The day of the competition, the sun hung low and blinding, turning buildings to ice sculptures and the stamped-down plains of snow into sheet silver. The talk in McKnight over lunch—the last school meal of the semester—was ferocious, and the glares the other groups gave me and Isaac when we walked through the Arlington doors were merciless. I’d taken concealer and foundation to my face in thick swipes this morning, covering up the creatively colored bruises that made me look like a badly conceived Jackson Pollock knockoff.
Kensington was, I decided, the worst place on earth to host any sort of competition. I expected bloodshed after the winners’ announcement.
“Even if Nihal told Trav, he won’t bring it up,” Isaac muttered as we headed toward the greenroom, where warm-up sounds issued beneath the door, muffled cascades of lip trills and humming. “He’s not going to throw the competition by dropping a bombshell.”
“Fingers crossed,” I muttered back. I pushed into the greenroom.
I instantly knew that Isaac was right. Trav’s eyes brushed over me as if I weren’t there.
Had Nihal told him?
I couldn’t look at Nihal, but I felt him standing against the wall, shoulders folded in, guard up. Our awareness of each other radiated across the room, so cold with shame, I couldn’t believe the guys didn’t feel the chill.
After our warm-up, during sound check, I caught sight of Connor Caskey. He wore an unconcerned smirk, as if absolutely nothing of interest had happened in the last twenty-four hours, as if Trav hadn’t destroyed their prized possession. The other Minuets weren’t so restrained. They shot us looks that were so furious they crossed the line into being sort of comical.
We retreated to the greenroom. Soon enough, the other groups poured in alongside us to wait. We huddled up in separate corners, trading narrowed looks. As six o’clock approached, the distant whisper of the approaching crowd turned into a murmur, then into a colony’s buzz of voice. Every seat in that hall would be full.
The stage manager called us out, and we filed backstage. Nobody spoke. We straightened ties, sipped water, set down water bottles, cleared throats, and adjusted cuffs. Our sound tech guys finally dropped Official Sound Guy Face, offering us a pair of smiles and a “break a leg.” We waited as the lights faded and the sounds of the crowd died.
In the darkness, I curled my toes up in the ends of my uncomfortable shoes. I flexed my fingers around the barrel of my mic. The boiling water in my stomach bubbled up and up.
We walked out in the darkness, curved into formation, and the quiet buzz of the pitch pipe rang to my right. I imagined my note, a fifth above, and cupped it in my throat, waiting.
The lights blasted on.
I made them out in the front row—a row of silhouettes with vaguely famous hairstyles. Aural Fixation. Three months ago, I’d stood alone in this exact spot, scanning seven different silhouettes. Are you nervous? Isaac had asked.
I wasn’t nervous anymore, even with the waiting silence of a thousand people forming a thick bubble ahead. So many darkened faces in that crowd, and all I felt was impatience.
The eight of us drew breath together, lifted mics to our lips, and Erik spat the beat into life. We sang.
The familiar notes vibrated up from my chest, instinct guiding my motions. Out in the audience, one by one, the people evaporated. The distant back curves of the auditorium folded away. The spotlights became an indistinct flood, and all I could feel was the soaring pop of the tenor lines as they spun out from my lips, and the slight tremor in the back of my calf as I fell into line with the guys.
“And you asked, ‘When you gonna tell the truth?’ and I said, ‘Never.’”
Nihal and I brushed shoulders, and my stage smile felt, all of a sudden, stretched too far. A flash of panic veiled my vision, and I snuck a deep breath between phrases.
The end of the first song approached fast, the stream-of-consciousness whirl of performance stealing time from me. I pivoted into our next formation, standing by Marcus’s shoulder as he’s picked up the solo. His gingery eyelashes glinted bronze when he squeezed his eyes shut. Every ounce of his awkward energy was let loose, his voice bright and sweet, his hand clenched around his mic, pale in the stage light.
Marcus handed the solo to Isaac, whose assured tenor spun up into the stratosphere and back with perfect control. Behind him, we cut out and fell back into place, punctuated silence with bursts of sound, and he hardly seemed to breathe, holding everything together single-handedly.
Seven voices dropped out at once, leaving Isaac’s vibrato over voluminous silence. A cheer erupted from the crowd, the baritones slipped up into falsetto to back him, and Erik shifted into a slower beat, a steady thump-thump-thump. Chord by chord, we transitioned into the second song. Careful and measured as always. This whole discipline walked a tightrope—one flat note and everything unraveled. We had to glue ourselves together to make it through.
The others peeled back, allowing Jon Cox and me to go forward to the lip of the stage. Our voices locked together as we navigated a tight harmony.
“And your touch is heaven falling,
And your eyes say love is blind,
And your fingertips keep hauling
’Til the stars are realigned . . .”
Every time I changed expression, every time I hinted at a smile, pressure clamped over the edges of my eye sockets. My face was stiff and painful, my nose felt eight sizes too wide, and under the heat of the lights, I worried I was sweating away the foundation. I tilted my head up too far, trying not to think, and the center spotlights gazed like two white eyes into mine. In a flash of blindness, I closed my eyes and let the echoes of light pulse against the backs of my eyelids. My voice soared high. As I drew breath, feet shifted behind me, whispers of dress shoe to stage that were masked by thick harmonies. Pops of falsetto startled out of the melody; the deep, swinging pendulum of bass kept our time.
My eyes cracked open again. The world solidified, and Jon Cox and I navigated the solo toward its end.
“I fall into bed with my hands turning blue,
And my aching head
Is full of you.”
The background textures faded as Jon Cox and I backed up into our cluster, Mama’s chest to my back, Erik’s shoulder reassuring against my arm. A second’s silence sewed us together before Nihal stepped forward, bursting the seams.
I didn’t want to focus on his voice, but when Nihal sang, I heard the personal care of my dad singing me a lullaby when I was younger. The words pierced too close, this time through.
“So I asked the clockmaker
How much it would break her,
Her cogs and bells and wooden ledges,
Her painted face and gilded edges,
To turn back the dial To turn back the dial
For a while.”
The song rose and fell like a tide, and the sound turned wispy and sparse. Trav had abandoned his fancy cutouts and creative chord shifts for this transition. He didn’t need them here, cluttering up the thread of melody.
We settled into a staggered formation, four and four, as Erik dropped the percussion into a slow hiss and scrape, like the hush of a steel brush against a cymbal. I looked between the window of Isaac and Nihal’s shoulders, and I wanted to reach out to them, all of a sudden, take them and hold on, dig in my nails.
Then they shifted, and the last thoughts—the last regrets—fled my mind.
The last song arrived in unison: E major, “Halloween.” We sang with tightly closed lips, humming syllables, so that I could practically hear the piano hammers striking. My freshman year song. Trav took up the solo, and his tentative delivery knocked me into remembrance, back to the start of Kensington, back to the beginning of everything, back to this: the twisted A of Arthur’s Arch and the crows casting sharp-winged shadows as the car pulls up the drive. There I am in the back. I’m peering out of the windows up at the dappled stone, awestruck.
“A couple of weeks ago, I tried to go back
Did I tell you this before?
Back to the, back to the, back to the place
Where yours was the second drawer.”
All over again, I’m sitting in my first day of class, when Reese tells us that if she hears one of us call her by her last name, she’ll walk out the door and we’ll just have to wait, useless, for the time to run out. I’m walking out of my first audition, exhilarated, nerves jangling, and leaning against the stone wall. I can smell the autumn air baking above Palmer’s stone steps.
“I stood in the threshold,
And all of the cobwebs,
Glimmering dusty and bright,
Reminded me of the gossamer-fine
Silences we’d always tie around each other at night.”
I’m staying up late one night freshman year, having a talk with Lydia that lasts until my throat hurts, wandering through every topic that matters, faith, fear, and hope, and somehow I can’t remember a single word of it a year later; I’m on a walk in the spring of my sophomore year, one of the first beautiful days that’ll drag us kicking out of the cold, just me and the countryside and that massive sky sending breezes and sunlight down in patches; I’m all over this town, and in the winters it eats up my footprints with fresh snow until nothing’s left.
“And it still smells like Halloween,
And the way things used to be.
Will someone take ahold of me
And promise there’s something inside me
I might want to be?”
I’m leaning over Carrie’s counter, trying to pull Michael back at the shoulder as he waves vigorously, parlando Italiano, into her gut laughter, clearing the air with it; I’m holding him by the elbows on the Palmer stage, his mouth on my neck, our legs twined, my ankles resting heavy on his calves; I’m heart-swollen at his graduation. I’m standing opposite him in my kitchen in San Francisco as he tells me there’s been someone for months. There’s been Alaina for months.
“A couple of years from now,
I’ll stop looking back,
At least, that’s what they’ve all implied
Back to the, back to the, back to the time
I let you come and curl up inside.”
I’m in that kitchen for an eternity, imagining every time over those three months that I looked into his eyes and thought he was mine, only mine; then time’s jolting onward and I’m drowning in summertime, feeling naïve and small and lost; I’m moving into Burgess alone and pinning posters to my walls alone; I’m scratching notes in black pen onto yellow college-ruled paper alone; I’m shearing off my hair and a great weight is falling from me; I am singing him away, back into my history; I am kissing someone else in a tower that pierces the sky and feeling something new; I am letting him go, I am letting him go, I am letting him go in all these tiny ways.
“I’ll find in a city,
Some gray, thirsty block
A lightning-rod building that soars:
Acquiring sky, and reaching so high,
I’ll leave those memories all the way down at the doors.”
I have all of this to keep. Two and a half years of calls home, of bundling up against the weather, of soupy morning mists and fresh fruit every night, running lines until I know them more intimately than my own name, trying to clear my head, hoping for a nod of approval from Reese Garrison, sneaking into an abandoned cinema, sipping smooth whiskey in a field under the stars, brushing Isaac’s hand in the dark, relaxing into my armchair in the Crow’s Nest. It all clings to my ankles, it drags me back. It’s mine.
“And it’ll smell like Christmas trees,
The scent of something new and clean
But in all of my realities,
I’ll never forget I’ll never forget what I’ve seen.”
There is no moment of calm before the surge of the cheering, just the audience’s roar, eating up the last shreds of sound, two thousand beating hands, a thousand voices giving themselves back in appreciation.