Consent

by Nancy Ohlin

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  For Christopher

  PROLOGUE

  The police officer switches on the video camera, and its red light blink blink blinks at me.

  “Are you comfortable? Do you want a different chair?” he asks.

  “No, thanks, I’m good.”

  His smile as he regards me is kind and fatherly; his eyes, not so much. On the table between us are an unwrapped granola bar and two cups of shiny Styrofoam water.

  “Don’t be nervous. It’s just us,” he says.

  He flips open a notebook and scribbles something in police hieroglyphics. And then the questions start.

  I tell my story to the blinking red light. As I do, I try to remember:

  Maintain eye contact.

  Keep it simple.

  Stay as close to the truth as possible.

  ONE

  It’s the first day of senior year—or as Plum puts it, “The Year Before Our Real Lives Can Finally Begin.” At lunch she and I eat Kraft cheese and French dressing sandwiches together in the cafetorium.

  What an awful word: “cafetorium.” It sounds like a monster in a Syfy movie. The reality isn’t much better. At Andrew Jackson High School, a.k.a. A-Jax, it is a vast, impersonal, mental-asylum space with milk-colored walls and the forever stench of boiled meat. The inmates within are many, noisy, and dangerous.

  Plum and I started Mad Sandwich Mondays sophomore year—the “wise fool” year, the year when we thought we would be stuck in the never-ending loop of high school and not–high school for eternity. We take turns bringing each other odd combinations, like peanut butter–cucumber, pineapple-mayo, and bacon–Marshmallow Fluff.

  “This is actually good,” I say, taking a bite of my sandwich. “It’s weirdly comforting.”

  “My mom used to eat these when she was little. Hey, Bea?”

  “What?”

  “Have you thought about what I said? About Harvard? Because the Early Action deadline is November first, and we should really get cracking on the application.”

  “Oh, yeah. That.”

  Over the summer Plum got the idea that we should go to Harvard together. She thinks we have a good chance of getting in because we have the two highest GPAs in school. I told her that my cousin Jin didn’t get into Harvard, and he had a 4.0, perfect regular and subject SATs, and a letter of recommendation from a U.S. senator, from some swank internship. Of course, this didn’t faze her one bit. The word “impossible” is not in Plum’s vocabulary.

  Now she reaches into her backpack and extracts her sparkly gold notebook—nicknamed “The Golden Notebook,” after Doris Lessing’s novel. On the first page are an A list and a B list of the colleges she wants us to apply to. Harvard is at the very top and has a big pink heart around it. Included, too, are a bunch of due dates and requirements: transcripts, test scores, the Common App, et cetera. The guidance counselor, Miss Beaven, is supposed to be doing all this, but with 798 seniors to get through, she’s probably slammed.

  Plus, she’s Miss Beaven. Plum and I try not to talk to her or any other adults at A-Jax unless it’s absolutely necessary.

  Plum sits up with an excited flutter of hands. “I know! Let’s go on a road trip to Boston. Columbus Day weekend! I’ve heard it really helps to visit the schools, do the tours, and suck up to the admissions people.” She blushes. “I mean, ‘make a good impression on.’ ”

  I laugh. “It’s okay to say ‘suck up.’ Just not to their faces.”

  Her eyes light up. “So we can go?”

  “No, that’s not what I—”

  But she is already looking at her calendar, rattling off dates, and talking about borrowing her parents’ Prius so we can save on gas.

  I eat my Kraft cheese and French dressing sandwich and let Plum’s Disney-cheerful voice wash over me.

  Maybe I should remind her that the heroine of The Golden Notebook has a mental breakdown.

  Maybe I should just skip college altogether and become a cafetorium lady.

  • • •

  No, I’m not one of those slackers who want to check out after high school and drift aimlessly through life. Not like my brother, Theo, who at age twenty-nine still works at CVS, shares a house with six other guys, and plays guitar for a garage band called the Angry Weasels. I think he thinks that beer is one of the four major food groups.

  I’m also not depressed. I know all about depression from health class, the not eating and not sleeping and not wanting to get out of bed, and that’s definitely not me.

  It’s just that I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. Pretty much the only thing I enjoy doing besides hanging out with Plum is playing the piano. But there’s no way I can become a professional musician. Plus, lately, that part of my life has lost its spark and momentum—I’m not sure why.

  Also, it’s not like anyone in my family shows any interest in my future whatsoever. Sometimes I envy those kids with the pushy helicopter parents, like Cassie Lindstrom’s mom, who videotapes her voice lessons and postmortems them afterward, or Zach Cormier’s dad, who puts his dance clips on YouTube and tweets about them:

  @zachcorm made it to the finals at Nationals! Woot!

  The only person who’s pushing me forward is Plum. And really, she’s just imposing her own blueprint on me, because as far as she’s concerned, we’re identical twins.

  But we’re not. We are so not.

  I love her, but she has no clue. About my future, my past, anything.

  Although maybe that’s something we have in common.

  Woot.

  TWO

  My afternoon is a blur of classes: AP bio, then AP English, then U.S. history. I’m already pretty knowledgeable in most of these subjects, on top of which Plum isn’t in any of my sections, so I have no one to make faces at the teachers with. I picture nine long months of doodling and playing hangman by myself. I wish I could cut and show up only for the quizzes and tests, but apparently, there are rules about that sort of thing.

  My last class of the day is music history. I needed an arts elective, and it was either that or photography with Mrs. Lutz, whose nickname is “Lutz the Klutz” for no other reason than it rhymes. Plum calls this the “random cruelty of youth.” I call it stupid. In any case, I picked music history, even though I probably won’t learn anything new, considering. Besides, it’s only for this semester, three days a week.

  I find a seat in the back, near the window, so that I can doodle in peace. The classroom is big and bright, part of the recently renovated performing arts wing. We used to be a regular old high school before we got rebranded as a “Campus for Baccalaureate and Performing Arts.” They built a bunch of new classrooms as well as a dance studio, black box theater, and keyboard lab. So, basically, A-Jax is a fancy-pants school now, even though most of it—the cafetorium, the halls, the randomly cruel student body—feels exactly the same.

  The teacher stands at the blackboard with his back to the class. He must be new; I’ve never seen him before.

  I crane my neck to get a glimpse of his face. No luck. From this angle, I can only make out broad shoulders and longish, curlyish brown hair.

  He writes on the blackboard:

  Mr. Rossi

  Music History

  1. The Baroque Period

  2. The Transition to Classical

  3. The Classical Era

  4. The Early Romantics

&nbs
p; 5. The Late Romantics

  6. 20th-Century Modernism

  7. Contemporary Music

  8. The Future of Music

  The bell rings. Nelson Geiser hurries into the room and sits down across the aisle from me. As he leans toward me, I smell Axe body spray and potato chips. “This is our second class together,” he says with a toothy grin. “By the way, did I mention that you’re looking very comely today?”

  I give him an eye roll. Nelson has been on-and-off hitting on me since last spring, when I made the mistake of agreeing to be his lab partner in AP chem. His M.O. is to “compliment” me with vocab-board words: “comely,” “resplendent,” “pulchritudinous.” Scoring with Smart Girls 101. I suppose I should be flattered by his attention, but I’m totally not.

  “What are you doing Saturday night, comely wench? Methinks we should go out,” Nelson says with a leer.

  “Methinks no,” I reply.

  “Splendid. I’ll take that as a maybe?”

  I guess “no” means something else in Nelson World.

  Mr. Rossi turns from the blackboard and scans the class. Oh my God, he’s cute. Chiseled features and sexy stubble . . . Are teachers allowed to be that good-looking?

  “Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Mr. Rossi, and this is eighth-period music history,” he says. He has a nice voice, deep and British.

  There are a couple of appreciative catcalls from across the room. Wendy Stiles and Mallory Meecham, the senior sluts—no surprise there. Mr. Rossi blushes and coughs and clears his throat. He pulls some index cards out of his pocket, reads over them quickly, and launches into the first-day-of-class drill: roll call, rules and regs, a detailed explanation of the grading system, and the handing out of the syllabus. Poor guy—I guess he’s not used to the wonderful world of raging hormones and low IQs.

  “Music history. Can anyone tell me what that means?” he asks.

  “The, um, history of music?” says someone in the front row.

  “Yes, but is it the history of all music? Why don’t we parse that phrase, ‘music history’?”

  Now, there’s a vocab-board word: “parse.” Although coming from him, it seems quaint and nineteenth-century versus obnoxious and Nelson-esque.

  “What is music? It is a combination of sounds intended to produce harmony, form, beauty, and emotional expression. As far as we know, music has been on this earth for over fifty thousand years, dating back to our earliest ancestors,” he continues.

  Nelson scratches his armpits like a chimpanzee and winks at me. Really attractive. In front of him Aziza Sayid texts under her desk without looking. I have yet to master that skill, and the one time I tried, I ended up sending a message to Plum that auto-corrected into: Meet my laundry. Sometimes she says that to make me laugh: “Bea, meet my laundry!”

  If I knew how to stealth-text, I would consider sending a message to Plum: Have you seen the new music history teacher? When did A-Jax lift its policy of hiring only appearance-challenged old people?

  “In this course we will not be studying the history of music from the time of the cavemen. Our starting point will be the sixteen hundreds”—Mr. Rossi taps his chalk against the words The Baroque Period—“and our ending point will be the twenty-first century and beyond,” he says, now tapping The Future of Music. “Furthermore, we will not be studying the music of all cultures. Our focus will be Western music, primarily Western classical music. That’s ‘classical’ with a little c. By the way, can anyone tell me the difference between ‘classical’ with a little c and ‘Classical’ with a capital C?”

  Silence.

  “Anyone?”

  More silence.

  I raise my hand.

  “Yes? You in the back,” Mr. Rossi says, apparently to distinguish me from the dozens of others with their hands up.

  I sit up in my chair and smile. He smiles back. That smile. For a moment I forget what I was going to say.

  “Did you have something you wanted to . . . ?” he prompts me.

  “Yes. Hi! So, ‘Classical’ with a capital C describes a period in Western musical history between the middle of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. ‘Classical’ with a little c describes a style of music that follows certain forms and conventions that were popular during that period. Like Mozart’s or Haydn’s music—or certain works by Stravinsky or Poulenc, who were twentieth-century composers. Also, people often use the term ‘classical music’ to describe any music that’s not pop, rock, jazz, folk, world music, et cetera.”

  Mr. Rossi blinks at me. “Yes, that’s very . . . um, that’s excellent. Thank you.”

  “You are so brilliant. It is such a turn-on,” Nelson whispers.

  I give him a withering look. He’s being disgusting; plus, he’s ruining my special moment with Mr. Rossi.

  “Like I said, we will be focusing primarily on Western classical music,” Mr. Rossi goes on. “By ‘Western,’ we’re talking about North America and Europe—and, of course, Russia, which geographically and culturally straddles both Europe and Asia.”

  Some students giggle at the word “straddles.” Mr. Rossi blushes again as he turns back to the blackboard. Has he never taught high school before? He’s going to have to develop a thicker skin. Still, it’s very quaint and nineteenth-century of him—the blushing. It’s also a paradox, because he seriously looks like a twenty-first-century sex god.

  He glances at another index card and writes 1600–1750 next to The Baroque Period.

  “Let’s begin with the baroque period, shall we?” he says over his shoulder. “This is an era we associate with such composers as Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Telemann, Scarlatti, Rameau, and Couperin. The word ‘baroque’ comes from the Italian word barocco, meaning ‘imperfect pearl.’ Why is baroque music like an imperfect pearl?”

  Ornamentation, I think. But I don’t want to be that annoying serial-hand-raising girl, so I keep it to myself. I lean over my notebook and doodle an oyster shell with a big, shiny pearl inside. My hair falls across my face, which gives me a useful cover for shameless ogling.

  “Pearls are supposed to be smooth,” Mr. Rossi says. “But baroque music is anything but smooth because of ornamentation. Here, let me show you what I mean.”

  He strides over to a piano in the corner and pulls the heavy brown quilted cover off of it. I crane my neck to see. Whoa, it’s a brand-new Steinway. A full seven-foot grand, all gleaming and black like polished obsidian.

  Mr. Rossi sits down and curls his fingers over the keyboard. He begins the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I generally don’t like Bach, but I love the Goldberg Variations. I especially love the aria, which is a seamless mash-up of happy, sad, and religious experience.

  On top of which, Mr. Rossi is an amazing pianist. He plays Bach like Glenn Gould, like he’s pouring his entire soul into each note. Where did he learn to do that? Listening to him, I feel as though I’m in a concert hall in New York City or London or Paris.

  “Do you hear this little musical embellishment?” He stops in the middle of a measure and executes a lightning-quick trill. His voice has grown more animated; he seems to be in his element, sitting at the piano. “This is an example of an ornament. Ornaments are like decorations, in that they are not necessary to carry along the melody line of the piece. I’ll play the same measure without the ornament, and you’ll be able to hear the difference.”

  He starts playing again—first just that measure, then the whole piece from the beginning, without ornaments. Aziza continues texting. Nelson continues being Nelson.

  I tune them out and play along on my knees, quietly humming the aria under my breath. I follow Mr. Rossi’s perfect profile as he closes his eyes and leans into the music.

  I think I’m going to enjoy this class after all.

  THREE

  After school Plum and I walk over to her house, which is what we’ve been doing almost every day since we met in ninth grade. It’s way better than my house for about a billion reasons. She and her fam
ily live on Lark Street in a sprawling green Victorian. They moved from Philadelphia to Eden Grove three years ago because they wanted a yard and a dog and a “slower pace,” whatever that is. Eden Grove is full of people like them: rich transplants from big cities who crave U-pick farms, used bookstores, and expensive restaurants pretending to be not-expensive restaurants.

  Mostly, I think Eden Grove is pretentious and boring.

  As Plum and I walk, we discuss teachers. “Who did you get for your afternoon classes?” I ask.

  “Mr. Rodriguez for chem, Mrs. Erlich for French, Ms. Lee for calculus, and Mr. Ferguson for English,” Plum replies. “What about you?”

  “Mr. Sappenfield for bio, Mr. Smith for English, Ms. Hillier for U.S. History, and Mr. Rossi for music history.” I pause. “Do you know him? Mr. Rossi?”

  “I think I saw him in my study hall. Is he the one who looks like Kit Harington?”

  “Hmm. Yeah, I could see that.”

  Plum giggles. “Bea! Do you have a crush?”

  “Right. Very funny.”

  “Because you haven’t dated anyone since that violin guy.”

  “Seriously, Plum. Cello. You really are illiterate about music. And I’m not going to date a teacher, that’s gross.”

  “If I were going to date a teacher, it would be Mr. Anderson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Or Mr. Thackeray in To Sir, With Love.”

  “If we’re dating imaginary people, I would probably go with Batman.”

  “You would!”

  “I wonder if he has sex hanging upside down?”

  We laugh and hurry our steps.

  At Plum’s house we hopscotch to the door along the path of inlaid stone: slate, then jasper, then quartz, then repeat. This is another one of our traditions, along with Mad Sandwich Mondays. On either side of the path is her mom’s garden, which is a profusion of zinnias, sunflowers, herbs, and vegetables. The late-afternoon sun makes everything look warm, sleepy, and hazy-golden.

  Plum pauses mid-hop, plucks a cherry tomato, and plops it into her mouth. “Someone’s home. The Volvo’s here. I wonder what’s for dinner?”