In all my time in theater, cabarets, and performances, I’d never seen a group with this rapt focus, especially not a group of boys. Even Marcus, who was on the solo line and had barely anything to learn, shifted in place and waited patiently.
After we’d warmed up, Trav handed me a thick, stapled piece of sheet music. “Love You Forever,” it said at the top, and the subtitle added, “by the Lonely Wingmen.” It was one of those Top 40 radio songs you’d try to escape by switching the station, only to find the same song wailing through every possible wavelength. Just the sight of the title made its infuriatingly catchy hook blare in my head (“I can’t do that / I can’t do that / I can’t do that, oh no, no, no”; repeat until you want to pour boiling oil in your ears). Trav had written my name in crisp blue pen beside the system’s top line. His handwriting looked like a bundled Windows font.
It was all very official until I read the words beneath the notes. Jin jah, it said. Dah din deh dat. Jin jah, love. Jah wah, if you promise you’ll, din deh dat.
I tried not to look amused. It would be like laughing at Trav’s religion.
As we dug into the piece, time fell away. The darkening world outside the windows vanished. Half the time, it seemed like the others weren’t even breathing, they were trained so hard on Trav’s solemn comments.
And those comments. With a few years of trumpet and choir under my belt, I could sight-read decently. I knew my mezzofortes and my crescendos. But what was a “diminished two in second inversion,” and why were Mama and Jon Cox nodding along like it was totally standard? What the hell was a “deceptive cadence”? An obscure supervillain?
I kept my mouth shut, trying to absorb as much as possible. Reassuringly, some of the others weren’t great sight-readers, Jon Cox especially. But the guy could sing back a line perfectly the instant Trav played it, even though line by line, the arrangement didn’t sound like much of anything.
After five minutes’ teaching, Trav ordered us to put the parts together. He counted us in, a collective intake of breath rustled around the circle, and the richness of the sound hit me so hard, I nearly stopped singing. We were loud. Erik and Mama’s voices, deep and vibrant, thrummed like a bass guitar. The soft excitement of the higher parts punctured the baritone lines, creating a texture that popped and danced. This was what I’d heard onstage last spring, the sound that made people in the seats around me shift, tense, and jog their knees in rhythm.
We finished the eight measures he’d taught. Trav, with patient displeasure, gave us an itemized list of everything we’d done wrong, absolutely none of which I’d noticed.
“Again,” he said, finally. “And don’t make me repeat anything.”
So it went. Measure by measure, part by part, line by line, and every so often, we rewound to assemble the phrases. Someone always fumbled something or other, losing a note or the thread of a harmony in the mix, and Trav’s face reflected the problem instantly, a downward twitch of his mouth or a concerned-looking eyebrow.
Half an hour in, Isaac said something to Mama while Trav was teaching a part. It wasn’t loud enough to hear, not even loud enough to distract, but Trav went quiet and still, like a predator going rigid before a killing pounce. Mama’s face slackened with dread.
Trav turned toward Isaac, who looked back unconcerned.
“Your part, Isaac,” Trav said crisply, tapping a note on the piano.
Isaac cleared his throat and sight-sang the line as if it were nothing. Even the weird chromatic part, which Trav seemed to have written in just to make life difficult.
The two guys held eye contact for a long moment. Trav’s lips thinned.
He went back to teaching. The tension cleared. Beside me, Nihal let out a slow breath, his expression telling me this wasn’t rare.
It seemed like hardly five minutes before the bell across campus in Palmer tower was hammering nine o’clock, the deep strikes droning through the windowpanes. We passed our music back to Trav, who shuffled it into his binder.
I slipped my backpack on, but the others seemed happy to stay, even with our nine-thirty curfew creeping up. Erik settled at the piano and improvised some soothing jazz, looking unconcerned in the most intentional possible way. If he wanted approval from the older guys, he needed a new tactic—Mama and Jon Cox were already sinking back to the sofa, watching a video on Jon Cox’s phone. And Trav . . . the instant his messenger bag landed on his shoulder, he was out the door without a word to anyone.
What was the guy’s deal?
Mama jabbed his finger insistently at the screen. “Okay,” he said, “hard evidence of Haydn being the best. This is the second movement of the Surprise Symphony. Just wait for it.”
“What am I waiting for?” Jon Cox said.
“The surprise,” Mama said, soulfully. “He puts this random fortissimo chord at the end of a pianissimo theme, out of nowhere. Haydn has the best sense of humor of anyone from the Classical period.”
“I don’t know, man.” Jon Cox stretched his legs out. “Mozart literally wrote a song called ‘Lick Me in the Ass.’”
“Well, that’s just immature,” Mama sniffed, and then his phone blared an orchestra hit so loudly that, over his shoulder, Marcus nearly fell out of the windowsill.
“Hey, Julian,” Isaac said, bopping me on the shoulder. “Could I get your number?”
I jerked back to myself, remembering my disguise. I’d managed to forget I was wearing it. My number? Why did he want my number?
I straightened up, puffing my chest out. “Uh,” I said gruffly. “Sure?”
He gestured with his phone. “Cool. I’m gonna add you to the group text.”
“Oh. Sorry, right.” I deflated, mentally pinching myself, and rattled off the number.
“Sweet.” Isaac typed something and hit send, and my phone buzzed in my pocket. “Brace yourself for constant updates,” he said. “This thing is a nightmare.”
I tugged out my phone. ALL HAIL JULIAN, said the message Isaac had sent to the group.
“Julian,” said a voice behind me. Nihal was holding the door. “Are you going east?” he asked. “Want to come with?”
I was taken aback. “Y-yeah, sure.” I looked back at Isaac. “Later.”
“See ya.” Isaac took a running jump onto the sofa beside Jon Cox and Mama, who protested loudly. Leaving the Nest filled with rowdy exclamations, all warmth, light, and noise, Nihal and I disappeared into the coolness of the stairwell.
The heavy door shut behind us, nestling us in silence. Nihal adjusted the portfolio slung across his back as we descended the stone steps. “Enjoy your first rehearsal?”
“It was . . . intense.”
“Fair,” he said. “Trav’s a lot at first. Give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“I can do that,” I said, glancing at Nihal. In the dim light of the stairwell, his expression was unreadable. “Why’s he so . . . ?”
Nihal shook his head. “Family stuff. Probably best not to ask.”
I loosed a sigh. That mantra was depressingly familiar. When Michael had lost the lead role in a show after breaking his arm, he’d been the same way: Don’t ask, don’t talk, don’t even try. When his chronic pain acted up, my dad did it too: Don’t ask, don’t talk, don’t even try. But they weren’t showy about their avoidance. They didn’t go quiet or dramatic. They carried on like normal, making enough noise that you couldn’t pick out the silence underneath.
That night, I jerked awake to a text tone. My room swam in darkness as I slumped over, grabbed my phone, and stared at the time: 3:25 a.m.
It was a text from Trav to the group message. Thinking about rearranging the opening bars of Love You Forever. Don’t get married to the cutouts after the jin jahs.
“What . . . why,” I whispered. “Go to sleep.”
Even as the words slipped from my mouth, a text from Isaac ballooned up in gray: SLEEP NOW, JIN JAHS LATER
More complaints followed.
From Jon Cox: thanks, gr9 to know, ive been weighing the pros/ cons of that stylistic choice for 4 hours, thats why I’m up at ~3:30 in the goddamn morning~
From Mama: Wait no!! The texture of the cutouts is the best part!!!
From Isaac: SILENCE, mama, do NOT encourage him
From Jon Cox: how dare u speak to yr mother that way
From Nihal: Gentlemen. I have a test in five hours. Kindly shut up.
They took his advice. The text went quiet. I shook my head and rolled back over, but for some reason, a smile pressed at my cheeks. A feeling was budding warm in my chest, and after a second of searching, I pinned it down: the feeling of being among family.
It had been over a year since I’d felt this with my actual family, this specific blend of humor, understanding, and comfort. A year and two months, to be specific.
I remembered that day’s details—the call, the white-knuckled trip to the ER, the news about drought that had flashed soundlessly on the televisions in the waiting room—in the way I remembered those overplayed songs on the radio: the memories were suspended, dormant, in my brain cavity, waiting to surface without me needing to try. Weird, how one day your life could be swallowed up in minor inconveniences, the bad weather and late arrivals of the mundane world, and the next, nothing existed but a turning point. For some people, that would be a death, or a fire, or an overdose. My family was sent lurching out of control by something that, at first, seemed like a minuscule upset to the balance: my father getting a cough.
Here’s what can happen at the crossroads of being poor, disabled, and sick, a road that’s about as pleasant to travel as I-80 during rush hour. Let’s say, as a totally hypothetical example, you’re a paraplegic dad in San Francisco who works a checkout job, enabling your daughter’s flights out to a fancy boarding school in New England. One particular month, let’s say July, you get a nasty cough, but you need the hours, so you work through it. The cough evolves into a chilling fever. You soldier on, determined to support your family. But when that cough starts turning up blood and rattling sounds, and a fist of pressure builds in your chest, and one day you can no longer breathe without choking, you land in the emergency room with a tube draining a thick packet of fluid out of your left lung and an $18,000 medical bill accumulated before you’re conscious again.
You don’t have the money. Not even close. To date, your family has mustered up $3,500 of savings. Actually, you find yourself wishing you’d saved less, because past a $3,000 threshold, your disability benefits evaporate and, along with them, your health insurance.
Your wife thinks that this must be a mistake—that policy can’t work like this—but it does. Now, without insurance, you somehow need to come up with the difference, $14,500 that the three of you have no way to pay. Your family starts to fight. First, about money; next, about everything, because it becomes impossible to put energy into things that are not money. The stability you built up over the years has evaporated because of one germ that got ambitious.
If, hypothetically, this were to happen, then the hypothetical daughter in the situation would feel, on any given day, angry, helpless, and guilty, in a steady turntable rotation. Angry, because in an apartment where a stalemate is now the best possible option, she eats and breathes tension. Helpless, because she can’t magically erase that hospital bill. Most of all, guilty, because she wants to leave. She wants to run as far as she can, away from her parents to her oasis in New York, and she knows they can tell.
I knew they could tell. Here I was, thousands of miles away, still running.
After a year and two months, with a third of the bill paid off somehow and twice as much to go, we were still clawing our way back to some sort of normal. Maybe the missing element was Mom finding a part-time job that gave her more hours, or maybe the solution was me going back to California and staying there. I didn’t know. All I knew was that home had a lonely feeling stapled to its side. We were just another problem I couldn’t solve.
I looked back at my phone and let myself savor the feeling it gave, that spark of warmth and reassurance. Tomorrow, I would wall myself off from all this. For tonight, for a minute, I could let it linger.