we had stuck on his ceiling in third grade. As the sky darkened, I marveled at the number of years that had passed since we had placed the constellation, how little we must have been, and how those stars—little scraps of sticky paper—had outlasted my mother. “The stars are still there,” I finally said, unable to close my eyes and unwilling to start specifying—here, nested within the Watson home, it just seemed cowardly. “Huh?” Boris answered right away. He was awake, too. “What stars?” “The stars,” I insisted, and he responded, “Yeah, but where?” I thought I was going crazy. Then he said, “Oh, those stars. Wow, I guess I forgot about them. Huh. You sure are an observant bastard. I don’t know, I guess that’s just how my ceiling looks. You better get used to it.” I wiped the sweat from my face and peeled away the dog hairs. He was right. I had better.
Boris wasn’t just my best friend, he was my only friend, really. By the time you hit middle school, one good friend was all you needed. We were not popular, Boris and I, but we were hardly Mac Hill or Alfie Sutherland. It was a big school, seething with nearly two thousand jocks and dorks and burnouts of every conceivable ethnicity and IQ. Within such pandemonium, it was blissfully easy to be overlooked.
If the adults were to be believed, each one of us possessed some sort of special talent, though they were kidding themselves if they thought all talents were equal. My straight As, for instance, were hardly something I went around advertising. Fortunately, there was one other place Boris and I shined: we both played trumpet. Boris had been playing since he was little—trumpet lessons were but one of the dozens of cultural pursuits foisted upon him by Janelle and Thaddeus. My mom was uncomfortable with anything that kept me away from home, but I guilted her into buying me an instrument in sixth grade and naturally chose the same one as Boris. We were both pretty good. We could sight-read and even improvise over changes a bit. We played at school pep rallies, football and basketball games, and seasonal concerts, and between the two of us we had scored four or five solos. We spent a lot of quality time bitching about what an idiot’s contraption the trumpet was, how it barely rated above a first grader’s recorder, and how we both planned to melt the brass for money as soon as we hit college. In reality we loved it. The trumpet is, in fact, a pretty unimpressive thing, but it’s different when you’re playing as part of an eighty-piece concert orchestra or twenty-member jazz band. There is power there, and we both felt it after every performance, even as we rolled our eyes at the applause and made lewd gestures involving the bell ends of the trumpets.
Since the beginning of summer, I had practiced maybe two or three times total, and each of those had been a reaction to my mother’s badgering. Now, bunking alongside Boris in weird imitation of the sleepovers of our youth, I couldn’t get practice out of my head—practice had been my mother’s final request. I sat up beneath the glowing green stars, the sheets clinging to my skin. I checked the digital clock. It was nearly two in the morning. I counted on my fingers. My mother had been dead for almost sixty hours. It was dark in Boris’s bedroom, much darker than my room at home, and I patted the carpet until I found my backpack, then dug past clothes, the flimsy folds of my wallet, the crinkled pages of my passport, until my hands felt the hard plastic of my trumpet case. Keeping my eyes focused on the phony universe six feet above my head, I removed the trumpet and ran my hands over the warm metal, slid my palm over the valves, gave a little tug to the water key. I settled my fingers onto the buttons and nested my thumb into its crook.
“Shit, man,” came a voice from Boris’s bed. “If you wanted to play, all you had to do was ask.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“I’m sure you are.” He paused. “It’s a nice night.”
“It’s dark in here,” I said. “I tried to be quiet, sorry.”
Boris drew a long breath through his nose. “Sound always carries best at night anyway. Think about how we sound at football games.”