The Most Precious Substance on Earth

by Shashi Bhat

  Would he have driven me to get an abortion?

  After a second, he says, “You better get going. You’ll miss the assembly.” He uses a teacher voice, like Hurry along. Get to class.

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Yeah,” he agrees. “Every year that assembly becomes more of a spectacle. You’re too mature for that.”

  On the other side of the school, in the stunning, ancient gymnasium that smells of varnish and everybody’s sweat, the assembly is about to start. If I were there I’d be sitting in the balcony with Amy, in the hush and rustle of waiting. The hallways are quiet, empty of students. Then, in the distance, I think I can hear the band playing the school song.

  * * *

  Amy calls me that night and asks me to meet her at the Wave. I duck out of the house and walk over to the Halifax Waterfront. She’s there, waiting in the dark at the bottom of the sculpture. It’s an armature of metal covered in thick concrete painted a glossy pale blue. It’s like a cold tongue rising out of the ground.

  To get to the top, you have to be barefoot, or wearing shoes with good grip. You need the momentum of a running start. We stand back together and run, as we’ve done countless times before, gasping out laughs as we push against gravity. When we reach the top, we spread our jackets over the concrete and cross our legs to sit, and though I’m still laughing, I think of Mr. M and want to die.

  Amy tells me, while shaking her head, that she doesn’t want to go out with Sam anymore. For the assembly, in lieu of a speech, Sam performed an improvised martial arts routine. He spent five minutes under the blazing lights of the gymnasium stage, slicing the air with his kicks, screaming hi-yahs that echoed through the gym as the audience vibrated in unanimous whooping laughter. “He didn’t even notice the whole school was laughing at him,” says Amy. “It’s like he thought they were applauding.”

  Mr. Mackenzie will stay on at Sir William Alexander until the end of my Grade 9 year. Over those last two months in his class, I’ll read the books I’m supposed to. I’ll do fine on the assignments. I won’t say a word, though every second of watching him teach is a foghorn blaring a warning. I’ll go on to Grade 10. That September, when I walk by the English office, I’ll see that one of the French teachers has moved in and taken over Mr. M’s desk, replacing his books with VHS tapes and a bust of Napoleon.

  On the Wave now with Amy, I think about telling her. Her arms fall loosely around me for warmth. She might be the only friend I’ll ever feel comfortable touching. The ocean is across from us. It’s rising in my chest. My fingertips bloat and grow heavy. I taste salt. My ears become seashells as the sound of rushing water fills them. When you live so close to the ocean you forget sometimes to listen for that sound, and then suddenly, it’s there. You forget sometimes that nobody is watching. That you’re just another student. You sit at the top of the fake wave and face the real ocean. Nobody is watching, but if they were, it would look as though you’re being carried away.

  The Most Precious Substance on Earth

  WE ARE ON OUR WAY to BandFest and we are going to win. Everyone can feel it. On the airplane from Halifax to Toronto, the band has a hive mind; we’re humming an electric rendition of the First Suite in E-flat, the woodwinds tooting out in forceful staccato as we begin the second movement. Brass players purse their lips to air-trumpets, extend the slides of air-trombones. Bandmates in the adjacent row thrum on their trays; I wet my mouth in preparation for my elegiac solo.

  “Stop, stop, stop, guys,” says Mr. Rees, the conductor, undoing his seatbelt and standing up in his seat. “You’re disturbing the other passengers.” The other passengers look down at their in-flight reading material as he says this. He puts his hands on his bony hips and scans the rows for culprits. “Remember, you’re representing the band. Musicianship is more than talent.” The last bit is a direct quote from Mr. Rees’s “Rules of Conduct for Band,” hand-printed in marker on chart paper and pinned up at the front of the band room back at school. At the start of the year he handed out typed copies and made us all sign and return them.

  Earlier this morning the ratio of parents to band members at the Halifax airport was nearly two to one. My mom befriended and exchanged numbers with the two other Indian moms, while my dad struck up conversations with the teachers, questioning them about the trip’s educational objectives and confirming for the second time that boys and girls would be staying in separate areas of the hotel.

  Corrine, who usually wears raver pants, was today not wearing raver pants. She was the first of my roommates to arrive.

  “Tearaways,” I said, gesturing at her athletic wear.

  “Jeans,” she said, gesturing at my jeans. We don’t know each other that well.

  It was a revelation to learn that everyone in her family, including a hyperactive younger brother, has the same dark bowl cut; Corrine’s hair is the colour of lilacs and assumes a new shape every day—it’s currently a triangle, like the hair of that lady from Dilbert.

  Around us, band members were flapping their boarding passes and imitating the bad French accent of the voice making announcements over the loudspeaker. Mr. Rees shouted over them: “Decorum, folks!” The two other chaperones, female teachers he presumably invited so he didn’t have to share a room, herded us out of the way of travellers taking advantage of cheap May flights. Then they exchanged eye contact, as if silently agreeing to never have children of their own.

  I wasn’t sure if Amy would make it in time to catch the flight, though I knew she had paid the trip fees. Her punctuality had been in constant decline, and she’d missed the last few rehearsals. Just before the teachers guided us to security, Amy rolled in with a crimson suitcase, shiny and hard like it was candy-coated. Her mother waved at me without smiling and then headed over to Clearwater to buy a live packaged lobster.

  Eunice, our fourth roommate, wandered in bewildered, eyes staring up at the signs listing departure gates, until she finally saw us. Eunice’s parents were the only ones who didn’t bother parking. They just dropped her off outside and sped away back to their house in Dartmouth (aka the Darkside), a city that had blighted its waterfront with a power plant and refinery. “I’ve never been on an airplane before,” she said. From her expression, I doubted she’d been to the airport before, either.

  When the families left, it was just the forty-three of us in identical green band sweaters with a petite white treble clef embroidered on the right breast: a teenage forest in the airport lobby. When we don our sweaters, it’s like on Captain Planet when the five teens shoot laser beams out of the magical rings they wear, combining their powers to summon up Captain Planet from wherever he usually hangs out. I never watched that show, so I don’t know what happens after that, but with the Platinum Band it’s like we morph into an unstoppable force of concert band music.

  The Platinum Band was originally called the Gold Band, but then Mr. Rees took over as conductor and explained to us that platinum was the most precious substance on Earth. This is false. A French horn player looked it up. One morning before rehearsal started, he got a percussionist to do a drum roll and then announced to us that platinum is surpassed in value by twelve other substances, including diamonds, rhino horns, and meth. “Why not the Rhino Horn Band?” demanded the French horn player, but Mr. Rees took it as rhetorical.

  On the plane, five of us are playing a whispered storytelling game. Each person adds a word to make a story:

  “There…”

  “…once…”

  “…was…”

  “…a…”

  “…gentleman…”

  “…bird…”

  “…who…”

  “…bled…”

  “…Ovaltine.”

  I’m simultaneously working on an arrangement of the Jurassic Park theme music with Eunice and Corrine, who are sitting behind me. Corrine’s hair rises above her seat in a glorious froth.


  Amy is asleep on my shoulder, her elegant nose letting out the occasional whistle. She’s the only one sleeping and I’m wondering why; it’s still morning. She and I both play the oboe, which is a disproportionate quantity of oboe for pretty much any ensemble. But Amy has a shitty band-attendance record. The Rules of Conduct state that three missed rehearsals means you’re out, but Amy is a favourite of Mr. Rees. He once called her a “true musician” (to the chagrin of the French horn player), and everyone knows Mr. Rees is quietly full of compassion. Eventually, Amy wakes up and yawns, checks her new bangs in a compact mirror, and pulls a magazine out of the seat pocket—last week’s issue of Time. On the cover, two teenagers smile in their school photos. Framing them are the black-and-white headshots of the thirteen people they killed at Columbine High School. Only the killers are shown in colour.

  Eunice passes the half-finished Jurassic Park score over to me, and I pencil in a key signature before Amy interrupts with a whisper: “Did you hear Eunice was voted most likely to shoot up the school?”

  “Shhhh, she’s sitting behind us,” I respond.

  “Even worse, she’s sharing a room with us,” says Amy, fanning herself with the magazine before opening the air vent above her head.

  She goes on to tell me that when the yearbook staff collected anonymous suggestions for superlatives to list under everyone’s photos, they received an overwhelming number indicating that Eunice Lam would most likely “kill us all.” The faculty advisor didn’t let them print this (obviously), so next to her name in the yearbook it says: Most likely to build a successful dot-com company.

  “I don’t see us surviving until morning,” Amy adds. “So much for BandFest.”

  From every exchange I’ve had with Eunice, it’s clear she’d feel infinitely more comfortable holding a flute than any kind of weapon.

  “If we’re all dead,” Amy continues, “does that mean we forfeit the competition and that Ontario school wins again? Like, how many euphoniums does a band need? Or is it euphonia?”

  “What’s the difference between a euphonium and a baritone?”

  “Wait, is this a set-up for a band joke, or are you actually asking?”

  “Seriously, though, look at her,” I say. We not-so-subtly spy on Eunice through the gap between our seats.

  Eunice is in Grade 9 and the youngest member of the band. She’s been taking private lessons forever, so was let into the Platinum Band a year early. She’s the kind of person a teacher would miss in a headcount. Though she is only maybe five feet tall, she walks with a hunch and would look like a figurine of an old lady except that her face is perfectly round—a child’s face. She talks incessantly about her private lessons and sometimes disagrees with Mr. Rees on things like whether the timpani are in tune, which is uncomfortable for everyone. At lunch she sits in the hallway or the band room, writing in a purple journal with a tiny heart-shaped lock on it. She’s writing in it now.

  “That’s the kind of diary your mom’s work friend buys for your birthday when you turn seven,” I say. If Eunice was more interesting, somebody would have stolen, photocopied, and distributed it by now. I try not to be irritated by Eunice, but it’s hard. I don’t hate her, though. Amy does.

  “Yeah, she’s like a child,” says Amy, propping herself up with her hands to gaze over the seats ahead of us. She sits back down and checks her watch, distracted. Then she turns to me. “All right, when we’re downtown tomorrow, I’ll go meet up with my cousin and bring the stuff back for us.” She mimes smoking a joint. So this is why she came.

  Over the winter holidays, Amy’s parents sent her to Vancouver to stay with family, and she came back a stoner. She smuggled some weed back inside a hollowed-out jar of peanut butter, which is apparently what people from Vancouver do all the time. Since then, Amy uses words like bud and roach and blaze, which sound like the names of Uncle Jesse’s motorcycle buddies on Full House. For the month her supply lasted, every time she phoned me I’d hear OK Computer playing in the background while she recalled obscure memories from her childhood, like the time she tried to whittle an anatomical heart out of a bar of her mother’s triple-milled French soap. “I remember so much when I’m high, Nina,” she says, and then forgets to practise for our group presentation on macrophages in Grade 10 Bio.

  * * *

  When I started playing the oboe back in Grade 6, it was three months before I could make a sound. What came out was just tortured air. I’d soaked the damn reed for hours but I still wasn’t entirely sure what embouchure meant. The only reason I was playing an oboe at all was because my dad had purchased one on a whim at a thrift store.

  “Why an oboe?” I’d asked him, as I opened up the case for the first time to reveal the slightly scuffed instrument, separated into three black-and-silver pieces tucked inside a plush blue lining.

  “What’s an oboe?” he responded.

  That was four years ago. It took me a year to manage a B-flat major scale. After two years, my dad invested in private lessons with this Slovenian woman named Irena or Alena or Galena…I’m still not totally sure. She sighed passive-aggressively when I used incorrect fingerings, but the sighs must have been a crucial teaching tool because three years in I was researching how to make my own reeds and growing enraged when people referred to my oboe as a clarinet. This past fall, I auditioned and joined the Sir William Alexander High School Platinum Band. I also signed up for about twelve different school activities at the same time, including the Geography Club, though I had no idea what you would do in a Geography Club—map terrain? This wasn’t school spirit; I had just wandered into the Activities Fair, held each September in the gymnasium. Every table had an eager, well-adjusted student behind it with a clipboard and a list you could put your name on, and on each list were a dozen other names. Oh, to be a name among other names. I wasn’t in the English Club anymore, so I just wrote my name down wherever. Maybe I needed a reboot. Maybe with the right hobby and social group, I could be well adjusted, too. My parents supported this—they believe in community but not in free time. “Just relax” is something they would never say.

  Band is the only activity that stuck. It demands a feverish commitment like no other extracurricular. The Geography Club is irrelevant in comparison. Band members outnumber any four other clubs combined. After the hockey team lost yet another championship, half of the team quit and joined band instead. The Rules of Conduct have a sternness behind them, but also logic and mutual respect. That Mr. Rees took the time to write them out by hand counterintuitively makes them seem more permanent. No other club has any rules at all.

  * * *

  Our hotel room looks clean but stinks of the thousand cigarettes that have been smoked there. When I open the window, noisy air rushes in; another brown building faces our brown building, with streetcars and delivery men grumbling in between. We’re a fifteen-minute walk from Roy Thomson Hall, which to the Platinum Band is a mythical place. When instructing the band to be quiet, Mr. Rees often reminds us of the time he heard the Toronto Symphony Orchestra perform there, and how during a long rest in the music it was so silent (and the acoustics so sharp) he could hear the ecstatic sigh of a woman on the other side of the hall.

  Amy, Eunice, Corrine, and I are rooming together because we’re all girls and first-year band members; i.e. there are no other possible configurations. Amy tried to get a pair of female clarinet players to trade so we wouldn’t have to room with Eunice, but they and their roommates had already hatched a scheme involving making out with percussionists.

  Amy throws open her suitcase over the garish florals of the bed closest to the window. In one half are PJs, underwear, and a Ziploc of toiletries. The other half is full of candy. “Sugar for everyone!” she shouts, and scatters Pixy Stix over the comforter.

  “Dude!” says Corrine, picking one up and biting an end between her front teeth.

  “Didn’t you pack any clothes?” asks Eunice. Amy ignores
her and starts undressing, flinging her flannel shirt over the radiator, where Eunice eyes it, probably worried it will catch fire and the sprinklers will go off, drowning our sheet music and destroying our chances of winning BandFest. Amy goes to brush her teeth wearing just her flared jeans and a polka dot La Senza bra. Corrine and I start changing too, but Eunice waits on her bed, fingers threaded over a bundle in her lap until Amy is done. Then she excuses herself to the bathroom, re-emerging fifteen minutes later in cotton pajamas. There’s a layer of Vaseline coating her face, and a terrycloth cocoon around her hair.

  “Should we practise?” she asks.

  Amy groans. “Seriously?” She points at Eunice and mouths the words school shooter.

  But Eunice has already unpacked her flute and fitted it together. She’s sitting on the very edge of her bed, facing the wall, and playing without looking at the music. She’s trilling away.

  * * *

  This is what we did to get here:

  Sixty mornings of our bleary, winter-coated parents shovelling out their cars in the blue dark to get us into our seats four minutes before the 6 a.m. start of rehearsal.

  Sixty twice-weekly mornings that began and ended with the sound of noodling instruments and clacking cases and Mr. Rees yelling, “Quiet, please!”

  Sixty two-hour rehearsals, me sitting in the second row, and Amy—when she was there—drawing fancy-dressed cats on my sheet music while the trumpet players behind us raised their bells and blared, tapped their toes, emptied spit valves onto the squelchy carpet.

  Two semesters of classic high-school concert band repertoire: Gustav Holst; Ralph Vaughan Williams; a medley of outdated film music (Jurassic Park, The Wiz, Wayne’s World); a medley of Mr. Rees’s favourite bands (Chicago, The Beatles, Night Ranger); an up-tempo seventies hit; plus the required performance pieces (Pomp and Circumstance, the national anthem).