Father was dying.  Everyone knew it.  Drew knew it especially, because he could see something dark and hollow in the back of his father's eyes where a soul used to be.  Mother refused to talk about it and looked harried these days, face pale and sunken, too tired trying to run after the younger brothers and sisters.

These days Drew was the only one who went to visit his father.  Instead of putting him in a hospital, one of those massive grey buildings that was like a sterile white city inside, Father was in a hospice.  Mother hated going there because she said it was creepy.  Drew knew she was lying.  The hospice wasn't creepy; on the contrary, the staff there was friendly and the place felt more like an old home, full of lost memories and childish joy revived seventy years too late.  It just smelled like death.

Drew stood by his father's bedside and watched the hollow shadows deepen in the man's eyes.

"Mom's pretty tired, but Christmas is tomorrow and the twins are excited," Drew said.  At twelve he wasn't the oldest by any stretch of the imagination, but he was the only one who seemed to be able to function at all.  After school he would ride his bike over to the hospice and sit by his father's bedside, chatting as he did his math and science like it was the old days, as if Father was sitting in his recliner by the television and trying to teach Drew the intricacies of America's favorite pastime.

Father smiled.  "I'm glad of it.  Tell your mother I love her."

"I always do," Drew said.  His father's smile looked so tired.

Both of them started when they heard weak applause and cheers from the den of the hospice.  Drew could hear the head nurse talking - it was the yearly Christmas party for the residents.

"You me to ask one of the orderlies to get a wheelchair so you can join in?" Drew asked.

Father shook his head.  The shadows were deep and dark and slowly swallowing the pretty blue that Mother had fallen in love with.  "No."  He smiled again, stronger but more gentle this time, and said, "Why don't you go sing some carols with them?"

Drew rolled his eyes.  "Don't you mean FOR them?"

Father laughed, and hope fluttered in Drew's chest.  Father hadn't laughed like that in a long time.  "Yes, that's what I mean."

"Are you sure?  I don't want to leave you alone."  Drew peered doubtfully at the doorway.

Father reached out and patted his hand.  "I'm sure.  I'll be able to hear you, too."

Drew leaned down and pecked a kiss on his father's cheek. "All right.  I'll tell them Merry Christmas for you too."

Father said, "Go on.  I love you."

Drew flashed a smile over his shoulder and then headed into the den.  All of the nurses knew him well.  He hated their sympathetic smiles; the empty, child-happy smiles from the elderly residents were somehow easier to bear.

"I just came to say Merry Christmas, from my dad," he said, stepping into the middle of the den.  The residents were circled around the edges of the den in wheelchairs or supported by walkers, some with oxygen tanks.  Old Mrs. Farmer beamed at him.

"And I came to sing a Christmas carol," he added before he lost his nerve.

"You sing?" a nurse asked.

Drew nodded.  "Pick a carol."

"O Holy Night," Mrs. Farmer suggested.

The nurses exchanged glances.  Drew knew what they were thinking.  It was a lovely carol, but one of the easiest to ruin.

Mrs. Farmer clapped her hands delightedly.  "Sing, sing!"

Some of the other residents were getting up in a stir about it as well, so the nurses relented.

Drew smiled at them, then darted a glance over his shoulder down the hallway.  He could see a faint sliver of light from his father's room.  If he projected just right, Father would be able to hear his voice.  He edged closer to the middle of the den and took a deep breath.  During singing lessons he had warmed his voice up well.  Hopefully its flexibility had lasted a bit.

"Sing!" Mrs. Farmer cheered again.

Drew took a deep breath and began.  The surprise that blossomed across the nurses' faces was worth it when the first notes hit the air.  No one ever expected Drew to have such a high, clear voice.  He had been singing since he was six, and voice lessons had been part of his school day for as long as he could remember.  "O Holy Night" was his father's favorite Christmas carol, so Drew closed his eyes and let his voice soar.

The last notes faded from the air, and Drew opened his eyes.  Mrs. Farmer smiled at him, and it was the first lucid smile he had ever seen gracing her features.

"That was lovely, young man," she said.

Drew bowed politely, and the nurses began to applaud.  The head nurse clapped him on the shoulder.

"Wow," she whispered, leaning down to breathe the words in his ear.  "Your father always said you could sing, but he never said you sounded so good."

"Thanks," Drew said.  "Mother says I inherited it from him."

The nurse's smile faltered, and she straightened up.  Drew followed her gaze and turned.  One of the orderlies stood in the doorway of Father's room, and Drew knew.

Father was dead.

Drew Beauchamp was an unremarkable boy, easily missed in a crowd.  No one was ever surprised by what he did, so when he started growing his hair long in the seventh grade, no one commented upon its strangeness.  He kept it shoulder length all through the eighth grade, and if he lacquered it so it hung in his face and hid his eyes some days, it wasn't so out of the ordinary.  A few of the teachers raised their eyebrows when he came to school with black eyeliner and black fingernails in ninth grade, but Drew was a quiet boy and didn't cause trouble, and there was no need to complain.  He might have been smarter than he let on, but he drifted silently through his classes and did most of his homework.

When other boys and girls began lacquering their hair, painting their eyes and nails and wearing too-skinny black jeans, Drew just blended in with the "emo" crowd.  Like every other boy his age he took up playing the guitar.  He was good at it, which was suprising.  Not because it was Drew, of course, but because most of the black-clad boys who took up the guitar weren't very good at it.

Drew joined a band, one of those bands with a bizarre name like "The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus" or "Panic! At the Disco" and played the guitar.  A boy with longer lacquered hair, skinnier black jeans and raccoon-like kohl-lined eyes was the lead singer and rhythm guitarist.  The bassist and the drummer helped him write uninspired lyrics.  "Love" rhymed with "above" a few times too many, and the songs ran out of synonyms for "pain," "anguish," "sorrow" and "sadness" too often.  The band practiced in the drummer's garage and played a few random gigs at high school house parties, but they really weren't great.

The drummer played a bit too loud, and the bassist was a 124th of a beat behind on most songs, and the singer didn't have much of a voice.  Not that most emo singers had great voices.  As far as the adults were concerned, most of the modern singers sounded like a monotonous series of nasal fifteen-year-old boys, and the lead singer of the band sounded as if he had a perpetual head cold.

Drew was by far the best musician in the band.  His black fingernail polish was perpetually chipped from his fast finger work.  Guitar solos in the middle of the song were all his, and he possessed them with every musical ounce of his soul.  Fast notes bled pure punk rock when Drew's fingers danced up and down the neck of the guitar with incomprehensible dexterity and speed, but the pathetic backdrop of the rest of the band made it seem as if he was trying too hard.

More than once, students wondered why Drew didn't play with a better band.  He could have, and rumor had it that some of the cooler college bands had offered him a place to play with them, but he never ended up doing it.  Most people said Drew turned them down because he was that careless about life, but others whispered, in the hallways and at the lockers between classes, that the college kids had turned Drew down because he refused to sing for them.  The other students noticed that Drew never sang back-up on songs.  The bassist and the drummer would lean into their mics and offer smatterings of notes for the chorus, attempt to harmonize on a word here or there, but Drew was absorbed in his guitar, hidden by a waterfall of shiny brown lacquered hair.  He never sang a note.

Friday nights in this town were fairly dull. When someone's parents were out of town there was a house party.  Where there was a party there was loud music and booze.  Sometimes the loud music came from Drew and his band mates.  They spilled out of the back of the drummer's beat up black van, dragging heavy equipment.  It was something of a free-for-all.  The bassist and Drew had their amps up and running first while the lead singer rigged up the microphones and tweaked with the sound system, torturing the early party-goers with shrieks of feedback.  By the time the rest of the kids arrived fashionably late, the drummer had conned the rest of the guys into helping him set up his rig, and he was tweaking with his cymbals.

Drew muttered something over his shoulder to the bassist, and they tried to coordinate a riff.  Unfortunately, the bassist had no clue as to the rhythm of the song, and eventually Drew gave up, beginning to run the chord progression on his own.

The lead singer wandered down in the party and snagged an illegal cup of beer.  The kids watched, amused, as he unsuccessfully tried to flirt with some of the girls.  The drummer was more noisy than strictly necessary.  Over the chaos of it all, the guitar music was cool, but no one paid any heed to the boy who played it.

The set was unremarkable, but the songs were fast enough to dance to.

After the set, the drummer and bassist drifted into the crowd to flirt as well.  The guitarist vanished out of the kitchen door with his guitar across his back and the amp straining his thin-looking arms.

Friday nights in town were boring.  A party, maybe a movie.  The lousy high school band would play, first a series of lousy covers, then an even lousier series of original songs.

Julian was the lead singer, a pretty androgynous emo boy who flirted with all the girls but cast disturbing come-hither looks at the boys.  Sam was the bassist, slightly rougher than an emo boy who had aspirations for heavy metal.  He was well-known for his alcohol tolerance and so popular in drinking games.  The drummer, Nate, could not hold his liquor, and always made an amusing fool of himself after three or four beers.  He was trying to dance on the kitchen counter, feet moving in something that was a mangled combination of a two-step and a jig.  Half a dozen teenagers were crowded into the kitchen with him, sloshing beer out of their plastic cups as they clapped and cheered and egged him on.

In the den, Sam was winning his third drinking contest of the night.  A chorus of boys and girls would "oooh" as he took a drink.  There  would be a pregnant pause while he swallowed, and then a predictable cheer when he remained upright.

Julian could dance properly and had insinuated himself between an arguing couple, both members of which were dancing up on him and glaring at each other.  Julian tossed his head and smirked, pink mouth curving.  Only one bright green eye was visible, and it sparkled with mischief and lust.

The band had a guitarist, but he was lost in the crowd, mingled with the other skinny, half-pretty lacquered-hair boys.

Some of the skeptics, the not-quite-emo kids who hung on the fringes of society and sneered down their noses at it, whispered to each other about how horrible the band was.  Their lyrics were trite, their musical skill was questionable.  There was some debate as to whether or not the guitarist was good.  Some said he was amazing and deserved a better band.  Others said he was the worst of all, trying too hard amidst dull mediocrity.  With a derisive snort, they asked each other if anyone knew his name, but no one could say yes.

The banality of Friday nights had spread to Saturday nights, though with an earlier curfew so the town's teenagers could get up early to swallow some aspirin and kill their hangovers with a handful of aspirin or two.  The high school band had given up on covers altogether.  The skeptics hoped that the band would give up music altogether, but they conceded that the self-titled musicians had probably not given up on covers so much as gained ill-deserved confidence in their original songs.

Most of the time, it was insult enough to be snubbed at a party, to be utterly and carelessly excluded from all conversation and other means of human interaction.  By the time December rolled around, however, it was even more of an insult to be literally kicked out of a party because the social pariah would have to face the cold.

If the host or hostess did the kicking out just right, the pariah was probably caught without a jacket or any other noticeable source of warmth.  The rest of the party's attendees could smirk at each other and clink their plastic cups of beer, safe in the warmth of the house.

The skeptics hovered on the edges of the room and sipped something stronger than beer, something distinctly foreign whose name no one could pronounce properly.  They grumbled about the band as it played.  The teenagers seemed no more taken with the original songs than with the covers, but then the original songs weren't all that original, were they?  Julian imitated Chris Caraba, Elliot Smith and Brandon Urie in turn but he couldn't do it well.  The lyrics were less than inspired and seemed rather as if they came from cobbled-together snatches of refrigerator magnet poetry.  A girl saluted another girl with a cup of Stoli for an excellently incisive turn of phrase and they turned back to the band, offering cutting remarks for every verse.  The bassist and the drummer were meant to be a rhythm section, though they seemed to be playing for two entirely different sections, and neither played a section for the song that Julian was slaughtering.

Again with the problem of the guitarist.  Maybe he did play perfectly.  None of them would deny that his dexterity was impressive, but what was the point of being perfect if he was perfect at something awful?  More quiet snickers, high fives and toasts with illegal foreign booze.

A boy and a girl exchanged matching devilish grins, and one of them called out above the din,

"Get off the stage!"

A rabble-rousing skeptic on the other side of the room decided to join in.  "Yeah, let them freeze out in the cold!"

Julian faltered, as did Sam, but Nate was probably playing too loudly to hear.  The way he played he was probably going to go deaf in a very horrible way in the near future.  One girl mentioned it to another, and they laughed behind their hands and said it wouldn't make  a difference to his music.

The host of the party and several of his friends looked embarrassed.  Most of the kids looked annoyed.  A few kids looked like they agreed, however, and that was all it would take.

"Shut up already!"

The guitarist was hidden behind a splash of dark lacquered hair, and he didn't seem to hear.  The skeptics prowled the edges of the crowd, shouting and taunting, and soon the some other teenagers in the crowd picked it up.

The guitarist's head came up sharply, and a chord went sour.  His eyes were even bluer for the eyeliner, and when he reached up to push his hair out of his face his black nail polish was chipped.

Julian stared down at them in open-mouthed shock.  "You really want us to leave?"

Sam gaped with equal stupidity.

"Yeah, get out," a boy yelled.  "Your music sucks, and we're tired of having to listen to you."

Nate scrambled to his feet so quickly that he knocked over a cymbal, and there was a howl of feedback.

Some kids winced, but it only made others angry.  Their voices rose in a horrendous shrieking din, their fury and frustration battering down on the musicians with such force that Julian and Sam flinched and ducked, trying to make themselves smaller targets.

Nate reached out to right his cymbal and leapt back when an angry teenager tried to grab him and drag him off the low stage.

The skeptics smirked at each other and decided to cause more trouble.

"Give us a Christmas carol!"

The abject terror that crossed Julian's face was amusing to everyone but the rest of the band, and the laughter that followed was worse than the taunting.

Other students picked up the new tactic.

"Yeah, sing a Christmas song."

"We Wish You a Merry Christmas!"

"Jingle Bells!"

"Santa Baby!"

Julian fell back a step, his face bleached of color.  Several of the skeptics wondered to each other if he was even still breathing.

Nate and Sam clung to each other, trying to hunker down behind the bass amp.  The guitarist was utterly still, a statue, utterly deaf to the other teenagers' roars.

Then he grabbed the mic and yanked it down.  More feedback shrieked through the sound system.

"You want a Christmas carol?" he growled into the mic.

Several students blinked.  No one had expected his voice to be that deep.  He was thin and almost pretty, but his jaw and cheekbones were too angular and masculine for that.

The momentary shock didn't throw the teenagers off their game, and they cheered and hooted derisively.

"You gonna sing for us, guitarist?  You never sing," a girl hollered.

"If you want a damned Christmas carol, I'll give you one."  The guitarist adjusted the mic stand with a sharp jerk of his wrist, and surprise rippled through the crowd.  Was he really going to sing?

"I hate Christmas carols, and I hate singing," he snarled, "but if you're gonna be assholes about this then I got something for you."  He cleared his throat, and the others braced themselves for a horrific screech in vengeance, amplified by Julian's particular work with the sound system at the beginning of the evening.

The guitarist said, "This is O Holy Night."

And he began to sing.

The lingering taunts for a Christmas carol died when the first notes spilled from the guitarist's lips.  He had a smooth, deep bass voice, but it was light and flexible, and he climbed the increasingly sharp ascensions of notes with devastating ease.  It was an incongruous image, his skinny black jeans and his The Clash shirt, the dark hair and kohl-lind eyes, and that voice.

Boys in high school didn't have voices like that.

Men in church choirs, in operas, on the greatest stages in Europe, were meant to have voices like that.

The skeptics were no longer skeptical, just confused, unsure of what to believe.  The guitarist was an unremarkable boy with a forgettable face, and none of them could remember hearing him speak, let alone suspecting that he could sing.

And he could sing.

His voice swelled and filled the entire building.  A boy closed his eyes, and he could feel that voice thrumming in his bones.

Then came that one note, the test of a singer's true mettle, oh night divine, o note so often profaned.  And he met it.  He soared to it, a breath-taking crescendo that must have taken his entire chest to hit, but he struck it square on the head and rode out the end of the song on his audience's awe.

They couldn't have been anything but awed.  Barely a breath was drawn as he sang.  Julian, Nate, and Sam shook off their fear and straightened up.  Julian tried to take a step forward, to ask his band mate how long he had been able to do this, but then he faltered and stopped.

The last note faded, and time seemed to suspend itself for an instant before the guitarist grabbed the mic again.

"Was that what you wanted to hear?  Are you happy now?"

"Yeah," a boy in the front said stupidly.

"I'm glad you're happy," the guitarist snarled.  "Because I'm not happy.  I hate that song.  You know why?  Because my father made me sing it so he could die alone in a hospice from a disease that made him so sick even his wife stopped caring about him.  I hate Christmas carols, and I hate singing, but somehow I had to find my happiness after he was gone, and I tried to find it the only way I knew how, in music.  We're not a great band, and we know it, but hell, we were happy.  Thanks for killing that too."

He spun on his heel, grabbed his guitar, ripped the amp out of the wall - for another squeal of feedback - and stomped off the stage.

Out on the street, a small boy lugged his trumpet case home, annoyed.  He hated being in jazz band.  All of the older boys, the cool ones who played the electric guitar or the bass, made fun of him.  His mother insisted that the trumpet was a fine instrument and he ought to be proud of it.  Fine wasn't cool, and that was that.

When Drew, the boy who lived a few houses down, stepped out of a party, he was carrying a guitar and an amp.

"Hey Mike," Drew said.

The little boy sighed.  "Hi.  You play the guitar too, huh?  You're like all the older cool boys."

"Not really," Drew said, falling into step beside the younger boy.  "What instrument have you got there?"

"A trumpet," Mike mumbled grudgingly.

Drew hummed thoughtfully for a moment.  "I'll trade you."

Mike halted mid-step.  He eyed the shiny black guitar that Drew held.  It looked well-played and worn, and was covered with band stickers.  The strap was decorated with punk buttons, and it looked like a real punk rocker's guitar.

"No way.  Are you serious?"

"Totally.  I'll walk you home, and then trade you my guitar and amp for your trumpet."  It was hard to tell if Drew lied because his hair was always in his eyes.

"Really?"

"Really."

Mike grinned.  "You got a deal."

Drew smiled back, the first real smile from him that anyone had seen in a long time, and they walked home.