Rival

by Sara Bennett Wealer

  “Hannan,” said Kathryn, reading over my shoulder. “I heard somebody came from Eastman just to hear her.”

  “I wonder if she’s nervous,” I said as the houselights went down. “I would be if it was me in that dress.”

  Hannan was first up, since rounds one and two are always alphabetical. There she was, the best singer at our school, wearing a purple evening gown with puffy sleeves at nine on a Saturday morning. It looked funny, but then everybody overdresses at the Blackmore. Because if you make it to the finals, then you don’t look funny at all.

  We sat superstill while Hannan sang her first two pieces. Halfway through the first one it was obvious something was wrong. She seemed tired. Jittery. Nothing about her performance was bad; something was just…missing. Kathryn fished a piece of paper and a pen out of her purse while Hannan took her bow. Uh-oh, she wrote.

  An hour and a half later, Beatrix came on wearing a pink gown that showed off her end-of-summer tan. I pulled the crossword out of the paper and pretended to work it while she got ready to sing. Boring Beatrix. Kathryn swatted my hand. I yawned, not even bothering to cover my mouth. Kathryn giggled, and Beatrix nodded to let her accompanist know she was ready.

  Her first piece was a Schubert lied. Nice, lyrical, and Beatrix made it look easy. Kathryn glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. Boring or not, Beatrix sounded better than most of the people we’d heard so far.

  Then, she did something that made everybody gasp.

  “No way!” Kathryn whispered as the pianist started the first, trilling notes to Bernstein’s “Glitter and Be Gay.”

  “Glitter and Be Gay” is a total soprano showpiece. It’s packed with vocal acrobatics. Not only that, but you have to act because it’s a song about a hooker who feels bad about her life until she thinks about all the jewelry she’s got, and then she gets insanely happy. Most high school singers wouldn’t touch that song. If they did, it would be a finals piece because it’s so showy. But Beatrix pulled it out for the first round.

  “This could be bad,” I whispered back. Except it wasn’t. It was incredible. As Beatrix tore through the last, superhigh notes, you could feel the excitement building in the room. She was so on—so wild and polished all at the same time that I actually lost my breath for a minute. Shy, sappy Beatrix. Who knew she had it in her?

  People started clapping before the pianist finished the last cadenza. By the time Beatrix took her bow, the applause was so loud that it felt like a thunderstorm.

  “Wow,” Kathryn shouted. All I could do was nod. Something special had just happened. I was glad I had her there to see it with me.

  The whole morning went like that. Great singers. Surprising performances. Kathryn and I passed snotty notes about the weak ones. We agreed instantly on who kicked ass. During breaks we talked about what we would do differently when we were the ones up on that stage. This was what I’d been missing—just me and Kathryn and music.

  Just like it used to be.

  Then, around three, she started checking her watch. She checked it while Hannan and Beatrix sang their second-round pieces. And she checked it while we walked to the coffee shop for dinner before the finals.

  “How long do you think this will go?” she said as she hurried to keep up with me. We didn’t have much time, and I wanted to make sure we could get our seats again when we got back to the hall.

  It started to drizzle. I walked faster. “A couple of hours,” I told her. “Depends how long the songs are.” When we got inside it was crowded with people from the Blackmore—ushers, audience members, singers who’d already been eliminated. I couldn’t imagine being able to eat after getting cut like that, but I saw at least five of them scattered around with their families. Some were even laughing.

  We found two free seats at the end of a long table and Kathryn started flipping through her program, trying to see if it told what each finalist planned to sing. When she didn’t find anything she looked up.

  “Can I borrow your cell phone?”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I need to call Chloe.”

  That name made my blood stop. “Why do you need to call her?”

  “She asked me to go out after the contest. I want to let her know I might be late.”

  There it was. The black again, turning what had been a great day into a sloppy, dark mess. I’d been hoping Kathryn and I could go back to my place after the Blackmore and listen to some CDs my dad had sent. I thought we’d talked about it earlier. But we either hadn’t or it didn’t interest her as much as going out with Chloe.

  Kathryn didn’t wait for me to hand her the phone. She just scooped it up and started texting.

  “You’re coming out, too, right?”

  “No.” I opened my menu. I wanted to get out of there fast, because I felt like I might actually cry.

  “Why not?” said Kathryn. “It’ll be fun. Chloe…”

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’d watch out for Chloe if I were you,” I snapped.

  Her smile froze on her face. She flipped the phone shut.

  “What? Why?”

  “She’s…just not all that nice all of the time.” How could I explain what I wanted to say without sounding like a petty, horrible friend? Chloe and I had been BFFs for almost six years. But when I looked back on it, I couldn’t say exactly why. All of the plotting, the parties, the getting trashed, the A-list obsessions—Kathryn was better than that. And I wanted to be better than that, too.

  But Kathryn just laughed.

  “Chloe’s been great to me, and she’s your friend, so I’m sure she’s fine. Right, Brooke?”

  I fiddled with my napkin so I wouldn’t have to look at her. I wanted Kathryn to believe me. More than that, I wanted her to want to be with me more than she wanted to be with Chloe. I was the one she had something in common with. I was her real friend. I wanted to lay it all out for her. Instead I just said, “Fine. Don’t say I never warned you.”

  “Okay.” She gave me a weird look. Then she picked up the phone and started texting again.

  After that, things were awkward. We didn’t talk much while we ate, or while we walked back for the finals. Onstage, things were even weirder. Hannan sounded more off than she’d been all day. Beatrix sounded even better, which was hard to believe if you knew her at all before the competition.

  Obviously none of us had.

  Kathryn and I watched while she accepted her first-place scholarship check and a huge bouquet of red lilies. We saw Hannan standing off to the side, trying to be gracious. But she looked pale and dazed. And when she moved forward to give Beatrix a hug, she almost dropped her fourth-place flowers. Kathryn nudged me to see if I’d noticed it and right then and there, I knew.

  We were looking into the future.

  Up until that minute, I had never really thought about what the Blackmore would mean for Kathryn and me. Now I realized that if one of us won, the other one would have to lose.

  Maybe it was unavoidable that things would end up the way they did. Maybe we were going to end up as rivals no matter what happened to us junior year.

  Maybe it just wouldn’t have hurt so bad.

  SENIOR YEAR

  Ostinato: stubborn—a musical phrase that repeats over and over

  KATHRYN

  “MATT, YOU ONLY HAVE A half hour before first bell.”

  Matt puts his cell phone down and goes back to his laptop, but not before checking the phone screen again.

  “What?” he says when he catches me glaring. “The anime fen are tweeting from Dream Con. James Cameron just announced he’s going to do a 3-D animated remake of Gone with the Wind!”

  “But your column’s due at the end of the day. If you don’t turn it in, I end up with a huge hole in the features section.”

  Ben Sherman, the sports editor, glances over and gives me a sympathetic smile. A hole in your section is serious, especially when we don’t have time for redos. It’s seven thirty a.m. and the Picayune office is packed with staf
f squeezing in any time they can get to work on our regular paper plus the Homecoming edition, because even though Homecoming is weeks away, that paper is a keepsake and it takes a huge amount of resources to put out.

  “Okay, okay,” Matt says, shutting off his phone. “You’re lucky you’re such a cute slave driver.”

  I sigh and go back to helping Elise Cordry edit her feature on a Douglas girl who was selected to study at the School of American Ballet.

  “I like how you describe her ballet classes,” I tell her. “But I think you buried the lede a bit. See?” I point at the computer screen. “If you switch these two paragraphs it’ll be more clear what the story’s about.”

  Elise leans in and nods. “Yeah!” she says. “You’re right!”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a familiar figure come into the room. A few weeks ago, this particular person would barely have pinged my radar, but he’s become a fixture of my mornings—my partner in fetal porcine mutilation.

  John Moorehouse.

  John high-fives Ben, then sits down next to Ben’s computer station. He says hi to Matt, then I feel his gaze fall on me.

  “Hey, Kathryn,” he says. “What are you doing here?”

  In spite of myself, I blush. It feels strange having him speak to me outside of Anatomy class. “I work here,” I tell him.

  “Kathryn’s the features editor,” Ben says.

  “Dang.” John regards me appreciatively. “Music, AP, the newspaper, what don’t you do?”

  “Um…” My tongue feels thick and clumsy. “Figure skating?” He laughs and so do Ben and Elise, and I start to feel more comfortable. “I should ask you the same thing,” I say. “Why are you here when everybody else is chugging Starbucks in the commons?”

  “Getting interviewed,” John replies. “Sherman here insists on calling me the star quarterback, so apparently that makes everything I have to say really gripping. After that, I’m supposed to talk to your news editor for a story on King and Queen candidates.”

  I glance over at Matt, who’s watching us over his laptop screen, a suspicious look on his face. I pretend to suddenly be interested in a hangnail, trying to make the whole thing seem like the not-big-deal that it really is. I mean, sure, the A-listers usually blatantly ignore me, but it isn’t that odd to have one of them engage me in conversation.

  Is it?

  I suppose to Matt it is, considering that I never told him about John and me being lab partners. I don’t know why, exactly—it’s just that ever since John asked if Matt was my boyfriend, I’ve been a little more sensitive to what Matt might think; because if Matt is thinking about things like that, then it means that I have to think about them, too.

  The office door opens and someone new walks in. Immediately, the energy in the room changes. I snap my attention back to my own computer.

  “Dempsey!” John calls out. “You here for your Queen interview?”

  “Yep,” Brooke tells him. “I’m supposed to meet somebody in news. Are they here?”

  Her gaze sweeps the room and, for a second, falls on me. I stare at my screen, pretending to be thoroughly engrossed in Elise’s story, until—thank God—Erin LeGault, our news editor, stands up.

  “Over here, Brooke!” she calls. “Thanks so much for coming in so early!”

  Brooke goes over and sits down, and Erin launches into a set of questions. She asks Brooke about her chosen charity and Brooke’s voice goes all soft and serious, as if she truly is concerned about rampant inequality within the music department.

  “I’ve always thought it was unfair that singers are expected to pay for their gowns,” she says. “I mean, the dresses cost a hundred and thirty dollars. To most people that’s not a lot of money, but some people have a hard time just affording clothes for school, let alone a dress for music class.”

  I reach down and grab my backpack; I don’t need to sit here and listen to this. The Picayune is one place where I actually sort of have friends—a safe, Brooke-free zone. If she’s going to invade it, then I don’t have to give her the satisfaction of sticking around.

  “Go ahead and give the story one more pass, then turn it in for copyedits,” I tell Elise. “You’re in good shape.”

  I stand and hurry over to Matt.

  “Come on,” I whisper. “Let’s go.”

  “But I’m not done with my column yet,” he says. His cursor hovers over the “log off” icon as if waiting for permission to shut down. “What about your section hole?”

  “I’ll fill it with something else,” I tell him. “Consider this an extension. Just please—let’s get out of here.”

  BROOKE

  THURSDAY NIGHT, I FINALLY GET an email from Dad.

  Honey, I’m so sorry I haven’t gotten back to you. San Francisco is insane, though the production looks amazing. I’m done next week and then I’m moving on to—get this—Tulsa, Oklahoma. One of their old patrons died and left a load of money to the civic opera. They’re doing Madame Butterfly, only they’re setting it in sixties Vietnam and it’s just too awful for words. I mean, why not just do Miss Saigon? Anyway, I can’t imagine you’d get much of what you’re looking for in Tulsa. If you want to go to New York you can always stay in the apartment. I can get recommendations for good coaches if you need a foot in the door. Just let me know. Most of my free time is during the day and I don’t want to interrupt your school, but I will try to call as soon as I can. I love you, Little Star!

  I try not to be worried. Dad’s really busy, and we’ve got plenty of time before the Blackmore. He always comes through, even if it’s last-minute. Like the time when I was in eighth grade, playing the Artful Dodger in Oliver! It was my first real lead role. I was so excited I must have called Dad about it a hundred times. But by opening night I still hadn’t heard from him. I waited right up until it was time to go on. Then I made myself accept that he probably wasn’t coming. During intermission, though, I got a message from the stage manager that somebody was waiting for me in the greenroom. It was Dad and Jake. They’d come in during the overture and sat in the back so nobody would recognize them. I ran to Dad and let him pick me up.

  “That was fantastic!” he said, and twirled me around. The stubble from his beard left marks in my greasepaint makeup. “I couldn’t take my eyes off you!”

  “Really?” I pulled off the old top hat I’d been wearing. “I almost forgot the words to ‘Be Back Soon.’”

  “Did you now? I couldn’t tell.” He put a kiss on my forehead. “My Little Star.”

  “Little?” said Jake with his big movie star voice. He was wearing sunglasses, even in the greenroom where nobody could see us. Which I guess just shows how nervous he was about getting recognized. “Why, she’s big enough to play college basketball, aren’t you, Brookie? How tall are you now? Six five? Six seven?”

  Dad ignored Jake and gave me another twirl. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “Just beautiful.”

  When I turned back around, he had something in his hand. It was a little blue bag from Tiffany. I recognized it right away because he used to bring bags like that to my mom on special occasions. It was the first time he’d ever brought one for me.

  I reached in and pulled out a tiny blue box. Inside was a silver star on a delicate chain.

  “That’s so you’ll always have a little piece of me with you,” he said. “So you’ll always know I’m here, even if it doesn’t seem like it.”

  I tried not to cry as he reached around and fastened the star behind my neck. Now, as I get in bed with the phone on the pillow next to me, I hold the star in my hand and tell myself everything is going to be okay.

  But it doesn’t make the next day any easier. I can’t concentrate at school. I keep checking my cell for missed calls and text messages. By lunchtime I’m so antsy that I have to go home to check Mom’s answering machine. Nothing. He probably stayed late at rehearsals. San Francisco is two hours behind us. He’s probably still in bed.

  We have nothing in the house for lunch but
olives and frozen pizza, so I skip eating and head back to school. To choir, where—great timing!—I get to hear Kathryn sing her solo again. And now I’m closer to a meltdown than I ever was before. Because Kathryn is even better than she was the last time. The only hiccup is one high note that doesn’t quite make it.

  After class, Laura Lindner rushes down from the second sopranos.

  “What a mess,” she says while we’re putting away our folders. “Kathryn, I mean. Is Anderson trying to screw us over?”

  I walk to the door. Try to ignore her because what the hell does she know anyway? Out in the hallway, we run into Chloe.

  “Hey, Chloe!” Laura says. “What’s up?”

  “I don’t know,” says Chloe. She looks pissed. “Why don’t we ask Brooke?”

  “Nothing’s up,” I tell them as we start down the hall. “At least I don’t think there is.”

  “Now see, that’s funny,” Chloe says. “Because everybody else seems to know what’s up. Laura, what is happening here in exactly three weeks and three days?”

  “Homecoming,” Laura answers.

  “Right. And since you actually seem to be interested, maybe I can get you to help me out? Here.” Chloe hands Laura a chunk of papers from the stack in her hand. They are light blue and say BROOKE DEMPSEY FOR HOMECOMING QUEEN in big black letters.

  “Crap,” I say under my breath.

  I totally forgot. Chloe and I were supposed to pass out campaign flyers today at lunch. Instead of meeting her I was at home, staring at a big, glowing 0 messages.

  “Chloe,” I say, catching up as she sprints ahead. “Chlo. I’m sorry. My dad’s helping me with the Blackmore, and I was trying to get hold of him at lunch. I just totally forgot.”