Jon Cox turned the music down. “Nah, bro,” he called back, glancing in the rearview. “Everyone knows the Minuets are the asshole group.”
I suppressed a laugh. It was true. Everyone knew the reputations: The Minuets were assholes. The Sharps were pretentious. The all-girls’ group—the Precautionary Measures—were super-gay. The jazz group—the Carnelian, named for one of our school colors—were a bunch of drinkers. And the two coed groups, Hear Hear and Under A Rest, were quagmires of in-group incest.
It had been only a week, but I couldn’t imagine what in-group dating would feel like. You’d never get a break from the person you were seeing.
Had the Sharps ever had a problem with that? They must have. The School of Music was less gay, proportionally, than the other schools, but that wasn’t saying much.
“Hey, do you have a phone charger?” Mama said.
“Yeah,” Jon Cox said, nodding at the glove compartment. “In there.”
Mama reached for the glove compartment’s handle. It snapped open, and there was a loud, distinct pop.
Out exploded a twinkling burst of glitter. It danced and twisted in the air like flour in a hurricane.
For a second, I just stared, unsure what the hell was happening.
Isaac flinched and drew his legs back into the car. Mama spluttered helplessly, his pale face screwed up and smothered in sparkles. He scrubbed at his forehead, spitting glitter over the side.
“What the shit?” Jon Cox said, as it settled. “Is that glitter?” A million flecks reflected the sun from the seats, from the backrests, from the dashboard—every last leathered crevice. Tiny, blinding points of light. As Mama hit the power button, killing the music, the hollow rush of the wind whipped up to fill the silence.
“Did you lend your car to someone?” I asked.
“Of course not. I don’t let anyone borrow this thing.”
“Hang on.” Mama leaned forward, staring into the glove compartment. “I—there’s a note in here,” he said, sounding disbelieving. He yanked it out. “It says, ‘Might want to put your roof up. Signed—’ and there’s a dotted half note.” Mama lowered the note, his expression injured. “Oh, come on.”
“The Minuets,” Isaac said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Minuets are in 3/4 time,” Mama said. “Dotted half note. It’s a joke.”
“Great joke,” Jon Cox said. He slammed the heel of his palm against the steering wheel. Once, twice. “Fuck. I’m gonna be vacuuming glitter out of this thing for the next eight years.”
“And not all minuets are even in 3/4,” Mama said, as if that were the worst part of the whole thing. “Some of them are in 3/8. Or even 6/8, for some of the Italian—”
“Man, shut up,” Jon Cox said. Mama emitted a sigh and went quiet.
“It’s okay, Cox,” Isaac said, a grim smile stretching across his face. “We’re gonna sort this out.”
When I got to the Nest that night, Isaac was sprawled on the floor in front of a hefty mason jar, snipping the heads off matches. They danced in the glass as they toppled in, plink, plink, plink. Nihal sat nearby with a sketchbook open in his lap. Jon Cox and Mama were in their usual spots on the sofa, both on their laptops.
“Hey,” I said, dropping my backpack into my chair. “Isaac, what’s that?”
He didn’t look up. “Science project.”
“Sure,” I said. “Is this about the glitter?”
“Maybe.” Isaac snipped another couple of match heads into the jar.
“Isaac has an evil plan,” Jon Cox said, looking up from his laptop. “He won’t explain.”
“My theory,” Isaac said, “is that they did it ’cause of the competition. They want to put us on edge, you know? Distract us. Which is, obviously, never going to happen, ’cause you could probably shoot Trav in the knee and he’d still show up at rehearsal ready to go.”
“You think they could win?” I said.
Nihal let out a merry chuckle but didn’t answer.
“I don’t know.” Isaac set his scissors on the ground. “I guess it depends. Aural Fixation has nine people, all male, so they might want their opener to contrast with that more than we do. Our best shot is to be so freakishly good that they have no choice but to hand it to us.” He flicked the empty matchbook into the trash can. From his backpack, he tugged out an unlabeled white bottle the size of a shampoo bottle. The cap popped open, and clear liquid glug-glug-glugged its way into the jar.
Isaac screwed the cap onto the jar and swirled it a few times. The match heads swam around, tiny red fish caught in a whirlpool.
“So,” I said slowly, “just to make sure: That’s not an explosive, right?”
He hopped to his feet, and Isaac took up his guitar by its rosewood neck, flopping down hard on the sofa. Jon Cox and Mama grumbled with no real malice.
“No exploding,” Isaac said, tugging a pick out of his wallet. “But in a couple days, those off-key degenerates are going to be sorry. And we’re still going to win the competition, and get famous, and that’ll be that.”
I sat down hard. “I can’t believe those guys sell out stadiums. Do people really care about a cappella that much?” I shook my head. “I don’t care about a cappella that much.”
Jon Cox, typing something into his MacBook, mumbled, “Nobody does except Trav. But it’s a thing now.”
“It’s probably those movies.”
“Right.” Jon Cox grimaced. “Girl power.”
The derision in his voice stuck into me like a pin. I shot him a look. He probably didn’t mean anything by it—he’d been in a shitty mood since the glitter incident. I got the sense that the Minuets’ sabotage had gouged a deep wound into his pride.
“They’re not bad,” I said. “The movies, I mean.”
“Not to nitpick,” Mama sniffed, shutting his laptop, “but their group only sounds good after they augment the bass. That’s essentially a coed sound.”
Isaac chuckled. “Aaand there’s the verdict from the pretentious peanut gallery.”
I thought for a second. My words kept falling apart before they reached the front of my mouth. “But—I mean—” I took a deep breath. “The Precautionary Measures are really good, though.”
Isaac nodded, spinning the lid of the mason jar around his thumb. “No, definitely, they’re great musicians. But believe me, they’re not winning this thing.” He shrugged. “Girls’ groups have a reputation.”
“What reputation?”
Isaac went back to his matches, picking around the words carefully. “Some people would say, um, that they don’t really . . . it’s a vibe thing. If we’re looking at musicality, the Precautionary Measures are obviously better than the Minuets. But the Minuets sell it. There’s comedy, you know?”
Drop it, warned a little voice. Let it go. But I couldn’t. “Why can’t girls’ groups have comedy?” I blurted out. Jon Cox, Mama, and Isaac looked at me with confusion, obviously baffled about why I was fighting them on this. Nihal had stopped sketching.
“Guys’ a cappella is just funny,” Jon Cox said blankly. “A bunch of music nerds jamming out pretending to be instruments.”
“To be fair,” Nihal said, his voice a quiet reassurance, “that is the same thing that girls’ groups do.”
Mama waved his hand. “I think we’re all kind of missing the point. Again, let’s look at the music.” He pointed at me and Nihal. “You two sing up to what, an F5?”
I glanced at Nihal. “I can kind of get a high E out,” I said reluctantly.
“G-ish on the better days,” Nihal said.
“Well, yeah, then,” Mama said.
“Well, yeah, what?” I said.
Mama shrugged. “Even girls’ groups hardly ever write parts that sit on a high F.”
With a snip of the scissors, Isaac finished guillotining the last of the matches. “The Measures obviously have ranges above that,” he added. “I think a couple of them have the F an octave up, which is wild.”
“Well, yes,” Mama said patiently. “But nobody’s ever going to arrange anything up there for more than about two seconds. Having bass gets you a hundred times more mileage than being able to sing notes from, like, Die Zauberflöte.”
Jon Cox grinned. “Here’s a fun game. Try to make Mama go a full conversation without name-dropping Baroque music.”
“Oh my God,” Mama said. “Die Zauberflöte is Classical Era; I’m embarrassed to know you.”
“Really digging yourself deeper here, Theodore,” Nihal said.
Jon Cox raised his hands. “Yeah, sorry my parents aren’t music professors.”
They kept bantering. I stayed quiet. Discomfort had settled like a bed of needles beneath my skin. My teeth were clamped tight together to keep the words in. I almost wanted to go to the Precautionary Measures right now and vent to them, but I sat there, wondering. Were the Sharps right? They knew more about music than I did—was my reaction a knee-jerk denial that girls’ groups were necessarily worse than guys’? It was true that all the songs we covered were bass-heavy, from recent thudding pop songs all the way back to the jazz standards from the thirties, whose double bass plucked along beneath flaring horn sections. Obviously, girls’ groups had a different sound quality.
How could it be objectively worse, though? Plenty of songs in the coed and all-guys’ concerts were missing something, too, not innovative enough to hook an audience in either. That seemed like the real battle—making each song engaging moment to moment. Not something as indefinable as “vibe.”
It just didn’t feel right. Music aside, didn’t they hear what they sounded like, with all the vague talk about comedy? It smacked of the same old argument that “girls aren’t funny,” as if all girls had one specific sense of humor and the Powers that Be had decided along the line that it missed the mark.
I didn’t want to fight the guys on it. All I wanted was for them to think a little bigger. For the first time, sitting among them, I felt inadequate, struggling to reach some tier they’d put themselves on. This was supposed to be the place where I was finally good enough.
I felt eyes on me. I glanced over at Nihal, who gave me a resigned-looking shrug and went back to his sketchbook.
Before rehearsal, the guys asked me to pull “After All” from the archives—a classic Sharps song, originally by sad indie boy Hendrix Bird. Since I didn’t know where the archives were, Nihal led the way. We wound down into the practice room where I’d done my callback, opened a filing cabinet, and started rummaging.
Nihal’s careful hands drew out two bursting manila folders. He shouldered the filing cabinet shut and placed the folders gently on the piano lid. “Here we go. The esteemed Sharpshooter Archives. You check this one.” He angled a folder my way.
“Not alphabetical?”
Nihal’s lips quivered, making his beard twitch. He didn’t bother answering.
I opened one of the folders and flipped through the clutter of arrangements. “God, there’s so much.”
“Mmhmm.” Nihal licked his thumb and started paging through the arrangements with a caution that verged on tenderness. “There’s twelve years’ worth of music in here. Everything after they stopped teaching by ear and before they started arranging digitally.”
As my fingers flipped aging pages, rivers of handwritten notes splashed across yellowing staff paper, a glimpse of memory folded against my vision. Last year, Mr. Rollins had asked me and Michael to alphabetize his cabinet of audition sides, its drawers crammed with photocopied excerpts from A Streetcar Named Desire and The Aliens and Much Ado About Nothing. I remembered sitting on the floor cross-legged in this sort of quiet. Easy and natural.
Nihal asked, “Do you have friends in the Precautionary Measures?”
“Why?”
“You seemed a bit—” He made a strained face. “—earlier.”
I kept my tone casual. “It’s nothing. I just didn’t think the guys were the type to throw shade.”
Nihal hummed his usual little chuckle. “They probably didn’t even realize they were,” he said. “Isaac, Jon Cox, and Theodore are delightful people who tend to get so far up their own asses they lose sight of daylight.”
I laughed, but my smile faded fast. I was doing exactly what I’d said I wouldn’t do. Random afternoon car rides with the Sharps, long conversations, feeling betrayed by opinions that distanced me from them—this was too much.
But I didn’t want to pull back. It was hard to miss isolation.
“Hey,” I said quietly. “Do you have a lot of friends in the Visual Arts school?”
Nihal’s hands faltered. “Why?”
“No reason.”
Nihal glanced at me. He had the kindest eyes, hazelnut brown, tapered at the edges as if in a permanent smile.
“No, really, it’s nothing,” I said. “The Sharps are so—” I broke off, shrugging. “Everyone’s so tight.”
“Yeah, and?”
“And what if I’m not like you guys?” The words fell out before I could stop them. I backtracked. “I mean, what if I don’t . . . fit?”
Nihal looked at me curiously for a second and said, “Julian, last year we only had two rooks: me and Jon Cox.” He raised his eyebrows. “Jon Cox, the most archetypical Kensington kid in the history of Kensington kids. And then me.”
He went back to paging through the music, still unhurried, serene. “I worried about what it’d be like in the Sharps. If I’d get staring, or weird questions, or the feeling that . . .” He switched folders. “But it wasn’t like that.”
“Why?” I said.
“I suppose it’s the work, right? It has to be.” He shrugged. “You can be weird. You can be a frickin’ furry, for all the guys care. We’re just trying to make something.”
I looked back down at the folders. Weird, sure. But would they be as forgiving of a girl? Someone who broke their circle of brotherhood, or all-male back-patting, or whatever it was at heart?
“Thanks, man,” I mumbled, nearing the middle of the folder.
“Sure.”
“Also, why do you call Mama Theodore?” I asked.
“Because he asked me to.”
“Oh.”
“Found it,” he said, plucking a stapled piece of music from his folder.
The archives went back in the cabinet, and Nihal shut off the lights when we left.
“—But it was just one kiss. She won’t make it a big thing. Right?”
“I don’t know, Jenna,” I said, lying back on my bed, wrapped in a towel. “I feel like if you kissed her, it’s your job to make it ‘not a big thing.’”
“Yeah, well. She kissed me back.” I heard cars rush by in the background. Jenna was the only one of my friends from home who actually called, instead of texting or Snapping, and she only ever called when she was walking home from school. People were slightly less likely to say shit to you on the street if you were on the phone, and Jenna had it rough with catcallers. You could see the girl’s curves from three blocks away no matter how shapeless her outfit was.
“Still,” I said. “You kissed her first, right?”
“I guess . . .”
Something unsaid lurked in the pause. I grinned. “You liiike her, don’t you?”
Jenna let out a jumbled stream of embarrassed-sounding consonants. “Forget it! Whatever. I’ll figure it out.” A car horn beeped in the background, a male voice yelled something indistinguishable, and Jenna’s yell came through, muffled: “Grow up!”
I smiled. “Okay, well, keep me in the loop.”
“Are you sick?” she asked.
“What?”
“Your voice sounds kind of weird.”
I cleared my throat, lifting my voice. “Oh, yeah, I’m kind of getting over a cold.” I had to be more careful—I kept slipping, speaking in Julian’s voice during classes by mistake.
“Aw, okay, get some rest,” Jenna said. “Talk later?”
“Later.”
“Love you!” she sang, and hung up.
<
br /> I rolled off my bed, adjusting my towel. These days, I’d been showering infrequently enough to disgust even myself. A bit of a journey separated my room and the bathrooms, and where I was going, my wig could not follow. That chamber of pure humidity would have made it soggy and sad for the rest of its lifespan. Burgess’s floor plan didn’t exactly help, with its seemingly random map of twists and turns. You never knew who was waiting around the corner, waiting to discover you wigless.
Shower caddy swinging from my right hand, I cracked my door and peered out.
All clear. I dashed forward, flip-flops clapping between the teal carpet and my heels. I stopped at the corner, peered around it to make sure the next stretch was clear, and accelerated back into a run. The decorations on doors flapped in my wake.
I slowed at the water fountain, tight grip on my caddy. One last turn.
As I peered around the final corner, Katie Woods shouldered through the bathroom door, looking down at her phone. I whipped out of sight. She was heading right for me. There was no time to make it down the hall—I only had seconds.
My eyes lit on the door labeled TRASH to my left. I barged in. My momentum brought me crashing into the unforgiving edge of the wooden trash container, which held a heaping tower of knotted white bags. I lost my balance, my arm flew up, and my caddy sailed into the infinite depths of trash mountain.
The door clicked shut behind me. As I breathed in, the foulest of stenches washed through my nostrils, so strong I tasted it. I gagged. What the fuck? What were people putting in their trash-cans, sacks of rotting produce? Literal feces?
Trying not to breathe, I extracted my caddy, which had landed between two bags, one seeping a horrible liquid. My shampoo had escaped, sliding all the way to the back, near the wall. I reached up with both hands, one for levering bags out of the way and the other for shampoo retrieval, which meant dropping my towel, and that was how I found myself naked in the trash closet digging through the garbage like a sad hairless raccoon.
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