Sleepovers, Solos, and Sheet Music

by Michelle Schusterman

  The bell rang, cutting him off.

  “Show me at lunch?” I asked, and he nodded.

  “Sure!”

  While Owen went to his cubby, I headed to my seat and found Natasha sitting next to it with a rather nervous expression. Aaron sat directly behind her, talking to Liam Park. I gave Natasha a sympathetic smile as I slipped past her to my chair. Hopefully Julia was right and things would get less awkward between Natasha and Aaron soon.

  “What’s this?” I picked up a brochure on my chair. “Oh . . . Lake Lindon.”

  “I think Mr. Dante put them on everyone’s chairs before the bell,” Natasha said, pointing to the brochure she’d set on her music stand. Lake Lindon Band Camp was a whole week of band-geek heaven—cabins, rehearsals, a concert, all kinds of stuff. It was where Julia and Natasha had met last summer.

  “Any chance your parents will let you go this year?” Natasha asked hopefully.

  Sighing, I stuck the brochure in my backpack. “Last year, they said I could go the summer before high school. But I’m definitely going to ask again.”

  “Hiya, ladies.” Gabby Flores flopped into the chair on Natasha’s other side, still tightening the mouthpiece on her saxophone. “Holly, I’m still freaking out about my paper.”

  I nodded in agreement. Gabby and I had first-period English together, and this morning Mr. Franks had given us back our first drafts for this huge research project he’d assigned back in January. Everyone’s papers had been covered in red marks and scribbled notes.

  “Seriously, I’m going to have to rewrite the whole thing,” Gabby said. “And it’s due next week? He’s crazy. How’d yours look? Hi, Owen,” she added.

  Shrugging, I scooted my chair back a little to let Owen pass me. “He said I need more sources. There are a lot more notes, but I haven’t read them all yet.”

  I tried to keep my voice light, but I was already kind of stressing about the rest of the semester, and my first day back wasn’t even halfway over. Between the research project, the science fair, and final exams, my countdown to summer was starting to feel more like a deadline time bomb.

  Something Mr. Dante didn’t help one bit when, after warm-ups, he handed out a letter for our parents. University Interscholastic League Concert and Sight-Reading Contest was printed in bold along the top. I scanned it quickly, even though he’d talked to us about most of this earlier in the semester. A bus would take us to Ridgewood High School for the contest after first period, so our parents didn’t have to worry about driving. We’d perform on stage for three judges, and they’d each give us a rating. Then we’d go to another room to sight-read a piece of music, and three more judges would rate us on that. After we got our ratings, we’d go to Spins for a pizza lunch . . . and, hopefully, to celebrate.

  In the back of the band hall was a long shelf lined with trophies. Those were for Sweepstakes, which meant earning a Superior rating from all six judges on stage and in sight-reading. Millican had a lot of them, but not for every single year—I’d already looked. I really wanted us to add another trophy this year.

  Mr. Dante began moving through the rows, placing a sheet of music facedown on everyone’s stands. Leaning to my left, I nudged Brooke Dennis.

  “You guys got Sweepstakes last year, right?” I whispered. Brooke was in eighth grade and had been in Advanced Band last year, too.

  She nodded. “Mrs. Wendell was really excited, since it was her last year. I think that was the fifth time in a row we got Sweepstakes.”

  My stomach twinged with nerves. Mrs. Wendell had been the band director at Millican practically forever, but she’d retired last year. I wondered if Mr. Dante was anxious about UIL, too, since it was his first year teaching here. If he was, he sure didn’t show it.

  “Let’s talk a bit about sight-reading,” Mr. Dante said cheerfully, placing a sheet of music on Liam’s stand. “Yes, Gabby?”

  Gabby lowered her hand. “What’s the point of them judging us on music we’ve never even seen before? Especially since we’ve already been practicing the other songs so much.”

  “That is the point.” Mr. Dante handed music to the percussionists. “The music we sight-read will be quite a bit easier that our other music. But it’s a way for the judges to hear how good our fundamentals are—tone, rhythms, technique. I want to try it today, so there are a few rules we need to go over.”

  He stepped back up to the podium and started to explain the process. After a minute, my eyes were pretty much bulging out of my head.

  The judges would set a timer. Mr. Dante would have a few minutes to talk to us about the music, but he couldn’t sing melodies or clap rhythms. Then the timer would go off, and he’d get another few minutes where he could sing or clap rhythms, but we still couldn’t.

  We couldn’t play at all, just move our fingers along while he conducted. If we accidentally played a note or something, we actually could get disqualified. And when the timer went off again, we’d just . . . perform it. The entire song, without stopping, for the first time.

  The whole thing was confusing, not to mention terrifying.

  I glanced around the room. Most of the seventh-graders looked as anxious as I felt, but the eighth graders didn’t. And they’d done this last year. Maybe it wasn’t as scary as it sounded.

  “Let’s give it a shot.” Mr. Dante set a timer, then opened his score. “Go ahead and turn over your music.”

  I flipped the page over. Well, it did look a little easier than our other music. I tapped my fingers on the valves while Mr. Dante talked us through it, stopping occasionally to point out difficult parts and remind us about the coda—a separate, final few measures at the bottom of the page.

  When the timer went off, I glanced at Natasha. She shrugged.

  “Looks easy enough,” she whispered, and I nodded.

  Mr. Dante raised his hands, and everyone sat up to play. At first, we sounded pretty good. We made it through almost half the page with just a few wrong notes and one misplaced cymbal crash.

  Then the trumpets came in a few beats early, and their melody didn’t line up with the clarinets.

  Then all the saxophones except Gabby missed a key change, and she insistently squawked the right notes louder and louder.

  Then literally, like, half the band missed a repeat sign while the French horn part only had rests, so all four of us lost count and didn’t know when to come back in.

  I was completely freaking out, my eyes darting back and forth between the music and Mr. Dante. He looked perfectly calm, cueing sections that sounded lost and gesturing for Gabby to stop honking. For a minute, we actually did start to play together again. But I only just remembered about the coda in time. I skipped down to the last line and played the last few measures, finishing just as Mr. Dante lowered his baton.

  Most of the band was still going. They stopped pretty fast when they realized he wasn’t conducting anymore.

  “Okay, guys,” Mr. Dante said, smiling around at us. Seriously, how was he still so calm? “Can someone tell me what it says above measure ninety-eight? Sophie?”

  “To coda,’” Sophie Wheeler replied.

  “Right,” Mr. Dante agreed. “So where is the coda? Holly?”

  I squinted at my music and found the coda symbol.

  “Measure one-twelve.”

  “Exactly.” Mr. Dante nodded. “So after we take that repeat, we play through until we see ‘to coda,’ and then we jump down to that symbol. I’ll do my best to cue you, but you have to watch out for those signs.” Opening his folder, Mr. Dante pulled out another score. “Let’s take out ‘Labyrinthine Dances, ’ please.”

  “That’s it?” Gabby blurted out. “We’re not going to work on this one anymore?”

  Mr. Dante smiled. “Sight-reading, Gabby. One shot. We’ll be sight-reading several times a week until UIL, but it’ll be a different piece every time. So tomo
rrow, we’ll address some of the problems we ran into today, and give it another try with a new song.”

  Natasha and I exchanged nervous glances. He was right—one shot. And if that had been our sight-reading performance at UIL, no way would we get a Sweepstakes trophy.

  Half an hour so wasn’t long enough for lunch. Between everyone catching up after spring break, plus resuming our ongoing Warlock card game, we could’ve used at least an hour. And my fried brain really needed more of a rest before facing more projects and final-exam preparation.

  I sat crammed in between Owen and Natasha. Owen, Trevor, and Max were already swapping cards over their sandwiches with several other Warlock players. On my right, Natasha was holding her phone across the table to show Seth her Disney pictures. Next to him, Julia glanced at a photo and started choking on her cookie.

  “Hang on,” she sputtered, grabbing the phone. “Is that—you went bungee jumping?”

  “What?” I cried, looking up from my Warlock cards. Natasha shook her head.

  “No, it wasn’t really bungee jumping,” she said. “More like a slingshot. You get strapped into this thing that’s attached to two giant towers, and then you get pulled back and . . . catapulted.”

  “That’s awesome,” Seth told her, right as Julia said, “That’s insane.”

  “I was kind of nervous,” Natasha admitted. “But I promised myself I’d go on any ride that looked scary. And it’s over really fast, too—way faster than a roller coaster.” She grinned. “It was like flying. So cool. I’d definitely do it again.”

  I smiled. This was the happiest I’d seen Natasha since . . . well, maybe ever. At the beginning of the year we didn’t even like each other. And even after we were friends, things were weird between us because we both liked Aaron. Then she’d started dating him, and while she seemed happy, it had been more of a nervous kind of happy. Like during lunch, when she used to go sit with Aaron and his friends and I’d get the feeling she’d almost rather stay with us.

  Out of habit, I glanced over at Aaron’s table. He was laughing and talking to some freckled eighth-grade girl I vaguely recognized. Wait . . . were they holding hands? I squinted, but then she stood to take her tray to the trash, and I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined it.

  Maybe Aaron was already dating someone else. If so, I hoped Natasha wouldn’t be too upset.

  “Your turn, Holly.”

  Looking up, I realized Owen and the other Warlock players were waiting expectantly. “Oh!” I glanced from the pile of cards in the center of the table to my own deck, then tossed a chimney-gnome card down. “Hey, I still want to see what you worked on in San Antonio,” I told Owen as Erin Peale used a cursed-broom card to snag my gnome. His expression brightened.

  “Oh, right!” Setting his cards down, Owen opened his backpack. I glanced over to make sure Julia wasn’t giving me any goofy faces like she usually does around Owen, but she and Seth still were looking at Natasha’s photos.

  Owen opened his sketchbook. “So we started with motion sketches—drawing a character going through one motion. See?”

  I burst out laughing. Twenty stick figures holding baseball bats covered the sheet in four neat rows. From left to right, I could see the progression as a ball zoomed towards the stick figure and he swung the bat and . . . missed. Which, I had to admit, happened more often then not when Owen was on the JV team. He hated baseball, but tried out just to make his parents happy.

  “The workshop got me out of the last game,” Owen said with a grin. “I figured this was a good tribute.”

  Snickering, I flipped through several more motion sketches. When I got to a page filled with waddling penguins, I stopped. “These don’t look like yours.”

  Owen glanced down. “Oh yeah—Ginny drew some of this stuff.”

  “Ginny?”

  “My partner,” Owen explained. “They put everyone in pairs to work on the final project.”

  “Oh.” I nodded, doing my best to look indifferent. But imagining this Ginny person drawing penguins in Owen’s sketchbook was kind of irritating. When I flipped the page, the penguins all were paired up and dancing.

  Make that very irritating.

  The bell rang, and I handed Owen his sketchbook. “So you guys made an actual cartoon?”

  “Yeah!” Owen gathered up his Warlock cards. “I’ll show you on Thursday. If you’re still coming over after school, I mean.”

  “Definitely.” I stuffed my cards in my backpack. “I bet we’re going to have lots of work to do on Alien Park.”

  Alien Park was our science fair project—kind of like Jurassic Park, but with aliens instead of dinosaurs. I wasn’t wrong about the work, either. When we got to science class, Mrs. Driscoll handed back our project outlines. And just like Mr. Franks with the research papers, she’d probably gone through a whole pack of red pens.

  “Revisions due next Monday,” she said, and I sighed. Sometimes I wondered if our teachers forgot we actually had other classes. Mrs. Driscoll spent most of the class period going over the new unit we were starting, on organisms and their environments, but I was kind of distracted. By Ginny and her stupid dancing penguins.

  “So let’s talk about habitats,” Mrs. Driscoll was saying. “Some animals live in rainforests, others live in deserts, and some even in live the Arctic. We’re going to take a look at their physical characteristics, as well as things like shelter and food available in their habitats . . .”

  Owen leaned over. “This could help with our project. Like the Mars habitat,” he whispered.

  I nodded, and he started taking notes. After a few minutes, I realized I hadn’t heard a word Mrs. Driscoll had said. And instead of notes, I’d doodled a penguin. But it just looked like a football with a beak.

  About the Author

  Michelle Schusterman is a former band director and forever band geek, starting back in the sixth grade when she first picked up a pair of drumsticks. Now she writes books, screenplays, and music in New York City, where she lives with her husband (and bandmate) and their chocolate Lab (who is more of a vocalist).