The picture wasn’t in my bag before, I’m sure of that, and I don’t see anybody else in the library who could have put it there. In case somebody is watching, I pretend like nothing’s happened and I’m just going about my usual business.
Inside, though, I am buzzing with shock as I gather my things and hurry out to the parking lot. Nearing my car, I see something hanging off of the rear antenna—an inflated inner tube, the kind that kids use. It is bright blue with little red fish swimming across the top, and somehow the brightness makes it even more sinister, especially when I read the note taped to it: You never know when you might need this.
I snatch the tube off and fling it into my backseat. Then, on the way home, I stop behind a Burger King and leave it in one of the Dumpsters. The nerve behind my right eye has begun to throb; if I don’t take aspirin soon, the headache will take hold and last for days.
I arrive home to the smell of fried chicken and venture into the kitchen to find the table set with mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and crusty butter rolls. Dad already sits in his place, thumbing through a packet of papers that I recognize as a statement from the guy who manages his retirement fund. He sighs, folds up the papers, and tosses them onto the counter as I sit across from him. Mom starts spooning food onto my plate, so quiet that I know something is going on; I discover what it is when I reach for my napkin and find three envelopes tucked underneath.
“I have a good feeling about these,” Mom tells me. “I was going to open them, but I thought you would want to do it yourself.”
I sit for a moment, looking at the envelopes. My hand hovers over the top one, which bears the seal of a school where I applied for a journalism scholarship.
“You don’t have to open it now. Go ahead and eat first,” says Mom. But I know she and Dad have probably been counting the minutes until they can see what’s inside, so I cool my throat with a sip of milk and start to open.
I open the first, then the second, then the third, looking over the contents quickly as if skimming will make it any less painful. It’s more of the same: minuscule scholarships and invitations to sing for the voice faculty again once I’ve completed my first year. One school rejects me altogether; apparently neither my writing nor my singing meets their standards.
“I just don’t understand it,” says Mom. “Your grades are excellent. You sang for the president, for goodness’ sake. Who in the world is getting these scholarships if it isn’t you?”
I sit miserably, picking the skin off my chicken, eating the crispies because I can’t resist them but feeling nauseous at the meat underneath; after four weeks of dissecting a fetal pig, I can identify nearly every muscle on the drumstick.
“Kathryn doesn’t need a scholarship,” Dad says. “There are other forms of financial aid.”
“Loans you mean.” Mom’s knuckles are white as she grips the serving spoon, plopping mashed potatoes onto her plate in big, angry dollops. “I’m not letting our daughter start out with the kind of debt we had. We said we’d do better than that.”
“Mom…” I hate it when they talk like this. “Something will come through.” Smiling weakly, they go back to their food and a vague notion I’ve had for the past few weeks comes suddenly into focus: Neither of them has mentioned the Blackmore to me. At first, when I didn’t want them to know I’d entered, their silence was a relief; but all this time has gone by, and they still haven’t said anything. Surely they know by now that it’s still on. It’s only the biggest thing to happen to this town every year, and now it’s an even bigger deal because of all the drama surrounding the new recital hall. If they know it’s coming up, then they have to know it’s something I’d participate in. There has to be a reason they aren’t talking about it with me.
Maybe they don’t think I can win. Maybe they’re trying to save me even more disappointment.
The possibility of this is worse than the great expectations I’d originally feared; it’s like they’ve given up before I’ve even had the chance to try.
“May I be excused?”
Mom looks at my plate, worried.
“You’ve barely eaten anything. Don’t you want dessert?”
“No,” I tell her. “I have a headache.” I take a bottle of aspirin from the cupboard above the sink, shake out three, and wash them down with the rest of my milk. “I’m going up to do homework.”
On my way through the living room I pass our old piano, which crouches in the corner like it expects something from me. I desperately need to practice but the piano is out in the open where everybody can hear, and the atmosphere is so tense that there’s no way I’ll be able to concentrate.
I go upstairs, take the cordless into my bedroom, and dial.
“Hold everything,” Matt says when he hears my voice. “I’ll be right over.”
“Guacamole. Good for whatever ails you.”
Matt smiles with satisfaction as a waitress puts a bowl of green dip on the table between us. He’s brought me to our favorite Mexican restaurant, the one with the tinted windows that tempt passersby to stop and admire themselves, not realizing until it’s too late that they’re putting on a show for a dining room filled with people. We started coming here when we were finally old enough to go places by ourselves, and over time it became our place.
Matt scoops some guacamole with a tortilla chip and tries to hand it to me. I wave it away, pointing instead to the picture of Ophelia on the table between us.
“It’s like she’s stalking me. Like she actually wants me dead.”
Matt studies the picture. “You didn’t see her in the library? Are you sure she wasn’t there?”
“She didn’t need to be there. Brooke Dempsey has people who wait in line to do her bidding.”
Matt scrunches up his forehead, then he flips the paper over, blank side up, and pushes it back across the table. “You’re right,” he says. “It sucks. But who wants to talk about sucky things when you’ve got avocados, sour cream, and a little bit of jalapeño pepper, hmmm?” His frown morphs into a smile as he dips another chip and waves it in front of my face. The smell from the onions almost makes me gag.
“I can’t,” I tell him. “Not hungry.”
“You have to eat something. You’ll make yourself sick.”
“I already am sick. I’ve got a headache and way too much to think about.”
“Then think about something trivial.”
“Something like…?”
“Like…” He whistles as he thinks. “Like Homecoming! What?” he says when I roll my eyes. “I thought girls loved that kind of thing.”
“Some girls.”
“You’re not a ‘some girl’?”
“I’m a ‘no girl’ as far as Homecoming is concerned.” Just to make him happy, I grab a chip and nibble at the corners. “You and I will go together because neither of us has anything better going on. We’ll get a pizza, head over to the game for the last quarter, and then hang out at the dance until we’re bored. Then we’ll go back to my house and fall asleep in front of the TV.”
He takes the half-eaten chip out of my hand, dips it, and hands it back. “So what’s wrong with that?”
“Absolutely nothing. It is what it is.” I stick my tongue into the creamy guacamole, letting the flavor spread across my tongue; the guacamole is good, and now that I’ve tried it I realize that I really am hungry. I gobble the dip and the chip together, then reach for another.
“What if I did something special this year?” Matt says. “Buy you flowers, say. Or maybe wear a suit?”
A piece of chip goes down the wrong way, setting off a hacking fit.
Is Matt your boyfriend?
No. I can’t go there, at least not tonight; tonight I need him to just be my friend. I grab my water and take a sip.
“Don’t you dare!” I croak. “The last thing I need is a reminder of the complete and utter lack of romance in my life.”
“Okay, okay,” he says. “It was just a thought.”
“W
ell, save your thoughts for my AP English paper. I have to come up with something flawless and original. And I haven’t even started on the ridiculously hard piece Mr. Lieb gave me for the Blackmore. Then there’s State choir regionals…”
“You know, Kath, it’s okay to let a few things slide every once in a while. You don’t have to do it all.”
Once again, my appetite vanishes. For someone who knows me so well, sometimes I am amazed at how much Matt doesn’t understand.
“What am I supposed to let slide?” I ask. “My grades, which I need to get money for college? Regionals, where the entire Honors Choir is relying on me to not foul everything up? The Blackmore, which is starting to look like my last chance to keep my parents out of massive debt? And oh look! Now we’re back to money for college again.”
I put my head in my hands. My right eye throbs, and I press the tip of my tongue between my teeth so I’ll have a different kind of pain to think about.
“What can I say, Kath?” Matt says. “It’s high school. It won’t last forever.”
“Well, how about I check out until it’s over? I could use an eight-month nap.”
“I’d miss you,” he says, taking the check from our waitress before I have the chance to grab it. “Besides, I’ve always liked having you to myself.”
Today the headache is worse. All morning I’m a dizzy, nauseated mess, and to top it all off, when I get to choir I find a CPR manual for lifeguards in my folder. YOU CAN SAVE SOMEONE FROM DROWNING! it says. I’m dying to go home, but Ms. Burke has an Anatomy study session scheduled for after school, so I take three aspirin, sleep in my car through sixth period, and then go on to the lab.
“You okay?” The concern in John Moorehouse’s voice tells me exactly how out of it I must seem.
“Honestly?” I say. “Not really.”
“Hm…” He studies me, and I can see faint smudges of black under his eyes from the football practice he had to leave in order to make it here on time. “Your left eye looks like it’s stuck in a permawince. Your pupils are dilated, and you’re hunching like it hurts to move your neck. I diagnose a migraine.”
“Is it that obvious?” I squeeze my eye shut and then open it again—now that he’s mentioned it I guess I really have been wincing all day.
“I get them, too,” John says. “Does it feel like somebody’s blowing up a balloon—right here?” He touches his fingers lightly, first to the spot where my eye meets the bridge of my nose, and then to my temple. It should probably make me uncomfortable, but his fingertips are cool, and the places where they’ve been are actually pain-free for a moment.
“That’s exactly what it’s like,” I tell him.
“Yeah,” he replies. “I don’t think it’s all in your head.”
“Oh, I know I’m not imagining it.”
“No, I mean you’ve got so much going on right now.” He waves his scalpel over our pig, then in a bigger circle, at everything around us. “I know I’m maxing out on the recommended daily dosage of Excedrin before I even make it to football every day.”
“That sucks,” I say.
He shrugs. “I guess that’s our reward for being over-achievers.” He turns back to our pig and points at a muscle in the leg. “Now what’s this? The semitendinosus or the semimembranosus?”
“Ummm…I don’t know. Let me see.”
I go to the textbook and start flipping pages; when I look up, a piece of paper is tacked to the muscle in question with one of the pins that Ms. Burke uses to hold back skin so we can identify the organs underneath.
Want to go to Homecoming? it says.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“What?” says John.
“This.” I point to the piece of paper.
“Oh, that! Well, that’s a question. Do you want to go?”
“With you?”
He looks around. “Um, yeah! Who else?”
I wait for his smile to turn into a sneer. John may be one of the few people I know who understands the agonies of a migraine, but he’s also an A-lister.
His smile begins to falter.
“You’re serious?” I say.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t.” He unpins the note and crumples it. “But it’s cool if you don’t want to. I just thought…”
“No, it’s just…” I pause; last year was the first time I had a real Homecoming date, and I’ve mostly blocked that out, because who wants to remember one of the most humiliating nights of their life?
“Don’t act too excited or anything,” John says. He looks truly hurt now, and I remember just last night, complaining about how nobody wanted to go with me. Now, one of the best-looking guys at school is asking me out.
Why is he asking me out?
“No!” I say. “I mean, yes. I’m excited. Just ignore me. I’m not feeling well, remember?”
“Does that mean you’ll go?”
“Yes,” I say, because his uncertain eyes with those black smudges underneath them truly are adorable and because, after the water toys and the notes and the worry about Brooke on top of everything else, it feels good to be wanted.
“Great.” He looks relieved. “We’ll meet up after the game, go to the dance, maybe get something to eat after that. It’ll be fun.”
It does sound nice; and for the first time in what seems like weeks, I smile and really mean it.
“That’s more like it,” he says. He points at a long muscle inside the pig’s thigh. “Now, what is this damned thing?”
“The semimembranosus,” I say. It turns out I didn’t have to look it up after all.
BROOKE
“ALL RIGHT NOW, NICE AND easy. Start here and slide up the octave, then back down, keeping the tone resonant in your nasal cavity. Let’s do it softly, and…”
I’m standing in the crook of Hildy Shultz’s piano, warming up at the start of my voice lesson. She gives me the beginning note, and I open my mouth to do the exercise. Nothing comes out. I put in a bit more breath and get a tone. But it’s hoarse. Like I’ve got a cold.
“Stop,” says Hildy after I’ve tried a few more times. “Brooke, are you feeling all right?”
I tell her I am. It’s the truth. I don’t feel sick, even though I sound like I’m trying to sing through a nasty sore throat. It’s like my voice box is swollen. The sound is having trouble getting out.
“Try this,” Hildy says. She leads me through some vocalises that go from what should be my lowest tone to what should be my highest. I can only get the middle register out. And even those notes sound forced.
“Okay, stop. Open.” Hildy stands up, leaning over so she can examine the back of my mouth. She pulls back and glares at me. “I admire your dedication, Brooke, but you need to let up a bit. You’re abusing your voice.”
“I’m being careful,” I tell her. “I don’t scream or sing outside my range or anything like that.”
“But how often are you singing? In addition to your regular practicing, are you having extra rehearsals in choir?” She can tell by the look on my face what my answers are. The look on her face tells me she doesn’t like it. “I’m stopping this lesson right here,” she says. “There’s no point in going on if you don’t have a voice, plus you need to take a break.” She pulls a sheet of paper from a pad on her music stand and writes down a phone number. “This is for Dr. Dunne. He’s the ear, nose, and throat specialist who sees all the students here. Get an appointment as soon as you can and take it easy for a few days. Let’s hope you haven’t given yourself polyps. Or nodes, God forbid.”
Leaving her office feels like getting kicked out. Nodes are a singer’s worst fear. They’re bumps that form on your vocal cords when you abuse them, like blisters or calluses, and they keep the folds of muscle from vibrating together right. Nodes can ruin your career. A lot of times the only way to get rid of them is surgery. But that can damage your voice even more.
Now I’m really freaked out, and I have no idea what to do with myself. I don’t want to go home. Th
e place is too quiet with Mom working late all the time, and if I can’t practice, then I don’t really want to be there. But if I call Chloe, then we’ll end up someplace like Pomodori’s or a party, and I’ll have to yell over the noise, which will only make my voice worse.
Bang, bang, bang… Out in the atrium, they’ve put up tape around the entrance to the new hall where the Blackmore is supposed to take place. Inside, construction workers are banging around under utility lamps. I step over the tape and peek around the corner. There’s no way it’ll be finished in time. The theater looks like I feel—ripped up and totally unprepared.
I walk across the atrium and up the stairs to the second floor, where the practice rooms are lined up in one long hallway. It sounds like an orchestra warming up—lots of people singing and playing instruments, everybody working on something different. The rooms are supposed to be soundproof, but you can hear a lot through the doors. Like the soprano three rooms down.
I walk up closer, trying to tune out the other noises. The voice is sweet but powerful. So clear and focused I can hear every word, even through the practice room door.
It’s Kathryn. Has to be.
The piece she’s working on is fast, with lots of high notes jumping around, and she’s having trouble with it. She starts a passage, stops, then starts again. She skips to another spot in the song, but that part is hard, too. She tries it out a few times, and then there’s silence. I go up to the door and put my ear close. Behind the thick wood I can hear a sniffle, then soft crying.
I should be happy she’s upset. But what I really feel is a tired kind of sympathy. I step away from the door and leave her alone.
Back downstairs, on the other side of the music wing, I test the door to the theater where the opera workshop rehearses. It’s unlocked. So I go inside and sit in the back row where nobody will see me. They’re working on The Turn of the Screw, which is based on the book about a nanny and two possessed children. I shut my eyes and listen like I’ve done so many times before, trying to see if there’s anything I can learn. But all I can think of is that the singers I’m hearing are stuck. Because if you really want to make a career out of this you don’t come to Lake Champion, Minnesota. You come here if you want to teach or maybe direct choirs, but not if you’re serious about singing. For that you go to a big city. Ian Buxton Blackmore must have realized that. Everybody talks about the Blackmore like he started it so people could come and hear all of the great singers in Lake Champion. I think he really created it so singers like me could get out.
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