“So, why are you still on campus?” she asked, a little too brightly. “Are—hang on, are you an international student? Am I making that up?”
“Nah, I’m from San Francisco. My parents are . . .” I trailed off. It would be so easy to make something up. A casual fib, thoughtless. My parents aren’t in the city right now, or I have this project I needed the library to work on. On and on.
“I can’t afford flights back,” I finished. “Or much of anything else, at this point.”
Her composure slipped for a second, showing a glimpse of surprise.
“Sorry,” I said at once. “I just—sorry.”
“Hey. No, it’s okay. Why are you apologizing?”
“I don’t know.” Old habits die hard. I looked down at the table, my throat tight. My heart was beating too hard. I curled my nails into my palms, trying to force out the tension. Get it together.
Victoria examined me as if I were a science fair experiment.
My mouth skewed in a grimace. A strangled sound worked its way out of my throat. I couldn’t get it together. Not this time. Something had cracked deep inside my body, and if I held it in anymore, its edges would shred my insides open.
“It must be hard not to see your family on Thanksgiving,” Victoria said. She sounded uncertain, and it made her younger somehow, hopeful and anxious, a girl I could recognize from her television show. The Family Channel had scripted twelve-year-old Vicky T into a heroine anyone could get behind, all sharp humor when a middle-school bully needed a dose of snark, but warm in her softer moments. I found myself stupidly glad that this version of her hadn’t been fiction.
“It’s not that,” I managed. “They’re making me go.”
I circled my hands over my cheeks, kneaded my temples with my index fingers. God, I could see it. Meeting after meeting. I’d sit in a thousand stiff leather chairs in a thousand tastefully decorated offices of a thousand well-meaning grown-ups, and they would all try to convince me to stay, and I’d have to smile in a chagrined sort of way, saying, “I’ve got to do what’s best for my family.” None of them would know I was fighting back a voice in my head that screamed, I don’t want to go. Don’t make me go. I need this.
Then I’d get on a plane. December 14th, the day after the competition, that useless competition I’d gambled everything on. And I’d never come back.
A hand lit on my shoulder. “Hey,” said Victoria. “Hey. Are you okay? What do you mean, they’re making—”
“I’m not coming back next semester.” I lowered my hands and looked at her. I probably looked like a train wreck. “I have to stay in San Francisco.”
Her hand dropped away. “But what about your spring concert and stuff?”
I gave a hollow laugh. “If my parents say it’s not happening, it’s not happening.”
“And they don’t know about . . .”
“Any of this. No. Course not.”
I cupped my cider mug, letting my hands grow uncomfortably hot. “Victoria?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”
She sat still, looking torn.
“Please,” I said, low, intent. “The guys can’t find out. It’s three more weeks. Singing with them is the one thing since June that’s made me feel like—I don’t know. Like I’m going somewhere. Like this wasn’t all for nothing.” This whole process. Class after class, audition after audition, fight after fight with my parents just to stay.
“It’s not for nothing,” Victoria said. “What happens if the Sharps win the competition?”
The question didn’t even feel like it mattered. The whole thing had been a ridiculous dream. I shook my head, studying my hands at the edge of the table.
“You could still do it,” she said quietly. “They pay for the whole thing.”
“I mean, yeah. But then I’ll have to tell my parents.”
“So tell your parents.” Her voice gained strength. “You would have had to anyway. What do you have to lose?”
I met Victoria’s gaze. She didn’t look away, didn’t back down. I saw myself in there, all stubborn conviction, hungry ambition, eyes on the prize.
Tell my parents I’d been posing as a guy in every spare hour since September. Gamble on the chance that they’d let me travel with a group of high school and early-twenties guys. Gamble on our winning the competition in the first place.
When was I going to run out of bets to make?
On Thanksgiving night, my parents video-called me, sitting in the kitchen, sink and cabinets out of focus over their shoulders. Mom had her hair out of its ponytail for once, two streams of tangled black. As the resolution of the video flickered and cleared, I felt my intestines form a deliberate pretzel.
I asked about Thanksgiving. They’d gone over to the Davises’ for dinner, as usual—the Davises had six kids, so they never said no to a couple of extra adults to balance things out. Hopefully, they’d managed to keep their tensions out of the Davises’ apartment.
Finally, Dad asked, “What did you want to talk about?”
“I need to tell you something.” My heart pattered. “So, this year, I got into this singing group.”
My parents traded a look. “You what?” Mom said.
“It’s a vocal group, and they’re really good. There’s this competition we’ve been working for, and it—”
“Why is this the first we’re hearing about this?” Dad asked.
I swallowed, improvising. “Since it’s not theater, I thought you might not want me to be doing it. But I love it, okay? I really love it. And this competition is a big deal. We’ve got a chance to tour all over the world with a professional singing group. A famous group.”
My parents looked as if I’d switched to speaking Arabic.
“They expense the whole trip,” I rushed on. “We wouldn’t need to pay anything or do anything. If we win, I—can I go? It’s over winter break. Please? It’s a big deal. A huge deal. It could be a career-making thing.”
They looked at each other, then back at me, in unison. My mom said slowly, “I don’t see a problem with that. Who’s in the group?”
“That’s the thing,” I said. “I mean, the tour’s going to be a bunch of adults. You know, professionals. But my singing group is, um . . . well, it’d be me and seven boys.”
“Absolutely not,” Dad said. At the same time, Mom spluttered, “What singing group has seven boys and one girl?”
“They sort of . . .” I winced. “I mean, they think I’m a boy, is the thing. I’ve been kind of pretending. To be a boy. So. Um.”
Both of them sat absolutely still for a moment, so still I wondered if the screen had frozen. Then they came back to life. “What?” my mom said, aghast.
My dad said, “How on earth have you been pretending to be—”
I tugged off my wig.
My parents’ mouths dropped open. I was tempted to screencap the sight and send it out as a Christmas card.
“You cut all your hair,” my mom said. She sounded as if she might pass out. “You cut it off.”
“Yeah. Yep.”
My dad sank a hand into his own hair as if reassuring himself that it was still there. Mom gave her head a violent shake and said in a low, dangerous voice, “So, you’re saying you lied to your school?”
“No! Kind of. Not really. It’s a club, so there’s only one teacher who’s involved. The school doesn’t . . . really know. It’s just the guys.”
If my mom heard a word I said, it made no visible impact. She was still studying my hair with unqualified horror.
I bit my lip. “If it makes it better, people cut their hair for parts in shows all the time.”
Then Dad let out a noise that sounded suspiciously like a giggle.
Mom looked at him with astonishment. After a second of restraint, Dad cracked. “How dumb do these people have to be not to see she’s a girl?” The burst of laughter that came from his mouth was too much for the computer: The audio peaked and
cracked, sending across a robotic blare of mirth.
Slowly, my mom looked back at me, and after a second, she started laughing, too. Stunned, I sat there, watching Dad transition from howling to wheezing. He wiped his eyes with his knuckles, caught Mom’s eyes again, and they collapsed against each other’s shoulders in hysterics.
What the fuck, I thought.
When they finally got themselves together, I said, “So, is that a yes, or?”
“I think,” Dad said, looking at Mom, “if it’s worth it, you should do the competition.”
Mom jumped in. “It really costs nothing?”
“Zero.”
“Well,” she said, and folded her hands. “If you win, we’ll talk more about it. But if you do win, no more of this lying to these boys. No more telling your school you’re—” She brandished an indicating finger at the camera. “You know.”
“Yes. Okay. Absolutely.” If I made it that far, then, I’d have to figure out a way to have my cake and also eat all of the cake. I’d have to explain who I was—but too late for anyone to take it back. I imagined an e-mail from overseas, or possibly a carrier pigeon. Smoke signals?
My plans slowed in their swirling patterns for a moment, stilling as I examined my parents. I wanted to thank them, but I couldn’t form a sound. Their laughter had struck a strange, sweet note inside me. I hadn’t seen them like that in so long, unified, looking at each other as if they were allies. They looked so much younger, it made me feel ancient.
“Who is it?”
“Julian,” I called through Isaac’s door.
After a second’s muffled noise, the door swung open. Isaac’s bun was messier than normal; a thick fistful of dark hair hung under one of his pointy ears. A pair of bulky headphones hung around his slender neck, branded with thick white text reading Audio-Technica. Wires snaked around his wrist, black and red.
For a second, we eyed each other. There were fragments of something swimming under his usual careless expression. Had five days changed his mind? Had he thought over everything and decided to tell the others after all—or never talk to me again?
“Hey.” He smiled. “Come in.”
Relief doused the fires of worry in my head. I wove through his maze of clutter, found a patch of wall to lean against, and summoned the words I’d planned while trying to sleep. Two plain sentences. Listen, I’m not coming back to Kensington after break. I’m still all in for the competition, but we should talk about replacing me.
I imagined some boy sitting in my armchair in the Nest, and I felt, for a second, as interchangeable as something sent down an assembly line.
My throat tight, I scanned the room. Isaac’s recording setup sat on his desk: the microphone plugged into a preamp with a half-dozen dials, which fed into his computer. In front of the mic, a disk of black nylon was positioned to catch uneven bursts of air, attached to the stand by a goosenecked bracket. “Didn’t you just get back?” I said, nodding at the setup.
“Yep.” Isaac leapt over his suitcase and folded his laptop shut, hiding the screen full of multicolored recording tracks. “I’ve got priorities. The muse waits for nobody, Julian. Um, Jordan.” Unplugging the mic and unscrewing the stand, he glanced at me over his shoulder. “What name should I use?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just don’t call me Jordan in front of the guys.”
“I’ll just call you J,” he said, looping the mic cable in a blur of black rubber. “Like a blue jay. Except that you’re human and stuff.” He gave me a suspicious look. “Supposedly.”
“You are the weirdest person I know,” I said with a grin, and it wasn’t even an exaggeration. Under the misleading layers of being well-dressed and good at guitar, he was very possibly the biggest dweeb at Kensington. I remembered my audition, with that heinous nonjoke about the president of the United States, and it seemed impossible that I’d ever been afraid of Isaac thinking I was weird.
I forced my smile down. Three weeks left, I reminded myself. No reminiscing. Time to start letting go. “How’s it going?” I said, keeping the strain from my voice. “The album, I mean.”
“Not bad. I did all the instrumentals over break, so now I just have to finish up the vocals.” He slid his equipment into a drawer. “I probably should’ve left my guitar home—I don’t really need it now, I guess. Anyway, whatever.” He hopped up on his bed and fiddled with the knotted drawstring of his hoodie. He had crooked fingers from holding pencils and picks and handles too tight. “Why’d you come by? What’s up?”
I opened my mouth and nothing came out. If I told him, it made this real. It would begin the three-week goodbye.
“Just wanted to . . . you know,” I said quietly. “Make sure you didn’t drive off the road.”
He laughed. “Thanks, asshole.” His laugh froze. “I mean, um—”
“Any time.” I smiled back.
His shoulders loosened. “Right. So.” He cleared his throat. “How was staying here for Thanksgiving? We got more snow, right? That must’ve been fun. Did you go sledding? You don’t look dead of boredom, at least. So that’s good.”
“. . . I survived, yeah,” I said past a strangled feeling in my throat.
After a moment, Isaac smiled a confused smile. “Gonna give me any more than that?”
“What?”
His smile skewed uneven. He shrugged. “Well, when we talked—I just. I mean, we talked.”
I know. I know. It had been smooth and effortless, the way talking hardly ever is. We’d talked and it had felt like a song.
I couldn’t hold his eyes. I studied the posters plastering the walls instead. One displayed a gaunt, stubbly man perched on a stool, draped in spotlights, acoustic guitar tucked into his lap. Another showed a slice of black stage with a guitarist on his knees, the red-and-gold face of his electric gleaming. And there was Freddie Mercury, stripe of mustache above his generous mouth, wailing into a sparkling microphone, sweat pearling on his brow.
My thoughts circled back around, apparently determined to remind me how, five days ago, Isaac and I had murmured into the night until it paled with the promise of dawn. Before that night, I hadn’t let myself think of Isaac as anything more than the senior always looking for trouble. Since then, I’d reconsidered. He wasn’t looking for trouble. He was trouble.
“Um,” he said. “So I guess I thought I’d . . .”
I waited.
“Never mind,” he said. “Forget it.”
“No, what?”
He swung his legs, his quick voice coming to life. “Did I tell you I burned the turkey on Thanksgiving?” he asked. “I can’t cook. It’s horrible. I swear I could burn those lazy-person cookies you get in the frozen section. When I was twelve, I basically set our kitchen on fire. My mom still has a grease burn on her forearm.”
I let him swing the subject in a wide arc, far away from anything that mattered. But I kept hoping, as we bantered about dining hall food and competition prospects and our upcoming rehearsal schedule, that he’d steer us back.
I didn’t want to tell him. I knew I had to.
Then, out of nowhere, he said, “I kind of thought I should call you,” and it jarred me back to myself.
“Uh. What?”
“I don’t know. After I got back home, I thought, like, she’s a girl. You’re a girl. That was a weird time at the retreat. Right? So, I should call. Or text. Something.” His eyes were brushing me all over, then meeting mine, then darting away embarrassed. He lay back on his bed, examining his ceiling. “You’re not mad, right?”
“Wh—mad about what?” I said, bewildered.
“That I didn’t get in touch.”
“What? No.” I pulled his chair out from his desk and sat. “What are you talking about?”
“Fuck. I don’t know.” He put his pillow over his face and said something into it.
“That’s, um, not the best way to make words.”
He slid the pillow up until his sharp chin and mouth poked out beneath. “It doesn’t make sense a
nymore. I don’t know if you would’ve wanted to talk, or if it made me an asshole for not talking, or if you were worried about—”
“Isaac. Hey. It’s okay.” I studied his profile as the pillow slipped from his face. He was still staring at the ceiling.
I wasn’t going to tell him to stop overanalyzing. Not until I figured out how to stop doing it myself.
“You’re not an asshole,” I said, quieter.
He straightened up slowly, a thick lock of hair falling over his forehead. He brushed it back. “Okay. I just . . . I don’t get how girls work.”
I tried not to laugh, disbelieving. “I work like me. Like a person. I’m the same human being, okay? You know me.” Sudden resentment needled me. “And also, I’m not suddenly trailing after you and hoping you’ll call me, just ’cause I’m a girl.”
He made a frantic motion. “What! No, that’s not what I—I didn’t mean—”
After a moment of his floundering, I leaned against his desk, amazed. No wonder Isaac Nakahara had never had a girlfriend, then, if this was how he talked to girls.
“Then tell me what you mean,” I said, and I meant it to sound amused, a little sarcastic, but it didn’t come out that way. His room was silent except for the murmur of the heating and a whisper of music down the hall, and in the stillness my words were halting and confused.
He leaned back against the wall. “All right. I wanted to call you, okay?” he said, with an air of finality. Like that explained everything.
I waited a long moment for an elaboration, but for once, Isaac didn’t keep talking. He just held my eyes, wearing a serious, unfamiliar expression.
The door opened. I jolted, twisting around.
Jon Cox stalked in, his mouth curled in a snarl.
“They keyed my fucking car,” he said, his voice trembling. “Those shitheads keyed my car!”
Isaac and I were both on our feet in seconds. “Where are they?” Isaac said.
“Isaac,” I warned.
“I saw a couple of them near Arlington,” Jon Cox said.
“Guys—”
Isaac grabbed his coat. The stuttering boy had disappeared. The sharp knife of revenge was back. “Let’s go.”
Noteworthy Page 24
