ten white plastic picks and four dollars. As he carried home his soon-to-be-thing, Kyle bounced on the balls of his feet just a little and clenched his jaw to keep himself from smiling.
Until that summer, Kyle had thought that Starlee didn’t have any friends. But since July, two guys who looked a little older than her and a lot older than Kyle had been pulling up in front of Starlee’s house every day around lunchtime in an older-model Camaro. Starlee would let them in and almost immediately turn up her music—all fuzz and feedback and whiny singing, not the dance music she’d listened to in junior high. Kyle could hear it clearly through the open double-hung window in his parents’ room, where he whiled away summer days on his father’s computer. The guys were always gone before Starlee’s mother got home from work. When they left, the music would stop, and Kyle could hear the crows cawing in the tall pines down the block.
The day after getting the guitar, Kyle spent the afternoon on the edge of his parents’ bed strumming F chord after F chord. Most sounded better than the one he’d played in the store, though none rang as clearly as the one the man had played. When the fingertips of his left hand began to burn, Kyle would blow on them and examine the dents he’d pressed into them with the strings. Starlee’s music blared out her open windows, but it registered with Kyle as white noise, like a box fan or a dryer running. All he heard was the F chord the man had played at the store. When the burning had subsided, Kyle would lay his index finger over the first fret, fit the strings back into the grooves in his fingertips, and try again to make the sound he heard in his head.
Around four, the rumble of the Camaro accelerating down the block swamped Kyle’s F chords. As the rumble faded, Starlee’s music cut off abruptly. Through his parents’ bedroom window, Kyle saw Starlee step onto her back step and light up a cigarette. An oversized white t-shirt nearly concealed her short red nylon shorts. Both the base and the tips of her ponytail were gathered high on the back of her head with a single rubber band.
Kyle could only play one chord—hardly enough to have made the guitar his thing—but he felt quite a bit different than he had just a few days ago. He wondered if anyone else could see the change in him. He wondered if Starlee could see it.
He laid the guitar down gently on his parents’ bed and scampered down the hall, stopping to gather himself before opening the screen door. Then he stepped out onto the rotting wood porch, hopped down from the top step, and walked with his hands in his pockets to the fence that divided the fifteen feet of gravel, dirt, and patchy crabgrass between his house and Starlee’s. Starlee blew smoke up and away, as if aiming for the tall pines. Her screen door was closed, but the thick white door behind it was open.
“Hey, Starlee.”
She finished exhaling her smoke and glanced at him. “Hey, Kyle.”
The up-and-down lilt that Kyle remembered in Starlee’s voice had flattened out. What remained of it sounded like an accident of muscle memory, or a put-on.
“How you been?” Kyle asked.
“All right,” she said.
“Good.” Kyle tried to keep his eyes off of Starlee’s long legs and was almost grateful that her t-shirt shrouded the rest of her shape. For her part, Starlee seemed to be staring into the thick mess of vines and scrub trees that made the back boundary of her mother’s lot all but impassable. He and Starlee hadn’t had a conversation this long in years, so Kyle didn’t waste any more time on small talk. “What kind of music do you listen to?” he asked.
She shrugged. “All kinds of stuff.”
“What kind of music were you listening to today?”
Starlee glanced at Kyle a second time. She nibbled at a cuticle, then examined it while the cigarette burned slowly in her other hand. “Neutral Milk Hotel,” she said.
“Oh,” Kyle said.
“Have you heard them?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Well, I’ve never heard them and known it was them.” Kyle smiled. “Maybe I should listen a little closer to what’s coming out your windows.”
Then Starlee looked squarely at Kyle. She tossed her cigarette on the gravel driveway, opened the screen door, and pushed past the white door with a long, purposeful stride. Before Kyle could figure out what he’d done wrong, Starlee reemerged from the house, walked to the fence, and held a CD over Kyle’s side of the property line. “You can have this,” she said.
She’d gripped the disc in the creases on the undersides of her first knuckles, and Kyle grabbed it the same way, momentarily interlacing his fingers with hers but never touching them. The bottom side of the disc shone purple and green in the sunlight. On the title side, “Neutral Milk Hotel” had been scrawled in green laundry marker above the spindle hole. “On Avery Island” was written below it in the same hand.
“Don’t be listening to anything going on in my house,” Starlee said. She stared at Kyle, as if waiting for him to acknowledge the order.
“OK,” Kyle said. He knew he could manage not to listen, but he wondered how he’d keep from hearing anything with both houses’ windows open and Starlee playing her music so loud.
Starlee went back inside her house. The screen door slapped twice against the wooden frame, and the thick white door closed behind it.
Kyle went into his parents’ bedroom, put the Neutral Milk Hotel CD into his father’s computer and clicked the on-screen play button. The songs sounded like mistakes at first—recordings that should have been thrown away and done over—but after hearing the first few tracks Kyle figured out that the fuzzy songs were supposed to sound fuzzy, and the clear songs were supposed to sound clear. Fuzzy or clear, each song seemed sad if Kyle listened to the words, so eventually he ignored them and absorbed only the music: chords strummed on a guitar that didn’t sound much better than Kyle’s own, and melodies carried by organs, horns and the raw, vibratoless voice of the singer.
The music evoked feelings of otherness in Kyle: this isn’t for me, he thought, by which he meant that he was neither as cool nor as weird as he perceived the music to be. But he kept listening, and as he listened he thought about Starlee. When the album ended, Kyle could not have told you for certain whether Starlee seemed melancholy because of her music or the music seemed melancholy because of Starlee.
Though he’d listened to twelve songs, Kyle found, in the near-silence of his parents’ bedroom, that he couldn’t shake the beat and melody of the album’s first song. He hummed some semblance of the tune and kept time slapping his thigh. Then he listened to the song again. The lyrics—about pornography and drugs and fires—scared Kyle a little. He couldn’t tell what was a joke and what was deadly serious.
Kyle googled a phrase from the lyrics, hoping he might understand them better if he could read them. The first page of search results all pointed to a song called “Song Against Sex.” Kyle didn’t recall hearing those words sung together and, though it was partly about sex, the song didn’t seem to be against sex, exactly. Kyle clicked on the second search result. “Song Against Sex” was indeed the song roaring out of his father’s computer speakers. On screen, the words were easier to comprehend and even more unsettling.
The letter F and a word Kyle had never seen before—“Bbmaj”—were written above each line of the lyrics. Kyle scrolled up to the top of the page and realized that these were the song’s chords: F and B flat major. He could hardly believe that a song this full could be made with only two chords, one of which was the only chord he could play. The page included two crude,
