Standing for Weirdo

Chapter 27

My study time passed and slipped into lunch hour, and I cursed my own words while squinting at the screen. The lack of sleep wasn’t helping in the slightest, and the letters and lines and whatever insisted on dancing around in the backlit monitor, giving me a monster headache and refusing to yield useful information.

The search was proving to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Of course, entering “Beatrice” + “crazy boyfriend” was absurd, but I felt I had tried every combination short of ridiculous.

I hadn’t found the song. There were a lot of minuet scores—or tablatures, or whatever they were called—that started off similarly to the one Trevor had given me. But after a few lines, one or two notes were off, and then four, and then the whole thing became something entirely different.

I had tried to look up famous composers, figuring that they’d be more likely to be remembered by Trevor unconsciously. When I ran through my shamefully short list of Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin, I decided to try and focus on the most obscure composers, because it was possible that, if the song was dedicated, it had been just a nameless man pining after a nameless woman. If that was the case, both of them remained nameless and unknown by the time I gave up.

In the end, I wondered if the song I was looking for just went a bit off key, or if it was a different kind of song altogether. I started to look up minuets as a whole to compare.

Apparently, there is a pattern that a song must conform to in order to be considered a minuet. It has to be divided in movements, whatever a movement might be, and each movement must be written in a scale that is harmonious with the other scales and…

Consider my brain imploded.

I couldn’t do this. There was nothing to find, the song was not online, and I didn’t know the first thing about music. If I kept at it, I’d only be bashing my head against the wall. I got that Trevor didn’t want to worry his father looking this up at home, but I was in way over my head with the topic.

Still, I tried to look up a couple more pages.

In one, I could listen to several examples of minuets, used to explain their complex structure, and I listened. They started out a lot like Trevor's mystery song, but then progressed evenly. When Trevor would pick up and start weaving notes sharper and sharper, the examples kept their consistent, relaxing tune. It was a comfortable music to dance to, and I remembered Trevor that first day in theatre class saying that they’d been favorites of the Season balls.

I could see why. And I could sort of see that what I was looking for was not a minuet, in spite of Trevor's notes and of the promising beginning of the melody, because it morphed into something way too furious for the Victorian dances.

That was all.

I was tired, and hungry, and not just a bit frustrated, so I closed the computer and made my way to the cafeteria, almost thirty minutes late.

Stella and Alex were sitting alone, laughing at some private joke and polishing up their desserts.

“Hey,” Stella looked up when I approached, confused. “What happened, girl? You look like a Zombie Princess today.”

“Thanks, Stella. I love you too.” I dropped on a chair in front of them. “So, where’s Trevor?”

“With you, I was hoping.”

“He hasn’t come to lunch,” offered Alex. “Since you weren’t around either, we thought you two had gone off to catch up on yesterday or whatever.”

“No, we came together to school, but I was busy,” I said, pushing myself out of the chair in spite of my weariness. So much for lunch. “I have an idea of where he might be, though. See you two later?”