sophomore year of high school.

School is school. I keep a pretty low profile. I don’t really have any friends outside of band.

After dismissal, I make my way over to the band room for our first afternoon practice. As soon as I get there, Ken looks my way and motions for me to come over to him. He’s sitting crisscross applesauce on the band-room floor. I play dumb and look back over my shoulder behind me.

There’s no one there, just an empty hallway.

Ken’s still waving his arm at me when I look back.

It’s that time though between the end of class and the start of practice when the band congeals into its close-knit squads. Today, however, Ken isn’t hanging out with the rest of the trumpet section. 

The fifteen-foot march over to him feels like a mile.

At first when I come over, Ken doesn’t say a thing. He’s scribbling something into a notebook resting on his legs.

I sit down close to him, but not too close.

“Want to get together after practice for another trumpet lesson?” Ken caps his pen and looks up at me from his notebook.

“Umm… I don’t know. I’m still having a lot of trouble playing b-flat.”

“That’s okay. That’s why it’s important to practice every day and get better!”

“I don’t want to take up all of your time.”

“That’s okay. It’s not a problem!” 

I notice Ken’s spiral notebook, filled with numbers and letters and symbols, all of it organized in red, black, blue, and green ink. Next to his knee, resting on the spit-stained carpet of the band room, is a multi-colored pen.

“What’s all that for?” I ask him.

“This? AP Calc.”  

“Oh. Is it hard?” 

“So hard! I take so many notes.” Ken flips back through his spiral notebook. Every page is a colorful blur of calculus. “Taking notes in color helps me memorize all the equations. So many equations!” In the margins, drawings start to catch my eye.

“I like your doodles,” I say.

“Doodles? What is doodles?” 

“Oh, umm… Like when you’re bored in class and you just draw stuff in your notebook because you’re bored. Like, right there.” I point to a drawing of a dark-haired boy in a hoody. The hood has pointy cat-ears sewn on top, and the boy has whiskers on his cheeks and a sad expression.

Ken blushes. “Oh, these! They are just to help me memorize and to study. Drawing makes it so I can remember the equations easier. I am not a serious artist!”

Mr. McDowell rallies everyone to head outside and Ken closes his spiral notebook. Before he does, however, I recognize something written below his doodle: Katakana characters, arranged in a way that looks like poetry.