Noteworthy

by Riley Redgate

  “Guys!” I snapped.

  Two heads turned my way.

  “This needs to go to the administration, okay? That’s destruction of property. That’s not rivalry—with your car, that’s a felony.”

  Jon Cox looked downright offended. “Oh, like we can’t sort this out ourselves?” he said.

  “Yeah, exactly like that,” I shot back. “If they get suspended, or in legal trouble, colleges are going to see it. That’s actual consequences. We can’t do actual consequences without . . . I don’t know.”

  “Without what?” Jon Cox demanded.

  “Without stooping to their level.”

  “They’re not going to see it that way,” Jon Cox said. “Connor Caskey is going to go around like, yeah, we won, the Sharps are a bunch of pussies.”

  A sheen of red lowered over my vision. “Oh, is that your priority? Making sure some asshole doesn’t think you’re effeminate?”

  Jon Cox mouthed for a second, looking baffled.

  Isaac leapt in. “Okay,” he said, giving me a cautionary look. “You know what, maybe it is time to just talk to someone. Graves, maybe. Tell you what, let me—”

  “No, don’t,” Jon Cox blurted. He shook his head, pushing a hand through his hair. “He’ll tell my parents. I swore I wouldn’t get the car hurt.” Looking defeated, he backed toward the door. “Forget it. I’ll see you guys later.”

  “Wait,” I said, but he was already gone.

  The lunch bell rang, and the Greek Monologue class sprang up from our table.

  “Tell your friends to come to the showcase next week,” Reese called over the hubbub. “Hang up those posters.” The posters in question showed us gathered in the Black Box in costume, under harsh lighting, looking suitably tragic and dramatic. We’d been having class in the Black Box, mostly, for a month or so, preparing for the final performance. Reese’s critiques were merciless, but the showcase replaced a final exam for this class, so nobody complained.

  I was planning on taking down every single poster I found. My face hanging up around campus? Not safe.

  “To the bathrooms!” exclaimed Ash Crawford, grabbing a sheaf of posters.

  “What?” said Pilar Velasquez, giving him a weird look.

  “The best place to hang up posters is the back of stall doors,” Ash explained, heading for the door. “People can’t escape, you know? If you put . . .”

  They made up the back end of the escaping stream of students, and when their laughter was cut off by the closing door, I turned to look at Reese, who stood at the oval table, appraising me. It was only the first day back from break, and I already felt threadbare. This dean’s meeting would be the first of this afternoon’s emotionally exhausting sessions. Goodbye to Admissions. Goodbye to Financial Aid. Goodbye to theater.

  “Let’s go to my office,” she said.

  Long rays of afternoon light fragmented through the old glass in Reese’s office window. The rhythmic whip of the fan took over. Her long nails were pressed together, arching a cage up between her palms. I gazed, resigned, at her silver manicure.

  “Have you considered work-study?” Reese asked.

  “Yeah, I talked to Human Resources. They said they’ve already finished their hiring for spring, so I’d have to wait until fall. I don’t have time to wait, is the thing.”

  Reese shook her head, toying with a charm on one of her bracelets. “This has come up at every single Board meeting for the past few years,” she said. “I can’t fathom how the academy claims to meet 100% of demonstrated need, if outside costs like travel and supplies aren’t within the student’s grasp.” Her lips thinned. “We’re slow to change, unfortunately.”

  “Yeah.”

  Reese folded her arms on her desk and leaned forward. The tightness of her dark bun drew her forehead back, lifting the arches of her brows. Beneath, her softly lined eyes were serious. “Jordan, I’ve started your parents with the transfer application, but I tried to discourage them from the idea. You’re an excellent student. I know the circumstances seem severe, but there are steps you and your family can take to tackle them, if you’re committed to graduating from Kensington. We can map this situation out for you; we can take this little by little.”

  The quiet intensity in her voice took me aback. I didn’t know why, but it made me want to disengage, or disappear. I stared at my thighs.

  “Let’s assume you get a work-study job next year,” Reese continued, clicking a pen into action. “That leaves us with two breaks and next semester to account for. Three blocks of time; we can look at them one by one.” 1, 2, 3 went the rollerball tip onto blank paper, hollow-sounding on the desktop. “Let’s start with next semester first, all right? There may be work opportunities available in town. I can ask on your behalf, if you’re not comfortable.” A pause. “Jordan?”

  I looked up reluctantly. My teeth felt glued together, my voice pushed deep inside a pouch I couldn’t open. It’s useless, said a repeating voice in the back of my mind. Why bother? Something would always fall through. It was easy to say this was just a set of Unfortunate Circumstances, but looking back, hadn’t we always just been stringing our way from Unfortunate Circumstance to Unfortunate Circumstance? If it wasn’t the fallout from a hospital stay, it was getting cycled out of a job. If it wasn’t a job, it was the hiking rent. If it wasn’t rent, it was some freak expenditure that threatened to unbalance everything: a rattling air conditioner that spat out hot air and rancid water, weeping for replacement; or an abscessed tooth that knotted up my mother’s face every time she bit down, which cost some stupid amount of money to extract, because it’s a rare part-time job that comes with dental.

  If it wasn’t any of those circumstances, it was my parents’ innate, unshakable conviction that I was more valuable at home where they could manage me.

  And if it wasn’t my parents, at the end of the day, it was my own failings. My own inability to get cast or find my way into this community as myself. My inability even to hold on to somebody. I didn’t belong at Kensington, and trying to belong made it worse every time.

  “Jordan,” Reese repeated, but I stood up.

  “I need to go,” I said. “Thank you for talking. But this isn’t going to work.”

  She called after me one more time as I walked out the door.

  Usually, Thanksgiving Break made the last couple weeks of school before Winter Break feel unnecessary. This year was different. With two weeks to go, the campus started to buzz with competition talk. Advertisements plastered campus. An Aural Fixation poster the size of my mattress appeared in McKnight above the dish return. A cappella talk started to infiltrate the neurotic pre-exam discussions of study techniques: Are you going to ask for their beatboxer’s signature? He’s so cute. Do you think people are going to stake out seats ahead of time? Carnelian has to win. No, the Sharps. No, Hear Hear. Do you think Aural Fixation is going to sing? If they do “When You Call,” I think I’m going to pass out . . .

  Soon, the obligatory counterculture discussions about the competition sprang up: Why is this happening with exams coming up? We need to study. Who cares about a cappella, anyway? It’s not even real music. Nobody was this excited when that amazing slam poet toured here. We didn’t get posters when that award-winning experimental kazoo artist did a show here . . . he got featured in TIME and everything . . . but nooo, a cappella is more important . . .

  Trav moved rehearsals to the Arlington stage so we could practice with sound tech. We trained ourselves to avoid the deafening feedback that came from aiming Ps and Bs directly at our handheld mics, shots of air that sounded like pressure popping in the amplifiers.

  Trav had a pair of kids from the music school sitting backstage left, plugged into a digital soundboard, tweaking dials so that the rocket-launch decibel levels from Isaac and Erik didn’t drown out Nihal and Marcus, who sounded like mosquitoes in comparison. These kids didn’t seem to have names and didn’t talk to anyone but Trav, but they seemed to love telling him things he already kn
ew. They also wore Official Sound Guy Face, which was an intriguing blend of displeased and pompous.

  To be fair to the tech guys, it must have been infuriating to watch us mess up in the same ways repeatedly for nights on end. “Hold the mic farther from your face,” Trav told Erik one night, for the eightieth time.

  Erik looked like he wanted to throw the mic at the wall. “Can’t we just use the area mics, like every other group?”

  “No,” Trav snapped, and took a breath. “No. This is worth it. Otherwise, we’ll lose half the arrangement to the choreography, and we’ll be hideously quiet in comparison to everyone else, and—just trust me.”

  He was right, as always. When we were balanced and mixed and polished, the mics were worth every minute we’d spent on them. The curved black spine of the performance hall reflected sound down to the back walls, every consonant as crisp as a cracked knuckle. The Nest had its own resonance, a homey echo back from the rafters, but here, plugged in, amplified, and choreographed, we sounded like another group entirely.

  After rehearsals, we packed up our equipment and marched it up the Prince stairs. We had eight wireless mics, heavy black Sennheisers; the eight-channel receiver; the mixer, with its army of sliders and dials and plugs; and a couple of bulky monitors that made my arms ache.

  “Why don’t the other groups use individual mics?” I asked once, as we climbed up to the Nest, equipment in hand.

  “Because they have more people,” Nihal replied over his shoulder. “And mics get expensive very fast.”

  “Careful, rooks,” Trav barked as Erik and Marcus accidentally knocked the tech trunk into the wall. They panted apologies. The instant we were back inside the Nest, Trav was under the lid of the chest and inspecting every bit and every piece, ensuring that nothing was scraped or bent. He had a tender, soulful look on his face, as if his father had wrought the sound tech over the course of sixty-one long years and it was all Trav had left of him.

  I set down a monitor with a grunt. “How expensive?” I asked.

  “$11,000, I think?” Nihal said, glancing to Mama for confirmation.

  I choked on my breath. “What?”

  “Yeah, several years’ concert tickets. Dr. Graves helped us figure everything out—he handles the money.” Nihal raised his eyebrows, his eyes laughing. “We suspect he’s skimmed off the top.”

  I was still gaping. “What, are those mics made out of platinum?”

  “Sapphire, actually.”

  I couldn’t even quip back. I could hardly think about money these days. It was a short slide to an inevitable reminder: Kiss this place goodbye.

  As the competition clock ticked down from two weeks to ten days to seven, I drifted out from myself like a boat leaving land. I began to count my lasts: the last essay I would turn in to Rollins, the last critique Reese would give on my monologue, the last time I would see Carnelian walking around campus in early December, doing jazz arrangements of carols. During the Greek Monologue showcase: last time I would see Ash perform, then Pilar, then Jamie. Ticking down by the word.

  My finals counted down. Core classes had exams first, hour-long blocks of frantic scribbling in blue books; electives took over on Wednesday; and the week ended with a whimper, not a bang, empty class periods filled with distractions. On Friday, I walked out of my last class, English with Mr. O’Neill; we’d read a poem by Eavan Boland he’d said was his favorite, about an Irish couple killed by weather and hunger and history. Emerging into the winter light, I got that feeling that sometimes sets in after waking up from a particularly vivid dream, a disconnection from reality. I almost expected the landscape to disappear around me patch by patch.

  Late that afternoon, Isaac and I got a text from Jon Cox: a picture of his and Mama’s dorm-room door. I zoomed in on the image.

  A whiteboard hung on the door. I’d swung by their room in Ewing a couple times and seen it—usually, inside jokes were scribbled across the board, doodles of comic book characters, thinly veiled sexual references, or the running count of how many times Mama had reminded Jon to take out the trash (thirty-four).

  In Jon Cox’s text, the whiteboard wore a very different doodle. A drawing of a person filled most of the space, a bulging shape whose head, hands, and feet were exaggeratedly small, toothpaste caps on a bursting tube. The doodle wore a shirt that read in angry capitals, THEODORE PUGH HUGE.

  They wrote it in permanent marker, Jon Cox texted. I’m taking it down. Mama’s pretty upset about it. He’s skipping his last orchestra practice.

  I stared at the horrible drawing. This must have hit hard. Nothing else all year had managed to tear Mama away from Handel, the love of his life.

  Furious heat itched up my back. Of every shitty thing so far—the music-burning, the car-keying—this was the shittiest. What had Mama ever done to Connor Caskey?

  Yes, fine, Connor’s dad was an asshole, but past a point, that stopped mattering. A reason wasn’t an excuse. Same genus, different species.

  I pulled my coat on and flung my window open, outrage spurring me faster. The snow hampered my rushing steps. It took longer than I would’ve liked to reach the music academic building, a heather-gray block adjacent to Arlington Hall. Teachers bulky with coats trickled steadily through the lobby, the stairwell, and the second floor. I rushed down the hall, scanning the plaques on the office doors. Mrs. Chen. Mr. Goossens. Ms. Mburu. The faculty in the School of Music kind of resembled a United Nations conference.

  Finally, I knocked on Dr. Graves’s door, praying he hadn’t left yet.

  “Come in,” he called, sounding impatient.

  I entered. Wintry sun through an arched window limned the office with white light. A bookcase by the door held titles like A Brief Introduction to Modal Counterpoint, and Religiosity in the Life of Bach, and Early Music and the Evolution of Stable Harmonies. Dr. Graves himself stood behind an oaken desk, hunched over his keyboard, square glasses perched on the prominent bridge of his nose.

  He straightened up. “Julian. Hello.” His computer sang a tune, shutting down. “I’m on my way out. I’ll be at the competition tomorrow; may we talk then?”

  “This won’t take long.”

  He checked his watch with a humorless laugh. “Can you make it under five minutes?”

  “Sure,” I said, drawing myself up. “The Minuets are trying to sabotage us.” It sounded so petty out in the air like this.

  His expression darkened. “How so?”

  “It’s been a bunch of stuff. Vandalism, and they burned a bunch of our music, and today they left graffiti on someone’s dorm.”

  “What sort of graffiti?”

  I shifted. “Well, it . . . here.” As Dr. Graves buttoned up his coat, I pulled out my phone, searching for the photo. Gray leather briefcase gripped in his grayish, leathery hand, he ushered me out the door. Backing up a bit in the hall, I held the screen out to face him.

  Graves locked his office, tucked his keys away, and peered at my phone through his glasses. A shadow passed across his expression.

  After examining the picture for a second more, he drew back and pinned me with a look I’d never seen on a grown-up’s face before. Some withering mixture of disdain and dismissal. “Mr. Zhang, if you can prove who exactly did this, let me know.” His gray eyes flashed. “In the meantime, may I give some advice for you and the boys?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Man up.”

  And he set off down the hall, leaving me doused in disbelief.

  Man up. I would have found the rebuke funny for the double entendre if it hadn’t sliced in like a paper cut and kept stinging. What, I wasn’t allowed to stand up for my friend? Mama wasn’t allowed to be upset if someone took a sucker punch at his weight? There was something deeply screwed up about that attitude. There is no world where “you’re wrong” is an acceptable answer to “this hurts.”

  Man up. What a cleverly disguised way to say shut up. Shut up, or fight back, or you deserved what you got.

  Everything was gro
wing clearer. So this was why the guys had such an issue backing down—why Mama fought for the last word in every argument, why Erik wanted revenge for every prank, why Isaac said sorry like it was brine on his tongue. I finally understood it. No, I felt it. Rage was mounting inside me; not at Graves, somehow, but at Connor fucking Caskey for setting me up for humiliation in front of a teacher. There was nowhere else to put the anger except back where it came from.

  I stormed away from the music quad. Soon, I realized my feet were carrying me toward Wingate. Around to the side door. Up four flights of steps, which I powered up mechanically, relishing the burn in my thighs.

  When I stopped at room 420 and knocked on Isaac’s door, Harry yanked it open.

  “What now?” he snapped. Harry was obviously suffering a postfinals hangover. His hair stuck out from his scalp at an impressively vertical angle; Band-Aids wrapped his fingertips. He’d probably resorted to playing his cello with his toes.

  “Where’s Isaac?” I said. I needed him to talk me down. I needed his endless tangents and distractions.

  “Oh my God.” Harry shoved his glasses up violently, as if they’d done him an unforgivable wrong. “Some guy literally just came by to grab his guitar for his EP thing, so probably Arlington or Prince? I don’t friggin’ know.”

  Harry made to shut the door, but I frowned, slamming a palm onto the wood. Isaac had told me he’d finished recording all his guitar parts over break. And . . . some guy? Who would Isaac ever trust to touch his guitar?

  “What guy?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Dark hair. Weirdly tall.”

  My fists clenched. I felt a strange excitement. The sun of anger in me lashed out a flare. “When did he leave?”

  “I mean, you knocked about ten seconds after I shut the door, so—”

  I spun away, scanning the hall. He couldn’t have come up this stairwell. I would’ve passed him.

  I stalked down the hall, hunting. Halfway down, I broke into a sprint. Half-open doors flew by, issuing snatches of soothing study playlists, hints of violin and flute. The sheets of paper pinned to the walls rustled and flailed as I rushed by.