I spent Friday afternoon on the Palmer stage practicing my audition piece, serenading the empty theater. With my chin drawn back toward my neck, I muted the brightness of my upper notes, adjusting my delivery to hit the sweet spot between scratchy and strong. I sang out the stress of the week until my throat felt raw.
On Saturday evening, I fixed on my wig and warmed up in my dorm, nervous froth bubbling in my stomach. Then I headed for West Campus.
The second I set foot outside Burgess, I became hyperaware of my posture, the way I usually kept my elbows tucked in and my strides short. That wasn’t masculine. Was it? I loosened up and tried to walk like a dude, at which point I discovered I had no clue how dudes are supposed to walk. It took me the entire journey to figure out a gait that didn’t look like a velociraptor pretending to be a West Side Story character.
The first time I passed someone, a girl who glanced up for a second from her phone, I nearly turned and sprinted toward Burgess. She said nothing. Once she passed, I unleashed a huge breath that I’d been holding for some reason, as if suffocation would make me look manlier. This happened four more times.
I jogged down a grassy incline into the music quad, toward Arlington Hall, an elegant sculpture of weathered brick and poured beige pillars. I pushed through the backstage entrance at the side of the building, stopped outside the stage door, and waited.
At 6:15, one of the Sharpshooters emerged. He was half a head shorter than me and slender. With his neatly organized ginger-blond hair and a pastel button-up, he wouldn’t have looked out of place in the children’s section of a J. Crew catalog.
“Are you Julian?” he said, and I choked back a nervous giggle. A deep bass voice had spilled out of the kid’s tiny body. It was like a Chihuahua opening its mouth and emitting a Rottweiler bark, or possibly the Darth Vader theme song.
I cleared my throat. “That’s me,” I said, pitching my voice down. I’d gotten used to pitching up in theater classes, both for projection’s sake and to sound more feminine. I could get used to the opposite.
J. Crew Junior eyed me a second longer than he needed to. My fight-or-flight instinct burst into life, beating its wings frantically against the inside of my skull. I saw the conversation play out in quick, horrible flashes. He was going to say, “Um . . . you’re a girl,” and I would laugh nervously and bleat, “Yep! Psychology project! Ha!” at which point I would sprint out of Arlington Hall and never again let myself see the light of day, because in what possible universe could I ever have thought this was a viable plan?
But no. He just glanced over my clothes with obvious distaste.
“What?” I said, looking down. This was my most masculine outfit: worn-out tan corduroys and a blue flannel. Had they expected me to rent a tux?
The kid shrugged, smoothing a lock of his hair back into place. “Nothing,” he said, meaningfully. “Come in.” He stood aside and held the door open.
Lightheaded with relief, I folded into the backstage darkness. J. Crew Junior swaggered ahead of me, out onstage, and down the steps, tan boat shoes squeaking. For somebody who had never set foot on a boat, I had seen about three thousand too many boat shoes.
I emerged onstage and white light struck me. Scars glared from the black slick of the stage: blemishes left by screws and sets, splinters torn up by spike tape, shreds of gray missed in repainting.
Arlington Hall could have eaten three of the Palmer Theater and still had space for dessert. The house was a yawning chasm stretching endlessly ahead, and the wings to the right and left felt a few days’ journey away. I felt very small and very naked, especially without makeup, which always reassured me onstage. It wasn’t so much the feeling of wearing it as the preperformance ritual of sponging on foundation, dusting on blush, the tracing and blending of lipstick, eyeliner, eyeshadow. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even left my dorm without it.
I peered into the first row as J. Crew Junior joined six other silhouettes. Suddenly, horribly, it occurred to me that all seven Sharpshooters could be like the kid from Wednesday. How would I survive three months of that? Was the competition worth the very real possibility of me spontaneously combusting?
Another silhouette sat off to the side, his face illuminated by an iPhone screen. I recognized the beaky nose and permanently downturned mouth, which belonged to Dr. Graves, one of the music teachers.
I planted my feet, tilted my head, and ignored the way the underside of the wig made my pinned-up hair itch. A picture came to me: the wig flopping off like a dead pigeon, mid-song, onto the stage. Hysterical laughter built up in my throat.
Paper rustled somewhere. My audition sheet, probably, with the batch of lies I’d typed into their form, from fake name to the matching fake e-mail account I’d made. “Julian Zhang?” said one of the silhouettes—not the bass kid, and not Dr. Graves, who was still frowning down at his phone. This guy had a bright, amused tenor.
I nodded. Julian Zhang was a cousin in Seattle.
The silhouette attached to the voice leaned forward, allowing the stage light to tinge his features. I recognized the guy instantly, the long, rumpled hair looped back into a bun, the serious eyebrows. This kid had sung Justine Gray’s “Slower Faster” in the Sharps’ last spring concert, a raw, crooning performance that had reduced about 60 percent of the audience to pools of sexual frustration.
“Welcome to auditions,” he said. “I’m Isaac Nakahara. I’m the president.”
“Of the United States?” said my mouth, without my permission. In the hideous silence that followed this total nonjoke, I wondered how much it would cost to hire someone to stand next to me with duct tape, ready to prevent these sorts of situations.
I started to apologize, but Isaac replied cheerfully, “Yep. Leader of the Free World.” He waved at the doors. “If Secret Service tackles you outside, that’s why. Because I, the president of the United States, am never safe from—”
“Isaac,” said an unimpressed voice beside him.
Isaac aimed a quick grin at whoever had said his name. “So, how’s it going, Julian?”
I deepened my voice and tried to look nonchalant. “Not bad. How about you guys?”
A couple of laughs came from the silhouettes. Some groaning and shifting. “It’s been a long-ass day,” Isaac said.
“Mister Nakahara,” said Dr. Graves to his phone, his permanent scowl deepening.
Isaac shot a careless glance over at him. “Sorry. A long gosh-darn day, by golly.”
The other Sharps snickered. Dr. Graves tore his eyes from his screen to give Isaac a withering stare, which Isaac responded to with a thumbs-up. Eventually, Graves shook his head and returned to his phone, and Isaac returned to me. “But yeah, we’ve been here since nine a.m.”
“God.”
“You’re the last one. Not to make you nervous.” He cracked a smile. “You nervous? I was like 90 percent nerves when I auditioned. I mean, I was a freshman, but I guess it never gets better, the auditioning thing.”
Somehow, his showy, joking patter was only making my nerves worse. I wished he would fold back into the dark, just let me sing and then get violently ill somewhere, probably. “I’ve had worse,” I lied.
“Good attitude.” Isaac leaned out of sight and addressed the others, a bit calmer. “He’s a Theater junior. Looks like we’ve got trumpet and choir in middle school, plus musical theater classes.”
A hazy sense of unreality sank over me. This boy, this actual human male, was talking about me like I was an actual human male. They were all buying this: the deeper voice, the wig, the too-small sports bra I’d used to strap back my already-flat chest under my baggy clothes. I hadn’t realized exactly how little I’d expected this to work until this second.
It was finally sinking in: This disguise looked convincing enough to turn me invisible. I was just some guy. Anonymous. Nobody. The world saw exactly what it wanted to see.
A different, deeper voice jerked me to attention. “Do you beat-box at all?” it said crisply.
“Uh,” I said. “No, I—”
“Any arranging experience?”
“Sorry. No.”
“Any background in music theory?” the voice demanded. It had slowly increased in volume, and the acoustics in Arlington were so crisp that it echoed from all around me. It was as if God were a baritone and had nothing better to do than lament my lack of musical experience.
I shook my head, praying the School of Music wasn’t filled with beatboxing and arranging experts. It seemed unlikely. Singers were a minority; the music kids were mostly instrumentalists. Pianists, flautists, guitarists. There were weirder music focuses, too. From the ones I’d met, I felt like every other Music kid had some focus with a name like Siberian Conducting Methods for Countertenor Rat-Choir.
“All right,” said Isaac’s voice. “Go ahead and—”
“Hang on,” interrupted Baritone God. “Do you need a starting note?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m good.”
“Are you pitch perfect?” he asked, sounding tense.
“I . . . don’t think so? What exactly—”
“Sing a middle C.” Baritone God leaned into sight. He was gaunt, with a shaved head and a pierced ear. Over his crisp button-up lay a tie in Kensington carnelian red, patterned with tiny black crows—our mascot. He looked as grave as if he were attending my funeral.
I picked a note and sang it. Baritone God drew a shiny disk from his pocket and blew into one of the apertures along the side. It whistled out a note a full third above the one I’d sung.
“Oh, well,” he said, looking disappointed. He flicked a hand and sank back out of sight.
“You done, Trav?” said Isaac, his voice smiling.
“Yeah, yeah,” muttered Trav.
“All right.” Isaac looked back up at me. “What are you going to sing?”
“I’m going to do ‘The Man for You’ by Season Sev—”
I cut myself off. Silence fell, absurd silence. I’d sung this song for two straight hours yesterday, and it somehow hadn’t occurred to me before this second—“The Man for You”?
“. . . Season Seven,” I finished, strangled.
“Cool,” Isaac said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
I breathed out the jitters. One breath, two, and then I was singing, and the tension in my body sank through my feet, forgotten.
“You came through like a hurricane,” I started, slow, steady. “You said you’d stay until the end of the rain. You never asked me where I come from, never asked me where I’ve been. I never asked you about home, or why you never let me in.”
I shifted my focus to the back wall, my head clean of everything but the basics: posture, breath support, loosening my tongue. “But you’re leaving town tomorrow, girl, now I’m feeling new,” I sang, shifting the last note around in a short run. One of the Sharps moved in his seat as I upped the volume. “I guess I never knew before, I never knew I needed you.”
I took a quick breath into the chorus, straightened my back, and belted: “And now I stop. Wait. Breathe a little, talk too late. You’re all I got, babe, and now I never want to hesitate. I’ll let you in now, I’m gonna show you how, so baby, kiss me ’til our time runs out.”
In the audience, Dr. Graves looked up from his phone.
My heart gave a panicked leap. I heightened the scratchy quality in my voice, disguising my high notes. “All I want to say is I’m the man for you, no doubt.” The notes cascaded down, down, and I ended near the bottom of my range.
The echo faded. Silence from the Sharps. Dr. Graves’s face, still tilted up toward me, was lit ominously from beneath by the white blur of his screen. Somewhere, a pen clicked.
Then Isaac said, “Thanks for swinging by. You’ll get an e-mail after dinner.”
I hurried offstage in a cold sweat.
At dinner, something jumpy and paranoid settled under the surface of my skin. Every time someone passed, I felt sure they were craning over my shoulder to stare at my face. But the nearest kids continued building a tepee out of their French fries, and not a single person gave me a second look, even ones I’d seen in class yesterday. Theater kids probably thought I was a film kid, and film kids probably thought I was a theater kid.
Kensington had two dining halls. Here on East Campus, the Film and Theater schools used McKnight Hall. On West Campus, the other three disciplines ate in Marden Cathedral, a hulking Gothic building that had been an active church until the fifties. Then they’d built the tiny, feather-gray chapel at the corner of town and converted the elegant cathedral into what had to be the fanciest cafeteria in the Western Hemisphere.
McKnight wasn’t hard on the eyes either. It felt like an experimental film set. Spindly wooden frameworks covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, mapping outlines of trees that sprawled across the glass. The walls leaned deep inward to prop up the raftered ceiling, a weird architectural choice made weirder by the paint job: dark floors and carnelian walls, to show some Kensington spirit, and also presumably to remind us vividly of blood while we chewed our questionable meatloaf.
Someone crossed close behind me. I got a whiff of lavender and stiffened—I would’ve recognized Lydia’s perfume anywhere. I angled my head directly down at my food, counted to ten, and snuck a glance upward. Her platinum hair bobbed into the distance.
Sitting out in the open was too risky. If I ever had to do this again, I would sit at the single-person round tables that lined the back wall, the lands of exile, designed for kids who wanted to read or study in peace while they ate. As far as the rest of McKnight was concerned, people in the back were invisible. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had died and nobody noticed.
I inhaled my dinner. The last bites always tasted better than the first. I slowed down enough by the end to savor the crisped texture around the edges of roasted chicken and the clean-tasting juice that snapped from fresh vegetables. Nothing here was ever canned, nothing saturated with salt or preservatives. Except the meatloaf, which consisted entirely of salt and preservatives. A real heart attack of a loaf.
My hands jittered as I scraped my plate clean. I pictured the Sharps in a seven-person circle on the black expanse of the Arlington stage, separating the callbacks from the rejects, Dr. Graves looming over them like a bird of prey.
I didn’t dare to hope I could beat all the actual boys who’d auditioned, but that didn’t stop my imagination from dancing all the way to the end of the road—the possibilities of that tour. I estimated that the average Kensington kid had been to 5.4 European countries, the way everyone talked about the continent like it was a second home, but I’d never left the US. I could only picture Paris as they showed it in movies, flooded with golden baubles of light, with streets that meandered downward like veins of lava glowing down a volcano’s slope, a quiet restaurant on every corner. I pictured what I’d seen of Berlin from photos in textbooks—its square and practical apartment buildings, pastel or neutral, with parallel lines of molding that underscored rows of flowering window boxes. I pictured what I’d heard of London—bad teeth? worse weather?—and knew I was missing everything. Everything: a particular cold scent in the air, I was sure, or a turbulent mix of sounds that flooded busy roads, or the kinetic dart of a bicyclist throwing caution to the winds while a black cab blared its outrage. I wanted all of it. The world in its honking yelling breathing glowing entirety.
Dorm check-in on Saturdays wasn’t until 11:30, but after dinner I couldn’t get back to Burgess fast enough. I power walked down August Drive, a black stripe of road that twined through the green of campus. The September dusk smelled thick and humid. Coils of clouds promised rain.
My mind drifted into forbidden territory as I walked. Last year, any given Saturday night, Michael and I would have been heading for the tiny coffeehouse in town, the Carrie Café. Carrie was a boisterous woman who had told me not-so-privately she wanted an invitation to our wedding. I’d smiled at so many versions of him across her rickety café tables: junior-fall Michael with braces clamped over his teeth; senior-fall Michael with scruff at the jawline for his part in The Crucible; senior-spring Michael, clean-shaven again, hair in a smooth fade at the sides of his head. Older in a way I couldn’t describe. Each one mine.
I passed a militia of brick administrative buildings, quaint colonials with white trim. The high-rise dorm for the film kids stood ahead, a concrete interruption that some donor had erected in honor of himself in the eighties. Past the high-rise, August Drive curved toward West Campus.
I split off through the grass toward the theater quad and hurried to the Burgess girls’ entrance, keeping my face ducked. Nobody paid attention, not the guys by the quad statue kicking around a Hacky Sack, not the girls up on the Palmer steps blasting “In the Heights” through a Bluetooth speaker.
I paused in the threshold. Those clusters of people looked so unworried, so unified, in their miniature worlds sealed away from mine.
I felt alone, but I had no one to blame but myself. It was the worst mistake to build your world on somebody else’s back. Only took one motion for everything to fall to pieces.
I gripped the pieces for a second: Michael’s voice, cocky and declarative, and the way the left half of his mouth smiled harder than the right. As the drizzle finally misted down from the sky, I imagined he would have had something to say about it. Probably the Dublin accent. Jaysus, man, this weather’s shite, y’know? Or the detective. It rained every night that week, cleared the cigar smoke right up. Sure, the dame had been on my mind, what she and I had done. There was nothin’ else to do but sit there and think, wait for ’em to catch me.
My laptop clicked like an insect as it started. It had a new series of worrying noises to give me every day. I appreciated its effort to keep things interesting.
The wig came easily from my hairline, the cap damp with sweat. My fingers fumbled bobby pin after bobby pin from my hair, and locks of black cascaded around my face, rippled with a curl. I stripped off my flannel. The open space breathed cool air onto my sticky shoulders, around the lines of my sports bra, and a corset of heat dissipated from around my torso.
The computer bloomed into light. I threw a flurry of clicks and typing its way and bit down hard on my cheek.
One new message in Julian Zhang’s otherwise-empty inbox. Audition Results, read the subject line. I tapped it.
Dear Julian,
Thanks for coming to auditions today. We’d like to invite you to a callback tomorrow evening in the practice rooms underneath Prince Music Library. Room 003, 7:30 sharp.
Best,
The Sharpshooters
The tightly wound clockwork in my chest spun loose. Bells and whistles and noise clamored in my chest, but all around me was silence.
The world saw exactly what it wanted to see. Finally, it wanted to see me.