The Beat of My Heart

Prologue

THE FIRST SONG: KINGS OF SUMMER BY AYOKAY

Blue Anderson's home was a shrine to art.

The front hall was a showcase for paintings; the kitchen table yet another surface to set oils and sketching pencils; the couch covered in pastel dust.

Apartment 208B of Brooklyn, New York was hopelessly entangled with blue and pink and red and watercolors and gritty artistry.

Lynn Ferdinand, technically the owner of said house, was a wonderful, scatterbrained artist, and so she was a wonderful, scatterbrained mother. She was not one for earthly endeavors like food shopping and bills. That was okay because Blue was excellent at food shopping and bills.

The system worked, strangely enough. Lynn, with her beautiful, curly hair that had a mind of its own, with her paint-stained jeans and old band t-shirts, was a wonderful artist, and so she created wonderful paintings. Blue was her muse: a little boy with angelic hair and a little joyful smile, a boy swimming in the reefs, Blue surfing, Blue swimming with whales, Blue holding hands with a pretty, pretty boy, their backs to the waves, Blue Blue Blue, everywhere everywhere, Blue, her angel boy, and of course the ocean, Lynn Ferdinand's first love in the world.

For sixteen years, Blue and his mother coexisted in art-centered world of oceans and ginormous cash payments and paintings of Blue and cash and fast food and "shouldn't we accept cards - Blue, should we accept cards? No, you're right honey, too much work for you."

Lynn Ferdinand was a wonderful, scatterbrained artist from Brooklyn, and Blue Anderson was her frequently painted son, and then suddenly Lynn wasn't there anymore.

It was a car accident. Blue didn't want to know the details. He had been sick that day with the stupid flu, and his mother had gone out for food and not come back, and that was that, keep going, because mom would never come back and angel boy would have to keep going without the ocean itself, without mom, his first love.

Blue didn't truly realize his mother was gone until old relatives came over to clean up the house.

Gone were the streaks of paint decorating the pale walls, now covered over. Gone were the paintings in the front hall, now packed up and sold to help pay for Blue's college education. The couch was scrapped. It was too streaked with color to sell for much.

Blue wanted that couch, with its Chinese takeout scent and its memories. How many days had Lynn sat on its brown fabric, sketching away at her son's skinny frame? How many days had Blue walked into the family room, only to see Lynn sleeping on the couch, her legs covered in a wool blanket?

Too many times to count.

Within weeks of his mother's passing, Blue's grandfather rolled into the apartment parking lot, the old man's gray, 35-year-old Honda Civic barely making it the drive from Bible Belt Oklahoma to the great, dangerous city of New York.

Ephraim Anderson was essentially a stranger. The Andersons were lawyers and Catholics, teachers and psychologists and businessmen.

Lynn Ferdinand was in life very much not an Anderson.

The Ferdinands were agnostics, believers in fate, psychics and painters and women of the night. They were dreamers of cold, blue dreams, dreams of which the angel boy had been named.

Blue's father had been a bridge, a way to stay the swaying cliffs so that he and Lynn could sit for a while. Lynn and Xavier raised their boy on a bridge, the child growing up connected to both the sky and the earth.

Bridges, though, cannot last forever. This bridge between worlds crumbled after twelve years of holding strong when the ocean claimed Xavier Anderson as her own. Blue was thrown to the sky, and Lynn, always and forever a Ferdinand, returned to her swaying cliff.

How ironic it was, that Lynn Ferdinand's first love was the one to take her husband away. How strange it was, that Blue and the ocean would one day be separated by hundreds of miles of land.

Too much of Blue was left in the apartment, secretly a shrine to all things creative and colorful. The bridge had broken years ago, but Blue was just now floating down towards the cliffs.

With a sigh, Blue closed the apartment door for the last time. He wouldn't be coming back.

Alexander Devereaux's house was a second home for swallows, a safe place for every wingless bird in the Oklahoma section of the Bible Belt.

Alexander had four living siblings, most adopted. All Devereaux children were flightless birds, wings broken or too scared to fly, bones snapped or legs tied to the asphalt. They all had something keeping them down.

The Devereaux household was large and marble and tile and multiple floors. It was a mansion, it was an estate, it was a castle home to princes and princesses of their own little worlds.

A Devereaux child was a tremulous thing. Devereaux boys and girls spoke first their native tongue, often Russian or French or Mandarin, and then they spoke anxiety. This close second language was a tongue they understood with startling frequency. They bore the pressure of royalty: the pressure to create a kingdom to rule, the pressure to build, the pressure to make something worthwhile and long-standing lest the Devereaux progeny crumble to the ground, dust in the wind, just another child forgotten. That was the struggle of these flightless birds: they didn't trust themselves enough to stay aloft.

Even among Alexander's similarly flightless siblings, he still managed to stand apart. There was something about the boy, something that muttered both lost! and found. Alexander was a privileged son of a crossroads heritage, a sea of luck and chance and possibility, all caged by a frightening monster. Alexander was caged by guilt, he was caged by responsibility, he was caged by shame. He was not the son he should be. He wouldn't be the son he should be. He would never be the son he should be.

Alexander Devereaux was on the brink of discovering something obvious, something integral to the anatomy of flightless birds, something that could not be avoided:

No matter how flightless you are, the night doesn't last forever. Eventually, you have to face the sun.