The first morning after my initiation, I put on so much makeup that my face felt like a wax mask. Between 7:15 a.m., when I woke up, and 3:00 p.m., when classes ended, my girl self was in charge, and she had to be deep undercover. Afternoons worried me—after lunch, theater kids left the quad for our core classes: math, science, history, and English. The core academics building rose thin and conspicuous in the center of Kensington, closer to West Campus, and everything music-related, than I would’ve liked.
Since the West Campus kids had morning core classes, there wasn’t technically any overlap, but it still felt unsafe. If the Sharps found me out, I was done, even on the off-chance that the guys themselves were okay with having a girl as one of their tenors. I had a feeling that somewhere along the line, any petition to change Kensington’s most historic all-male society to coed would be stamped out mercilessly in its tracks. The administration had miles of bureaucratic red tape running around our student organizations. You wanted to change your club’s name? Switch your meeting space? Find funding? Get ready for a whole world of forms. A list of gatekeepers had to sign off on them, from faculty sponsors and deans to the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, probably. Then the forms vanished into a black hole of Student Life paperwork where they took weeks or months to process. No wonder nothing ever changed around here.
Still, none of that was scarier than the public shaming that would follow if I was discovered. I imagined a senior year where nobody would look at me, afraid of being associated with the girl who’d infiltrated an a cappella group, like the least impressive spy of all time.
It didn’t matter. I wasn’t planning on getting caught.
For the first time since June, I felt grateful for my ex-relationship. I’d spent so much time with Michael that I’d never made any legitimate friends in the School of Theater. Kensington friendships took upkeep. I’d never done the work. I knew the others in my grade, of course, and I still waved in the halls to Lydia and my other ex-roommate, Katie Woods, a stylish girl from Providence even taller than me. But we never went out of our way to see each other. I was scenery; I was set dressing; I was never center stage to anybody but Michael.
This summer, the idea of returning to Kensington without him had terrified me. Walking into Burgess Hall on move-in day had felt like walking into quicksand: the sensation of slow drowning, with nothing to grasp onto.
Now, being alone was useful. The usefulness wasn’t a cure-all, but it lessened the sting.
After seventh period, I locked myself into my dorm. I rubbed off that morning’s red lipstick and peeled off my false lashes, slipping my long wig into its drawer. Minutes later, Julian stared out of the mirror at me, arranging his boy bangs into place, attaching fake sideburns in front of his boy ears with a Q-tip and spirit gum, courtesy of the costume shop.
Lastly, I slid on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses I’d found in the shop’s recycling bin. One of the hinges had been bent out of shape, but with a miniature screwdriver from the scene shop, I’d put them in working order. They were the perfect finishing touch. I officially looked like some grungy hipster.
The problem was the clothes. I’d signed out a few outfits from the costume shop for this week, but there was no chance of hanging on to those—the department rarely used wigs, but they would miss costume pieces soon enough. The current plan: raid the annual Dollar Sale this Saturday. During the week leading up to the sale, Kensington kids abandoned their unwanted bits and pieces in donation bins. On Saturday, everything was equal-opportunity dirt cheap, a dollar apiece. Snakeskin belts, leather brogues, and dorm accessories became a secondhand patchwork blanket strewn across the Marden Cathedral lawn.
With the twenty-three dollars left in my wallet, I needed boy clothes that could disguise my silhouette as thoroughly as possible. I also needed dresses and heels—Jordan had to be more feminine than I’d ever been, to make her 100 percent unrecognizable as Julian. I had makeup galore, raided from bargain bins and gifted from friends since I could remember, but I’d outgrown all but one of my dresses, and my single pair of heels had broken last fall.
Just as I finished my transformation, a knock came on my door. I froze with the pencil hovering over my eyebrow.
“Room check,” called Anabel, the Burgess prefect. The sound of a pen tapping on a clipboard rang through the door. I could picture the expression on Anabel’s face to the millimeter: dignified and determined, with one eyebrow arched high. With her golden barrel curls always perfectly in order, and her seemingly endless, neatly pressed array of semiformal blazers, Anabel Jennings looked exactly like the word “prefect” sounded.
“Shit,” I breathed, looking around. I had to hide. I had to escape. No way I’d fit between the wardrobe shelves, and under the bed or the desk was too obvious.
I dashed for the window and grabbed the iron latch. The first-floor windows weren’t supposed to open—it would make it too easy to sneak out—but I twisted anyway, gritting my teeth, praying they’d somehow forgotten to fix this one.
A horrible crunch came from the latch. Then the chunk of iron was dangling in my hand.
I stared at it for a split second, horrified, bewildered. How? This was iron! What was I, a wizard?
“Room check, second call,” Anabel said, and I hissed a stream of curses, smacking the window open. It swung wide with an appalling squeal from its ancient hinges. I snatched my backpack from the bed, shouldered it, and hauled ass out the window as she said, “Coming in.”
My sneakers sank into the dirt beside the rosebushes. Amid the distant scraping of Anabel’s master key, I swung the window shut and ducked under the sill. She wouldn’t see the broken handle, right? She was only checking for fire hazards, making sure we hadn’t draped dynamite over our lamps or anything. No reason to look at the window.
Doubled over, I fled down the side of Burgess like someone trying to outrun a hail of bullets, iron latch still clutched in my fist, and as I skirted the corner, I wondered why I hadn’t just told Anabel not to come in because I was naked and needed a second to become not naked.
Day one was going excellently.
That night, I got to rehearsal half an hour early, imagining that Trav would skin me alive if I wasn’t sufficiently on time. I expected to be the only one, but when I reached the top of the jagged stone steps, I found three of the guys sitting around the Crow’s Nest.
Nihal, who sat cross-legged on the floor, glanced up and offered a solemn nod in greeting. A square of butcher paper was splayed in front of him, pinned open by a pair of textbooks. With black-smeared hands, he sketched the outline of something huge and oblong, the charcoal nub hushing across the rough paper. Freshman Marcus sat in the same windowsill he’d claimed last night, typing in furious spurts on his laptop. An angry constellation of acne had lit up on the center of his chin, and he kept rubbing it, looking upset. Meanwhile, Isaac sat on the piano bench with a guitar in his lap, strumming a chord progression. With his long hair bound loosely, messy strands all over the place, and his omnipresent T-shirt-and-dark-jeans combination, he looked kind of like an extra from Grease.
“Julian,” Isaac sang in a ridiculous nasal voice, as I shut the door. “Yeah, Julian the hooligan, oh. There’s no foolin’ Julian, oh-oh. Or droolin’ on Julian—”
“By all means,” Nihal drawled, “keep going until I’m completely deaf.” He tilted his head to scrutinize his sketch from another angle.
Isaac grinned, slapping his palm over the guitar strings. They gave an atonal complaint. “My bad. Didn’t mean to interrupt your self-portrait.”
I walked around the butcher paper, squinting at it from Nihal’s perspective. The drawing was missing his facial hair. It also had no ears. Or a neck. “That’s a self-portrait?” I asked.
Nihal sighed, giving me a long-suffering look. “It’s an avocado.”
“Ah.”
He leaned over the butcher paper again. “I would advise taking Trav’s advice and ignoring everything Isaac says.”
I glanced at Isaac, who seemed happy with himself, like a cat that had just shoved something breakable off a counter.
“Oh my God,” Marcus whispered from the window.
We looked over. “What?” Isaac said.
“Grimsley,” Marcus said, turning his laptop to face us. A graph took up the left half of the screen. “Look at his poll numbers,” he said, his voice growing frantic. “Is this really happening? I can’t believe this.”
Isaac shot a knowing glance at Nihal. “Kid’s the second coming of Ted.”
Nihal hummed a tuneful little chuckle—“hm-hm-hmm!”—before going back to his charcoal avocado.
Isaac saw my questioning expression and said, “Ted graduated last year. He commuted like forty-five minutes to Lake Placid to canvass for local midterm elections, if that gives you any idea.”
“Hey.” A frown darkened Marcus’s round face, making him look ridiculously young. Borderline fetal. How did the freshmen age backward this much every year? “Th-the locals and midterms,” he protested, “are just as important as presidential elections.” He turned his laptop back to himself, rubbing his acne patch again. The computer screen streaked blue into his ash-brown hair. “Maybe more important,” he said, “if you look at the math. Like, your vote gets more weight by proportions and stuff. Since less people vote.”
“Fewer people,” Nihal corrected, not looking up from his drawing.
“Yeah. That.” Marcus’s voice slid into a mumble. “God, who would actually vote for Grimsley . . .”
“Definitely not you,” Isaac said, “’cause you’re, you know, fourteen.”
“Well, yeah, and also ’cause I have a conscience.”
Grinning, I set my backpack next to the door. The hanging flag caught my eye, and I leaned close, inspecting the crows’ beady eyes, remembering how they’d flashed in the candlelight. Since we had no sports teams, you couldn’t find our mascot printed on cutesy pennants, but you’d find the birds lurking around campus if you knew where to look. Crow statues clung to the ends of the stone banisters outside the Ewing and Wingate dorms, and the chapel’s stained glass windows had deep blue birds worked into the designs. The most obvious, though, were the pair of iron crows perched at the apex of Arthur’s Arch, our main gates, named for Arthur Blaine of Kensington-Blaine fame. The birds’ wings were spread, and they gazed down at everyone who entered campus.
I touched the banner the embroidered crows held, tracing the cursive golden swirls of the Latin motto. Verbis defectis musica incipit.
“Music,” said Nihal behind me, “springs from failing words.”
A chord sang out from Isaac’s guitar, mellow and lovely, and then he ruined it by breaking into that fake nasal warble again. “Music springs from failing words, yeah, yeah. Latin springs from total nerds, yeah, yeah. Um. Ostriches are giant birds? Yeah?” He picked out a quick scale on the guitar, maneuvered it from his lap, and leaned it against the wall, moving with the painstaking care of someone setting down a newborn. Then he unfolded from the piano bench and loped toward the door. “Back in a bit.”
He hummed down the stairwell, leaving silence behind him. A breeze floated in through one of the open windows and stirred the warm air. I loosed a slow breath.
“Welcome to Isaac,” Nihal said, outlining the avocado’s center stone.
“Is he always that . . . ?”
“He says whatever comes into his head, 100 percent of the time. And nobody has the heart to tell him to shut up. It’d be like kicking a kitten.”
I laughed. If singing and drawing didn’t end up working out, Nihal had a future in narrating nature documentaries. He spoke like he was reading from a script, every line laden with careful disinterest.
Marcus let out an uncertain laugh too, a split second too late for it to sound natural. Glancing over at the boy curled on the curve of the window ledge, I wondered what it must be like, being a freshman in the Sharps. He and Erik had gotten to Kensington only a couple weeks ago—they probably didn’t know anything but the reputation, the obsession, the fan following.
Then again, what did I really know about the Sharps besides that? They didn’t seem as full of themselves as I’d assumed they were. They were something else, an unknown variable, a family I wasn’t a part of yet. I felt like the weird estranged aunt crashing the reunion. The estranged, cross-dressing aunt.
I relaxed into the sofa. Nihal straightened up, serious brown eyes fixing on me. “So, Julian,” he said, “how long have you been singing?”
I was instantly suspicious. Was he trying to wring information out of me? Had he noticed something off?
But no. He was just curious, and I was just paranoid, and it had been a while since I’d had a personal conversation longer than thirty seconds.
Nihal told me he lived outside Newark. He was a sophomore, which surprised me, since he seemed older than any of the Sharps except maybe Trav, although maybe that was the beard at work. And to my disappointment, he had no interest in narrating nature documentaries, even though fame and fortune were obviously waiting for him there.
“Thank you, though,” he deadpanned. “I’ve always wanted to sound overeducated and uninteresting.”
“Ha. Goals.”
“In all seriousness,” he said, “my sister’s applying for med school, and is looking at nine straight years of school, and I’ve started to wonder if there’s a point at which your brain hits a plateau and can’t absorb any more information.”
I tugged Antigone out of my backpack. “I bet.”
“She went to Kensington, too,” Nihal said, carving shadows into the avocado pit. “Imagine my parents’ relief when she said she was more interested in pre-med than jazz theory.”
“God, that’s the dream,” I mumbled. “Getting interested in something that’s actually going to make money.” I always wondered whether other Asian kids had as tough a time as I did, convincing their parents to let them come to an arts school. “Are your parents doctors?” I asked.
“Yeah, my mom’s an anesthesiologist and my dad’s an orthopedic surgeon.”
“I hope my job title never has that many syllables.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re setting the bar pretty low with ‘actor.’”
“Same with ‘painter,’” I retorted.
“Please.” Nihal gave me a wounded look. “Visual artiste.”
It caught me off-guard. I laughed, desperately tried to keep the sound deep, and it came out as a strangled sort of hurr-harr, horf! noise. The sort of laugh a cartoon dog would have.
“Um,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Yep absolutely. Yes. Just something. Caught in my throat.” I snapped open my copy of Antigone, face burning, and chewed on the end of my pen.
“Well, there’s a water fountain downstairs, if you need.” Nihal sank back into his drawing. Contented silence took over. In the evening light, a thin barrier collapsed from around me, connecting me to the Crow’s Nest, its centuries-old walls, its scuffed-up armchairs, its summer air. The black flag on the door rippled in the breeze.
Loud, casual voices surged in the stairwell, reawakening my first-rehearsal jitters. Jon Cox and Mama piled in, Adidas logos splashed across their chests, shiny running shoes double-knotted. I blinked rapidly, my eyes playing tricks. The pair of them were complete opposites, with Jon Cox’s golden tan and Mama’s milky complexion, with Jon Cox’s top-heavy muscle and Mama’s evenly distributed fat, with Jon Cox’s swish of blond hair and Mama’s frustrated tangle of dark brown—but their best-friendship was so immediately recognizable, they still somehow looked like twins. They moved in that same bouncing, space-occupying way.
Erik strutted in after them. He had a hand folded in front of his mouth, and with the beat that clattered out from his cupped hand, it sounded like he’d managed to hide a full drumkit between his fingers and his lips. Over Erik’s meticulously parted hair, Jon Cox and Mama continued a heated argument. From the cheerful tone of their bickering, they were enjoying it.
“—like, I’m sorry, but Haydn is bullshit,” Jon Cox said. “All his concertos sound like that boring startup music that plays whenever you open Sibelius.”
“What?” Mama looked like he’d been slapped. “That’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me. I’m disowning you.”
“But you’ll give me mommy issues,” Jon Cox said.
“Dude, suck a dick.”
Jon Cox adjusted his tortoiseshell glasses, grinning. “You’ve got to be the only person in the world who cares this much about Haydn.”
“Thousands of scholars—you know what, I’m not talking to you. We’re in a fight.” Mama shook his head, but his eyes were bright with good humor. He headed for the window closest to me and swung it open, waving in more cooling evening air.
Through the open door, Isaac strolled in, and Trav followed, carrying a black folder. Everyone went quiet. Erik stopped beat-boxing. In the sudden hush, I heard the air stirring outside the library, curling around our tower.
“Gentlemen,” Trav said. “Let’s get started.”