“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 version 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.”
“Right,” I said. “In this space, specifically. Because there isn’t an entire campus’s worth of space just on the other side of those steps.”
“Right,” he agreed, and flashed a brilliant smile. I narrowed my eyes at his perfect teeth.
Lydia and I stood in deadlocked silence across from Tall and Taller. For a minute, I was determined to stand there until the natural world eroded me to dust, but then my eyes fell to the other Minuets’ hopeful faces, and guilt crept into me. Maybe Tall and Taller weren’t the nicest human beings, but these other kids just wanted to get on with rehearsal. There were more campus spaces for two people than sixteen, and anyway, at this point, it seemed like the options were to back down or waste another half-hour testing out new ways to explain the words “go away.”
I sighed and relented. “Come on, Lydia. Let’s find somewhere else.”
There was a smugness to the way Taller said “Thanks” that made it sound distinctly like “I win.” Although, to be fair, his entire persona oozed “I win.” This kid was really leaning into the Kensington type. When people heard “Kensington-Blaine,” they envisioned an alarmingly specific person: He was a third-generation legacy from New England with great bone structure; he was a he, because the school hadn’t gone coed until 1985; he was white, with a name like Oliver or Henry or Phineus; and his trust fund was roughly the size of Iceland’s GDP. With Kensington’s aggressive diversity initiatives, though, the type was transforming, blurring out of boxes and categories by the year. They were a diminishing breed, the Olivers, Henries, and Phineuses (Phinei?).
As Lydia and I climbed out of the amphitheater, her hand was tight over the navy tote bag that hung on her shoulder, and I plucked hard at the patches of wear in my jeans. With every step, I got angrier at myself for backing down. Why did it always end up like this? Why was I always the one to cave? Why did I feel guilty that we’d stood up for ourselves, even temporarily?
I tried not to hate the dark-haired boy down the steps, because anger didn’t do anything, and besides, if I let myself hate him, it wouldn’t entirely be for the way he’d acted. It would be for selfish reasons. All my failings were his successes: He could ask for what he wanted without feeling like an inconvenience. He could be totally sure of his own importance, not second-guessing a word out of his own mouth. That kid was handsome and rich and had a voice I remembered, a soaring tenor that was everything it should be. It’s too simple to hate the people who have doorways where you have walls.
That night, in my room, I scrolled through the flood of back-to-school audition advertisements. The e-mails had slowed to a trickle and finally stopped over the weekend, and I’d been glad at the time, but now I imagined turning back the clock and trying for any of these, instead of throwing away my chance on the musical. I could have run sound or lights for one of the senior capstone projects. I could have auditioned for Trazba, an experimental two-person play inspired by 1950s science-fiction films, in which one of the people is pregnant and the other person plays the fetus, because I guess every other idea for a play was already taken.
The e-mail system refreshed, and the thin stripe of a new e-mail appeared at the top. The subject line read, “Audition Call.” My heart leapt, my mind yelled, FATE! and my finger stabbed the clickpad.
The message loaded. My excitement died. A cappella again.
In a black-and-white photo, eight boys in sport coats and ties sprawled in bored-looking positions on the steps to the Arlington Hall of Music. Stone lions flanked the steps, prowling on the columns that guarded Arlington, carved muscle rippling beneath their alabaster skin. Calligraphy font across the photo read The Sharpshooters, and beneath, the audition notice said:
ONE SPOT HAS OPENED IN THE SHARPSHOOTERS, KENSINGTON-BLAINE’S PREMIER ALL-MALE A CAPPELLA OCTET. WE INVITE TENOR 1S OF ANY YEAR TO SIGN UP FOR AN AUDITION SLOT USING THE FORM BELOW.
Below that, they had an honest-to-God coat of arms, which displayed a pair of crows peeking around a quartered shield. Each crow carried a corner of a banner in its beak, stretching the cloth out to display VERBIS DEFECTIS MUSICA INCIPIT. I forced back the urge to laugh.
To be fair, the Sharps had been around since the 1930s, so the crest and the Latin hadn’t been these guys’ idea. Besides, with the way the school treated them—basically, with the type of reverence usually reserved for religious figures—how could we expect them not to have egos the size of your average planet?
Something about the Sharps made people lose their minds. The all-girls’ group, the Precautionary Measures, packed Arlington Hall for their concerts, but for some reason it wasn’t quite the same. Our whole student body—girls and guys alike—fawned over the Sharps; they were a blank canvas that people could write their dreams onto, a blend between boy-band obsession and artistic admiration. Even Michael had harbored a secret dream of joining the Sharps up until graduation, not that he’d ever had time to audition.
Maybe that was why the Minuets were so unpleasant. An inferiority complex. The thought pleased me a little more than it should have.
I scrolled back up and paused over the photo. The Sharps looked nothing alike, but something about them was identical. The crisp lines of their jackets, maybe, or the loose way they held their heads and hands and bodies. Or maybe just their expressions, which wore the thoughtless confidence that came with practice.
I would’ve bet all my worldly possessions that the Sharps would win that December competition, and just like that, they’d have a shot at fame. The envy in my mouth tasted hot and bitter. Liquid gold.
Then my eyes fell to the audition notice, to the words TENOR 1, and my hands went flat on the keyboard as an idea hit me like a thunderbolt. An idiotic, impossible idea.
“Your range,” echoed Reese’s voice, as I straightened in my seat. “It’s just so deep.”
It could never work. Of course not.
Could it?
The feeling of failure still itched across my skin, a brand I was desperate to claw away. How hard will you work to get what you want? demanded Reese’s voice. I remembered that kid from this afternoon sneering at me, and now, eight impassive faces stared out from this audition notice, daring me, questioning if I had what it took: Could I be a Sharpshooter? Could I be hyper-confident, hyper-competent, all my self-consciousness forgotten?
For the sliver of a chance of performing across the sea, maybe I could.
This competition was three months out. Find my way into the Sharpshooters, stay under the radar for ninety measly days, make damn sure we won, and there was the springboard to my future. An international tour would be a shining star on my college apps—something not every other overachieving arts kid would have. It was downright depressing, the lengths it took to feel special when you wrote yourself out on paper. All As? Who cared? That was the standard here. Some shows, some activities? Big deal. How were you changing the world?
Sometimes, when I wasn’t too busy, I wondered why we had to change the world so early.
I went for my wardrobe and yanked it open, eyeing myself in the full-length mirror. From my dresser, I grabbed a tissue and rubbed off my purple lipstick, my eyeliner, my blush. Cheap chemical remover stung the air. Barefaced again, back to monochrome tan, I flipped my hair up the back of my skull and over my forehead, the fraying tips hanging above my eyes.
Everyone told me I looked like my dad. Never my mom, who had a delicate nose and chin. I had Dad’s prominent features and his stubborn mouth. But I’d inherited Mom’s height, plus a spare inch that had come from God knows where. “American food,” she’d said, shaking her head, when I’d growth-spurted past her at age fifteen.
I released my hair. As it fell halfway down my waist, I remembered the endless row of wigs in the costume shop. I could even picture the one I wanted—short, shaggy, black. We were supposed to sign them out, and for only three days at a time, but if anyone ever confronted me, I could say I’d forgotten . . . innocent mistake, right?
I worked my dresser’s top drawer, gummy with age, out of its slot and rummaged around for the finishing touch—a blunt-tipped pencil, worn down by use. I started filling in my eyebrows, shading the ends out with the tip, making my brows thick and serious.
I gathered my hair up and postured in the mirror, hooking one hand into the pockets of my jeans. Legs swiveled to shoulder-width apart. Tilting my head, I stuck my chin out.
“Hey,” I said to myself, and again, deeper. “Hey. What’s up?”
I was unrecognizable.
For the first time since Monday, I didn’t hate the sound of my voice. I couldn’t fix it, but I could use it. I’d solved the unsolvable problem, kept my answer and rewritten the question.
Two knocks came on my door, and I flinched. In the mirror, my shoulders buckled in. I shrank two sizes.
“Hey, lights out,” called our prefect, Anabel, from beyond the door. Heart pattering, I flicked the switch, but my desk lamp still shed a remnant of buttery light. As I turned back toward the mirror in the dark, lifted my hair back up, and pulled my guy-stance back on, limb by cautious limb, I felt free and empty and new.
This had the potential to be the most embarrassing stunt in Kensington history, but I had nothing to lose except my dignity, and I’d lost so much of that in June, the prospect hardly fazed me. Besides, theater was all about risk. Risk wasn’t scary. Insignificance was terrifying.
The light drew streaks down the thick lines of my arms. I rubbed one elbow, my throat tight. Michael Jordan, they’d taunted me every other day in middle school—not so much the girls as the boys. Incredible Hulk. Hey, Jordan, can you sell me some steroids? Whatever you’re on, I want some. Early growth spurts and a thick frame had gotten me so much shit back then. I’d come out of middle school thinking, that was it, I was done caring what anyone thought.
Of course, if I didn’t care, I wouldn’t still be trying to prove myself, would I?
I wouldn’t still want to win.