The rest of the competition, from the other groups’ performances to the judges’ deliberation, took about thirty years. My heart was pattering like a rabbit’s by the end. Carnelian’s arrangements had been so complex that I couldn’t imagine what they looked like on a page, the Precautionary Measures had a set of soloists who could easily have outsung half the artists on the radio, and the Minuets may have been terrible people, but their performance, like all the best performances, made me want to sing.
Finally, the nine members of Aural Fixation took the stage to raucous applause. The other groups, also huddled back here in darkened masses of suits and dresses, fell silent. I edged closer to the curtain. I couldn’t see who had taken the microphone, but I assumed it was that tenor, Watson, with the cult following.
After the applause cleared away, Watson said, “First of all, wow. Thanks for inviting us into this beautiful space. It’s really an honor to visit the place that helped make our newest members into such remarkable talents.” A few hands waved from the front of their group, the Kensington alums, pandering to the crowd.
Polite applause. Watson continued, “These six groups have made our decision incredibly difficult. Please, another round of applause for the hard work everyone’s put in.”
The audience obliged with a short, impatient burst of clapping.
“With no further ado,” he said, “we’d like to announce that the group to accompany us on our winter tour will be the Sharpshooters.”
The crowd erupted. The guys and I burst into excitement. “Yes, yes, yes,” Isaac was yelling, all but lost in the applause. Jon Cox jumped onto Mama’s back, and Mama stabbed his fist into the air. Trav looked like he’d been clocked in the forehead with something heavy, his eyes blankly searching the darkness of the house, and I imagined his parents sitting out there in the crowd, swept away in everybody’s appreciation for Trav’s work.
Onstage, Aural Fixation waved us out. We ran between the curtains. Everything was bright and delirious and unreal. And then, as we came up to them to shake hands, to accept our recognition, I froze. Shock struck the smile from my face.
They’d parted. At the front of the group stood the alumni, and among them—right there, like a bad dream—stood Michael.
Michael, eyes like obsidian, copper skin burnished by stage light. Michael, tall and handsome, still himself.
My feet reacted before my thoughts, carrying me back in a rush. I made it offstage just as Watson started talking again, but the other Sharps were looking after me, and Michael hadn’t stopped staring. I dashed for the greenroom. A hand—Victoria’s hand, small and strong—caught my arm. “Hey. Are you okay?”
“Stage fright,” I managed, which wasn’t technically a lie. I darted into the greenroom, around the L-shaped room’s corner, and burst through a back door, which led me into a stairwell. My fingers clamped around the iron railing, and I levered myself to the steps, a haze settling around me, an insulating shroud of panic.
Why was he here? How could he be here like this, sprung on me like a bear trap? How couldn’t I have known?
I’d imagined him in college classes, in fancy lecture halls. Or waiting tables, maybe, going to rehearsals at night in New York City or Chicago, walking fast with his coat collar up in a pair of stiff corners, his head down and hands in his pockets. Tiny in the biggest of cities. And now he was fifty steps from me. His knobbly knuckles that he cracked absentmindedly, and the blueberry smell of his aftershave, right there. The memory of him darted across my skin like referred pain.
The call during the retreat, I realized. If I’d picked up, I would have known. This must have been what he was calling about. Maybe he’d wanted to see me when he came back to campus.
And now this. We’d won. I was days from getting on a plane to Europe, days from seeing city after city that I might never see otherwise. I’d gotten all the way to the end, even as my lifelines slipped away, the guys starting to figure it out one by one.
It didn’t matter. He was here now, and he knew, and that was it. I’d run out of second chances.
I shivered. This stairwell bottomed out in an exit, and cold leaked up toward me. I stood. I would grab my coat from the greenroom, run out, and that would be the last of it.
I grabbed the greenroom doorknob, slipped in, and collided with a suit-jacketed torso. Nihal reeled back from me as if burned.
The L-shaped room had filled to the brim.
Heads turned in a unanimous wave. Attention trapped me in the threshold. Aural Fixation and the Sharps stood opposite, and—God, why?—Dr. Graves and Dr. Caskey had appeared beside the television monitor in the corner, near the door to the stage. Dr. Graves looked like it was physically paining him to stand so close to Dr. Caskey. Connor stood at his dad’s shoulder, the button of his sport coat undone, fiddling with his red tie.
I held Isaac’s eyes, the only point of reassurance in the mass of men and boys.
“Are you okay?” Marcus blurted. “What’s going on?”
There was no use trying to deflect it. I stayed silent.
Michael cleared his throat. “We know each other,” he said. “She’s my ex-girlfriend.”
Eyebrows rose. A long moment of disbelieving silence followed.
“Wh-what?” Trav said, his voice a rasp of shock. He peered at me as if I were a bright light.
“Yeah, I’m a girl. I’m just . . .”
“Acting,” said Mama, sounding weak.
Dr. Caskey’s gimlet eyes bulged. A few of the Aural Fixation guys shifted, like they would rather have been anywhere else. Dr. Graves’s gash of a mouth was slightly open, and I wondered if he was reconsidering the whole man up suggestion.
The stares became too much. My eyes found my feet, and I studied the hard, shining lines of my shoes.
“For real, Jordan, what on earth?” said Michael’s voice. The words shrank me. I got the distinct feeling that I’d had a clairvoyant nightmare about this situation.
“Wait, your name’s not even Julian?” Jon Cox said. “Are you also secretly a swarm of bees wearing human skin?”
“Stop it,” Isaac said.
The Sharps turned to him. Disbelief slackened Jon Cox’s face. “You knew?”
“Yeah, but guys, this doesn’t change anything.” Isaac’s voice strengthened. “Nothing’s different, all right? We still won. We’re still—it doesn’t matter.”
Dr. Caskey let out an incredulous laugh. “All right, excuse me,” he said with icy precision. “It matters, Mr. Nakahara, because your group is an historic all-male society intrinsic to the culture of the academy. An unchanging part of the landscape of student life since 1937.”
Isaac lifted his chin, defiant, new president clashing against the old. “Okay, sure, but what does that mean without the rhetoric? What’s the actual reason Jordan can’t sing with us? So she’s a girl. So what? She’s got the tenor range. She worked just as hard as the rest of us.”
He shot an urgent glance at the guys for backup.
Trav cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. “True.” Marcus nodded along at his shoulder.
Jon Cox and Erik shrugged simultaneously, still looking baffled. “Well, yeah,” Mama said, “but technically she has a contralto range, not a tenor.”
I could barely look at the seven of them. Gratitude drew my throat tight. I hoped they could read it on my face, because if I opened my mouth I thought I might be sick. Was there a chance this could still happen?
To my side, Nihal stayed quiet.
The Aural Fixation guys were murmuring. Michael was bowed into the pack. I felt disconnected from the sight of him, from the knobby crown of his head down to the neon laces of his sneakers. The shock of his appearance had worn off. Now it just felt strange not to want him.
Eventually, Watson cleared his throat. “Yeah, we don’t mind if you guys are coed. The main thing is that it’s weird to tour with sixteen guys and one teenage girl, but we have ladies on crew, so it might be all right, depending on whether your parents—”
Dr. Graves cleared his throat. “Hang on.” He sounded a bit dazed. “Let’s talk through some steps. You just—you can’t do this as the group exists currently. For this tour, this . . . young lady . . . needs to be accounted for under her real name, for liability reasons among others. For her to travel as part of the group, she needs to be formally registered with the group. And for her to be allowed in, you need to get a recategorization petition from Student Life, to change the status of the organization.”
“We can do that,” Isaac said. “All the offices are open until the seventeenth, right? We’re not supposed to fly out for a couple days, so I’ll just stay and—”
Dr. Caskey shook his head, waving Isaac’s words away with a confident hand. “I hate to break it to you, gentlemen, but that switch is never going to happen. Your group has a lot of influential alumni who would be diametrically opposed. Risking their relationship with the academy over this?” He clicked his tongue and shook his head. “I doubt it, guys, I really doubt it. You’re not just going to need Dr. Graves’s signature; you’re going to need the dean’s, too, and I’m afraid I’m just not going to put my name to it.”
Resignation weighted my body. That was it, then. Dr. Caskey had the final say, and it was over.
Caskey finally looked to me. Something malicious was in his eyes. “Besides,” he said, “it wouldn’t be appropriate to reward this kind of behavior.”
The patronizing tone made my entire body heat up a degree. “What behavior?” I ground out, finally finding my voice.
“The Kensington motto: ‘Art through innovation, art through perseverance, and—” he raised one eyebrow,“—art through honesty. Music is nothing without honesty.”
Dr. Caskey looked around at the Sharps. His voice grew an edge. “This event has made you all representatives of Kensington to the public. This is an embarrassment.” He looked back at me. “And frankly, I’m not sure what’s more immature: the idea that you could conceivably manage an international tour under a pseudonym, or your unwillingness to accept responsibility for months of lying to your community.” His eyes narrowed. “I’ve never seen such a waste of a Kensington education.”
The sentence landed like a blow. I knew everyone felt it hitting me, because the room took on the absolute silence of held breath. In the vacuum, I tried to breathe, and tears needled my eyes. Dr. Caskey’s voice sounded like the one in the back of my mind, assuring me that I would never succeed. I was a waste. I was disposable. I was nothing.
Then a dry voice rang out to my left, clear and confident. “Actually,” Nihal said, “since she’s an acting student, I’d say this whole thing reflects pretty positively on what she’s learned.”
Chuckling broke the silence. I looked up. The Sharps were all glaring murder at Dr. Caskey, except Nihal, who was looking at me now. I met his brown eyes. One side of his mouth lifted, and I read the beginnings of forgiveness out of his expression.
Dr. Caskey’s voice strained. “I can guarantee disciplinary action on this. There’s a Board meeting at the turn of the year; I’ll ask them what they recommend.”
Dr. Graves finally broke out of his stupor. “No. That’s absurd,” he said flatly. “There’s been no technical rule-breaking in the slightest. In fact, if she were doing this as an independent study for a sociology class, I’m sure she’d be getting high grades.” He looked at me, exasperation in the grim lines of his face. “I’d be extremely surprised if you faced disciplinary action.”
“Well,” Dr. Caskey said, turning a glare on Graves, “that’s a matter of opinion. We’ll see.”
I found myself faintly smiling. Confidence coursed through me, dissolving my guilt, rolling a weight off my back. It was strange. In so many ways, I’d failed: I couldn’t tour. I would never graduate from Kensington. I had nothing on paper for these months of effort. But with the Sharps at my back, I felt a little invincible. I stood tall and clear-headed and myself, sensitive and strong, voice unhidden, a mix of everything masculine I’d stopped suppressing and everything feminine I would never let go of. This was finally me, the most perfect me I’d ever been.
“Well, I’m not sorry,” I said, because tomorrow afternoon I’d be on a plane to California, and this sad middle-aged man’s threats would never touch me. “I’m not going to pretend it was a mistake. I would do it again in a second.”
I took a breath. I let it go. I let it all go. “I changed for this. Didn’t you ever want something that much?”
Dr. Caskey looked like he’d tasted something sour. Beside him, Dr. Graves was examining me as if he’d never seen me before.
After a long silence, Dr. Caskey zipped up his coat. “I hope you all have a restful winter holiday,” he said, clipped. “I’ll be in touch.”
He strode for the door and disappeared. Connor hurried after him, his eyes stuck to his black dress shoes.
Nobody could meet my eyes. There was nothing left to do.
“I’ve got to go pack,” I said.
And I left.