Sleepovers, Solos, and Sheet Music

by Michelle Schusterman

  GROSSET & DUNLAP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Cover illustration by Genevieve Kote.

  Copyright © 2014 by Penguin Group (USA) LLC. All rights reserved. Published by

  Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-698-17182-4

  Version_1

  To bus trips, breakdowns, and Billy Madison

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Acknowledgments

  Special Excerpt from Crushes, Codas, and Corsages!

  About the Author

  The second half of seventh grade should come with some sort of warning: Congratulations! You’re exactly halfway through middle school, so everything’s about to get twice as hard.

  Apparently all my teachers came back from winter break last month thinking we were high-schoolers or something. My English teacher, Mr. Franks, announced that we’d be writing two essays a week—two!—plus a big research paper due later this semester. In science, Mrs. Driscoll had given us a crazy schedule for our science fair projects, and our labs were getting ridiculous—as if any day now she’d be asking us to find a cure for the common cold. And the way Mr. Hernandez kept drilling us on verb conjugations, I was pretty sure he was expecting us to be fluent in Spanish by the end of the year.

  But that was nothing compared to band.

  My music folder was stuffed: a thick packet full of new scales and exercises; “Labyrinthine Dances”—this ridiculously hard piece that we’d been rehearsing since the beginning of the year for a contest that wasn’t even until April; three more songs we’d be performing on our band trip to New Orleans a month from now; my music for the all-region concert in a few weeks, which sent a flurry of butterflies flitting around my stomach every time I looked at it; and “Pastorale for Horn,” my solo for Solo and Ensemble Competition, which I’d perform in front of a judge for a rating and (hopefully) a medal.

  As if all that wasn’t enough, now Mr. Dante was handing out even more.

  “‘Triptych,’” he said, reaching across the saxes to hand me a sheet of music. “Brass trio—this one will be Holly, Aaron, and Liam. Next up, let’s see . . . ‘Canon in A,’ woodwind quartet: Julia, Sophie, David, and Luis.”

  While Mr. Dante continued handing out parts, I stared at my music. The butterflies started swing dancing.

  “Triptych” made all those other songs look like “Three Blind Mice.”

  “Wicked,” Gabby said next to me, and I glanced at her music. It looked just as hard as mine, but Gabby could totally handle it. She was amazing.

  I mean, I was good, too. I was actually first chair French horn in the advanced band. But still . . .

  “When exactly is Solo and Ensemble again?” I asked her, even though I knew the answer.

  “Last weekend of February,” Gabby replied. “Right before the band trip.”

  “Less than a month,” I said, drumming my fingers on the bell of my horn. “We have less than a month.”

  On my other side, Natasha Prynne was staring at her own music, her eyes wide. “This is crazy.”

  “I know,” I agreed. Honestly, I was kind of relieved that she was worried, too. Up until all-region auditions last November, Natasha had been first chair in our section. Then I’d made the top all-region band, while Natasha was in the second band. And even though I practiced a lot, part of me still thought it was some sort of fluke. I was a really good horn player, but Natasha was pretty fantastic, too.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and the smell of cologne made my stomach flip for an entirely different reason.

  “Hey, Holly, do you think we could practice this before school?” Aaron Cook asked, and I saw he was holding the trumpet part to “Triptych.” “I had baseball tryouts yesterday, and it looks like practice is going to be pretty much every day after school for the next month or so.”

  “Sure!” I said, trying not to sound too enthusiastic. “How about Wednesdays and Fridays?”

  “Works for me,” Aaron replied. “I’ll check with Liam.” He smiled at Natasha. “So who’s in your ensemble?”

  Natasha half-turned in her chair to face him. “Um, Gabe, Victoria, and . . . I think Max.” Her voice was a little higher than normal.

  “Cool!”

  Before Aaron could say anything else, Mr. Dante stepped back up on the podium. I glanced at Natasha; her cheeks were pink. I hoped mine weren’t.

  Last semester, I’d had a pretty big crush on Aaron, and Natasha knew it. And now she was kind of dating him. Which was totally fine with me—I’d actually helped set them up, because I knew they liked each other. But being in an ensemble with my friend’s almost-boyfriend who I used to like (and was sort of still getting over) . . . yeah, that could be a little bit awkward.

  Maybe that was another part of making it halfway through middle school. Congratulations! All your friendships are about to get twice as complicated.

  Lunch was now total proof of that. It used to be pretty simple—me, Julia, and Natasha at our regular table. But now, lunch involved boys.

  Specifically, Seth Anderson—Julia’s boyfriend. Not almost-boyfriend, like Natasha and Aaron. Boyfriend boyfriend. So he ate lunch with us. Which was totally cool, don’t get me wrong—I liked Seth a lot. He played cello in the school orchestra, he was really into photography, and when he found out about my obsession with horror movies, he let me borrow his book of Edgar Allan Poe stories (which was amazing, and had some pretty wicked illustrations, too).

  Still, lunch was different once he started eating with us. Because Julia was different.

  “That test in Spanish yesterday was really hard,” Natasha said as we left the cubby room. I nodded in agreement.

  “Mr. Hernandez is losing it, I swear.” I held the band-hall door open for her and Julia, and we headed to the cafeteria together. “I didn’t recognize half of those vocabulary words.”

  “That’s what Seth said,” Julia chimed in. “He has Mr. Hernandez seventh period.”

  “Hey, I for
got to tell you!” Natasha said suddenly, nudging me. “We ordered Lotus Garden last night for dinner, and Chad delivered it! My dad gave him a five-dollar tip, and I said that would cover half a load of laundry. He looked pretty mad.”

  Julia and I laughed. Not only was my brother pretty much the messiest human being on the planet, he refused to learn how to operate a washing machine. At ten bucks a load, I was making decent money keeping his clothes clean—although sometimes I wondered if it was worth it. I mean, doing his laundry meant dealing with underwear. Which was why I wore rubber gloves.

  “I might up my price,” I told them. “Last weekend he played football for, like, six straight hours. Oh my God, that load of clothes—I almost passed out from the smell, I swear.”

  “Still, the extra money must be nice,” Julia said. “Seth’s been doing yard work for his neighbors, but I bet you make more doing your brother’s laundry. Oh, did I tell you guys I met Seth’s sister over the break? She’s a music major! She plays piano, but she’s a singer, too, and . . .”

  Julia kept talking, and Natasha and I shared an amused look. Amused, and maybe a little exasperated, too. Lately it seemed like it was pretty much impossible to talk about anything without Julia bringing up Seth.

  That was probably why we only spent half our lunch period together lately. I mean, it wasn’t just because of Julia. Aaron had lunch then, too, and Natasha usually went and sat with him after she finished eating. She’d been worried about leaving me at first—and honestly, it might have bothered me if I’d been stuck as a third wheel with Julia and Seth. But I had someone else I could sit with, too.

  “See you in seventh?” I asked Julia, standing and crumpling my lunch bag. Natasha was on her feet, too, brushing the crumbs off her skirt.

  Julia nodded. “Tell Owen I said hi.”

  I glanced at her, because she sounded like she was trying not to laugh. “What?”

  “What?” Julia asked innocently. “Nothing!”

  “She thinks you like Owen,” Seth told me. Julia smacked his arm, and Natasha giggled.

  I rolled my eyes. Right before winter break, I’d asked my friend Owen Reynolds to the spring dance. For whatever reason, Julia and Natasha both found that funny. No matter how many times I told them it wasn’t a date date.

  “I do like Owen.” I smiled at Seth. “That’s why we’re friends.”

  Julia nodded in agreement. “For now.”

  Natasha walked to the trash cans with me, still grinning. “She’s just giving you a hard time.”

  “I know.” I tossed my bag in the garbage. “Kind of weird that she talked about me and Owen with Seth, though.”

  “Well,” Natasha pointed out, “she can’t talk to Seth about Seth.”

  I snickered. “True.” And honestly, I was kind of flattered. Julia had spent so much time lately talking about her boyfriend, I’d been wondering if she was even interested in the rest of us anymore.

  Natasha headed off to Aaron’s table. Most of his friends were in eighth grade, like him. I didn’t really know any of them, but Natasha said they were pretty nice. She didn’t talk about them much. Actually, she didn’t even talk about Aaron much, and not just in comparison to Julia.

  I plunked down next to Owen, who was shuffling a stack of Warlock game cards. “I’m in!”

  “Good timing,” Owen said, smiling. He handed me half of his stack. Across the table, Trevor Wells sighed.

  “You know the reason you keep losing is because you split your cards with her,” he informed Owen. “Last week she got your draught of death card.”

  Owen shrugged, brushing the blond hair out of his eyes. “So?”

  “So, you would’ve won if you’d had it.”

  “Come on, Trevor.” I flipped through my stack and glanced at the goblin-chief card he’d tossed in the center of the table. “It’s not about winning and losing, it’s about having fun. And freezing your goblin chief with my ice sword is really, really fun.”

  I placed my card on top of Trevor’s with a flourish, and everyone laughed. Everyone except Trevor, of course. He was always a sore loser.

  “Everyone” was Owen, Max Foster (who played trombone in advanced band, like Trevor), and Brent McEwan and Erin Peale from fifth-period science. And today there was a new guy who I vaguely recognized from my history class last year. Keith or Kyle or something like that.

  Ten minutes later, Max was pretty much destroying all of us, which was nothing new. (Although Owen and I really would have had a better chance if we’d each had a full deck of cards.) I’d managed to snag one of Trevor’s undead-warrior cards, along with the goblin chief. When Max scored his shield cloak, Trevor threw his cards down in frustration and started arguing with him.

  “Guess that’s the end of that game.” I handed Owen back his cards.

  “The bell’s about to ring, anyway,” he said, wrapping a rubber band around the deck and tucking it into his backpack. Out of habit, I glanced over at Aaron’s table. They were all laughing at something—all except for Natasha. She was smiling, though. I squinted, trying to read her expression. It might have been my imagination, but sometimes I thought Natasha looked a little uncomfortable sitting with Aaron’s friends.

  “You okay?” Owen asked.

  “What?” I glanced at him, startled, and realized he’d seen me staring. And since Owen knew I liked—used to like—Aaron, that’s probably who he thought I was staring at. “No! I mean, yeah. I’m okay.” My face felt a little warm, so I ducked down to pick up my backpack. “Do you have our proposal for Mrs. Driscoll?”

  “Yup.”

  “What are you guys doing for the science fair?” Erin asked, and Owen immediately launched into a detailed description of our project. I was pretty excited about it, too, actually—I mean, it was about aliens on Mars, how could that not be cool? Right now I was too distracted to think about it, though. The science fair wasn’t until May, and I had to focus on all-region band, where I’d be performing with a bunch of kids from other middle schools. And we’d only have two rehearsals to learn the music. Then there was the contest on the band trip to worry about, plus my solo for Solo and Ensemble. Oh, and now I was supposed to learn this crazy-hard music for a trio with my former crush who was now kinda dating one of my best friends.

  My other classes might have gotten more intense, but band was officially insane.

  “We could just pick a different planet.”

  My thumbs flew over my game controller. “Nah,” I said without taking my eyes off the TV screen. “If Mrs. Driscoll’s right and four of last year’s science fair projects were about alien life on Mars, making ours Venus or something won’t make our project stand out enough.”

  “True,” Owen admitted. Thursdays after school were our designated hangout time. And after spending the last hour and a half working on our science fair proposal, a little Prophet Wars was definitely in order.

  Owen jabbed at his controller, and my side of the screen went black. “Sorry,” he said with a little grin.

  I sighed. “That never would’ve happened if I had my tank.”

  “You mean my tank.” Owen laughed when I scowled at him. “Hey, I won it fair and square, right?”

  “Right,” I muttered. Over winter break, Owen and I had watched his favorite movie, Cyborgs versus Ninjas. We had a bet that I couldn’t guess who the bad guys were halfway through. I’d been positive I was going to win—I could guess the ending to pretty much any movie that wasn’t horror, because they were always so predictable.

  Cyborgs versus Ninjas was the first time I’d ever been wrong. I was still kind of annoyed about it, although the movie actually had been pretty good. But hello, how was I supposed to know the cyborgs were being controlled by evil aliens? And losing the bet meant I had to give Owen my Prophets character’s tank.

  Worf, Owen’s dog, whimpered at my feet. I leaned over to s
cratch him behind the ears until my character reappeared. Soon she was wearing a giant gas mask and hacking her way through a jungle of red vines.

  “You know,” I realized out loud, “Mrs. Driscoll said there’s been a lot of science fair projects on what humans would need to survive on an alien planet. But what if we did one on what aliens would need to live on Earth?”

  “You mean like if they built a colony here?” Owen asked, blowing up a pod and sending my character flying. She landed in a puddle of glowing greenish stuff.

  “Yeah, like an alien habitat or something. Thanks for the nuclear armor, by the way.” My character was sprinting through the vines now, which melted as soon as she touched them.

  “An alien habitat,” Owen repeated. “And then people could visit it to see how they lived.”

  I laughed. “Sounds like Jurassic Park, but with aliens instead of dinosaurs. Hey!”

  My character had frozen mid-leap. Owen stared at me, his thumb still on the pause button.

  “Alien Park!” he said excitedly. “That could be our project—a theme park with aliens from Mars!”

  I stared back at him. “That . . . would be awesome.”

  Owen dropped his controller and grabbed the folder with our science fair proposal off the coffee table.

  “We could still use a lot of this,” he said, flipping through our notes. “Like all this stuff about what an alien’s respiratory system would have to be like to live on Mars, and what kind of food they’d eat. But there’s a lot we’d have to change, too.”

  “Mrs. Driscoll said we had to have our proposals revised by Tuesday,” I said. “Want to work on it Monday after school?”

  “Yes,” Owen said immediately, then groaned. “Oh. No, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  He made a face. “Baseball tryouts.”

  I patted my knee, and Worf jumped up into my lap. “Oof, he’s getting too big for this,” I said. “Anyway, I thought baseball tryouts were last Monday. That’s what Aaron said.”

  “That was for the eighth-grade team.” Owen sounded glum. “Next Monday’s for seventh-graders.”