The big things could wait. The song knew where it belonged.
Chapter Sixteen
The Rumor
The rumor reached Darius on a Tuesday, from someone who didn't even mean to tell him.
He was at his locker before first period, trading his math book for his history binder, when a seventh grader named Ellis slowed and said, with the casual cruelty of a child repeating his parents' dinner talk, "So, did you really steal that song?"
Darius's hands went still on the binder. The hallway noise β lockers slamming, somebody's laugh echoing off tile β thinned until all he could hear was the blood in his ears.
"Excuse me?" he said.
Ellis shrugged, already drifting away. "Preston said no kid from off the street writes something like that. Says you must've copied it." And then he was gone, swallowed by the stream of students, leaving Darius alone in the suddenly too-bright corridor with the words circling like flies.
A kid from off the street.
Darius didn't go to first period right away. He stood there until the warning bell rang, then walked, because walking was better than standing still with that feeling in his chest β like a thumb pressed against something soft inside his ribs.
The accusation followed him all morning. In science, a girl two rows over whispered behind a cupped hand, and they both looked at him. In the cafeteria, Spencer Doyle held court at a table of boys; Darius heard his own name across the noise, and the boys laughed. He didn't need the rest. He sat with Harper at their usual table and pushed his sandwich around his tray.
"You okay?" Harper asked. "You've got your piano face on."
"My what?"
"The face you make when you're about to play something hard." She snapped her cookie in half. "Spill."
He told her what Ellis had said. Harper's face did something complicated β the cheer drained out of it like water from a sink.
"He's doing that?" she said quietly. "After everything? Wow. Okay." She drummed her fingers on the table, thinking fast. "Darius, if Preston Hale says you plagiarized your own song, somebody just needs to prove it's yours. And I know exactly where to look."
"Harper β"
"Nope. Trust me." She was already standing, cramming her lunch into her bag. "Eat your sandwich. Leave this to me."
He didn't eat his sandwich.
That afternoon at the Eastside Community Center, the old rec room smelled the way it always did β radiator dust, floor wax, aging wood. Darius sat at the bench and stared at the keys without touching them. They looked back, a row of white teeth in a grin that suddenly felt accusatory.
Three years of Mr. Banks tapping his temple and saying, "You hear it first up here, son, then you let your hands do the translating." Three years of writing "Song for June" note by note, starting with the lullaby Nana June used to hum on the porch β the one nobody else could remember quite right, so he had written it in music, so it would never be lost. He had played it at the community center's spring recital. He had played it in the hospital room while Mr. Banks lay pale against the pillows. He had played it for a room full of strangers, and they had stood up.
And Preston had taken all of that and turned it into a theft.
Darius put his hands in his lap and sat very still, and for the first time in three years, he did not want to play.
"That is not the face of a boy about to practice," said a voice from the doorway.
Harper stood there holding a manila folder like a trophy, slightly out of breath, her backpack slipping off one shoulder.
"How did you even get in here?" Darius asked.
"Charm," she said. "And a security guard who likes my mom's charity. Darius, look." She crossed the room, dropped the folder on the piano's music stand, and flipped it open. Inside was a folded program, printed on cream paper, the corners soft with handling: EASTSIDE COMMUNITY CENTER β SPRING RECITAL. And under the list of performers, in plain black type:
Darius Cole β "Song for June" (original composition).
His breath caught. He remembered that evening β folding chairs, his mother crying quietly in the third row.
"I went to Mrs. Adler in the office," Harper said, breathless with triumph. "She keeps every program ever printed β she's got boxes. This is from last spring. Before the gala. Before Preston Hale ever heard your name. You wrote it, you played it, it's right here in ink." She tapped the page. "So Preston can say whatever he wants. Paper doesn't lie."
Darius stared at the program until the words blurred. It should have felt like victory. Instead it felt like being handed a shield he hadn't asked to need.
"Why is he doing this?" Darius said quietly. "He already won. His dad already β " He stopped. He only knew what Preston had looked like at the gala, standing in the wreckage of his humiliation while his father's face went cold.
Harper's expression softened. "Because somebody has to be losing, and he picked you. That's what people like him do." She folded the program into the folder and pressed it into his hands. "Keep this. It's yours. All of it is yours."
After she left, Darius sat alone with the folder in his lap. He looked at the upright, at the scarred keys he'd worn smooth, and thought of Nana June humming on the porch, and of Mr. Banks saying music was his answer. He set the folder aside and lifted the piano lid. And slowly, deliberately, he began to play β not the gala piece, not the showpiece, just the lullaby underneath it all, the first four bars his grandmother used to hum. The notes came out soft and a little shaky, then steadier, then true. Proof, he realized, had never been the paper. The proof was in his hands. It always had been.