Just One Night Read online

  ‘Are you going tonight?’ Dad asks.

  ‘I was planning to. It depends if they shut down the whole state on account of the snow.’

  ‘It is approaching a blizzard,’ Dad says, pointing to a single snowflake floating its way to the earth.

  ‘I’m also supposed to rehearse with some pianist from the college that Professor Christie dug up.’ Professor Christie, a retired music teacher at the university who I’ve been working with for the last few years, is always looking for victims for me to play with. ‘Keep you sharp so you can show all those Juilliard snobs how it’s really done,’ she says.

  I haven’t gotten into Juilliard yet, but my audition went really well. The Bach suite and the Shostakovich had both flown out of me like never before, like my fingers were just an extension of the strings and bow. When I’d finished playing, panting, my legs shaking from pressing together so hard, one judge had clapped a little, which I guess doesn’t happen very often. As I’d shuffled out, that same judge had told me that: ‘it had been a long time since the school had seen an Oregon country girl’. Professor Christie had taken that to mean a guaranteed acceptance. I wasn’t so sure that was true. And I wasn’t 100 per cent sure that I wanted it to be true. Just like with Shooting Star’s meteoric rise, my admission to Juilliard – if it happens – will create certain complications, or, more accurately, would compound the complications that have already cropped up in the last few months.

  ‘I need more coffee. Anyone else?’ Mom asks, hovering over me with the ancient percolator.

  I sniff the coffee, the rich, black, oily French roast we all prefer. The smell alone perks me up. ‘I’m pondering going back to bed,’ I say. ‘My cello’s at school, so I can’t even practice.’

  ‘Not practice? For twenty-four hours? Be still, my broken heart,’ Mom says. Though she has acquired a taste for classical music over the years – ‘it’s like learning to appreciate a stinky cheese’ – she’s been a not-always-delighted captive audience for many of my marathon rehearsals.

  I hear a crash and a boom coming from upstairs. Teddy is pounding on his drum kit. It used to belong to Dad. Back when he’d played drums in a big-in-our-town, unknown-anywhere-else band, back when he’d worked at a record store.

  Dad grins at Teddy’s noise, and seeing that, I feel a familiar pang. I know it’s silly but I have always wondered if Dad is disappointed that I didn’t become a rock chick. I’d meant to. Then, in third grade, I’d wandered over to the cello in music class – it looked almost human to me. It looked like if you played it, it would tell you secrets, so I started playing. It’s been almost ten years now and I haven’t stopped.

  ‘So much for going back to sleep,’ Mom yells over Teddy’s noise.

  ‘What do you know, the snow’s already melting.’ Dad says, puffing on his pipe. I go to the back door and peek outside. A patch of sunlight has broken through the clouds, and I can hear the hiss of the ice melting. I close the door and go back to the table.

  ‘I think the county overreacted,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe. But they can’t un-cancel school. Horse is already out of the barn, and I already called in for the day off,’ Mom says.

  ‘Indeed. But we might take advantage of this unexpected boon and go somewhere,’ Dad says. ‘Take a drive. Visit Henry and Willow.’ Henry and Willow are a couple of Mom and Dad’s old music friends who’d also had a kid and decided to start behaving like grown-ups. They live in a big old farmhouse. Henry does Web stuff from the barn they converted into a home office and Willow works at a nearby hospital. They have a baby girl. That’s the real reason Mom and Dad want to go out there. Teddy having just turned eight and me being seventeen means that we are long past giving off that sour-milk smell that makes adults melt.

  ‘We can stop at BookBarn on the way back,’ Mom says, as if to entice me. BookBarn is a giant, dusty old used-book store. In the back they keep a stash of twenty-five-cent classical records that nobody ever seems to buy except me. I keep a pile of them hidden under my bed. A collection of classical records is not the kind of thing you advertise.

  I’ve shown them to Adam, but that was only after we’d already been together for five months. I’d expected him to laugh. He’s such the cool guy with his pegged jeans and black low-tops, his effortlessly beat-up punk-rock tees and his subtle tattoos. He is so not the kind of guy to end up with someone like me. Which was why when I’d first spotted him watching me at the music studios at school two years ago, I’d been convinced he was making fun of me and I’d hidden from him. Anyhow, he hadn’t laughed. It turned out he had a dusty collection of punk-rock records under his bed.

  ‘We can also stop by Gran and Gramps for an early dinner,’ Dad says, already reaching for the phone. ‘We’ll have you back in plenty of time to get to Portland,’ he adds as he dials.

  ‘I’m in,’ I say. It isn’t the lure of BookBarn, or the fact that Adam is on tour, or that my best friend, Kim, is busy doing yearbook stuff. It isn’t even that my cello is at school or that I could stay home and watch TV or sleep. I’d actually rather go off with my family. This is another thing you don’t advertise about yourself, but Adam gets that, too.

  ‘Teddy,’ Dad calls. ‘Get dressed. We’re going on an adventure.’

  Teddy finishes off his drum solo with a crash of cymbals. A moment later he’s bounding into the kitchen fully dressed, as if he’d pulled on his clothes while careening down the steep wooden staircase of our drafty Victorian house. He started belting out the lines to ‘School’s Out’.

  ‘Alice Cooper?’ Dad asks. ‘Have we no standards? At least sing the Ramones.’

  Teddy carried on singing the tune over Dad’s protests.

  ‘Ever the optimist,’ I say.

  Mom laughs. She puts a plate of slightly charred pancakes down on the kitchen table. ‘Eat up, family.’

  About the Author

  GAYLE FORMAN is an award-winning author and journalist whose articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Seventeen,Cosmopolitan and Elle in the US. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

  Also available by Gayle Forman

  IF I STAY

  WHERE SHE WENT

  JUST ONE DAY

  JUST ONE YEAR

  Visit Gayle at www.gayleforman.com

  JUST ONE NIGHT

  AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 19607 4

  First published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK

  A Random House Group Company

  This edition published 2014

  Copyright © Gayle Forman, 2014

  Front cover artwork copyright © Gettyimages.com/Taxi/Dennis Felix and courtesy of Thinkstock.com, 2014

  First Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital, 2014

  The right of Gayle Forman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  (Series: Just One Day # 2.50)