ATP

She was bisexual, or so Sam had heard.

It was funny, Sam thought to herself, she didn’t look it. That is, if one could look bisexual. Melody was her tutor, and she looked the way Sam imagined all tutors looked, albeit maybe slightly prettier—low-riding jeans, simple t-shirt (in this case, one that proudly displayed the words “Orlando Band Festival” in bold white font), worn tennis shoes. She was a college student, so she towered over Sam, but her face still held that roundness to it, that baby fat that made her dark, intense eyes pop out at you. The auburn waves framing her face and neck were incredibly soft. Sam had been allowed to braid them once. There was nothing in her upright posture or perfectly lopsided grin that proclaimed, “I’m down with either, really!” Then again, those ever-gossiping, dreadfully chatty boys at school weren’t exactly known for their intuition and logic. The disdainful tones they took on when they mentioned Melody clashed horribly with the glowing woman in front of her, anyway, so Sam tried to ignore them.

“Are you paying attention?” Melody asked in that usual stern way of hers. Sam had to marvel at how adult her voice was. It was deep and musical and had a slight purr to it when she laughed.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Melody said, gently flicking Sam on the nose. Sam blinked. “C’mon, Squirrel, we don’t want a repeat of last week’s biology quiz, do we?”

The nickname "Squirrel" was born of an incident the previous fall, when Melody had just become Sam's tutor. They'd taken a break at the nearby park, where Sam had made eye contact with a squirrel for so long that she tripped over a tree root. "Squirrel," Melody had called her softly as she scrubbed the dirt off her face with a washcloth. The next week, they'd started to study algebra.

“The mitochondria, Squirrel,” Melody declaimed, more dramatically than was necessary, “is the powerhouse of the cell. And how does the cell transport energy?”

Sam thought about that for a moment. She was confident that it started with an A, maybe a P. Like her aural perception class, which somehow managed to make singing less fun. Her instructor, a balding man with a rather gravelly tone for a singer, raved about Melody whenever she visited or was mentioned. Said she had the most gorgeous, refined voice he’d ever heard. Fitting, he beamed, considering her name. He boasted as if he’d raised her herself, rather than just having taught her for three years, and she smiled fondly and let him.

“ATP, Squirrel,” Melody reprimanded mildly, and Sam’s glassy gaze returned to her sharp one. “ATP, adenosine triphosphate, remember?”

Sam did not, in fact, remember, but she nodded. Disappointing Melody was never any fun. She wouldn’t yell, but she got that certain look in her eyes, that wrinkle in her brow, like she was exhausted. Not with Sam, necessarily, but with herself.

“It’s okay,” Melody soothed at Sam’s involuntary distressed expression. “Can you think ‘adventure, time to play!’ for ATP, Squirrel? For energy?”

Sam nodded. Adventure, time to play. It sounded energetic enough. You needed to have energy to go on an adventure, after all. She reminisced happily on the day after her first test under Melody’s tutelage, when they’d built a giant pile of leaves and played in it for hours. It had thoroughly used up her energy, and Melody had had to half-drag her home.

“I can remember that,” Sam promised, and she was rewarded with a bright smile.

“Excellent work today, Squirrel,” Melody told her. Sam’s eyes were drawn to the curve of her lips. One side was slightly higher than the other, exposing a shallow dimple, and it always caught Sam’s attention. “Just remember, when you take your quiz, don’t overthink things. Your instincts are always better than you think.”

The day after the quiz, Melody showed up in a soft leather jacket and aviator sunglasses and relocated their study session to the park. “As a celebration,” she said, a little more dully than the words merited.

“I haven’t got my quiz score yet,” protested Sam, but Melody shook her head.

“An early one, then.”

About an hour in, in between recitations of her times tables, which always inexplicably seemed to go better when she was moving around or doing something else, Sam fidgeted uncomfortably from her spot on the tire swing. Melody was quieter and less readily laudatory today, and Sam could feel her eyes burning holes in her skull. “Are you mad at me?” asked Sam, choosing to stare at Melody’s left earring instead of her face, obscured by the sunglasses. The earring was a simple baby blue one, maybe imitation pearl, Sam thought.

“No,” said Melody carefully. There was a poignant pause, and then she added, “Sorry, Squirrel. Sometimes adults have a lot on their minds. It isn’t your fault.”

Sam considered this for a moment, tilting her head as the spinning of the tire swing slowed. Wordlessly, she patted the tire swing, and when Melody hesitated, Sam smirked,

“What? Too cool for a swing?” and Melody grudgingly joined her. Even her slender form was clumsy and awkwardly large on the child-sized swing, but Sam would not be deterred, and began to spin with great effort. Melody, smart woman that she was, caught on and helped her. Before long, they had a pleasant, constant spin going. Melody’s thick hair caught the white, fluffy balls that fell from the trees above. They almost looked like huge snowflakes, and Sam blinked them out of her eyelashes.

They spun in silence for a few minutes, and then Melody sighed. “Good multiplication, Squirrel.” Nothing else was said until Sam picked up where she’d left off on her times tables. Things are normal, Sam wished she could say, they’re the same here with me, see? Don’t be sad. Instead, she began on geology and described the cleavage pattern of gypsum. The more details Sam got right, the more she was rewarded with little smiles from Melody, the subtle relaxation of Melody’s tense shoulders until her usual half-slouch had returned, and Sam could relax as well.

When Melody left that evening, Sam thought she heard a mumbled “Thanks, Squirrel.” It was odd; as Melody turned away, the dying sunlight caught Sam’s eye, and she thought she saw a purple gleam underneath Melody’s sunglasses. She was often told she had an overactive imagination, though.

Melody was absent from their next scheduled appointment two days later. Sam had forgotten that they’d even scheduled one until her mother let her know that Melody wouldn’t be over until the weekend. “She never misses,” Sam said hesitantly, glancing at the front door as if tempted to run and check on her.

“Family issues or something,” Sam’s mother replied carelessly, her eyes already locked onto her favorite newspaper section, the horoscope. She was a Taurus, she told Sam often, so it was only natural for her to be bull-headed and stubborn. Sam glanced over her shoulder and saw that today, the newspaper declared she was in for a relaxing week. Her mother’s voice interrupted her reading. “Go do your homework before your father gets home, now.”

In her room, Sam stared at her math book and read the same sentence eight times before closing it and watching the raindrops meander down the windowsill instead.

Sam’s biology teacher, a stiff woman with wrinkled talons for hands, graded as slowly as she spoke, furthering the students’ theory that she was a zombie. It took her four full seconds to extend her hand fully enough for Sam to grab her quiz, and Sam’s heart skipped at the splash of red ink across the top of it. B+. As always, she’d struggled on the multiple choice, but there was a hastily scrawled red “Nice” alongside the ATP short answer.

Melody was waiting for her outside the school. “Figured I’d walk you home since it’s such a nice day,” she said, and Sam nodded appreciatively. “So, how was school today?”

“We got our quizzes back,” Sam responded, tugging her falling backpack back onto her shoulders with difficulty. “I did better than I thought I would.”

“But not better than I thought you would,” Melody said, and Sam grinned.

The sound of giggling drifted over to them, stealing their attention the way secretive sounds tend to do. Sam swiveled her head around and saw a gaggle of her peers; she recognized them from math, and she was pretty sure that the tall one with the particularly loud giggle was named Steven, but she wasn’t sure about the others, mixed girls and boys whose overly bright eyes were fixated on Melody. Steven leaned over, jerked his head toward Melody and Sam, and whispered something into the ear of the student next to him, a bespectacled girl with curly red hair and a baggy ACDC t-shirt, and the entire group broke out in more giggles. Sam met the girl’s eyes, confused, her stomach dropping sickeningly for some reason she couldn’t quite identify.

Melody had stiffened up beside her. “Come on, Sam,” she said lowly, and Sam jolted, not having realized that she’d stopped walking. The giggling intensified, and it still sounded in Sam’s ears an hour later as they studied. “Pay attention, Squirrel,” Melody said, more tiredly than usual, and Sam felt her cheeks burn.

"Sorry,” she muttered, and Melody sighed.

“Maybe we should be done for today, Squirrel. I’m sorry. I’m not really feeling well.”

Sam squinted at Melody, as if she could try to cure Melody’s ailments that way. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah. Sorry.” Sorry, again. That was wrong. That wasn’t very Melody of her.

“Wait,” said Sam, and she rifled through her backpack. “Here.” She handed Melody her quiz, with the “Nice” on the ATP question.

Melody looked at it, and Sam thought she blinked rather harder than she needed to. “Thanks, Squirrel,” she said, and her voice was stuffy. She leaned down and gave Sam a hug, a rarity, a treasure, and Sam breathed in her scent, aloe vera shampoo and vanilla latte and a flowery perfume so faint Sam wondered if it wasn’t hers.

She’d forgotten that there was a biology test the next day, but she felt rather better than expected about her performance on it. There had been a short essay question on simple cellular energy storage and transport, which was worth twenty points, and several more questions on different single-cellular organisms. Melody’s bright, cheery song echoed in her head. “Paramecium, bum, bum! Paramecium, bum, bum! Pro-tist, ci-li-a, pa-ra-me-ci-um!” Sam’s teacher rebuked her, inciting treasonous giggles from her classmates, and Sam forced herself to stop humming, flushing with embarrassment.

“Melody was student teaching again today in band,” a lanky, tan boy asserted loudly to another, a squatter boy with a round, freckle-covered face, on the bus home. “She doesn’t know a thing about the trumpet, it’s the worst.”

Heat rushed into Sam’s cheeks, and she bit her lip. Those boys gossiped worse than her mother and her obnoxious friends.

“She’s got another girlfriend now,” Freckles whispered conspiratorially, scooting closer to Lanky. “Saw her this morning, dropping her off at school. Had a boyfriend last month.”

“Ah, that’s because she’s bisexual,” Lanky confirmed, giving a somber, self-assured nod. Sam had the sudden, bizarre urge to laugh, and suppressed it hurriedly. “Feel like I’d just pick?”

“Don’t think I’d date a bisexual chick,” Freckles reflected, “seems like she might cheat on you with a girl, right?”

Should I assume you’d cheat on me with another girl, then? Sam wondered. Her fingers twitched. They felt hot.

“She does seem flakey,” agreed Lanky. “Hope she doesn’t end up teaching here permanently, imagine if she taught a class herself, not knowing the trumpet and bringing in girlfriends and boyfriends, it’d be irritating.”

Sam cleared her throat. She could feel her heartbeat in her ears, her jaw. Enough was enough. Her own voice echoed in her skull, as if someone else were speaking the words. “Melody hasn’t done anything to you. She’s a nice tutor.”

Lanky’s eyes settled on her, and he grinned. Sam envisioned a lean wolf, leering toothily and considering her, lowering his haunches, preparing to spring. Freckles grinned too, more like a bear than a wolf, his eyes less sharp. “I bet you think she’s really nice,” Lanky said. “What, are you bisexual too?”

“Oh, gross,” laughed Freckles, and a couple of girls behind them laughed with him. Sam blinked back tears and stared at her tennis shoes.

When Sam got home, her nerves were stretched to their breaking point, her hands shaking so badly that she accidentally dropped her plate of quinoa salad with a symphony of shattering porcelain. Her mother cried out, maybe with concern and maybe with exasperation, and helped Sam bandage her bleeding, stinging palms. Sam was glad Melody wasn’t coming over.

Melody showed up at their appointed time the next day, her eyes locking on to Sam’s bandaged hands with unnerving speed. Melody tutted, gently taking the soft white wrapping in her own hands. “What’s this all about, Squirrel?”

A strange shiver went through Sam, as if Melody was something foreign, something Sam didn’t know, and she yanked her hands away and glared sullenly at a nearby armchair. It was unsatisfyingly steady under her severe gaze, so she switched to glaring at the dark tabby house cat, Mr. Mo, who stared back defiantly, white-tipped tail lashing. They stayed like this until Melody asked, “Want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” grouched Sam, a bit petulantly.

Melody hummed. “I’ve got something special in mind for today, Squirrel. Quit harassing the cat and come on.”

As it turned out, “something special” involved a picnic lunch at the park, complete with messy tuna salad finger sandwiches made by Melody herself. “Cooking isn’t among my many talents,” Melody defended as Sam prodded experimentally at the soggy bread. Admittedly, the celery and pickles Melody had added in made it delicious enough to compensate for the unsettling texture. They took their time eating, and Sam watched as an ant made its way stubbornly up her leg, even when she started jiggling it.

They were out long enough for Melody to insistently apply sunscreen to Sam’s exposed shoulders twice, despite how Sam loathed the greasy texture of it, before they began the walk back. As they reached the house, Sam frowned, the previous day’s words ringing deafeningly in her ears. Impulsively, she blurted, “Are you bisexual?”

There was a heavier silence than Sam had ever known with Melody, and it lasted so long that she wondered if Melody was going to answer at all. “Yeah,” she finally said, simply, and that was that, although Sam's jaws burned with the effort of clamping in unspoken questions. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” said Sam.

Sam passed the next test just after her fifteenth birthday, and Melody took her for ice cream. She got to order mint chocolate chip, her favorite, but only one scoop. “You know you get brain freeze, Squirrel,” Melody scolded at Sam’s pout, and Sam had to sheepishly agree. They ate their ice cream, reveling in the relief from the heat, Sam with her mint chocolate chip and Melody with a vanilla/chocolate mix. “I just can’t choose,” Melody smirked to Sam confidentially. “They’re both so appealing.” Sam giggled, and Melody was here and she was the same beautiful, funny Melody, and suddenly those boys were just stupid wisps of insignificant chatter again, leaking out of Sam’s ears until they were gone. The tension that had been between them since the day of the picnic seemed to dissipate.

“You realize we’re going to have to actually study next time, right, Squirrel?” Melody said after a while. Unfortunately, this announcement was given precisely as Sam fell prey to a brain freeze, and it seemed that Melody mistook Sam’s pained expression for disapproval at that, because she flicked Sam’s nose. “C’mon, smart Squirrel,” she scolded lightly, and Sam gave her her best shit-eating grin. Melody gave that laugh of hers, the one with the purr.

Finals week was an intense and miserable ordeal that had Sam sleeping three hours a night and stressing for the other twenty-one, nothing like the tame finals weeks in middle school; as expected, high school was hell. She had biology and math on the same day that her essay on the checks and balances system of the government was due, and English, geology, and aural perception the day after that. She walked out of her aural perception final with a sore throat and sweaty everything else, still shivering from the adrenaline rush.

The school was unbearable. Most students in Sam’s grade were done for the semester, and the hallways were flooded with cacophonous voices and loose papers covered in red marks, fluttering on the floor and tripping up the students like Sam, who were just trying to escape. The seniors had left several days before, but their mess still cluttered every room. Sam’s phone buzzed in her pocket, and when she tried to check it, it was knocked from her hand by some stampeding theater kids, fresh from a final rehearsal of some play Sam had to guess was about tragedy of some sort, judging by the dried fake blood on one of their costumes. The real tragedy, unfortunately, was that her cell phone was utterly broken, the screen all dancing cyan and magenta and absolutely useless. She threw a biting glare in the direction of the theater kids, but they were long gone by then, although she could hear their exaggerated vibrato echoing down the hallway like banshee screams.

Melody was waiting outside the school in a tattered silver Cadillac. “Get in, Squirrel,” she called, and Sam complied eagerly. It was a short drive to Sam’s house, but they weren’t going there today. As it turned out, the text Sam’s shattered phone had tried so valiantly, yet so fruitlessly, to receive was from Sam’s parents, who were trying to let her know she had permission to go out with her tutor. “I figured you could use a break,” Melody explained, maybe a little more quietly than usual, but then, it could’ve been Sam’s imagination again. Either way, Sam nodded emphatically.

Sam had only been in Melody’s car once before this, and it was precisely as she remembered. Worn leather interior, cool to the touch, floor that always seemed to look dirty despite the complete absence of any actual clutter or trash. The pestering whine of the engine battled for dominance with the doo-wop cassette tape, which seemed to eternally play “Poison Ivy” and “Love Potion No. 9” on repeat. Sam sang along for a while, clinging to the repeated lyrics and blushing when she blurted out a chorus prematurely, until her long, tiring day caught up to her. The car hit a bump after a while, jostling the napping Sam awake long enough for her to groggily ask, “Where are we going?”

Melody glanced over at her, then hastily returned her eyes to the road, shielding her face against the sun. “I thought we could see a different park today,” she answered. Sam managed to nod before dozing off again.

Much too soon for Sam’s liking, Melody was gently shaking her awake. “We’re here, Squirrel,” she whispered, and Sam stretched and forced herself up, frowning at something in Melody’s voice that she couldn’t quite identify. “Put on your jacket, now.” Sam did, which was fortunate, because the air was chilly when she stepped out of the car, blinking and squinting in the sudden light.

It was a park, but not the one they usually went to. Sam got the sense that this one was always this quiet and empty and it didn’t have a tire swing, just two regular swings, both of which looked as though they were a breath away from collapsing entirely. Vegetation had consumed the teeter-totter and the rusted merry-go-round. Sam made accidental eye contact with a faded hippo painted on the merry-go-round, and its milky stare captivated her until Melody’s soft touch on her hair and murmur pulled her away.

The two of them sat on the swings, Sam thinking to herself that they both might die this way, but it seemed as if Melody needed it right then so it was worth a shot anyway, and for a while there was only the rustling of the wind in the bushes and the ominous creaking of the browned chains that supported them. Maybe a short time later and maybe a long time later, for time seemed inconsequential here somehow, Melody said, “I’m going away.”

Sam’s neck ached from the force of her head snapping around to stare at her. “Away?”

“Yes.” Silence, but only for a long moment. “I’m sorry, Squirrel.”

Sam’s mouth was dry; her tongue was sandpaper, and it scratched the roof of her mouth. “Why?” When there was no response, her heartbeat quickened, and the throbbing in her neck extended into her temples. Her fingers buzzed and went numb. The aural perception final seemed a lifetime ago, a lifetime where Melody hadn’t just brought her world crashing down. “Did I…?”

“No, sweetie,” Melody rushed to answer her, “no, Squirrel, no.” The throbbing didn’t abate. “Remember how I said adults sometimes have a lot to think about?” Sam forced a stiff nod. “Well, I just have a lot going on. It’s my own problem. Besides, I’m going to be done student teaching after this week, and I was offered a job in Oregon. It’s too good to pass up.”

“After this week?” repeated Sam slowly. Her brain, her frustrating brain that never seemed to catch up to the speed of the world around it, to the speed of Melody, hit an obstacle and screeched to a halt. “This. You’re saying goodbye?”

She heard Melody answer, but she was up by then, and it didn’t matter what Melody said, because she was leaving Sam and she hadn’t even told her until today and—

“You’re leaving me,” cried Sam. Melody was following her, something foreign in her eyes, something Sam couldn’t understand. Something wet. “You think I can’t do it, I know I never pay attention, I know, I’m sorry, I…” There was something wet in Sam’s eyes now, on Sam’s face, and she wiped at it angrily, so hard that her skin was rubbed red and hot. “I can’t do it without you.” She never could. “Melody.”

“Squirrel,” said Melody simply, and she held out her arms, and Sam crashed into them, furious waves on the steady rocks that were Melody. “Squirrel. You are without a doubt the smartest, the kindest, and the bravest girl I know.” The two of them sniffled for a moment, and Sam almost had to laugh at the bizarreness of it, this woman and this girl, crying on each other in an abandoned park in the middle of nowhere, knees itching in the undoubtedly moldy playground sand. “Some girls learn differently than others, and some can have more trouble focusing than others, but that doesn’t matter, Squirrel. Be patient with yourself. Believe in yourself. Because if everyone else gets to see the brilliant, incredible Squirrel I know, they’ll be just as amazed and spellbound as I always am.”

Maybe the speech was slightly less effective than it could have been, since it was given in bursts through both of their sobs, and it only served to make Sam cry harder, but the adrenaline rush was fading fast. Emotions were exhausting. “Oregon is stupid,” she informed Melody tearfully, and Melody gave her a watery grin.

“Yeah, Squirrel, it is,” she said, and things were alright.

Melody dropped her off later that evening with a dry, if slightly swollen, face and a warm hug. The embrace lasted so long that Sam started to get overheated, but she squeezed all the harder before eventually being forced out of it by a need for oxygen. “Bye, Squirrel,” Melody finally said, giving a smile that didn’t quite feel right but then, how could it? Sam watched her walk away, those auburn waves that were so very pleasant to braid and to touch falling almost to her elbows now. They’d grown almost three inches, Sam thought to herself. Melody turned and waved. It was final now. This was it.

Surprising even herself, abruptly, Sam called, “I love you, Melody.” She did.

The lopsided smile widened, brightened. “Love you, Sam.”

Sam knew high schoolers were abhorrent gossips, but she was still shocked at how long they clung to pieces of information that they found interesting or dramatic. When the break ended and school started again, everyone was talking about two things: Dawson’s embarrassing attempt at wooing the ludicrously out-of-his-league Jessi Hall, and Melody. Oh, they said a lot of things about her (Melody, not Jessi Hall—all they could say about Jessi Hall was that she was far too pretty and intelligent for someone like Dumbass Dawson). She left to go live in a colony of bisexual people that spent all day, every day just having sex. She left because she was too ashamed at how bad she was at the trumpet and, consequently, had decided to live the rest of her life as a monk in a monastery. She left to get away from her parents, who were rumored to hit her and yell at her from time to time, homophobic old assholes that they were. She left to go find her true calling in underwater basket-weaving or stripping or veterinary medicine, in which she treated lizards exclusively. She left because students’ parents had complained about her, although Sam couldn’t imagine why. It didn’t really matter what you thought at the end of the day. She was gone, and that was that. She was in Oregon, and Oregon was not here.

Sam’s new biology teacher graded much faster than the old one, getting back their first quiz to them the very next day. Sam wrinkled her nose and felt heat rush into her face at the bold “D” scripted neatly on the top of it, and when she got home, she stuffed it into her wastebasket as if hiding something shameful before she remembered that Melody wasn’t there to see it anymore.

Raindrops beat on the roof and the windows, and Sam bit her lip, staring at the wastebasket. She grabbed the quiz and laid it out on her desk, smoothed it out, displayed the grade for herself to see, forced herself to look at it, took a deep breath.“Where did you go wrong?” asked the bright young woman in her mind, her hair bouncing as she tilted her head. Sam’s eyes roved over the quiz, finally settling on the multiple choice section.

“I didn’t read the sentence correctly,” she said, maybe to herself, maybe to the woman, maybe to the rain outside, which drummed relentlessly against her skull. “I knew the answer. I lost my head.” A weight lifted off of her shoulders, and she breathed deeply. The red glare of the D diminished slightly.

“Can you do better?” asked the woman, even though she already knew the answer.

“Underline the important words,” Sam answered, demonstrating on a question about the electron transport chain. “Which of the statements is false, not which one is true.” She read the sentence again, understood it. The electron transport chain took place in the mitochondria, not in the cytosol. She knew that. She took out another sheet of paper and grabbed her textbook, flipping open to the page about mitochondrial metabolic pathways.

“ATP, Squirrel,” the Melody in her brain reminded her, glowing, smiling that crooked smile of hers.

Sam smiled back and began to write.