“So . . . what’s going on?”
Nihal cleared his throat and held up a sheet of paper. A fine-tipped pen hung behind his ear, casting a shadow across his eye. “I printed the recategorization petition and filled it out. I talked to Dr. Graves, and frankly, I think it would kill him if the Minuets got to tour instead of us, so he signed it. Isaac’s going to visit Student Life and file it tomorrow before they close up for the semester.”
I frowned, uncomprehending. “But the dean needs to sign it. Caskey needs to sign it.”
“No. A cappella groups aren’t discipline-exclusive, so a dean needs to sign it.” Nihal passed me the paper. Beside Graves’s slapdash pair of initials, a tight spiral of a signature was coiled up at the bottom. “So I made a visit to your housemother, who, by the way, is exactly as scary as you’ve claimed, and who also seems pretty interested in this whole thing. She called it avant-garde found theater, which sounds vaguely complimentary.”
“I’m going to get this filed tomorrow,” Isaac said. “I’m going to stay in the Student Life office until I see them get it done myself. We have the signatures. Caskey can’t stop it from happening.”
I clutched the paper for a minute, waiting for some sort of inevitable contradiction, maybe, for one of the guys to speak up. No, we don’t want you. No, no, no. The retraction, the rejection.
All my plans had come undone. Everything was exposed. It didn’t seem possible that this was where it got me.
Why was I so afraid, all of a sudden? Nervous like I hadn’t been in months?
“But I—I have a flight home tomorrow,” I said. “I can’t cancel it.”
“We talked to the Aural Fixation guys,” Isaac said. “They can take care of all that. The only thing is whether you want to come with us.”
My hold tightened on the corner of the flag in my hand, and I snuck the word out into the air: “Yeah.” It hung there for a moment, hesitant, before settling. Then smiles started creasing faces, heads started bobbing, and the inimitable relief of crossing some sort of finish line rushed into me, cold and overwhelming.
December 31
I jogged downstairs to the hotel lobby to find that nightmares do come true: Isaac and Michael were leaning against the wall by the stairwell, talking. As I approached, they cracked up about something or other, Michael’s nose crinkling up at the bridge, Isaac’s unconcerned laugh bouncing off the metallic lobby’s slopes and edges. I immediately assumed that they were comparing notes on the way I kissed and that my defects were hilarious, but I would never find out, because everybody is too polite to tell someone they’re a bad kisser.
This had to happen at some point, I figured. For two weeks, they’d managed not to talk. I was lucky I’d made it this long.
Michael and I had talked the first day of tour. The talk had consisted of two parts: 1) an elaborate eight-minute apology he’d clearly scripted and figured out how to perform, which probably would have made your average audience-goer shed a tear but which left me weirdly indifferent, and 2), the realization that I had nothing to say to him, because time was the rope that hung into the pit of heartbreak and I’d finally climbed over its lip. I had no desire to look back over the edge. Some things are made to end. Storms, and winters, and hurts.
This was our last stop, the New Year’s Eve show in London. Tomorrow, Aural Fixation was headed to Germany, and the Sharps were flying back to the States on a horrifically early flight. I was almost looking forward to it. At least it wouldn’t have the distinct scent of urine that had permeated the back of the bus over the past few days.
Our voices were all but shot. We performed only twenty-five minutes a night, but constantly being around each other, we were talking our vocal cords into disrepair. Something about traveling, too—the bus’s recycled air, maybe, or inhaling the grime of cities after the Kensington fresh air—had us all drinking hot water with lemon out of thermoses and mumbling about “saving voice,” like complete caricatures of ourselves. Trav had taken to carrying around a whiteboard that read “Vocal Rest: Do Not Talk to Me,” which resulted in everyone asking him increasingly insulting questions, trying to get him to crack.
“Hey, blue jay,” Isaac said as I passed him and Michael. I’d been determinedly staring at my feet but couldn’t stop myself from looking up at the sound of his voice. He looked like a hug feels, soft black jeans cuffed and dark sweater pushed to his elbows.
“Hey,” I said, pausing midstep. With Michael’s eyes fixed on me, I felt an urge to prove something, to show him how I’d moved on, to show him that this new relationship was important, too—that my entire life could still be full of important things without him. A lot of pressure for a three-second interaction.
I took a long breath and let it go. Isaac was smiling, and I smiled back. I was happy. That mattered by itself.
I walked forward, past the long stretch of welcome desk that gleamed bright purple in the light of dangling bulbs. I passed ten-foot-high panels of surrealist wall art, all incomprehensible jumbles of facial features and landscapes where seas dribbled into skies. I skirted the deep rock pool sunk into the lobby floor, which was guarded by a shin-high glass perimeter. I was convinced that this hotel’s designer had been given the directions, “Imagine an acid trip that looks like it’s worth eighty million dollars.”
The rest of the Sharps were seated in a far corner of the lobby, where a trio of weirdly shaped sofas faced a wall-mounted TV. Jon Cox, Mama, and Erik were riveted on an American football game. Somebody in white hurtled into somebody in black. The ball popped free from his arms, and Mama let out a small, anguished wail, capsizing backward into the sofa. How had they even found a channel that played football on this side of the Atlantic?
“Hey,” I said, sitting beside Nihal, who was on his phone for once. Mostly, he didn’t approve of phones in public. “What are you doing?” I said, reaching over to flick at his screen.
He dodged, frowning at me. “Oh, just avoiding harassment, as always.”
I grinned. “Ready for the concert?”
“I suppose you could convince me to sing tonight.” He issued a belabored sigh.
“Just . . .” I waved a hand. “Just do your texting, millennial.”
He obliged, looking back at his phone with a half-smile. It warmed me. The first few days of tour had consisted of superficial conversation and avoiding each other’s eyes. On day four—night four, really, past midnight in Berlin—we’d given in and talked, leaning against the balcony rail outside his and Marcus’s hotel room as compact cars trailed by far below. I’d unleashed an elaborate babble of apology, round two. Nihal had told me that after everything Dr. Caskey had said in the greenroom, he could understand why I’d been desperate to hide. A week out from the talk, we were beginning to find our old dynamic again.
“I see you and Isaac have detached yourselves from each other for once,” he drawled.
“We’re not that bad.”
“You’re pretty bad.”
I sighed. To their credit, the Sharps were less insufferable about me and Isaac than they could have been. The worst thing had been when Trav very seriously sat us down and gave us a talking-to about how this could not be allowed to affect our professionalism. I’d nearly cried from trying not to laugh.
I sank into the sofa, staring up at the hotel ceiling, glad to be in a stationary location. Touring exhausted me more than I could have imagined, the cycle of boarding the bus, driving all day, checking into a new city, performing, and crashing. Wake up, rinse, repeat. It was exhilarating but intimidating, every city too huge for us to absorb much of anything before we were accelerating out of it. The entire experience was already blurring over in hindsight, becoming an indistinct black-and-white reel of dark bus seats and spotlights.
“Sharps!” called one of the Aural Fixation guys as they crowded out of the hotel restaurant. “Game time.”
We filed up the steps toward the stage. With the hand that wasn’t holding a mic, I patted Marcus on the back—one night, the performance s
pace had overwhelmed him so much, he’d had breathing problems and nearly blacked out halfway through a song.
We came out, blinking, into the lights, which dangled from the frame of metal scaffolding like grapes on a web of vines. The stage was smaller than most we’d performed on—unsurprisingly, New Year’s Eve meant more people interested in staggering drunk through the streets than attending a singing concert—but the roar of the crowd inundated us. A semicircle of eight stools waited ahead.
We’d stripped away most of our choreography. As the opener, we needed to warm the crowd up but couldn’t risk seeming like the main event. So wardrobe had us in simple matching outfits, dark jeans and heather-gray shirts, and we performed the front half of our set seated. The four songs from our competition set, plus the two we’d performed at Daylight Dance, occupied all the time they’d asked us to fill.
We took our seats, lifted eight mics, and sang. It was all muscle memory by now: the reassurance of the set going off like clockwork, and the trust hanging heavy between the eight of us.
Near the end of the set, as we were on our feet near the edge of the stage, I found myself looking around at the guys instead of playing the crowd. This was the last of the lasts I had to count: the last time I’d be performing with them.
Our voices wound around each other, chased each other up scales and down riffs in parallel. I remembered watching them perform last year: From the audience, their performances had seemed synchronized into a single machine. Here, singing among them, it was impossible not to focus instead on the harmony and the dissonance, the ways we converged and the ways we clashed, the tension and the resolution. The machine had cracked open to reveal not a collection of cogs but a multiplicity of colored threads, alive and humming. I was going to carry these colors with me a long time.
January 1
Isaac was quiet in sleep, and still. For a moment I looked at him, his planes and valleys equalized, everything about his face flattened and hazed by the half-light of the opening morning. The glow snuck in through the airplane window.
“Hey,” I whispered, brushing the back of his hand.
Jon Cox had been assigned the boarding pass reading 27A, but when we’d filed down the aisle a few hours ago, he’d stood aside, waving me in beside Isaac. “All yours,” he mumbled, and sat in the seat I’d been assigned, in front of us, where Isaac put his knees up on the back of his chair for three hours just to piss him off. True gratitude.
Now the guys, like everyone else on the plane, were unconscious. We’d reached the fatigue section of the flight; we’d all given up on the ambitions we’d had sitting down. I had abandoned my plan to marathon three movies in a row after finishing the first, which was discouragingly terrible. Nihal’s sketchbook, meant to document the trip from top to bottom, was slipped into a seat back as he slept silently against the porthole window behind us.
Isaac stirred next to me. He pawed at one eye to wake up, a little clumsy. When he saw me he smiled. “What’s up?”
“I think we should talk before we get to the airport.” After we touched down in Newark, the eight of us would split, half to connecting flights, half done with the journey. For me, it was another six-hour leg to San Francisco.
“Yeah,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Okay.”
The drone of the plane engines hummed along. I took a deep breath. “So, I guess . . . do you want to keep this going when I’m home?”
He thought about it, and kept thinking. My thoughts began to fray, excitement into anxiety, hope into dejection. This was it. The moment he told me he didn’t care, or not in the right way, or not enough. Here, again, another moment of letting go.
“How are you feeling about it?” he asked. “Do you want to stay together?”
Obviously, I thought. This is a terrible sign, I thought.
“I mean,” I said, “I want to try.”
But then relief eased his expression. “All right.” He leaned forward, resting the side of his head on Jon Cox’s seat. He studied me. “Then let’s try.”
I let out a slow breath. My hand loosened on my wrist, which I had been squeezing, afraid. But it was all right. I wouldn’t have to look back on this as a hinging moment that swung the track from hope to hurt, yes to no. At least for now, we were still on the rails together.
“But you have to be honest,” I whispered, after a moment.
“About what?”
“Everything. I’m serious, everything.” I swallowed. “Don’t keep something from me because you think I can’t handle it. If something happens, or if you’re not feeling it anymore. If—if there’s someone else. Just tell me.”
Comprehension started to settle into his face. “Jordan.”
“Because I can get hurt. That’s fine. But I don’t want to feel stupid again. Ever.”
He reached for my hand and squeezed.
“Can you do that?” I said hoarsely. “All honesty, full disclosure?”
“Can you?” he said.
It took me aback for a moment. Then I tightened my hand on his. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m gonna try. I’m gonna always try.”
The coolness of the San Francisco January still felt tropical compared to the weather of the last couple months. I stepped off the bus in the early afternoon—half my day having reappeared thanks to time zones—and it growled off. The brisk wind flicked my short hair. I needed to trim the back, which was approaching mullet status.
The few blocks I walked to get home were in the middle of a serious identity crisis. My building, similar to the ones flanking it, was a mildewing brick face painted the perfect mathematical average between gray and brown. The only color was a greenish awning, which stretched over the glass doors of a shuttered business, and the snatches of muted reds behind window screens, two by two, four stories up. But from where I stood in front of our building, I saw sleek new projects in chic pastels not even a block away, with crisply trimmed bay windows and Victorian flourishes. When I was in elementary school, there’d been cheap brick housing rising high from that corner.
Everything was how I remembered it. The percussion of the passing cars blending into the groan of the outside door. The echo and faint stink in the stairwell. The cheerful barking of the lapdog on the second floor, the amused Spanish chatting of the lady in 3C. The light that caught all the dust. My front door.
I pulled my suitcase in and wedged the door shut. A bright, narrow hall stretched ahead, with old family photographs and certificates of my achievements taped to the wall at my left. Our four rooms lined up to the right: bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, kitchen. My parents’ voices were bouncing around the space.
I kicked off my shoes and headed for the kitchen. The suitcase’s wheels down the hall sounded like the hollowness of the highway. I stopped in the threshold, feeling the exhausted relief of a homecoming.
My father sat at the table at the far side of the room, a can of beer in front of him, crosswords and papers scattered before our ancient computer. My mother stood up from the table, her thick hair escaping its neat left part. She rushed to me, her cheeks two bubbles of restrained smile. “Give me a hug,” she said, preempting this by binding me into a hug. I let my suitcase go and hugged her tightly. She’d gained weight; she threatened to spill out of my arms.
“Getting so thin again,” she said. “They must not feed you anything.”
She let go and looked up at me—“Your beautiful hair, ai yah,”—and with a single tsk of her tongue, turned away to fuss with my suitcase, rolling it back down the hall. I approached my dad, who wheeled his chair my way and reached out an arm. I leaned down to tuck my head over his shoulder as we hugged. “Welcome back,” he said gruffly.
As we separated, I glanced over his crossword. “This one’s Monaco, I think,” I said, pointing. “Kelly Monaco.”
Dad filled it in. “Can’t ever finish them,” he said. “There’s always something or other. Actors, baseball players . . . I don’t know how they expect me to know who these people are. Look at th
is—I can’t get half the questions. Useless.” He dropped the pen and leaned back with a sigh. I found myself smiling. I’d somehow managed to miss my father’s constant dissatisfaction. Between him and my mother, I was the least perfectionist member of the family, which was a pretty pathetic state of affairs.
My attention shifted from the crossword to the papers scattered around it. I frowned, my eyes catching on the Kensington-Blaine logo.
I picked the top sheet up. The transfer application was only half filled in. “Mom,” I called, turning around, “shouldn’t you guys have mailed this in by now?”
She reappeared in the threshold of the kitchen, exchanging a long glance with my dad. It held volumes. Something in that glance, or in the air, told me there’d been a sea change between them. Maybe this wasn’t just a peaceful period. Maybe it was really and truly peacetime again.
“Mom?” I repeated, after a moment.
She sighed. “We’ve been talking with a woman from your school. Reese Garrison, who sent us the form. She told us to wait until the New Year, so. We waited.”
“And?” I said.
“And—” My mom waved her hands, a dismissive flourish. “I thought with the plays, if they didn’t cast you, they didn’t care. But this woman’s really pushing.”
Dad spoke up. “She called a couple days ago and told us about a School Board meeting they had this break. She said every year there’s a motion to change the financial aid, so she brought in a petition about what you did this semester, had a list of faculty sign it, and it—” He waved at the papers. “You can read it. She sent us a copy.”
I rifled through the papers and found a page-long letter with Reese’s signature. I scanned it, my heart beating faster and faster. By the conclusion, I was lightheaded: “. . . this social disguise project embodies the aggressive, real-life approach to artistic and, more specifically, theatrical applications we seek to engender in our student body. It shows a keen interest in both character study and improvisation, and from the length of the commitment, a dedication to the Kensington ideal: art through perseverance. Unfortunately, Ms. Sun’s financial experience with the academy demonstrates a fundamental weakness of Kensington’s current policy. She is one example of the losses we incur annually—not of funds but of exceptional academic and creative talent. We fail current students and applicants alike by using an outdated, limiting financial aid system. Luckily, the Board has the capacity to create change, and to work toward a more comprehensive, realistic network of support for low-income, often first-generation students.”
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