The Secret Song of Shelby Rey – Novel Excerpt Chapter 1

By Rayne Lacko

Shelby

2010

The last semester of high school, I kept a list called “Things I Won’t Miss After Graduation” in the back of my chemistry binder. The instigator of the list was the periodic table. It seemed impossible that so much magic should be boiled down, parsed, categorized, and then fenced together in cubes. What is dug from the ground or fallen from stars, what is reactive, noble, or admittedly unknown after millennia, can and should be revered as nothing short of divine. But is there anything less reverential than the periodic table’s rigid and linear bureaucracy? The elements’ names are downsized to a couple of letters, boxed, and shelved. Their powers are pushed into a corner. Their inscrutability is scrutinized and junked together with dubiously related elements that, to me, are far more different than they are the same.

Goodbye, periodic table. Elements, you deserve better.

I’ll never shed a tear for Ms. Allen’s tenth-grade geometry class either, or any math class before or after. Math’s morals are better than mine. I’m all gray area. Math is right or wrong, yes or no. In Ms. Allen’s class, I was “wrong,” I was “no,” I was a glitch in a formula that would never result in the correct answer.

Ms. Allen believed math was accessible to everyone because it didn’t change. She said you could rely on it. I don’t think I could ever trust something that never changes. If this is all life is, it isn’t enough. I’ve got nothing if nothing changes.

By the end of January in sophomore year, it became clear to Ms. Allen that geometry and I were not meeting at a right angle. She held me back after class to evangelize about quadrilaterals and parabolas. I didn’t mind, because I wasn’t in any hurry to get home.

It was just the two of us in her classroom. Ms. Allen had me sit at Romy Rivera’s desk at the front, as if Romy’s superior math genes might somehow seep through my jeans by osmosis. They didn’t.

I could see the fading pulse of Ms. Allen’s patience in the flattening line of her lips. She steadied herself as, squeezing my shoulder, she attempted to explain a theorem for the third time. I don’t know if the squeeze was meant to cheer me on or to bolster her, but that’s when I heard it: the music inside her, streaming from the palm of her hand into my shoulder.

What I should’ve done is pulled away, but I didn’t. What I shouldn’t have done was stare, but I couldn’t help it. I wondered how music got in her veins and how I could hear it through her touch.

The music coming from Ms. Allen’s hand wasn’t any song I recognized, but at the same time it was familiar. It seemed like a song I might have heard at a middle school dance (when I still went to things like that, before Dad up and offed himself and everyone at school stopped talking to me, because what do you say to a girl whose dad ups and offs himself?). Or maybe I heard it at the club where Mom works and blocked it out along with everything else in that place: the dingy carpet, the sticky walls that grab the dust of dead skin cells hovering in the fog-machined air.

I heard her. The entirety of Ms. Allen. The song inside her was adrenaline-spiked hip-hop; the lyrics mentioned, among other things, a misdemeanor and jail time for possession.

I was angry that she’d made me feel even weirder and less competent than I had already, angry that I was unable to grasp what came so easily to Romy Rivera. So, before I could stop myself, I blurted out the lyrics to the beat of her music.

I’ve never been much of a singer, and certainly I’m no rapper. I was as caught off guard as Ms. Allen when I couldn’t keep my fool mouth shut. The lyrics came like hornets, and I spoke them as though swatting the hornets away, wondering why she was telling me in the first place.

Ms. Allen came undone.

Well, first she turned to stone. Then she came all undone, her eyes darkening to black holes.

She wanted to know how I found out. Not even the principal or the school district knew she had faked her background check. She screamed at me, threatened me, and, finally, begged me to tell her how I knew. I told her I didn’t know. She didn’t believe me. I told her I hadn’t wanted to hear the song in the first place, but she refused to believe she was the one who’d made me listen to it.

She gave me an A in geometry but treated me like a mental case wrapped in a tripwire for the rest of the year.

I don’t blame her. She was scared and confused. I know it because I was afraid too. And messed up about it, because after that day, the music didn’t stop. I started hearing it everywhere, in anyone who touched me. I wasn’t sure what was harder, busting out another person’s innermost secrets in song or trying to maintain a no-touch zone around my body at all times. I started sitting farther toward the back of my classrooms, closest to the door. I wanted to be the last to arrive and the first one out. Survival meant keeping my distance.

I’d somehow merited entry to another realm of hearing, but it was making me crazy. As in, locked-up psych-ward crazy.

Then it occurred to me that if the music was the problem, maybe it could also be the solution.

I fished around the apartment for Dad’s old headphones and radio. The headphones clearly weren’t the best even when they were new, but I liked that they were big. They served as an effective shield even when the batteries were dead. With my ears covered, other people gave up talking to me. When I turned the volume up, the music canceled their mutters about me in the hallways at school. Best of all, I could control what I heard. With music playing in my ears around the clock, there wasn’t much room for my classmates’ startlingly revealing songs when they bumped into me in the cafeteria while waiting for nuggets and mashed potatoes, or for the songs of strangers when they copped a feel on a city bus.

Sometimes this whole music thing feels like a curse. But it’s funny; now that I’ve been living with it for a while, I’ve started to worry that it might disappear as unexpectedly as it arrived. The hornet sensation went away after I got used to the lyrics coming. Once that happened, I stopped feeling attacked and started to feel curious.

Turns out some people have pretty decent music. 

I figure it’s no coincidence that all I have left of Dad is his old AM/FM radio. I think he meant for me to have it. One night, after he’d put back a few too many, he told me he had originally bought it for my grandma, who passed before I was born.

“She really got into pop and electronic music back in the early ’80s,” he said, a faraway admiration warming his drawn face. “She just wanted to dance.”

The radio exhumed a glimmer of the boy he used to be, holding him afloat for a while. He wasn’t sleeping around that time, and I had no notion he was thinking about ending his life.

Like a stupid kid, I told him he should have gotten an MP3 player so he could load Grandma’s favorite songs onto it. He shook his head, cradling the radio in his palm like it might contain a genie granting wishes.

“You got to tune in to the pulse of the moment. Give yourself over to whatever the radio might play. It’s a chance encounter, Shelby. That’s what she used to say.”

Dad’s radio still holds a memory of what was, the best of something that will never be again. It’s my lineage, the root of my father and my father’s mother before him. I always wonder what my life would have looked like if he were still around or if Grandma hadn’t died, if I had someone to count on. Mom barely speaks to me even though we live in the same apartment. When I hear other people’s music, I catch a glimpse of what it’s like to have a family, a place to belong, a reason, and a history.

All I have is music. Not a playlist of my own design, only the “chance encounters” Dad told me about.

I haven’t met anyone else who can do it, get an earful of everything that makes up a person just by touching them. It’s a one-sided conversation, a blind confessional, listening to a stranger who can’t hear me. And lonely.

A couple of months ago, I was busy counting the days until graduation. With high school behind me, I thought, I’d finally be free. But I spent so much time wishing away the homework assignments and homeroom roll calls that I forgot to figure out what I would do once it was over. Now here I am with graduation behind me, and I only have a couple more weeks to use the free bus pass they give kids who couldn’t get to class otherwise. I didn’t have any other options. Even if she’d wanted to drive me, Mom couldn’t have. She failed the written part of the test three times before deciding the DMV had it out for her and she wasn’t going to give it the privilege of making her feel bad.

I like the bus the same way I like an elevator. There’s space to breathe when I’m suspended in time, always leaving one place and heading to another.

The 8:23 a.m. westbound bus going under the freeway and into Laguna Beach is a long ride. Seven or eight full loops of the route should fill the time until Mom leaves for her night shift and I can have the apartment to myself. I head to the back row and dump my backpack on the seat next to me to block anyone from sitting there.

I put my headphones on and watch the morning traffic negotiate the fast lane. Drivers inch along, balancing coffee cups, answering cell phones, and painting lashes black. How do they put the whole thing together—the job, the car, the home they came from and will return to in the evening? Mom says I can’t stay at the apartment any longer. I guess I’d understand if it was because I freaked her out or something, but that’s not it. She just doesn’t want me around, plain and simple. You’re old enough to live on your own, she says. If being “old enough” was enough, I’d have a job. A place to live. A seat to fill, where someone calls my name and checks to see if I’m present, like school. The irony bites at me.

When I was little, I thought I’d enlist in the army like Daddy. We always had a decent place to live and food to eat. The problem was we moved a lot. Dad would get stationed across the country, or a county social worker would get wind of my bruises, the kind a kid gets when her parents are falling-down drunk or when one finds out the other is getting a little side action, and we’d pick up and leave.

I wish Dad were still around. He’d point me in the right direction.

The bus lumbers on through traffic, occasionally lurching to a stop. New passengers shuffle on: an immigrant mother pushing a baby stroller loaded with groceries, surrounded by two silent children not yet old enough for school and an older lady in a maid’s uniform who’s clutching a lunch box. The women are careful not to meet each other’s gaze, yet they both scowl at me.

Next on, a guy with a twelve-pack of beer in a grocery bag who looks me up and down with hopeful eyes. I hate that all I have to wear are Mom’s clothes. Between the silver tunic and the heels, too big and too high, my fellow passengers probably think I’m either hooking or on my way to dance at Mom’s club.

The manager at Mom’s club tells me no one will ever pay me as much as I could make dancing. This smells like a lie to me. It seems it’s Mom who pays to dance, maybe not in cold, hard cash but in something cold and hard. That will never be me.

I should have filled the back of that binder with what it means to be free.

I close my eyes, rolling the tuner on my radio back and forth, dusting the last few specks off a station that plays music without words by people with extraordinary names like Tchaikovsky and Haydn. Their music fills me with a savory kind of sadness, sometimes more than I can bear, like when I think about what happened to Dad. I once heard about saudade, a Portuguese word that means finding comfort in longing for someone or something that is gone. I always remember that word because to me it sounds like “so daddy.”

Tuning the radio, I search for chance encounters with my favorite songs. I don’t listen to people talking, talking, talking about stuff that happened to someone somewhere, the weather, or a war between two countries that ultimately want the same thing. I already know the story they’ll tell because I hear it in the music. Songs are all about those things, even when the lyrics aren’t. The rise and fall of the tempo and the melody tell all the talkers’ stories of troubles, triumphs, of people hurt or lost or reunited. There’s nothing the talkers can say that the music hasn’t already told me. Music is my only friend.

As the bus edges closer to the coast, I people-watch for a half-dozen stops. There is a change in the mood of the passengers as we get closer to the beach. The listless stares at the scuffed, black-matted floor become far-off glances out the window into the salted marine air. Conversations shift to plans for the weekend; excitement grows. There is buoyant hope for the possibility of fun.

I’m killing time. Tomorrow, more will die. Weekend plans would be nice, but I’m in the market for a life of my own. I wish someone would tell me what to do, because I’m stuck. All I have is music, and what am I supposed to do with that? I don’t play any instruments, and I’ve never been much of a singer.

I wouldn’t sing at all if I could help it.

The trouble is that everyone has a song, and if someone gets too close, if we connect, I can’t help but hear it roaring inside them. It’s like a shadow gasping for sunlight. I give the shadow a voice so it can breathe. The way I see it, my singing is mercy. Not pity, I don’t do pity. Mercy.

But most people don’t know their own song. That is, they don’t know it until I voice it back to them. Then, they can’t help but hear the truth of it. And what do they do? Shove it right back into darkness, and shove me down while they’re at it.

I’m learning to keep my mouth shut. But it isn’t easy.

After the incident with Ms. Allen at school, I made the mistake of telling Mom what had happened. She ratted me out to a social worker, who ratted her out to a psychiatrist, who gave me pills I didn’t want. The only thing worse than hearing music inside everyone who touches me is hearing music inside everyone while getting kicked around by side effects from meds. I was dizzy, and then drowsy, and then dizzy again. My eyes blurred and my heart raced. I got a rash around my belly button. I had weird periods.

“The drugs make me feel sick,” I told the doctor, and that was true. But the side effects weren’t what bothered me most. What bugged me was that agreeing to take them felt like agreeing with his judgment about me: that I was hopeless, a lost cause.

I’m not interested in giving up my hope.

A couple squeezes up the steps of the bus, hip crushed against hip in the narrow entrance. The only open seats are next to me. I turn my gaze away as they approach, their whispers toppling over one another as they exchange ideas for how best to spend a day by the water. I can almost feel the warmth of their regard for one another.

I steal a glance at them, wondering how they found each other—how anybody ever finds anybody—when I realize I’ve been holding my breath, longing for a connection of my own, a hand to hold mine that won’t let go.

I cross my arms and tuck my hands under my elbows. It won’t happen now, I guess.

I always hoped I might find someone and that we’d do what my parents couldn’t: love each other and no one else. Mom said it was only fair that she had some company when Dad was on tour of duty, but somehow it was always my fault when he got home and found out. When they were happy, they didn’t need much to be happy: a six-pack of Bud Light, South Park on the TV, their knuckles brushing when they reached for a can at the same time.

“You mind?” the woman asks, standing over me. I pull my backpack into my lap and she plops down, her thigh wedged tightly against mine. Through her bare leg, I can hear her, the song she holds inside, the rhythm of her selfish assumption: “If no one finds out, no one gets hurt.”

They’re cheaters, I can tell. Escapees from marriages no longer joined at the hip.

I press my headphones closer against my ears and turn up the volume to drown her out. I look out the window and stare at the asphalt scudding below. I need to keep moving forward. When I get some money, I’m moving away. Old enough to live on your own, Mom says.

I keep trying to edge my bare leg away from hers, but every bump in the road pushes her more fully against me. We’re jammed together at the shoulder, elbow, thigh, and knee. My radio and earphones can’t drown her out, even at full volume. All I hear is her desire, the wicked thrill of risk, the danger of being caught, and a gaping difference in their age I didn’t notice when I first looked at them. She’s carrying guilt, too, but even that is some kind of freakish turn-on for her. Whatever she’s doing with that man, she doesn’t care who she’s hurting.

I don’t want to know any of this about her.

The slow-moving bus feels stagnant. All this close contact is itchy, and it hurts. When I try to pull my legs closer to me, I get mad at myself. Why am I worried about the people attached to this couple—people who aren’t even here, people I’ll never meet? It’s because I get it. I have an idea how they will feel when they find out about these two. And they will find out. The truth is the only sure thing.

I keep my radio playing at full blast, but her lyrics seep through my skin, enter my blood, and catch in my throat. I have to spit them out. If I don’t, I might suffocate or something, I don’t know. Looking away, I cover my mouth with one hand and let it out, trying to keep my voice down as I do. The little kids flanking the stroller turn and stare at me.

I swear I’ve been good at keeping my singing under control lately, but this woman has me pinned, and I can’t get away.

The music in my headphones argues with the song oozing from her. I jumble her lyrics and have to start over, singing where I left off. My skin is hot, and I can’t move any farther away. The woman’s guilt dukes it out with her desire in the chorus and I trip up, stuttering. I don’t want to sing any of it, but slamming my lips shut tight only makes me choke, and I have to start over once again.

It crosses my mind to leap out the window into oncoming traffic, but the window doesn’t open that far.

I try to make sense of her music, to sing it correctly at least once through so I can finally get it out of me.

A sudden sting sears my scalp where a few caught strands of my hair are yanked from my head. My music rips away in one motion, pulling at me as it goes like a bandage left too long over a wound. I gasp and cover my ears where my father’s headphones should be.

The woman is holding my headphones and radio in her fist, strands of my hair poking out between her fingers. The older man with her leaps to his feet, yelling at me to shut up, flailing his arms like I’m an uncaged, rabid animal ready to bite.

I’m scared he might hit me or something, but I can’t take my eyes off my radio. I have to get it back. Now.

I lunge at the woman, grabbing for it. The man dives between us, pushing me away to protect her. I fall to the floor and my backpack thunks down next to me.

“Keep your hands off her,” he yells at me.

I get up quickly, ready to fight. I need my radio. I don’t want to touch her. I don’t want either of them to touch me. But she’s still got my radio in her grip.

“Thief!” I yell, scanning the faces of the other bus riders for help. “She stole my music!”

No one moves to help me. Lazy and unbothered, they do nothing but hold down their plastic transit seats, looking at me like I’m as crazy as one of those drug-addled doomsday preachers standing on a street corner screaming about the end of days.

The driver pulls the bus to a stop, and everyone groans when he calls for police assistance.

“I got a mental chick on my bus,” I hear the bus driver say over his walkie-talkie. “Disturbing the peace. Probably under the influence.”

Author of A Song For The Road, an Eric Hoffer Book Award finalist, Rayne Lacko tackles addiction and mental health in her upcoming novel. “The Secret Song of Shelby Rey” (SparkPress, June 3, 2025) is a gritty upper YA novel that explores the vulnerable and confusing time in a teen’s life when they transition to adulthood. Through main character Shelby, who can feel people’s deepest emotions through touch, Lacko crafts a compelling story of music, addiction, and self-discovery.