Day 1

Henry and Klara meet.

She watched him when he sang, and felt happy for the first time in years.

 

Klára Myšková was only seventeen years old, main caregiver to her three living siblings, and homeless. They hadn’t always been homeless, though; for the first four years of her life she had lived in a big apartment with her parents and two younger brothers. Then her mami became pregnant again �" with twins, no less �" so they moved into a little house that was about the same size as the big apartment, but it had a garden and a hammock. Klára was a particularly jealous child, and had been prone to pinching and poking her younger siblings until one day she packed up her Krtek (The Mole, her favorite cartoon) lunchbox and climbed a tree and announced that she would live there forever. Her father, her Tati, had had to make up a song all about her to get her to come down. When she got older and more forgiving toward her siblings’ existence, Tati added on bits about all of his children to the song, and Klára sang it night and day. Her mami, who was a music teacher, began teaching her to play piano and classical guitar and flute and trumpet, and put her in their church choir, and Klára learned more about music and passion in those seven years than she ever would in her whole life.

 

When she was fourteen years old, Tati suddenly lost his job, and the family had decided that it was time for new opportunities to arise in another country, and so they moved out of their home in Prague to go to Minneapolis, in the United States, where immigrants were treated more fairly than other cities.

 

Then, at the tender age 15, stricken by one tragedy after another, Klára became the only providing caregiver to the infinitely-angry Markus and rowdy Nik and quietly-strong Jopie. She couldn’t get a job anywhere, and so took to begging in the streets for money and going to shelters for food on days that money was scarce. She drifted through life with no other purpose but the survival of her family, unable to muster up the determination required to preserve her own. There was no music in her world anymore, something that she had not lived without since she was four years old and her Tati wrote her song, and it made her want to die. She wandered the streets in a fog of her own misery, going to different places every day because people tended to get impatient with her very quickly when she showed no promise of trying to get off of the streets.

 

One day, a few months after she had turned seventeen, when she was at the end of her rope and seriously considering slipping away where her brothers and sister wouldn’t look for her and ending her own misery, it seemed that the clouds parted and god’s own grace shone down upon the dirty pavement of the city, and the first strains of music were detected by Klára’s ears since she was 15. She couldn’t quite believe it was true, and therefore instantly began following the faint sounds through twisting alleys and narrow streets until she finally stumbled upon a beautiful boy with brown hair and dark eyes and a beaten guitar and a harmonica. Skirting around so he wouldn’t see her staring like an idiot, she planted herself about twenty feet away from him, just close enough to listen but far enough for no one to notice her listening. She would go there every day, she resolved, if she were to ever be happy again.

 

Within just over a month, having inched closer and closer to the busker every day, Klára fancied herself in love with him and was then only about ten feet down the pavement from the boy with the guitar. He still hadn’t noticed her, even in all those weeks, had been too enthralled in the passion of his music to so much as turn his head and find her there loving him for 35 long days. But he didn’t, not once, and she was alright with that. She didn’t know what she would say if he ever did notice the homeless girl sitting beside him, writing harmonies and instrumentals in her mind to the songs he played. All she knew was that this was where she was meant to be indefinitely.

 

***

 

Henry Duke was, deep at heart, a performer first and a prodigy second. He hated the word prodigy, for one; everyone assumed that, simply because one day he went home from primary school and taught himself how to play “All You Need Is Love” on his mother’s violin, he could sit down and play anything under the sun. It was rather different from that, really. Everything he knew he had had to teach himself or learn from his mother (His mother was a born musician, granted with natural talent everyone spent their lives working toward). He merely learned everything much, much faster than other children did.

 

By the time he was thirteen years old, Henry was failing algebra and teaching his band director how to play guitar and harmonica simultaneously. When he went home at night (after an afternoon out busking with his mother) and his dad asked what he learned at school that day, without a fail Henry said “Nothing,” and truly meant it, unlike most boys his age. Before the year even reached the Christmas holidays, Henry’s parents and teachers agreed that school was not the right choice for Henry, that he could be much more than some other student, even at his young age. So he stopped going, and started busking with his mom full-time while his dad wrote and sold stories to magazine and newspapers, and for a long time they were happy.

 

The years passed and Henry learned more and more on the pavements of Northern Minneapolis than he ever would at a desk. But as he got older he wanted to learn all the things his mother couldn’t teach him, so much so that he was willing to descend back to the land of reading, writing, and arithmetic in order to do so. With almost a week’s constant urging from his parents, he began filling out applications to Julliard College. It was one of the most daunting tasks of his life, filling out those forms that wanted to know where he went to high school, but he shoved through and mailed them out and in three weeks he was somehow accepted.

 

His parents had been thrilled, and were more than happy to put on banquets and fundraisers and rallies to help their son go to school, but then his mother suddenly developed a cough that would not go away; all of the money raised went to her hospital bill when she was diagnosed with lung cancer, and Henry abandoned all thoughts of university to be with his family. He did not consider it a step downward, but merely a step away from his goal, to be made up for when everything cleared up.

 

As his mom’s health slowly declined over the next two years, his dad was forced to stay at home with her all the time, leaving Henry as the only working adult in his family. He had taken a job at a family friend’s restaurant when his mom was diagnosed, and when he wasn’t pulling doubles there he was out on the sidewalks with his guitar and harmonica. For a while he would wander from place to place, hoping to circulate interest and new customers, but tired of it after only a few months. He finally settled on a place halfway between Vinnie’s (the restaurant where he worked) and home.

 

He had been there for over a month, two weeks after he turned 22, when one day he paused between songs and heard the faint sound of coins rattling and a girl’s voice saying “God bless you.” He looked to the left and saw a girl who looked to be around 14 or 15, sitting on the curb with a dirty paper cup in her hands. For a moment his heart constricted with the thought of You see? You could be so much worse-off than this, but it was tinged with malice. Because of this girl his earnings were likely to be cut in half for the whole day, and he needed that money.

 

(Henry did not, at this point in time, know that Klára had been around that stretch of pavement for just as long as he had, and would therefore not affect his income in the slightest; she, after all, was a seemingly-talentless wallflower and did not attract as much attention as the handsome young man with the guitar and harmonica did, thusly making much less than him. But he was not aware of that, and so his face contorted into a glare toward her pitiful sympathy-inducing appearance.)

 

The girl seemed to realize that she was being a bother to someone nearby, because she looked up moments after Henry’s brow furrowed. She looked directly into Henry’s eyes and her face turned bright red, immediately ducking her head again. With her sandy blonde hair pinned back, Henry could still see the cold-flushed shells of her ear and nose. It was January, and she wasn’t wearing a scarf. His momentary hatred of the girl faded instantaneously, to be replaced with crushing guilt. She hadn’t done anything to deserve his resentment but sit on the pavement.

 

To distract from his guilt, Henry pretended the girl didn’t exist and threw himself into a song he had made up to memorize the various scandals in the American government, casting only the most occasional glance to his left and telling himself that he wasn’t doing it to see if the girl was still looking so sad. She seemed to feel his eyes flitting over her every time, and would sink her head even lower. Finally, she seemed unable to take it any longer and stood while he was still singing, scrambling to hold her satchel in one piece. Henry forced his eyes forward when the girl started walking toward him, keeping his eyes focused on the old woman who had stopped to listen. She reminded him of his Nana Margaret.

 

“You like this song?” he asked with his most charming smile in an instrumental break, thinking that she looked like the sort of lady who tipped big if you reminded her of her grandson. Not-Nana-Margaret nodded, giggling like a teenager and nodding eagerly, and so Henry continued singing with a little laugh.

 

“Woo-wee, in the land of the free�"” Henry cut off to clear his throat and Not-Nana-Margaret seemed confused when another voice continued in his place. The girl passed him, barely making a sound as she did, not even realizing that he could hear every word anyway.

 

“�"who does the work and who�"” she broke off when she noticed that Henry had stopped singing and was staring openly at her. “…plays for…the team…” Her face went white instead of red, she wiped her nose on the cuff of her coat sleeve, and then ducked her head and bolted around a corner out of sight.

 

Henry turned back to Not-Nana-Margaret. “You heard her, right?” he asked perplexedly, slowly realizing that his song had sounded so odd coming from her mouth because she had not been matching the melody, but harmonizing with him, almost perfectly.

 

Not-Nana-Margaret nodded with wide eyes. “Yes,” she said in a small voice. “She was very good. Do you know her?” Henry shook his head, trying to piece together how the girl had known the words to his song, and Not-Nana-Margaret put a ten-dollar-bill in his hat. “Well, she knows you quite well, I’d guess.” Before she left, in the opposite direction of the girl, Henry shook her hand and thanked her for listening. Not many people did.

 

Shaking his head like a wet dog to clear it of cobwebs, Henry started playing another song, trying to get his focus back. However after a few moments he realized he could very faintly hear the girl’s voice, hidden but still close. Thinking slyly, Henry put his hat with the note in it on his head, pushed the guitar case against the wall and, still playing and singing, rounded the corner and there she was: hunched over her cup, lips moving and thin voice shaking frailly. She looked rather like she was trying not to cry, as if something she’d always wanted had been utterly devastated. She looked up when he got closer and louder in her ear and bit her lip as nervously as if she thought he would yell at her or hit her. He didn’t yell and he didn’t hit her; he stopped playing and sat down beside her instead. “You know the words to my song,” he said.

 

The girl nodded mutely, eyes wide and avoiding his like nobody’s business.

 

“Have you been listening long?”

 

Positively gnawing on her lower lip (he saw a small droplet of blood forming and wondered why he made her so nervous) and staring intently at the ground, the girl nodded again. Henry felt oddly touched; no one, not even his mom, knew the words to his songs. He looked down at her battered shoes, the runs in her stockings, the destroyed hem of her dress, the holes in her coat, her white bare neck, and felt suddenly like the whole world was fucked. What had she done to deserve this? Why was it that girls like this were the ones in improper shoes while alcoholics and wife-beaters were living the good life?

 

“You’re awfully good,” he tried again.

 

She blushed, shook her head, and made a soft sound close to disbelieving laughter. She switched from biting her lip to the ridge of her thumbnail. He wondered what could make a girl so reticent to receiving compliments. He wanted to say something, anything that would get her to calm down a bit, but when he opened his mouth to speak she jumped as if pinched and leaped to her feet, briefly grappling with her tattered satchel.

 

“Oh, please don’t go!” he blurted out before thinking about it, springing up as well. He touched her arm and she made a noise like a bird in distress, jerking away and running. Henry watched the girl vanish down a side-street he usually tried to avoid and let out a sigh. Then he saw something gleaming white in the corners of his eyes and looked down. She had left in such a rush that she’d completely forgotten her Styrofoam cup. He pocketed it thoughtfully, being careful not to spill any of the coins, and set off toward home.

 

***

 

Klára ran blindly through the streets of Minneapolis, tears blurring her vision, when she slipped suddenly in a puddle of slush and fell. She lie there on her back, ankle throbbing silently, water soaking into her clothes, breath coming out in small white puffs, and wondered why she had run.

 

How many times have you wished for that boy to talk to you? she asked herself critically in the quiet darkness of her inner eyelids as soft downy snowflakes dusted her cheeks. Then he finally does speak to you and you freeze up? You f*****g moron.

 

“Klára?”

 

Her brother’s face, pale and drawn and gray eyes concerned, swam before her, and she forced herself into a sitting position. Her head was foggy; she must have hit it going down, and sure enough felt a lump beginning to pulse painfully. Markus pulled her to her feet and held her steady when spots of darkness ate at her vision.

 

“What happened?” asked her brother in their first language. He wasn’t as strong in English as she was, and she wasn’t very good at all. Klára was already shivering from the water soaked into her jacket, and Markus wrapped his own coat around her shoulders, leaving his arms bare. It was already getting dark, but Klára was not afraid with her brother by her side as she would be if she were alone. If Markus could fight off four boys twice his size at only 12, she figured he could fight of practically anyone at 15.

 

“I’m fine,” she said, though she wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t as if the boy had been angry with her for stalking him. He had almost seemed pleased, and that was what had worried her enough to make her run away. In the now-35 days that she had watched the boy from afar, her innermost imagination had constructed the entire perfection of his personality deep within; when he finally spoke to her she was so terrified of that image being false that she couldn’t help but get away before her dreams were crushed. Dreams were all she had, and she was not about to give them up quite yet.

 

“I found some money today,” Markus told her after a while of contemplation. Klára gave him a sharp, inquiring look. “A man dropped it, and when I asked if it was his he shouted at me and I got scared and ran away.”

 

Klára sighed and leaned her head on her brother’s shoulder. Since she was the best English-speaker in their family, she figured that the man had been shouting because he thought that Markus was stealing his money, not trying to return it. People tended to assume the worst from the boy because of his dark olive skin, dark hair, and the permanent scowl on his face. She told him her theory about the man and the wrinkles in his brow furrowed.

 

“Whatever, at least we have money, right?” he scoffed. “You count it up, see how much there is.” He pulled a small wad of bills from his pocket and held it out to Klára, who counted it easily as they walked, trying to hide the astonishment (and guilt) on her face. There was over 200 dollars in the palm of her hand, though all in large bills so it looked like very little. She shrugged at Markus like it wasn’t much, and then tucked it safely into the inner pocket of her coat. She kept all of the family’s money there because it was the only article of clothing she never removed for more than an hour.

 

Their entire life’s saving, from the day they moved to America, was in that pocket. The day Klára turned 18 she would be using the money to rent a flat; she knew there was enough. The only real reason they were homeless was because of her age. It was national law that someone had to be 18 or legally emancipated to rent or own property, and if she tried anything the police and social workers would be on them in an instant. If they found out the family was all orphans she and her siblings would be thrown to the mercy of the American foster care system. It wouldn’t be so bad for Klára, as she would be 18 in only five months, but Markus and Nik and Jopie were a different story altogether. They could be sent anywhere, separated forever, and that was the last thing any of them wanted after already losing nearly half of their family.

 

“Klára,” said Markus quietly, and she snapped out of her reverie. Even though she had forced the horror of that night when she was 14 into the furthest-back recesses of her mind it wasn’t enough to keep her from losing herself to dark thoughts once in a while.

 

That night Klára sat with her younger siblings in a shelter with her coat handing up in a window, only two feet away, so it could dry, leaving Klára with bare arms. It was warm there, crowded and noisy, but it was better when it was crowded. It was easy for four orphans to blend into the woodwork, and if anyone ever asked their mother was off finding extra blankets.

 

Klára slept sitting up, back flat against the wall so she could watch the kids, clutching her coat to her belly like a mama would her newborn baby. It wasn’t just the money that made her cling to it so; it had been her tati’s coat, the one Klára had spilled a whole bottle of her mama’s perfume onto only days before the family left Prague. She had been horrified, but Tati only laughed and said her punishment would be to wear it, doomed to suffer the overwhelming stench of perfume that only smelled pleasant in small whiffs on her mami’s wrist or neck. Sometimes, if she pressed the dark gray fabric to her face, closed her eyes, and concentrated with all her might, she thought that maybe the scent might still linger.