Old Wounds by N.K. Smith

that her eyes were fixed on me as she waited in that annoyingly patient way of hers.
    Finally, I pushed it from my mind and out of my mouth, stumbling the entire way. “K-k-k-keyyyb-board.”
    Her smile stayed on her face as she extended a hand and laid it gently on my shoulder. It was times like these that I wished she wasn’t a mother; that she could truly just be a clinical, detached professional. It would have been easier to shut her down; shut her out. But she was in my house after she’d just fed me dinner, smiling at me with that motherly grin. “Play the piano for me and keep me company.”
    Since I’d been taught from a young age that requests were just thinly-disguised commands, I relented. Instead of answering, since I knew I couldn’t say no and I didn’t want to hear my loser of a voice concede, I just walked out of the kitchen and into the sitting room. She followed me and took a seat on the chaise lounge as I went to the piano bench.
    Truthfully, I was excited, since I rarely allowed myself to play the piano. But my excitement only annoyed me since it meant Robin got what she wanted and she could chalk it up to “helping” me. I raised the cover and let my fingers glide across the keys. I had hundreds of songs memorized, so I rarely needed sheet music. Some were from the great composers that everyone knew, and some were obscure little melodies that only true connoisseurs of classics would know, and still others were my own compositions.
    I knew which ones Robin liked the best and decided to start with one of her favorites. When I played new songs for her, she always wanted to interpret them and start labeling my emotions as if I picked the song because it reflected my current mood. Heaven forbid I play Moonlight Sonata. She would instantly think I was depressed and wanted to start writing my suicide note. It would take too many words for me to express that Beethoven’s piece didn’t make me depressed, and it held no connotation of sadness for me.
    Robin wasn’t an aficionado of music. She heard what she wanted and analyzed it with a shrink’s mind. Music wasn’t the same for everyone and just because she got depressed by a certain song, didn’t mean that everyone did. Moonlight Sonata was peaceful to me. It was what I thought about on the nights I couldn’t sleep. I could imagine myself in a moonlit garden, surrounded by night-blooming plants and the sounds of trickling water. I could imagine the moon shining down, illuminating all of the most beautiful things in the garden as the stars twinkled like tiny diamonds reflecting a beam of light.
    But all Robin would connect it with was morbidity and death.
    “How was your session with Ms. Rice today, Elliott?”
    “F-fine,” I answered casually. There was no need to go into the depth of my failure.
    “David mentioned that you ran into Sophie Young.” I stopped playing the lighthearted Mozart piece and I swung around to look at Robin and shrugged.
    “Did you speak with her?” she asked in a hopeful voice. I shook my head. I didn’t think one poorly-executed word of apology constituted the type of “speaking” Robin was talking about. I turned back around and changed songs. I began the very first song of my own that I’d ever played for her. “Do you have any classes with her?”
    She was going to continue to ask me about Sophie Young until she was satisfied. I nodded. “H-H-HHHortic-c-culture.”
    “That’s great!” I sighed, trying to conceal it. “She’ll have a friendly face in at least one of her classes. It’ll be good for her to have a friend like you.”
    I wanted to slam my hands down on the keys and yell at her. Sophie Young wasn’t my friend, and even if Robin had some weird ideas about how we could help each other through therapy, she still wouldn’t be my friend. Sophie was too good, too pretty, and too smart to be my friend. There wasn’t one person in that school besides my siblings and their significant others who