The Sound of Us

by Julie Hammerle

  “So,” he says, “I learned one of Dana’s sappy lady songs.”

  “You did?” That was unexpected.

  “‘Deathly.’ Aimee Mann. You know it?”

  “I know the song. I don’t know it on piano…but I can learn it, probably.”

  “You don’t have to. I was just saying.”

  The door at the end of the hall creaks open. The RAs are on their way back. I don’t even care. I can’t end this conversation yet. I spent all week fantasizing about this guy, wondering if I’d made him up, now here he is. “Technically, I’m not supposed to sing,” I say.

  “What, are you part of some Footloose-type religion where singing is forbidden?”

  “No. I’m an opera student and I’m supposed to kind of stick with that.”

  “I see.”

  “I could get kicked out of the program. I’m trying to earn a scholarship.”

  “Me too.” Jack glances down at the end of the hall where we can see the RAs fast approaching.

  “For drumming?”

  “For golf. And to rack up some pre-law college credits.”

  Cough. “Nerd.” Cough.

  He grins. “How about this? I don’t want anyone to know about my drumming. You don’t want anyone to know about your forbidden singing. What if we make it our little secret…?” He waggles his eyebrows.

  “Why do I feel like you’re a bad man trying to lure me into his van?”

  His eyes twinkle behind his glasses. “I’m just a boy, standing in front of a girl, asking her to jam.”

  “To jam.” This is trouble. This is the kind of thing Mr. Bertrand warned us about. Maybe this guy is a plant, sent specifically to get me into deep shit. Is that ridiculously paranoid or is it completely reasonable and logical? “How do I know I can trust you? How do I know you’re not here to sabotage me?”

  “You watch too much television, I can tell,” he says. “I respect that, don’t get me wrong. I watch too much TV myself, but seriously. Maybe we’ll run into each other in the basement again some night.”

  The memory of playing “Romeo and Juliet” resonates in my bones, how it made me feel powerful, invincible. Damn it, I want that feeling again. But I can’t have it. I’ll be kicked out of camp. But I just spent the evening kissing a disgusting dude, whom I assumed was the best I’d ever be able to do. Jack, possibly the guy of my dreams, is standing next to me, asking me to hang out. I need this win. I deserve it.

  The RAs are getting closer. I have to act fast. I spent the last week looking for this guy, Jack, who is everything I ever wanted and never thought I could have. He’s every preppy guy who’s never given me, a music geek, a second glance in high school. We’d never run in the same circles in real life, but here we are talking at summer camp. There’s something forbidden about us, illicit, exciting. I can’t let him escape again. I’ll agree to meet up now, and explain later why I can’t sing with him. Then we can hang out and possibly enact some of my deepest, darkest basement-related fantasies. “Maybe we should plan on it,” I say. My heart leaps into my throat waiting for his answer.

  It takes Jack long enough to give me one. The RAs are getting closer. “Are you still there?” the girl shouts from down the hall.

  “Maybe tomorrow night?” Jack says.

  “Sounds good.” I pull away from the wall, stepping toward the stairwell, ready to make a break for it.

  “Nine o’clock?”

  “It’s a date,” I say, before catching myself. “I mean, not a date. A thing…an appointment. A meeting.”

  Jack pounds the wall with his fist before leaping away and heading back down the hallway. Without looking at me, he says, “It’s a date.”

  chapter seven

  Kiki Nichols @kikeronis: I have a date tonight!! <– Tweets you never thought you’d see from me

  Jack doesn’t kiss like Tromboner Dave.

  Jack’s kisses are sweet, but passionate, and he doesn’t smell like a sweaty baby and there’s not a lot of superfluous body hair involved. Because he’s wearing a shirt, like a normal, human person.

  On our date down in the basement, Jack and I don’t even talk about playing music together. We don’t talk at all. We fall right into each other’s arms. It’s so hot, we set off the fire alarm. It keeps beeping and beeping, but we ignore it. We ignore the beeping, beeping—

  I pull my eyes open and realize I’m not in the basement. I’m in my dorm room. Damn it.

  I shoot up in bed and crane my neck over our desks to see Brie’s side of the room. She’s gone already. Her bed is made. I roll my eyes. Knowing her, she’s already over at Yunker Hall practicing and it’s only…I check my clock. Eight a.m. On a Saturday.

  The beeping is coming from my phone. It’s my parents, who want to FaceTime. I can’t believe they’re calling me this early. Of course, back at home I would’ve been up long before this, because I have no friends and I don’t stay up late, but I was out until midnight. And then I spent all night dreaming about Jack, running through every possible scenario for our date tonight.

  But I click accept anyway, and there are my parents on screen, smiling. “Hi, sweetie,” my mom says.

  I wave.

  “You didn’t call us last night,” she says. My dad is staring down at his lap, trying to be subtle about looking at his phone while talking to his daughter.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I was busy.” And there goes my mind again, thinking about Jack.

  She smiles. “Working hard? On a Friday night?”

  “Not exactly.” I wince. Every good thought of Jack is always followed by a horrifying thought of Tromboner Dave’s lips on mine.

  “Tina wants to know how things are going with Greg.”

  I shake my mind free of Tromboner Dave’s salami baby smell. “They’re…going. He’s a tough teacher.”

  “He’s the best,” she says. “And obviously he sees something in you.”

  I look down at my desk, where I put my “Vergebliches Ständchen” music last night. I really need to practice today. All day. As soon as I get off the phone, I’m going over to Yunker Hall and I’m not leaving the practice rooms until I know the words better than I know the names of Rome’s seven kings, a list my dad forced me to memorize when I was six. Thanks, Dad. If that ever comes up at a trivia contest, I’m all set.

  “You made it into his class, Kiki.” My mom crosses her fingers. “You’re well on your way to getting one of those scholarships.”

  My eyes still on my music, I say, “Yeah, hopefully. We’ll see.” I realize my shoulders are hunched up. I shake them, trying to loosen the muscles.

  My dad looks up from his phone. “What do you mean, ‘We’ll see’?”

  I massage my left shoulder. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if I’ll get a scholarship. There are lots of really talented singers here. Really talented.” I think of Mary, Norman, and Andy getting kicked out of class on Thursday. I have my first lesson on Monday morning. I hope to God the same thing won’t happen to me.

  “You’re talented, honey,” says my mom.

  “Yeah, but I don’t know. I’m figuring things out. It’s a lot of pressure.” I work through a knot on my other shoulder.

  “Welcome to the real world, Kiki.” My dad shakes his head. “If opera is what you want to do with your life, it’s going to be a lot of hard work. And not just the singing.” He points behind him. “That part has never really sunk in for your sister.”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “Do you get it?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say, “I mean…I don’t…know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  I somehow accidentally dug myself into a hole. I’m feeling overwhelmed and I’d love it if my parents would give me some blind support for once.

  My dad waits for my answer.

  I decide it’s better not to give him one. I feel a headache coming on. I rub my temples, trying to conjure up an image of Jack. He’s my one good thing here. He’s the one part of my li
fe at Krause that doesn’t make my body want to turn on itself and implode from the stress of it all.

  “Kiki, we’re paying good money for you to be there this summer.” My dad’s voice is measured, but increases in volume with every word.

  “I know.”

  “You told us this camp was important to you. You told us studying opera was important to you. Life or death, was how you put it, I believe.”

  “It still is,” I say. “But it’s eight o’clock in the morning. You woke me up. I don’t know what I’m saying.” I don’t like where this conversation is going. My dad has a twitch in his eye that develops every time opera comes up in conversation. My parents paid for my sister to go to Krause for four years and now she’s living in their house, eating their food, and spending her days sleeping and her nights partying. She is not the best example of a serious, working singer, but she’s the only example my parents know. “I’m not Tina,” I add for good measure.

  “So you’ve said.” My dad’s not done. “Your mother and I warned you that you’d end up unemployed and unqualified for other work like your sister, but you maintained that you were different, that you were serious. Serious about opera. Serious about this camp and this scholarship.”

  “I am serious,” I say. My lower lip trembles. “I am serious about opera.”

  “Is this about getting back at Beth?” my mom asks, arms folded.

  “No, oh my God.” The tears pour down my face. “It’s about me and music. That’s it.”

  “Tullia Cicero Nichols,” he says, using my full name (uh-oh), “we are paying thousands of dollars for you to be there this summer. We are not paying for you to mess around for six weeks.” He shakes his head and looks at my mom. “It’s the golf thing all over again.”

  “Don’t forget the guitar,” she adds.

  “You made me quit guitar,” I say.

  “You weren’t practicing.”

  “I couldn’t figure out how to string it. Or tune it.”

  “And when she wanted to learn how to make dollhouse furniture and we paid for all those lessons and supplies.” She ticks off all the ways I’ve disappointed them on her fingers.

  “You start things and you never finish them,” my dad says. “You have no follow-through.”

  “I have follow-through.” I drop my head into my hands.

  “Kiki,” says my mom, her voice gentle, “no, you don’t.”

  I pull my head up. I’m sure I look terrible. I know my hair is a mess and my face is blotchy and wet. Whoever invented FaceTime is a giant butthole. Why couldn’t my parents have simply called me on the phone like normal old people?

  “This is different,” I say. “I am going to follow through on this. All I’ve ever wanted was to sing and play music. All that other stuff was just a distraction. This”—I hold up a stack of music—“is who I really am.”

  “Are you sure?” says my mom.

  “Positive.” I wipe my eyes.

  The look on my dad’s face makes my shoulders hunch again. I prepare myself for the worst. “Your mom and I have been talking,” he says, eyes on her. “We talked the whole ride back from Indianapolis, in fact.”

  I nod.

  He focuses on me. “I can’t pay for another unemployed opera singer. I won’t. I work at a college, Kiki, where you can have free tuition. Tens of thousands of dollars, just handed to you and me and your mother. You can walk away after four years, free of loans, with a degree in something practical.”

  “What are you saying?” The tears threaten to fall again. I know this isn’t going to be good.

  He sighs. “I’m saying, Kiki, we’re done paying for your frivolity. If you get one of the scholarships to Krause this summer, fine. Go there. But if you don’t, I think it proves to all of us that you’re not really serious about this music thing. If you don’t get the scholarship, you’re taking the full ride at my school.” He laughs, like this is some big joke. “So, basically, you get a full ride either way. What a rough life you have.”

  “If I don’t get the scholarship here, I have to go to your school.”

  He nods.

  “What if I take out loans or whatever?”

  He shrugs. “You can do that, but know that your mother and I will give you nothing at that point. No room and board. No book money. No living expenses. You’d be putting yourself under a mound of debt, and for what?”

  “I don’t think you understand,” I say. “I am working like crazy. I’m up in the practice rooms constantly. After I get off the phone with you, I’m going right over to Yunker Hall to work on this song.” I hold up “Vergebliches Ständchen.” “If I don’t get the scholarship, it won’t be because I haven’t tried my hardest. There are a lot of good singers here.”

  “And your goal for the summer is to be one of the seven best. Do that, and you have our blessing to go to Krause. Don’t, and you go to my school.”

  I swallow. “But your school doesn’t have a music program.” Now I’m thinking about everything I’ll lose if I wind up going to my dad’s school. No practice rooms. No music theory class. No piano lessons.

  “Then get the scholarship, opera singer,” he says.

  *

  I head over to the practice rooms immediately after getting off the phone with my parents and I spend the next several hours staring at “Vergebliches Ständchen,” which I hope never to see again after my lesson on Monday.

  My reward for bearing through Brahms’s most boring song is to play around with Aimee Mann’s “Deathly,” the song I told Jack I’d play with him in the basement tonight.

  I pull out my tablet and open to the sheet music I downloaded last night.

  I can’t sing with Jack. I simply cannot. I know this. But that doesn’t mean I can’t work on the arrangement. That doesn’t mean I can’t play the piano. Maybe he can do the singing.

  Playing through the chords, I fiddle around with the baseline, humming the melody as I go along. For the first time all day, I realize my shoulders aren’t up near my ears.

  I am in my element. I am at my most Kiki right now.

  I shut off the tablet and plunk my elbows on the keyboard, pressing the palms of my hands into my eyes.

  This is stupid. I can’t mess around. I have to stay focused. I need the scholarship.

  Yeah, I’m not breaking the rules by learning to play a non-classical song on the piano, but I’m not helping my cause, either. I’m wasting time on this nonsense when I should be laser-focused on my assigned work.

  Hard work leads to a scholarship, which leads to me being able to study music in college.

  Farting around leads to no scholarship, which leads to me going home a failure, which leads to me having to study Latin or some other bullshit at my dad’s school.

  I can’t go home to Beth and my dad with nothing to show for myself.

  I can’t let myself be distracted, even a little bit. I need to spend the next five weeks being the perfect musician. No parties. No fun. No boys.

  No Jack.

  That’s the way it has to be.

  I’m scared that I’ll cave if I break off our date face-to-face, so about a half hour before we’re supposed to meet, I do the mature thing and leave a cryptic note (“Sorry, Jack. I can’t.”) under his door.

  I turn around, attempting to tiptoe out of Unit Six unnoticed. I sneak past Seth, whose door is wide open. He’s working at his desk, shirtless, wearing only a pair of basketball shorts. Don’t worry, his naked torso is just as magnificent as the rest of him. Also, what is it with guys in Unit Six and no shirts?

  “Kiki,” he shouts.

  I stop dead and automatically respond with a desperate, “Shhh!”

  He waves me in. “I need help.”

  I glance back at Norman and Jack’s door. It’s still shut. No light peeks out from the cracks. I head into Seth’s room, shutting the door behind me. I’m not sure where to look. I don’t want to stare at his chest or anywhere lower on his body, but it’s hard to look in his eyes a
s well. He has the piercing gaze of a Siberian husky, meaning I think Seth’s majestically beautiful like a husky, not that I’m attracted to dogs or anything. God, I have enough problems.

  “You’re really good at music theory,” Seth says.

  I shrug. “I guess so.” I’m awesome at music theory. It’s actually the one part of opera camp that’s not giving me hives right now.

  “Have you looked at Friday’s homework yet?”

  “Yeah.” We have to compose a piece of music in a minor key with a walking bass line. It’s kind of fun. I did it right away in the practice rooms on Saturday morning. I couldn’t wait to start, actually, not that I’d let Seth know that.

  “It’s kind of tough, isn’t it?” He runs his fingers through his floppy, dark hair.

  “You think so?” I say, avoiding his stupid eyes again.

  “Yeah, it’s tough.” He’s smiling now, revealing his one imperfection. His two front teeth overlap each other just slightly. Hideous. “You think you can help me?”

  “With your homework?”

  “If you’re not busy.”

  I’m not busy, I think. I was supposed to be, but not anymore. Now I am a single-minded student who spends every waking moment thinking about opera and solidifying her chances to win one of those scholarships. I am a shark. I am Brie. Helping Seth will help me further hone my music theory skills as well as show him I’m a camper to be reckoned with. This is me showing my dominance. “We can go up to my room.” I can’t be this close to Jack’s door.

  Andy comes in right as I say it. He shakes his head. “Not Kiki, too.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Not Kiki, too’?” I ask.

  “You’re joining his harem?” He ticks off a list on his fingers. “You, Brie, Daffodil, Yvetta… Good thing I’m gay or I’d be pissed that Seth’s been hoarding all the girls.”

  Seth rolls his eyes and pulls on a shirt. “Ignore him.”

  “We’re doing homework,” I say.