After being safely escorted to Oceanside Middle School by the masked hero Ace of Blades, Marth realized the school was not locked. He stood for a moment outside the main entrance with his key already in his hand, looking at the door as if it had spoken first. The glass was cold and faintly cloudy with morning damp. Beyond it, the front hall waited in holiday silence, its old brick walls holding the dim gold of the security lights.

He tried the handle again and it opened. Must have been one of the janitors, he assumed. Mr. Belsky, perhaps, who treated days off as rumors invented by weak men. Or Mrs. Ibarra, who came in during holidays to polish floors with the severity of someone preparing a ballroom for ghosts.

Still, Marth lingered.

His wrist ached where Bruno had held him.

Not badly and not in a way that would bruise, probably. But enough that his body remembered what his mind was trying to arrange into something more manageable. Bruno’s face kept returning to him in pieces: wet hair, bright unfocused eyes, want curdled into entitlement. And then the masked hero, too, arriving out of nowhere like a dark answer to an unprayed prayer. Marth had not seen much of him clearly during the alteraction. Only motion, presence, a kind of impossible timing. A figure between him and Bruno when his ex-lover had been on the edge of doing something he could not take back.

It was absurd, really. The sort of thing that belonged to other people.

Marth had lived a rather provincial life, despite being raised in one of the strangest houses in Calder City. The Old Prue Gables Bed & Breakfast had been eccentric enough for anyone as a grand old Victorian with too many angles, too many windows, and the deep plum-gray temperament of a house that had spent generations learning everyone’s secrets and deciding to keep them mostly out of affection. He had grown up among siblings, interesting guests, his father’s paintings, his mother’s dancing feet, his grandparents’ old stories about their world travels and the "Faraway Tree" in the backyard, breakfast bells, crooked stairs, and family arguments that always ended with someone buttering toast for someone else.

It had not prepared him for being stalked by an ex-lover in an alley. It had certainly not prepared him for being saved by a masked hero before lunch. His phone buzzed in his coat pocket.

Sybil.

He answered, softened his voice, and let her worry at him for three and a half minutes. She asked where he was, whether he had gotten to school, whether he sounded strange because something had happened or because he was being himself in a concerning way. Marth told her he was fine and that he had arrived. He did not mention Bruno, or the masked hero, nor the way his wrist still felt occupied by someone else’s hand.

There were omissions, he thought, that were not quite lies. Then again, there were songs that were not quite good. He hung up with the vague guilt of both.

Oceanside Middle School rose on the edge of The Docks district, an old brick building with tall windows, a wide front staircase, and stone trim darkened by years of coastal weather. In spring, the courtyard planters tried very hard to look cheerful. In winter, the building looked like a stern aunt in a sensible coat. Today, with school closed for the Days of Remembrance (most, but not all schools were closed) it seemed smaller and more solemn than usual, as if the absence of children had taken some necessary madness out of its bones.

A painted starfish smiled from a banner beside the office door. GO STARFISH! Marth had never found the mascot intimidating, but he had become fond of it. There was something admirable about a creature with no obvious face deciding to represent school spirit anyway.

He moved through the front hall with his satchel against his side. The floors shone from recent cleaning. Bulletin boards displayed construction-paper wreaths, student poems about remembrance, and a large hand-painted sign that read: HEROES HOLD THE CITY UP. Someone had added, in very small pencil beneath it, EVEN WHEN THEY ARE TIRED. Marth paused at that, and then he kept walking.

The music room sat at the end of the east hall, past the auditorium doors and the trophy case where Oceanside’s debate team had been undefeated for so long that Marth suspected mystical intervention. The closer he came, the more he expected silence.

Instead, he heard a chair scrape. Then a small, guilty rustle. Marth opened the music room door. A boy startled so hard he nearly knocked over a music stand.

“Mr. Oldfox!”

Samir Vashani stood beside the piano with a notebook open on the bench and a pen in one hand. He was in seventh grade, narrow-shouldered, solemn-eyed, and currently wearing the expression of a person caught committing a crime. Around his sneakers lay several crumpled balls of paper. More were gathered under the piano like a little nest of failed courage.

“I’m sorry,” Samir blurted. “I know school’s closed. I just—I didn’t think anyone would be here, and the door was open, and I wasn’t doing anything. I mean, I was doing something, but not anything bad.”

Marth looked at the notebook. Then at the pen. Then at the crumpled paper. He heard, and then felt, the bright nervous tangle inside the boy. Anxiety wound around fragmented thoughts, half-formed lyrics, a melody that kept tripping over itself, and one image that flashed up shyly before Samir could bury it again. It was a girl with dark curls, a yellow backpack, and a smile Samir’s mind had polished until it glowed.

Oh, Marth thought.

Oh, dear.

His face softened.

“It’s all right.” he said.

Samir blinked. “It is?”

“Sure.” Marth said.

He moved to the teacher’s desk slowly and sat his satchel down, giving the boy’s embarrassment room to survive. His classroom looked strange without the students and even more strange with the chairs tucked in almost properly, instrument cases stacked along the wall, the whiteboard still holding the last lesson on dominant seventh chords, and paper stars hanging from the ceiling in honor of the Remembrance holiday. The room smelled faintly of old wood, dry-erase marker, brass polish, and the particular dust that lived inside old instruments. And of course, that signature Oldfox lavender.

Marth took off his coat and asked, “What are you working on?”

Samir’s ears went red. “Nothing.”

Marth glanced at the crumpled papers again. “Impressive volume for nothing.”

“It’s just—homework.”

“Is that so?”

Samir pressed his mouth shut.

Marth tilted his head, as if making a harmless guess. “Is it a song?”

The boy went very still. Then, after a second, he nodded.

“A song,” Marth said, warmly enough to take the sharp edge off the word. “That’s lovely.”

“It’s not good.”

“Most first drafts are shy little monsters.”

Samir looked up despite himself.

Marth smiled. “They become friendlier when you stop frightening them.”

The boy’s grip on the pen loosened.

Marth could still feel the emotional undercurrent in him, tender and terrified. The girl’s image slipped through again, this time with a name attached only in shape, not sound. Samir liked her with the full catastrophe of being twelve. They were absolute, secret, and with no reliable sense of proportion. It was very serious. It was also, in a way Marth would never say aloud, adorable enough to bruise the heart.

“I came to grade essays,” Marth said. “You may keep working, if you like. An hour or two.”

Samir stared. “Really?”

“Really. But you cannot come to school again when it is closed or without permission from a teacher and your parents. Okay?”

A small smile broke through the boy’s panic. “Ok.”

“Good.”

Marth sat at his desk and opened the stack of music theory essays his students had turned in before the holiday. They had written about melody, harmony, tension, resolution, and, in one memorable case, why rests were “the music taking a nap.” He uncapped his pen, drew the first paper toward him, and tried to become the kind of man who graded efficiently.

Samir returned to the piano and for a few minutes, the room settled into a companionable hush. Paper shifted. A pen scratched. Samir plucked at a borrowed classroom guitar with great care and not much skill, each chord arriving like a diffident animal from under a porch. Marth listened without appearing to, because he knew what it meant to make something tender near another person.

He understood songwriting as a private little wound.

His own had begun years ago as a hobby of transcribing classical pieces for cathartic pleasure, then for family, then once, with dreadful sincerity, for Bruno on their second anniversary. A whole arrangement, handwritten, ribbon-tied, impossibly earnest. Bruno had looked at it as if no one had ever made him something that required patience before. Marth had believed, then, that love could be preserved if one wrote it carefully enough.

He set his pen down.

No.

Not that.

Not now.

He tried to shake Bruno from his mind the way one shook rain from an umbrella, but the thought clung. Bruno’s hand on his wrist. Bruno’s voice. The obsidian smoke. The masked hero’s sudden arrival. A hand between him and harm.

At the piano, Samir hummed silently in his head. Marth caught the words by accident.

If I could say your name like lemonade...

He almost smiled.

Then immediately looked back at the essay in front of him, because it was unethical to enjoy the private lyrical distress of innocent first love, even when it was sweet enough to make him want to rest his chin in his hand. And for a brief moment, he did.

His mother would have loved all of this.

She had spent his childhood dancing through The Old Prue Gables announcing to anyone who would listen, and several guests who had not agreed to listen, that her son was a musical prodigy. Marth had never believed her. Mothers were built with generous inaccuracies, but he had liked the way she said it, one arm lifted, scarf trailing, as if music were not something he did but something that had chosen him and would be terribly rude to leave.

An hour passed. Then a little more. Samir’s song improved by three chords and one brave crossing-out. Marth graded six essays, though he suspected his comments became increasingly ornate after the third. When Samir finally closed the notebook, he looked exhausted in the way only young hope could exhaust a person.

“Thank you, Mr. Oldfox,” he said, hovering near the door with the guitar returned to its stand and the notebook clutched to his side.

“You’re very welcome.”

“I’ll lock—well, I guess I can’t lock anything.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

Samir nodded, then hesitated.

Marth did not pry.

Prying was easy. Kindness was harder.

“Good luck, Samir.” Marth said.

“Ugh,” Samir paused, curious as to why Marth would say that. "Thanks?"

The boy slipped out into the hallway. Marth watched him go through the classroom window that looked over the side path toward the street. Samir emerged from the school a minute later, small beneath the old brick archway, his notebook held tight against his jacket. For a few steps, he walked with purpose.

Then he stopped.

Like always, heard it first and then he felt it before he fully understood it.

A sudden bloom of anxiety. sharp, bright, and humiliating settled beneath a tumble of frantic thoughts about her house, the song, too stupid, what if she laughs, what if she tells everyone, what if she hates it, what if she knows, go home, go home, go home. Samir turned half-back toward the street that would take him away from her.

Marth stood at the window.

He rarely used his gift to intervene in people’s private lives. Rarely. Almost never. He believed in the sacredness of choice, even the foolish little choices people made at twelve with a love song burning a hole through their backpack. Especially those. The heart had a right to its own complex sentiment. But compassion rose in him swiftly. And despite his gifts, Marth was immensely empathic.

The boy looked so small out there, caught between courage and retreat, with his little song pressed to his chest like a candle in wind.

Marth closed his eyes.

Just a little assistance, he told himself. Only the gentlest thing.

He opened his mind just enough to reach.

Not a command. Not control. No hand closing around the will. Just a telempathic sensation, soft as a palm between the shoulder blades. A nudge. The image came to Samir's mind first, with the feeling of being believed in from behind.

And one word.

Go.

Outside, Samir jolted.

He turned around, eyes wide, one hand lifting as if someone might truly have stood behind him and pushed him forward. No one was there, of course. Only the empty walkway, the old school, the starfish banner stirring near the entrance, and the city holding its Remembrance hush.

Samir looked baffled.

Then slowly, wonderfully, his shoulders changed.

Not fully brave. Not magically transformed. But corrected, a little. As if doubt had been a too-heavy coat and he had finally shrugged one sleeve free. He glanced back once toward the school, his expression half-startled, half-awed, as if a mystical cupid had wandered out of the sunlight, tapped him on the spine, and declared itself in favor of love songs.

Marth stood very still at the window.

Samir lifted the notebook closer to his chest.

Then he ran.

Not toward home.

Toward her.

Marth watched him go, his head tilting slightly, a soft smile beginning before he could stop it. There was something almost painfully dear about it, from the thin legs and earnest notebook to the whole bright foolishness of youthful affection flinging itself at possibility.

“Well,” Marth murmured to the empty classroom.

The paper stars stirred faintly above him, though there was no breeze. He hoped it helped and he hoped she was kind.

But most of all, he hoped, with the helpless tenderness that had always been his most inconvenient talent, that somewhere in Calder City a seventh-grade love song might survive the morning.