The Music of What Happens

by Bill Konigsberg

Could he look past my rough exterior to see that I have a heart too?

I wish I could show him my heart. That’s dangerous, though. You show it and people laugh. Nothing is worse than people laughing at your open heart, which is why I think guys don’t do that so much.

“Shut up. Really. Just shut up. I told you no. You don’t get to decide what no means. It’s called consent. I’m not gonna like call the cops. I just want you to know that I know now that you raped me.”

With my white friends, I’m always half-Mexican. They never say I’m half-Irish. Never say I’m half white. Like I’m tainted halfway away from standard. It’s like when I was a kid and I thought vanilla ice cream meant no flavor, like it was the base of all the flavors. But vanilla is a bean. Like chocolate is a bean. Like cinnamon is a root. All roots and beans. All flavors. There is no base. No ice cream without a flavor.

Betts stands, walks over, and makes like he’s going to sit on my lap. I laugh, because I just told him I got raped and what’s the first thing he does? Invade my space. “Plastic chair, dude,” I say. He stands and he lifts me up by my shoulders, and he hugs me tight. “I’m sorry, dude.” Zay-Rod joins our little huddle. It is, sex included, the most intimate moment of my life. They hold me tight, and I just close my eyes and breathe, thinking how glad I am they’re my buddies, and wondering why I was ever afraid to tell them.

That never even occurred to me, that he had feelings.

“It is pretty incredible,” Max says again, shaking his head. “How a month ago I barely knew you, and now you’re, like, here.” “It’s just the music of what happens,” I say.

Then we talk more about the rape. His counselor and what she said about the healing process. How when trust is violated, it’s like you’re left with an empty piggy bank. Building trust again, she said, is like putting big, fat nickels into the slot. They clank against the bottom, and that sound is jarring. But in order to heal, you have to keep adding those nickels, and soon enough, there will be coins to cushion the nickel’s fall and make the sound not so grating. I tell him that I don’t mind the clank, and that I’ll make sure I always remember that he’ll hear a jarring sound even if I hear nothing.

I don’t know. I mean, it’s not all beautifully harmonic, this world we find ourselves in. Clearly. There’s shit music, and sometimes the melody goes away completely. There’s silence and dissonant chords that cringe your ears. But the synchronicity of a perfectly created chorus? And the fact that you never know when one is coming? And that amazing feeling, the first time you hear a song and you know it’s going to be with you forever?

I think about the half notes of dissonance, between what I hear and what someone else hears, and those moments where the world is so cold, and when someone reaches their hand out to you. In those symphonic, connected moments where another soul joins you and feels what you feel, and you can breathe again.