“Don’t ‘okay,’” she said. “It’s always ‘okay’ this, ‘okay’ that. Don’t ‘okay’ me. How about you explain why this keeps happening?” A disbelieving laugh. “It’s every single audition since you’ve gone to that place! It’s not just singing. Why don’t they put you on the, those, the regular plays?” I imagined the agitated fluttering of her hand as she tried to grab the words, put them in the right order. Mom’s English tended to fracture when she didn’t give herself time to breathe.
“Because,” I said tiredly, “mainstage straight plays always have, like, eight-person casts, and the parts always go to seniors.”
“I don’t know, Jordan. I just don’t know. All we get is bad news. What do you expect us to think, ah?”
“Mainstages aren’t everything,” I insisted. “I can find a student-led show in October. And my GPA’s fine, and everything else is fine, it’s just . . .” that you’ve trained yourself to sniff out my weak spots. The sentence I could never finish. Even this much talking back was pushing it. My mother and I had the sort of relationship that operated the most smoothly in silence.
She heaved her knowing sigh. I could picture the slow stream of air between her lips, her mouth framed by deep, tired creases. The sound punctured me.
Silence spread across my room. I’d been one of twenty Burgess residents to draw a single this year. It was twice the size of my room at home. Everything I owned stretched thinly across the space, making it look like an empty model room you might find, three-walled, sitting in the middle of a furniture store. I’d pinned my two posters, Les Misérables and Hamilton, as far apart as possible, thinking that it might make the white cinderblocks look busier. It hadn’t worked.
The only thing I had in numbers were books. They lined up single-file on the shelves, quietly keeping me company. It was impossible to feel alone in a room full of favorite books. I had the sense that they knew me personally, that they’d read me cover to cover as I’d read them.
My mother had always been aggressive about getting me to read, scouring garage sales and libraries for free novels, plays, or biographies. She’d always wanted me to learn more. Do more. Be more. She spent her life hoping for my way up and out.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice tiny, and for a horrible second, I thought I was going to cry. She never knew what to do with that.
I searched the photos I’d tacked to the corkboard above my desk, trying to distill reassurance out of the patchwork of familiar faces. Near the top hung my best friends in San Francisco, the four of us, arms slung around each other’s shoulders. Shanice pandered to the camera, pulling that picture-perfect sun-white grin. Jenna had her eyes crossed and her tongue stuck out, and to the left, Maria and I were in the middle of hysterical laughter, both of us shaded brown by the end of the summer.
I took a stabilizing breath. “How’s . . .” I started, tentative. “How’s Dad?”
“Fine. We’re fine.” She sounded weary. I didn’t reply. If they’d been fighting, she wouldn’t have told me, anyway. And what did it change, for me to know whether they were in a peace period or a war period?
“I need to make dinner,” Mom said, her voice softening. “Bye. Talk soon, okay?”
“Yeah, I—”
Click.
I dropped my phone, my whole body heavy. At least it wasn’t ever anger with my mom—just anxiety, a nerve-shredding worry on my behalf that made me feel inadequate like nothing else could. Every time I dropped the ball, it made visible cracks in her exterior.
It felt like my parents had been gearing up their entire lives for next fall, my college application season. Last year, I’d read a one-man show for Experimental Playwriting in which a man decides over the course of forty-five minutes whether to press a button that will instantly kill somebody across the world, a random person, in exchange for ten million dollars. If you’d handed my parents that button and told them the reward was my admission to Harvard, I swear to God they would’ve pressed it without a second thought.
And if you asked them why? “Because it’s Harvard.” Conversation over.
In a way, I was lucky that they banked on name recognition. Their faith in the arts as a legitimate career path hovered around zero, so if Kensington hadn’t been nicknamed “the Harvard of the Arts” by everyone from USA Today to the New Yorker, the odds of my going here also would’ve hovered around zero, scholarship or not. I was fourteen when I convinced my parents to let me apply to Kensington, and—when I got the full ride—to come here. I’d cajoled them into it every step of the way. But they would never be happy until I was the best. Here, you were more likely to have several extra limbs than be the best at anything.
I slid off my bed and measured my breaths. Stop thinking about college—stop thinking at all—give your brain a rest. It was always busy in my skull, always noisy, a honking metropolis of detours and preoccupations.
I hunched over my desk, studying my corkboard. There hung a creased picture of my dad and me, his knees leaning crookedly in his wheelchair, one of my hands set on his shoulders. Beside it was a shot of my mother standing on our building’s crumbling stoop, stern and stately, wearing a summer dress with a red and green print. The pictures were three years old. They seemed to be from a separate lifetime. Before Kensington, before the fighting, before Michael, a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror, every layer of difference adding a degree of warp.
The corner of a stray picture glinted to the side, snagged behind a family photo. I swiveled it into sight and yanked my fingers back. The image of Michael’s face made something clench in my chest. His dark eyes peered out at me accusingly.
Why did I even have that? I could’ve sworn I’d put all those pictures in the garbage, where he belonged.
The flare of hurt withered into disgust. Three months, and I was still circling the carcass of our relationship like an obsessive buzzard. The worst thing about breakups was the narcissism that trailed after them, the absolute swallowing self-centeredness. Every movie about heartbreak had turned into my biopic. Every sentence about aloneness, every song lyric about longing, had morphed into a personal attack.
I snatched the photo down, crumpled it, and chucked it across the room at the trash can. It missed, landing beneath the open window. The dark ridges of the balled-up photo shone. Outside, a yellowing harvest moon was rising over the treetops.
I approached the window, flicked the scrap of glossy paper into place, and gazed through the glass at the moon. For a second I lost myself in the sight. For a second I could breathe clearly, the first instant of clarity since that morning.
Kensington was beautiful through everything. When I didn’t have anything else, I had this castle in the countryside, this oasis, this prize I’d snared. Some days it was a diamond, and I almost couldn’t understand how lucky I was to have stumbled upon it. And other days it was a living thing, trying desperately to free itself from me.
“What an impertinent thing is a young girl bred in a nunnery!” Lydia jabbed an accusatory finger at me as she approached. “How full of questions! Prithee no more, Hellena; I have told thee more than thou understand’st already.” Lydia Humphreys, my ex-roommate, had a football-helmet-shaped bob of platinum blonde hair and a voice that bounced off the amphitheater steps like a solid object.
I flashed a coy smile and sauntered backward. “The more’s my grief. I would fain know as much as you, which makes me so inquisitive. Nor is it enough to know you are a lover, when . . .” I grimaced and rewound. “To know you are a lover, when . . . shit.”
“Should I start again?” Lydia said, drifting out of character.
“I don’t think it’ll help. I’m so sorry, I should know these.”
She waved it off. “It’s a short scene. We have until Friday.”
“Yeah. I’ll get it together. Sorry.”
“Really, it’s fine,” Lydia said. I hunted her freckled face for a trace of displeasure and came up empty. She looked mild and unbothered, but then again, she
always looked mild and unbothered. Lydia had grown up with her grandparents and inherited all of her grandmother’s mild, unbothered facial expressions. When she took the stage, her face full of life and outrage, she was unrecognizable.
I drifted into a sitting position on the rough stone of the amphitheater stage, eyeing the graduated rings that rippled up and out from us. Weeks at Kensington-Blaine all followed the same trajectory, a sine curve of stress that peaked on Wednesday afternoons. You got the sense, Wednesdays, that even if the Gods of Time came down from on high and magically inserted eighty-two extra hours into that evening, finishing your work would be a stretch. But I needed to find time somewhere to memorize this, get it into my muscles. If you had to think about your lines, you weren’t doing it right.
This past weekend’s audition had put a permanent twist in my focus. Since my conversation with Reese, whenever I talked, I resented my voice. What did you do with a problem you couldn’t solve?
I could tell that Lydia wanted to ask what was wrong, but she stayed quiet, tentative. This was fair. We hadn’t had a real conversation since freshman year, which was absolutely my fault, since I’d turned into that apocryphal girl who gets a boyfriend and vanishes into the ether. I wasn’t proud of it.
I rubbed the heels of my palms into the seams of my closed eyes, exhausted. Suggesting we rehearse here had been a terrible idea. I saw Michael everywhere in the amphitheater. As last year had dwindled toward summer, we’d snuck out every other night, ducking up the quad fastened at the hands, and we’d always wound up on this stage, a stone circle that glowed like a second moon. We stayed until our voices buckled and our eyelids drooped, because soon he was going to graduate, and it’d be NYU for him and junior year for me. Soon there’d be no more secret hours to steal. Now, there was his ghost at the edge of the stage, six foot two of burning presence as I remembered him: a muscular knot of motion. Watching him move was like watching a firework twist up into the evening before it bursts.
Lydia broke the silence. “I’m sorry you didn’t get cast.”
I glanced up at her. I’d forgotten how blunt Lydia was, in a way that was never cruel, never for selfish satisfaction. It was so you knew she was always what she appeared to be. She could take a scalpel to a conversation, work it down to the bone, spot your fractures before you could describe them to her.
She smoothed the edge of her skirt. Splashes of pink on white. Lilly Pulitzer, a Humphreys family favorite. “It really is subjective,” she said. “Seeing how Reese chooses people is actually very eye-opening.” Lydia was assistant-directing the show, which seemed like a brave move. I would never have subjected myself to that quantity of Reese Garrison.
“For real,” I said. “What’s she looking for?”
“It’s different for every part. Way fewer guys audition for the musical, so for guys’ parts she’s basically like, okay, which of these people can actually sing a high A and sound good? Whereas for girls, there’s another whole checklist of stuff.”
“God, maybe that’s why Michael got leads three years in a row,” I said, and instantly hated myself for bringing him up. It was a weird compulsion, like picking at a scab.
“Well,” Lydia said, “he was also great. At everything.”
“Yeah, I know.” Michael could pull on a persona like a well-fitted costume piece. Accents especially—teachers sat up straighter when he did them, taken aback even after twenty years of teaching. He had a flamboyant Italian character he’d nicknamed Angelo and a simpering Frenchman I’d dubbed Pierre; he used to tug them out over the tables at dinner. And he did such a pitch-perfect Dublin accent, burbling out the corner of his mouth, that it was obvious he’d spent three summers in a row there, badgering all the Dubliners to speak more slowly so he could slip their words into his pockets.
His favorite was the noir detective, all flattened and nasal and fast-spoken in a transatlantic twang. Last year, he’d watched about six noir films in a row and then considered himself an expert. He whipped up vaguely hard-boiled-sounding lines about kids and teachers, dragging us into his made-up worlds. “Reese Garrison was a dame whose legs went ahhhn ’til next Tewsday,” he’d drawl over my shoulder as I tried to write. “I gave ’er my essay, and she gave me three bullets, one for every danglin’ modifier . . .”
And I’d groan, or I’d laugh. Or—mostly—I’d let him distract me. “It rained that summah,” I’d drawl back in my smokiest femme fatale voice, playing along. “It rained ’til my conscience felt damn neah clean again.” Then he’d reach forward and mess with my computer, and I’d swat at his hands until he’d take my wrists and pull me in, everything else forgotten. Characters abandoned. There we’d be in private closeness, silent all of a sudden and real.
I could still text him. I could break the three-month silence.
The second the thought came, I stood. Get over this. “Okay,” I said, yanking the folded script pages out of my back pocket. They were an inked, highlighted disaster. I had notes annotating my notes. “Can we maybe run lines?”
“Sure,” Lydia said, tucking her phone away. Instantly, I felt selfish for asking her to stay, but before I could offer her an exit strategy, she started the scene. “What an impertinent thing is a young girl bred in a—”
Noise spilled into the amphitheater. Lydia broke off, and we looked up. A group of vaguely familiar-looking boys was jolting down the steps, a herd of pastel shorts and tank tops. They caught sight of us and faltered but didn’t stop. Soon they were pooling around the front of the stage, and a pair of them jogged forward.
“Hey there, ladies,” said one of them, dark-haired, with even eyebrows that winged out over hazel eyes. He was unreasonably tall and unreasonably good-looking, and he’d also said the phrase, “Hey there, ladies,” which obliterated any potential interest with the merciless speed of a plummeting guillotine blade.
“Are you leaving soon?” said the other boy, a redhead who was a more acceptable sort of tall, and whose words sounded so bored it was a miracle he’d mustered up the interest to open his mouth.
“Actually, we’re in the middle of a rehearsal,” Lydia said, the picture of neutrality.
“Like, just the two of you?” Tall looked at Taller and laughed. “Okay . . . uh, when’s your big important rehearsal gonna be over?”
Lydia’s lips pressed together almost imperceptibly. The Grandma Humphreys equivalent of taking out a shotgun. As my cheeks filled with heat, I remembered, suddenly, where I’d seen these guys: onstage, at their concerts. They were the New York Minuets, Kensington’s douchiest a cappella group. This was an impressive title to hold, since the Kensington a cappella scene was a shade or two less friendly than the mafia, and a shade or two more exclusive. I wondered if the exclusive vibe was something they manufactured on purpose, or if they just fundamentally lacked the ability to befriend people who didn’t spend all their time singing nonsense syllables.
“Don’t you guys have music buildings to practice in?” I asked.
“Don’t you have a theater to use?” said Taller, adjusting his perfect hair.
“Yes,” I said. “You’re standing in the middle of it.”
Tall lifted his freckle-spattered hands. “Okay, calm down.”
“I am calm,” I said, thinking that there was no faster way to enrage a calm person than by telling them to calm down. These music guys had some nerve, anyway, trying to boot us out of a space specifically built for the School of Theater.
To be fair, near the back of their group was a kid I vaguely recognized from the theater school. Even though it was dominated by music kids, a cappella was technically extracurricular. Anyone in any discipline could audition for the half-dozen groups, and as a result, a cappella had become one of the few things that tied Kensington’s five schools together (the others being the newspaper and a universal disdain for the administration). Even Visual Arts kids, who hardly ever stepped off the Northwest quad, could be spotted at a cappella concerts, begrudgingly jamming along to some remixed ve
rsion of a pop song by Justine Gray or Sam Samuelson. The fall Sharpshooters concert was like our version of a Homecoming game—the guys’ octet was our oldest group, and, if possible, even cultier than the rest of them.
Behind these two, the rest of the New York Minuets aimed questioning looks at me, murmuring to each other in an inaudible rumble. Tall glanced up at Taller, looking for guidance.
“Look,” Taller said to me, in a clearly-you-don’t-understand-the-gravity-of-the-situation sort of voice. “We have a competition we’re preparing for. So if you could just—”
“You mean the one in December?” Lydia said flatly. “Three months from now?”
Taller looked at her. He seemed to have lost the ability to speak. Lydia’s blue eyes were flinty beneath the blunt line of her bangs.
We’d gotten a bottomless pit’s worth of e-mails about the competition. Aural Fixation, an a cappella group made famous by competition-style reality TV, was visiting Kensington right before winter break. Since their latest lineup had a couple of Kensington alumni, they’d be picking one of our a cappella groups to open for them during the European leg of their international tour over winter break. This, hilariously, meant two straight weeks of sold-out stadiums in London and Rome and Madrid and Lisbon. For concerts that consisted of people pretending to be musical instruments. Unreal.
There was no logical reason for a cappella to have exploded like this. It was the geekiest thing in the world, filled with terrible pun names and obscenely technical singing. It’d been born out of barbershop quartets and doo-wop, for God’s sake. Its DNA was filled with strains of undiluted nerd.
Taller found his voice. “See? Even you’ve heard about it,” he said, dripping condescension.
Lydia and I traded a disbelieving look. Even us! Mere plebeians!
“So,” he continued. “You get why we need to practice.”
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