Girl, Unstrung

by Claire Handscombe

  Girl, Unstrung

  Claire Handscombe

  Published by CH Books, 2020.

  While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

  GIRL, UNSTRUNG

  First edition. July 7, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Claire Handscombe.

  Written by Claire Handscombe.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Girl, Unstrung

  One

  Two

  Three

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

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  GIRL, UNSTRUNG

  Claire Handscombe

  One

  You might think it’s cool to have a famous actor for a dad.

  You’d be wrong.

  Sure, there’s the Emmy parties, which now that I’m fourteen I finally get to go to. There’s the fun people I meet. I never would have gotten to be friends with Madison Harper if it wasn’t for my dad. And yeah, I get some inside info and gossip about Hollywood.

  Still.

  Exhibit A. It’s the first week of freshman year and I’m leaning against my locker, peering at the campus map, frustrated with myself for not being able to figure out where orchestra practice is. The cool metal digs into my back. Small doors clang around me. I look up and make eye contact with a boy, and I see it in his face right away. The flicker of recognition. Of triumph. Like he’s unearthed some great secret treasure. I can almost see the thought bubble above his head. I heard Thomas Cassidy’s daughter was going to be at this school, and here she is! I’m unmistakable, after all, with my reddish blonde hair and my smattering (my clump, really, smattering is too elegant) of freckles across my nose and cheekbones. Thanks for those, dad. I can see this guy thinking, hmmm, she could be useful to me in the future. Think of the Instagram likes! She could make me Internet famous! Or maybe boys don’t care about Instagram. But you get the idea. He knows that offering to help me with whatever I’m confused about is a good plan. An Investment In His Future. Or at least In His Social Status. He can forever be The Guy Who Helped Clara Cassidy Find Orchestra Practice. He can tell those stories forever at those lame Hollywood parties where everyone tries to outdo each other with stories of their brushes with celebrity.

  “Hey,” he says. Smooth opener. Can’t fault it so far. “Looking for something?”

  I look down at my viola case resting on the floor between my feet.

  “The music room,” I say. I want to add, genius, but I don’t know who this guy is yet. I have my own Social Status to work on. There is, after all, always a chance that some kids here won’t know whose daughter I am, and I don’t want those people to hate me. To think of me as The Girl Who Was Unaccountably Mean to Greg or Darren or Paul or Whatever His Name Is.

  My dad isn’t even that famous. I can’t imagine what it’s like the for the Brangelina kids, or what it was like for Miley Cyrus growing up. Still, she’s done pretty well out of it, I guess. It probably doesn’t hurt to have the doors to the world of show business already open so that all you have to do is sing a note vaguely in tune and they hand you a TV show and a recording contract. Me, I’m going to have to work my way to success. Nobody in the symphony world is going to care that my dad was on some TV show about teachers that ended forever ago, even if he did go to Juilliard and that’s where I want to go too. And that’s the way it should be, right? Those of us who work the hardest and have the most talent should be the ones to make it. It’s only fair.

  “The music room?” the boy says, shaking his head once to get the bangs out of his eyes, à la Dean from Gilmore Girls. “I think I know where that is. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

  I’m unconvinced by the I think. And I know he’s only being nice to be because of who my dad is. But annoyingly, he’s kind of cute with his swoopy brown hair and his chin dimple. So I tell myself his pathetic desire for some semblance of proximity to fame is only natural. Involuntary. Sort of like the way some guys’ pants get embarrassingly tight in the middle of freshman algebra class at some other random time. They can’t help it, bless them. It’s a reflex. A by-product of being a teenage boy. Besides, I really do need to find orchestra practice, so I let him lead me there, down the winding hallways and across the sunny courtyards.

  “You’re Clara, right?” he says. I was hoping he wouldn’t try to make conversation. Four days into high school and I’m already sick of the small talk. Which part of town do you live in? Do you have brothers and sisters? What school were you at before? Like we’re all foreign exchange students having some lame English conversation lesson.

  I don’t correct him on his pronunciation of my name. I like people to say Clah-ra, the British way. That’s how Libby said it, the woman who came to stay with us a few summers ago when she was writing a screenplay with my dad. She, by the way, is Exhibit B. She was clearly in love with him, and it was so obvious that she was only nice to us kids to prove to him what an awesome stepmom she’d make. Anyway, as it turns out, she left us and went back to England and we got a different stepmom a couple of summers later – this summer just gone, in fact – and Libby is actually great and I’m going to get to go to London to visit her when we’re both on spring break, which I’m super pumped about. I’ve stuck pictures of red buses and the city skyline and the Underground map on the inside of my locker to help me get through high school till then. I hated the way Libby said my name at first, Clah-ra, but my dad kept telling me it was sophisticated and cool and, I don’t know, by the end I kind of agreed with him. Plus, I’m pretty sure that’s how Clara Schumann pronounced her name. I don’t know about Clara from the Nutcracker, though. My youngest sister Juliette is the one who’s all about ballet. It might make more sense for her to be the one named Clara, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she was jealous of my name, but well, that’s what you get for being born first. The best name. Being the eldest sucks in a lot of other ways, like always being held responsible when something goes wrong, so at least the first pick of names makes up for it some.

  Apparently I may have said some of this out loud, because the swoopy-haired boy and I find ourselves in front of the orange music room door and I’m not aware of there having been any more awkward silences, and also he has this shell-shocked and slightly glazed loo
k on his face that sometimes people get when I talk, because apparently I do so at great volume and velocity. One of my mom’s boyfriends called it that once, great volume and velocity, and I had to explain to my baby brother Harry right there at the dinner table that it just means I talk a lot and fast and sometimes grownups use big words to make themselves look smarter than they actually are. That boyfriend didn’t last long.

  “Well, anyway,” the swoopy-haired boy says, outside Practice Room A. “I’m Tim.”

  “Hi, Tim,” I say, remembering my manners. “It’s nice to meet you. Thank you for delivering me here safely.”

  “No problem,” he says. “We have a pretty great orchestra. It’s not LACHSA, but you know. Maybe you’ll still like it.” And then he’s gone and I didn’t get the chance to say, wait, what, LACHSA? You know about that? I was really hoping no-one knew about that.

  Thanks, People Magazine.

  Exhibit C, I guess.

  Two

  My dad’s house is in one of the curvy, zigzaggy Pasadena streets that’s almost in San Marino but technically not quite. It’s still close enough for me to walk from there to the Huntington Gardens, though. You might know the Huntington from La La Land. It’s s a blink-and-you-miss it moment, but if you’re paying attention, there’s a split second in the summer montage where Emma Stone and Ryan Gossling (sigh) are walking through this green jungle-like place, all shade and dark, giant leaves. That’s the Huntington, the part of it unsurprisingly called the Jungle. There’s also a Japanese Tea Garden and a rose garden and all sorts. I like going there sometimes, on the weeks I’m at dad’s, just to think or to make adjustments to my life plan, like I had to when I didn’t get into LACHSA. On the first page of my red leather bullet journal it says three things.

  LACHSA

  JUILLIARD

  SYMPHONY

  I’m flexible as to which symphony I’d end up playing in. Obviously, the LA Philharmonic is the dream, with its exciting repertoire and shiny new concert hall, and especially if Gustavo Dudamel is still conducting there, with his crazy hair and his dimples and all his energy and passion. It’s like he draws every detail, emotion and nuance out of the score and sends it directly to my brain and heart. It would be amazing to be conducted by him someday, but it might be fun to try different things first, see different things and places. Maybe the London Symphony Orchestra in England. (I love their red swirly logo, which stops looking like letters at all if you look at it hard enough. And I know I’m going to love London. Libby could take me to all the cool places.) And obviously I’d need to work my way up through city orchestras and then regional ones first.

  In the end, though, I realized I didn’t have to make any adjustments to my life plan. It was still

  LACHSA

  JUILLIARD

  SYMPHONY

  It’s just that I was hoping and expecting that by now the front of my bullet journal would say

  LACHSA

  JUILLIARD

  SYMPHONY

  In case you’ve been living under a rock or something, or maybe just not in California, I should probably explain what LACHSA is. It’s the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. It’s Fame Academy, in other words. Not that I care about fame, because as previously discussed fame actually kind of sucks. But I do care about the viola, and being great at the viola, and people applauding me for how great I am at the viola. At LACHSA, you have to do the normal school subjects, which makes sense, because I hear Pythagoras’ Theorem is super helpful in everyday life when you’re an adult. In fact, just the other day my dad and Ebba, my new stepmom, were discussing it over dinner. Or they could have been talking about politics. I wasn’t really listening. But anyway, at LACHSA, you learn all that stuff in the morning, and then you get to spend the afternoon doing the things you actually care about – dance or drama or music or whatever. How cool is that?

  So I’ve been dreaming about going to high school there ever since I was ten and started to be able to play real music on my viola, not just, like, Three Blind Mice and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I would close my eyes when I was holding a long note and listen to the sound, sweet like honey, feel it resonate through my body, and picture myself as the first chair on the stage at the Kennedy Center in DC, looking out onto rows and rows of red velvet chairs filled with people who know how to appreciate good music.

  Of course, now I know I was pretty terrible back then, long notes were just long notes without the undulating beauty of vibrato. If the note’s pitch jiggled it was because the fingers on my left hand weren’t firm enough on the strings they was holding down. It wasn’t by design and hard-won results, but I loved wobbly notes then because I could imagine it was vibrato, imagine I’d just nailed the slow movement of the Walton concerto, and I knew I could do it, the LACHSA-JUILLIARD-SYMPHONY thing, knew I wanted to. But then, I don’t know what happened last year, I sent in my audition tape to LACHSA but I never got called in for the next part, the in-person audition. Maybe they had a glut of violas that year; maybe everyone’s finally figured out that the viola is not only the violin’s more sophisticated cousin, deeper and more mellow and unsqueaky, cello-like without the hassle of lugging an enormous instrument around, it’s also much easier to go further with it because fewer people play it. Maybe the honeymoon is over and now it’s going to be all about the viola.

  It doesn’t matter, though, because I’ll work doubly hard this year and get into LACHSA for my sophomore year. It’s just a minor setback. So back in February I sat at the Huntington on a wooden bench in the shade of the Jungle Garden and I got out my pink highlighter and underlined it.

  LACHSA

  JUILLIARD

  SYMPHONY

  There. No problem.

  Three

  I love having the house to myself to practice the viola. Somehow, I can play better when no-one’s listening. I can really just get lost in it. I can close my eyes and play by heart. There’s something about internalizing the music, making it part of you. Your fingers remember, your body remembers, and so your mind is freed up to engage, to be fully present.

  You have to work at this, though. It’s easy, when your hands are just doing what they do automatically, to let your brain roam elsewhere: to wonder what’s for dinner or to worry about what you’re going to buy as a gift to take to the birthday of the girl you only just met two weeks ago in freshman algebra class, a gift that will say you are thoughtful and pay attention to what she likes but you are not a creepy stalker. You mustn’t let your mind go there. You’re wasting a golden opportunity to engage with the music. To let it make you feel things. And you especially mustn’t let your brain make the leap from imagining yourself on a stage in a floor-length electric blue dress, playing the solo from the second movement of Brahms’ Symphony Number Four on the viola your parents promised to buy you when you get promoted to First Chair at Pasadena Youth Symphony Orchestra, from there to standing on the stage at your LACHSA audition and failing it again, and then what?

  You especially mustn’t think about all that because then you’ll have lost all the benefits of playing for yourself, of relaxing into the music. Instead, your heart rate will increase and your sweaty fingers will slip a little on the strings and the tuning of the notes will waver and you’ll be snapped out of the moment, out of the beauty of it, out of why you are even doing this in the first place.

  Today, Harry is at a playdate and dad’s taken Juliette to her ballet class. No idea where Rosie is; the library, if I had to guess. Ebba’s working, probably, or something. I don’t pay much attention. She goes to coffee shops to work on her novel and she teaches a few ballet lessons and every now and then she’s in a play or something. I can’t keep up with it, so it’s easier not to try.

  I go into my bedroom but don’t bother shutting the door; that’s another nice thing about everyone being out. My rooms are basically the same at both mom’s and dad’s houses. Pride of place in both of them goes to a framed poster of the famous Juilliard red stairs. I have a r
ed bedspread and red-accented drapes, and there’s a decal of an alto clef above my bed: that’s the clef the viola uses instead of the treble clef. (You’ve probably seen a treble clef. It looks like this: ___. The viola has its own clef, the alto clef, like this: ____ I love that it’s different, that it’s unique.) Rosie thinks I’m crazy: her rooms are different in our two houses, or at least different-is, both with zillions of shelves of books, but one is Harry Potter­-themed and the other is Anne of Green Gables. Her bed is against the wall at mom’s and in the middle of the room at dad’s. Things like that. I’m not sure I could cope with that. I think I’d wake up in a cold sweat, not knowing where I was.

  So I’m in my Juilliard-themed bedroom, playing the Glazunov Elegie. It’s the piece my teacher played me to convince me to ditch the violin and take up the viola instead for good, and it worked. This piece gives me goosebumps. I want to give people goosebumps when I play it, too. I’m playing by heart, and because no-one is around to judge me; when I love my place or forget what comes next I improvise and play around, play my way back to something I remember.

  The other thing I do when everyone’s out of the house is work on stuff. It winds my family up when I go over the same few bars and over and over until I get the fingering just right, or when I’m learning a piece in C# major and I keep forgetting the B sharps. Today I worked on the Telemann in G Major for a long time, for my LACSHA audition, and now as a reward I’m playing the Glazunov. I love this piece, the way it’s seemingly so simple but requires perfect bow control and really shows off the tone of a viola. I like the acrobatics of more technically challenging pieces, too, for different reasons, the double stopping which is where you play two notes at once, the quick changes between positions of the left hand, but sometimes it’s just nice to lean into a piece like this one, to let the music carry you.