“Sorry. No.”
“Any background in music theory?” the voice demanded. It had slowly increased in volume, and the acoustics in Arlington were so crisp that it echoed from all around me. It was as if God were a baritone and had nothing better to do than lament my lack of musical experience.
I shook my head, praying the School of Music wasn’t filled with beatboxing and arranging experts. It seemed unlikely. Singers were a minority; the music kids were mostly instrumentalists. Pianists, flautists, guitarists. There were weirder music focuses, too. From the ones I’d met, I felt like every other Music kid had some focus with a name like Siberian Conducting Methods for Countertenor Rat-Choir.
“All right,” said Isaac’s voice. “Go ahead and—”
“Hang on,” interrupted Baritone God. “Do you need a starting note?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m good.”
“Are you pitch perfect?” he asked, sounding tense.
“I . . . don’t think so? What exactly—”
“Sing a middle C.” Baritone God leaned into sight. He was gaunt, with a shaved head and a pierced ear. Over his crisp button-up lay a tie in Kensington carnelian red, patterned with tiny black crows—our mascot. He looked as grave as if he were attending my funeral.
I picked a note and sang it. Baritone God drew a shiny disk from his pocket and blew into one of the apertures along the side. It whistled out a note a full third above the one I’d sung.
“Oh, well,” he said, looking disappointed. He flicked a hand and sank back out of sight.
“You done, Trav?” said Isaac, his voice smiling.
“Yeah, yeah,” muttered Trav.
“All right.” Isaac looked back up at me. “What are you going to sing?”
“I’m going to do ‘The Man for You’ by Season Sev—”
I cut myself off. Silence fell, absurd silence. I’d sung this song for two straight hours yesterday, and it somehow hadn’t occurred to me before this second—“The Man for You”?
“. . . Season Seven,” I finished, strangled.
“Cool,” Isaac said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
I breathed out the jitters. One breath, two, and then I was singing, and the tension in my body sank through my feet, forgotten.
“You came through like a hurricane,” I started, slow, steady. “You said you’d stay until the end of the rain. You never asked me where I come from, never asked me where I’ve been. I never asked you about home, or why you never let me in.”
I shifted my focus to the back wall, my head clean of everything but the basics: posture, breath support, loosening my tongue. “But you’re leaving town tomorrow, girl, now I’m feeling new,” I sang, shifting the last note around in a short run. One of the Sharps moved in his seat as I upped the volume. “I guess I never knew before, I never knew I needed you.”
I took a quick breath into the chorus, straightened my back, and belted: “And now I stop. Wait. Breathe a little, talk too late. You’re all I got, babe, and now I never want to hesitate. I’ll let you in now, I’m gonna show you how, so baby, kiss me ’til our time runs out.”
In the audience, Dr. Graves looked up from his phone.
My heart gave a panicked leap. I heightened the scratchy quality in my voice, disguising my high notes. “All I want to say is I’m the man for you, no doubt.” The notes cascaded down, down, and I ended near the bottom of my range.
The echo faded. Silence from the Sharps. Dr. Graves’s face, still tilted up toward me, was lit ominously from beneath by the white blur of his screen. Somewhere, a pen clicked.
Then Isaac said, “Thanks for swinging by. You’ll get an e-mail after dinner.”
I hurried offstage in a cold sweat.
At dinner, something jumpy and paranoid settled under the surface of my skin. Every time someone passed, I felt sure they were craning over my shoulder to stare at my face. But the nearest kids continued building a tepee out of their French fries, and not a single person gave me a second look, even ones I’d seen in class yesterday. Theater kids probably thought I was a film kid, and film kids probably thought I was a theater kid.
Kensington had two dining halls. Here on East Campus, the Film and Theater schools used McKnight Hall. On West Campus, the other three disciplines ate in Marden Cathedral, a hulking Gothic building that had been an active church until the fifties. Then they’d built the tiny, feather-gray chapel at the corner of town and converted the elegant cathedral into what had to be the fanciest cafeteria in the Western Hemisphere.
McKnight wasn’t hard on the eyes either. It felt like an experimental film set. Spindly wooden frameworks covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, mapping outlines of trees that sprawled across the glass. The walls leaned deep inward to prop up the raftered ceiling, a weird architectural choice made weirder by the paint job: dark floors and carnelian walls, to show some Kensington spirit, and also presumably to remind us vividly of blood while we chewed our questionable meatloaf.
Someone crossed close behind me. I got a whiff of lavender and stiffened—I would’ve recognized Lydia’s perfume anywhere. I angled my head directly down at my food, counted to ten, and snuck a glance upward. Her platinum hair bobbed into the distance.
Sitting out in the open was too risky. If I ever had to do this again, I would sit at the single-person round tables that lined the back wall, the lands of exile, designed for kids who wanted to read or study in peace while they ate. As far as the rest of McKnight was concerned, people in the back were invisible. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had died and nobody noticed.
I inhaled my dinner. The last bites always tasted better than the first. I slowed down enough by the end to savor the crisped texture around the edges of roasted chicken and the clean-tasting juice that snapped from fresh vegetables. Nothing here was ever canned, nothing saturated with salt or preservatives. Except the meatloaf, which consisted entirely of salt and preservatives. A real heart attack of a loaf.
My hands jittered as I scraped my plate clean. I pictured the Sharps in a seven-person circle on the black expanse of the Arlington stage, separating the callbacks from the rejects, Dr. Graves looming over them like a bird of prey.
I didn’t dare to hope I could beat all the actual boys who’d auditioned, but that didn’t stop my imagination from dancing all the way to the end of the road—the possibilities of that tour. I estimated that the average Kensington kid had been to 5.4 European countries, the way everyone talked about the continent like it was a second home, but I’d never left the US. I could only picture Paris as they showed it in movies, flooded with golden baubles of light, with streets that meandered downward like veins of lava glowing down a volcano’s slope, a quiet restaurant on every corner. I pictured what I’d seen of Berlin from photos in textbooks—its square and practical apartment buildings, pastel or neutral, with parallel lines of molding that underscored rows of flowering window boxes. I pictured what I’d heard of London—bad teeth? worse weather?—and knew I was missing everything. Everything: a particular cold scent in the air, I was sure, or a turbulent mix of sounds that flooded busy roads, or the kinetic dart of a bicyclist throwing caution to the winds while a black cab blared its outrage. I wanted all of it. The world in its honking yelling breathing glowing entirety.
Dorm check-in on Saturdays wasn’t until 11:30, but after dinner I couldn’t get back to Burgess fast enough. I power walked down August Drive, a black stripe of road that twined through the green of campus. The September dusk smelled thick and humid. Coils of clouds promised rain.
My mind drifted into forbidden territory as I walked. Last year, any given Saturday night, Michael and I would have been heading for the tiny coffeehouse in town, the Carrie Café. Carrie was a boisterous woman who had told me not-so-privately she wanted an invitation to our wedding. I’d smiled at so many versions of him across her rickety café tables: junior-fall Michael with braces clamped over his teeth; senior-fall Michael with scruff at the jawline for his part i
n The Crucible; senior-spring Michael, clean-shaven again, hair in a smooth fade at the sides of his head. Older in a way I couldn’t describe. Each one mine.
I passed a militia of brick administrative buildings, quaint colonials with white trim. The high-rise dorm for the film kids stood ahead, a concrete interruption that some donor had erected in honor of himself in the eighties. Past the high-rise, August Drive curved toward West Campus.
I split off through the grass toward the theater quad and hurried to the Burgess girls’ entrance, keeping my face ducked. Nobody paid attention, not the guys by the quad statue kicking around a Hacky Sack, not the girls up on the Palmer steps blasting “In the Heights” through a Bluetooth speaker.
I paused in the threshold. Those clusters of people looked so unworried, so unified, in their miniature worlds sealed away from mine.
I felt alone, but I had no one to blame but myself. It was the worst mistake to build your world on somebody else’s back. Only took one motion for everything to fall to pieces.
I gripped the pieces for a second: Michael’s voice, cocky and declarative, and the way the left half of his mouth smiled harder than the right. As the drizzle finally misted down from the sky, I imagined he would have had something to say about it. Probably the Dublin accent. Jaysus, man, this weather’s shite, y’know? Or the detective. It rained every night that week, cleared the cigar smoke right up. Sure, the dame had been on my mind, what she and I had done. There was nothin’ else to do but sit there and think, wait for ’em to catch me.
My laptop clicked like an insect as it started. It had a new series of worrying noises to give me every day. I appreciated its effort to keep things interesting.
The wig came easily from my hairline, the cap damp with sweat. My fingers fumbled bobby pin after bobby pin from my hair, and locks of black cascaded around my face, rippled with a curl. I stripped off my flannel. The open space breathed cool air onto my sticky shoulders, around the lines of my sports bra, and a corset of heat dissipated from around my torso.
The computer bloomed into light. I threw a flurry of clicks and typing its way and bit down hard on my cheek.
One new message in Julian Zhang’s otherwise-empty inbox. Audition Results, read the subject line. I tapped it.
Dear Julian,
Thanks for coming to auditions today. We’d like to invite you to a callback tomorrow evening in the practice rooms underneath Prince Music Library. Room 003, 7:30 sharp.
Best,
The Sharpshooters
The tightly wound clockwork in my chest spun loose. Bells and whistles and noise clamored in my chest, but all around me was silence.
The world saw exactly what it wanted to see. Finally, it wanted to see me.
The Prince Music Library was Kensington’s oldest building, perched at the southwestern tip of campus. Tall and elegant, with slender colonettes running up its dark walls, the library looked like a watchtower. A coppery sign stood outside, burnished by 160 years of terrible upstate New York weather, explaining the building’s historical significance: A slightly important soldier had stayed here for a night, one time.
I made sure my wig was secure, my hair curled into locks and pinned beneath, and pushed through the ancient doors. As they boomed shut behind me, I stopped.
Most of Kensington’s Gothic-style buildings were beautiful on the outside, but their interiors had walls the color of oatmeal and carpets the undecided green-gray of ditchwater. The interior design smacked of dentist waiting rooms. Not Prince Library. Here, copper-bracketed sconces on the walls peeked out from book-cases that loomed like beasts. Overhead, miniature spotlights aimed their beams at artful positions to avoid shining on the books, drawing pools of light on a weathered oaken floor.
I wound through the imposing bookcases toward the center of the building: a sunken lounge space outlined by red sofas. Above, the ceiling was conspicuously missing. Instead, the hollow expanse of the music library stretched up overhead. Upper levels with wooden railings gazed down on where I stood. Iron staircases glinted on the corner of every floor.
This, I thought, was the Kensington they’d had in 1850, when nobody like me could have set foot inside. This was the unchanging part of this place that belonged to the older world, the part that I could only ever spy on.
Shaking off the feeling of having time traveled, I headed for the basement door.
I was early. I waited. I’d half-expected to find ancient catacombs down here, lined with flickering torches and maybe some disturbingly humanoid skulls, but the basement wasn’t as old-fashioned as the rest of the music library. The underground halls had the shabby appearance of something built on a whim in the seventies and totally ignored ever since, with chintzy still-life paintings dangling here and there.
After a few minutes, a tall kid shouldered his way out of practice room 003—my competition. He was handsome in a baseball-player sort of way, with a round face and floppy chestnut hair. He nodded to me before disappearing upstairs.
Shit. Did the Sharps care how good-looking the auditioners were? That was part of their whole shtick, right? Being stupidly attractive? Maybe I could pass as a guy, but I somehow doubted I could pass as a hot guy.
J. Crew Junior wasn’t hot, I reassured myself. But that was because he hadn’t looked old enough to be hot yet. Even he was pretty, like one of those weirdly old-looking Renaissance babies from art history slides.
I should’ve found a suit. A suit could turn a 6-out-of-10-looking dude into a solid 8.
My watch’s second hand ticked across home base: seven thirty. I knocked, and deep within practice room 003, a muffled voice called something that the soundproofing blurred into nothing. I cracked the door and slipped in.
The room was bigger than I’d expected. Filing cabinets were lined up along one wall, and a grand piano sat against the other, sleek and black, lid down. Isaac Nakahara sat on the lid, legs crossed. Baritone God—Trav—was perched at the piano bench with the ramrod posture of a soldier. He was even more solemn up close. His face looked as smooth and unlined as marble, like he’d never smiled in his life.
Dr. Graves was nowhere to be seen, but the other Sharps littered the room. They weren’t all hot, thank God. Mainly, they were just intimidating, eyeing me with such obvious evaluation that I got the urge to somersault under the piano.
The seven of them made up a decently representative sample of Kensington kids: majority white, but not by much, overall well-dressed, and covered in symbols of the Kensington “middle class,” which was a pretty ill-defined term around here. They wore crisp neon running shoes, Mizuno or Asics or Nike, barely broken in, a new pair bought every season or so. On wrists gleamed watches that bore zero resemblance to the scrap of Walmart plastic on my arm. These were a different species, muscular chunks of silver with miniature dials set into their generous faces, which made sense, because if your watch is as expensive as multiple watches, why not get a few extra dials in there? And tossed over shoulders were Kensington hoodies from the bookshop, soft and thick.
I only envied the school gear. Everything emblazoned with the Kensington logo was marked up obscenely for no other reason than that it was part of this place, and if you wore it, then you were part of this place, and eighty dollars—for most kids here—wasn’t too steep a price to belong a little more.
“Julian!” greeted Isaac from the piano, with so much familiarity in his voice, you’d think we’d known each other for years. “Great to see you.”
“Y-you too.”
“You have a good weekend?”
“It, um, yes, good,” I blurted, and resisted the strong urge to whack my forehead repeatedly on the door. God, get it together.
Isaac grinned, showing pointy canines. “Well, welcome to callbacks. First, let me tell you a bit about us.” He flourished a hand at the guys. “We are the Sharpshooters. Originally, the group was called the Wing Singers, and they performed at the cathedral services, but that was ages ago. We’ve been here since Kensington added t
he music school in 1937. I mean, not us specifically, we haven’t been here since the thirties.” He reconsidered. “Except Trav, who has absolutely been here for eighty years.”
Trav closed his eyes. “Isaac . . .”
Isaac shot him a grin and barreled on. “In terms of workload, we practice every night from eight to nine. We’ve got two gigs for the school in fall, another three in spring. And this year, we have that competition in December against the other groups, and if we win, we’ll get to tour in Europe with Aural Fixation.”
From the corner, J. Crew Junior let out a snicker. “Oral,” he said.
Isaac looked like he was trying not to laugh. “Yes, Erik, thank you for your contribution.” He unfolded his legs, letting a mile of dark wash denim hang over the edge of the Steinway. Scanning his outfit, I felt a sudden flash of insecurity about how I looked in my cheap, formless disguise. I hated how sensitive I’d become to minuscule markers like the Polo player on Isaac’s gray V-neck. It wasn’t that I wanted to care about brand names, but they were loud. When I met one of those kids wallpapered in brands, it felt like they wanted me, specifically, to know they were wearing a thousand dollars’ worth of cashmere or cotton or silver or leather. It was the least I could do to acknowledge it.
Trav lifted the lid from the piano keys. It creaked very slowly. When he spoke, it was with sinister softness: “We will win that competition. Or else.”
Isaac nodded. “There’s that lighthearted attitude we love so much.”
I suppressed a laugh. Isaac looked at me in time to catch the tail end of my grin. “I think that’s it,” he said, looking satisfied. “Questions?”
I shook my head.
“Then it’s all you, Trav.”
“Mm.” Trav’s nose wrinkled. “Off the piano.”
Isaac rolled his eyes but jumped off the lid. He leaned deep into Trav’s personal space, pulling one of those boy-stretches that showed the flexing sides of his underarms.
Trav sighed, shoved Isaac away by the shoulder, and looked back to me. “Let’s get started,” he said, in the tone that most movie villains would use to say, “Prepare to die.”
Noteworthy Page 4
