第1章 ALLEGRETTO

for Marlene Hoirup, who gave music to my life

for Terry Hicks, who gave life to my music

and for Benjamin Locke, who taught

me what it means to give it all back

1

Monday morning was the worst possible time to have an existential crisis, I decided on a Monday morning, while having an existential crisis.

Ideal crisis hours were obviously Friday afternoons, because you had a full weekend afterward to turn back into a person. You could get away with Saturday if you were efficient about it. Mondays, though—on Mondays, you had to size up the tsunami of work that loomed in the near distance and cobble together a survival strategy. There was no time for the crisis cycle: 1) teary breakdown, 2) self-indulgent wallowing, 3) questioning whether life had meaning, and 4) limping toward recovery. Four nifty stages. Like the water cycle, but soul-crushing.

I scanned the list posted on the stage door for the sixth time, hoping my eyesight had mysteriously failed me the first five times. Nope. No magical appearance of a callback for Jordan Sun, junior. I was a reject, like last year, and the year before.

I moved away from the stage door with dreamy slowness. My fellow rejects and I drifted down the hall, unspeaking. Katie Woods wore a hollow, shocked expression, as if she'd just seen somebody get mauled by a bear. Ash Crawford moved with the dangerous tension of someone who itched to smash a set of plates against a wall.

All normal. At the Kensington-Blaine Academy for the Performing Arts, half the students would have slit throats for parts in shows, dance pieces, and symphonic ensembles—anything to polish that NYU or Juilliard application to the blinding gleam the admissions officers wanted. Kensington loved its hyphenated adjectives: college-preparatory, cross-curricular, objective-oriented. "Low-stress" was not one of them. Every few days, you heard some kid crying and hyperventilating in the library bathroom. I, like any reasonable person, saved the crying and hyperventilating for my dorm.

Another failed audition. I could already hear my mom releasing the frustrated sigh that spoke more clearly than words: This place wasn't meant for you.

Familiar anxieties seeped in: that I should be back in San Francisco, working, making myself useful to my parents. That being here was a vanity project. That, as always, I didn't belong.

There was something alienating about being on scholarship, a tense mixture of gratefulness and otherness. You're talented, the money said, and we want you here. Still, it had the tang of You were, are, and always will be different. I was from a different world than most Kensington kids—I'd never been the Victorian two-story in western Massachusetts or the charming Georgian in the DC suburb. I was a cramped apartment in an anonymous brick building with a dripping air conditioner, stationed deep in the guts of the West Coast, and I'd landed here by some freak combination of providence and ambition. And I never forgot it.

I exited the cool depths of Palmer Hall onto a landscape of deep green and blissful blue. Ahead, marble steps broadened, rolling down to the theater quad's long parabola of grass. To the left and right, Douglass Hall and Burgess Hall flanked the quad, twin sandstone buildings that glowed gold with noon. Nestled in the far north of New York State, a long drive from anything but fields and forest, Kensington in early autumn was the sort of beautiful that begged for attention.

Hot wind fluttered through the quad, dry heat that brought goosebumps rippling up my arms. I stood still, my too-small sneakers warming in the sunshine, as a stream of traffic maneuvered its way around me, confident hands fitting Ray-Bans over squinting eyes, shoulders shrugging off layers to soak in the heat. Neatly layered hair cascaded over even tans. Highlights snatched the sun and tossed back an angry gleam.

Over the banister, a line of backpacks wriggled up-campus toward the dining hall. I stayed put. I never skipped meals at school, but something had gone wrong with my stomach. Namely, it didn't seem to be there anymore, and wherever it had gone, my heart and lungs and the rest of my vital organs had danced merrily after it. Holding the full interior of my body was the dull roar of a single thought: Fix this.

I rocked forward on the balls of my feet like a racer before the starting gun. I tried to take steady breaths. All this excess energy, all this drive to get something done, and nowhere to funnel it. Zero options. I would have kidnapped the cast and deported them to Slovenia, but I didn't have sixteen thousand dollars for plane tickets. I would have sabotaged the light board and blackmailed the department into giving me a part, but I wasn't an asshole. I would have bribed the director with my eternal love, but she was Reese Garrison, dean of the School of Theater, and I couldn't think of anything that probably meant less to her than my affection.

I squinted back up at Palmer Hall, its peaks and crevices blacked out against that signature blue sky. Reese had posted the list only twenty minutes ago. If I caught her in her office, maybe I could wring some audition feedback out of the endless supply of needle-sharp comments that constituted conversations with her.

Given her entire personality, I didn't know why I was so sure that Reese, at the heart of everything, wanted us to do well. Maybe it was because she respected wanting something, and there was nothing I did better than want.

With a squeak of rubber on marble, I turned on my heel and walked back inside.

Like all the offices on the top floor of Palmer Hall, Reese's was sterilized white and too bright for comfort, small lights gleaming down from on high. At best, it gave off the atmosphere of a hospital room. At worst, an interrogation chamber from a 1970s cop movie.

Behind a cluttered desk, Reese adjusted her silver-gray frames. Her lined eyes glowed up at me, amplified by thick glass. The lady had a way of making everyone feel the height of your average garden gnome, even those of us who stood five foot ten. She never got less terrifying, but you could get used to it, in the way that when you watch the same horror movie repeatedly, the jump scares start to lose their sting.

"I hope," she said, "that you're not here to ask me to reconsider."

"Heh, like that would work." It came out before I realized what I was saying, and as Reese's lips thinned, my life flashed before my eyes. It seemed shorter and more boring than I would've preferred. "Sorry!" I added. "Sorry, sorry."

I spent half my life whipping up apologies on behalf of my mouth, which I considered to be kind of separate from me as a person. I, Jordan Sun, valued levelheadedness, and also other human beings. Jordan Sun's Mouth did not care about either of these things. All it wanted was to be quick on the uptake, and the only people it behaved around were my parents. You had to be completely unhinged, borderline masochistic, to sass my mom and dad.

But the same went for Reese. Maybe I'd gotten too familiar—I'd known her from my first day at Kensington, first as a teacher and now as a housemother. The old housemother of Burgess Hall, the frighteningly ancient Mrs. Overgard, had gotten around to retiring at last, which meant that Reese lived three doors down from me this year, tasked with overseeing the dorm. This was a bit like living three doors down from a swarm of enraged hornets. Her definition of "quiet hours" was "if I hear music even one second after 11:00 p.m., I will personally rend to pieces everyone you love."

Reese let me wallow in a long moment of sheer terror. Then her small, sharp mouth assembled a toothy smile. "You're right," she said. "I don't reconsider. But I do take bribes in the amount of eight million dollars, unmarked bills."

Before I could laugh, or even register that Reese Garrison had made an actual joke, she asked, "What's your question?"

I glanced around her office, hunting down an inspired way to phrase this. Nothing in here was inspirational.

"Spit it out, Jordan." Reese folded her hands on her desk. The collection of bracelets around her wrists rattled.

"Sorry, right," I said. "I wondered if I could ask for audition feedback. Since you—" I cut myself off. Don't accuse. Step carefully. "Since I haven't had success in casting, so far, I figured it was a me thing."

"A 'you thing'?"

"A pattern in my auditions, I mean."

Reese picked up a pen, spinning it between her nimble fingers. Tiredness passed across her face, a startling little specter of an emotion. She was so expressive, Reese, expressive and flexible—an ex-dancer who had floated on- and off-Broadway for twenty years. "As with everyone, it's a combination of things," she said. "Mostly, the parts just haven't fit. I don't need to tell you, do I? You've heard the lines. Subjective industry. Case-by-case basis."

"Sorry, but—mostly?" I repeated, picking at the single weak spot in the spiel.

"What?"

"You said, mostly, the parts just didn't fit me."

One thin eyebrow rose. "And you're sure you want to hear what I might have to say."

It wasn't a question. She was steeling herself. I waited.

Race, whispered something in the back of my head. Kensington's race-blind casting policy was meant to give everyone the same shot at a lead part, but I couldn't quite shut off the voice that said, Of course you, Jordan Mingyan Sun, aren't getting cast as a lead, when the leads are named Annabeth Campbell, Janie Wallace, and Cassandra Snyder. Or was it my height? The fact that I was taller than half the guys I read with during auditions?

Still, it didn't explain why she hadn't cast me in the ensemble. Freshmen got cast in the ensemble.

Reese set down her pen. "Then let me be frank, because this is something you'll want to consider when you're auditioning for college programs: Your singing voice is difficult to reconcile with musical theater. Firstly, there's a timbre to it—and I'm not saying this couldn't be trained out, but it's a harshness, almost an inattentiveness to the text. Like a rock singer, not an actor."

I blinked rapidly. Thoughts about race and stature evaporated with a twinge of embarrassment. "Wh—you mean my pronunciation?"

"That's part of it. It also affects your physicality." She gestured at me. "Your eyes close; you shift and sway; your hands move with the notes instead of with intention. Those tics are a challenge to eliminate."

"I can do it," I said at once. "I'll fix it. If—"

She lifted a hand. I broke off.

"Again," she said, "that's subject to change. Unfortunately, what won't change for the foreseeable future is the number of roles that fit your range. It's just so deep." She took her glasses off, massaging the bridge of her nose with her sharp fingertips. Wisps of her dark hair escaped over her forehead. "You've got a unique sound, Jordan; you don't hear many voices like yours, and I mean that genuinely. But musical theater will be a tough pursuit for a girl who's more comfortable singing the G below middle C than the one above."

For once, words wouldn't come. Instead, a horrible memory of eighth grade arrived, a middle school choir concert built of white button-ups, an array of bright lights, and a clutter of anxious feet on the bleachers. Our choir director had made every girl sing soprano. My voice had cracked down half an octave at the peak of the song, an ugly bray among the sweet whistle of the other kids' voices, and laughter had popped across the stage. My cheeks had gone as hot as sweat.

Of course this was why. Being an Alto 2 in the musical theater world is sort of like being a vulture in the wild: You have a spot in the ecosystem, but nobody's falling over themselves to express their appreciation. In this particular show, even the so-called alto ensemble parts sang up to a high F-sharp, which seemed like some sort of sadistic joke. For those unfamiliar with vocal ranges: Find a dog whistle and blow it, try to sing that note, and the resulting gurgling shriek will probably sound like my attempt to sing a high F-sharp.

"The last thing I want to be is a naysayer," Reese said, slipping her glasses back on. I bit back a skeptical noise. Naysaying was basically the woman's job description. The arts world, Kensington wanted to teach us, was brutal, so everything here was "no": no's at auditions, no's from our teachers, no, no, no, until we accumulated elephant-thick skin, until we made ourselves better.

"But," she went on, "remember. It's the greatest strength to know your weaknesses. It just means you have a question to answer: How hard will you work to get what you want? And that's the heart of it: from your career, from your time here, from everything, really—what do you want?"

I stayed quiet.

The world, I thought. The whole world, gathered up in my arms.

Nothing kills productivity faster than feeling helpless. That night, I sat at my usual table in the corner of the Burgess common room. My hands were fixed to my laptop, which whirred frantically under my palms in the computer equivalent of death throes. The library had slim MacBook Pros to lend out short-term, but for long-term loans like mine, they apparently leased equipment dating to sometime in the Cretaceous Period.

I pressed my hands closer to the computer, absorbing its warmth. The common room was always a few degrees too cold, a perfect studying atmosphere. Even the thermostats at Kensington knew the philosophy. Don't get too comfortable. Stay on your toes.

The evening burrowed into night. Stacks of books shrank around everyone else, vanishing from the scattering of cherry tables at teardrop windows, but my work went untouched. I stared up at the brass chandeliers and out the window at the star-strewn country sky. I stared at the seat beside me, which had belonged to Michael every night last year. He'd sat with a hunch that gave him pronounced knots in his shoulders; beneath my fingers they'd felt like stone beads worked deep into bands of muscle. His hands dwarfed his pet brand of mechanical pencil: Pentel Sharp P200, sleek, black, reliable.

In the opposite corner, Sahana Malakar, ranked first in our class, was highlighting her notes. By the gas-jet fire in the hearth, Will Teagle was mouthing lines to himself, brow knitted. These were the kids I'd been comparing myself to for two years already. Kensington was divided into five disciplines—Theater, Music, Film, Visual Arts, and Dance—and the five schools hardly ever mixed, so although we had 1,500 students, Kensington could feel insular, even isolating. We lived with the kids in our discipline, went to every class with them, and spent our free hours on projects with them. "Full immersion in your craft," Admissions bragged, "and with your partners in learning!"

As my time trickled away, my brain supplied me with the usual helpful spiral of consequences: If you don't finish this essay, you won't have time for your English reading, and you'll never catch up, and by next week you'll still be on page 200 when everyone else has finished the book, and O'Neill will look at you across the table with his bushy eyebrows doing that knowing waggling thing, and he'll realize everything you're saying is bullshit, and you'll end up with a B, and your class rank will slip, and goodbye Harvard or Columbia, goodbye to your parents being proud of anything you—

I managed to cram in about two paragraphs around the thoughts, as they spiraled into Why do you bother? and You're never going to make it and Give up, give up, give up.

Finally, mercifully, my phone interrupted. Cheerful music sliced through the common-room ambiance.

The housemaster, Mr. Rollins, squat and well-postured in an armchair across the room, looked up from the play he was annotating. A few studiers shot me disgruntled glances. I mouthed an apology and stuffed notebooks and laptop into my backpack, yanking the stuck zipper so that it chewed black teeth together in an uneven zigzag. I slipped out the door.

The halls of Burgess were a maze of corkboard, colored nametags taped to doors, and embossed silver numbers. 113. 114. 115. I dashed to 119, locked myself in, and took a deep breath before hitting accept. "Hey, Mom."

I delayed the audition talk as long as possible, but I couldn't put it off forever. My mother took the news about as well as I thought she would: with a wandering string of Chinese and a lecture that whipped into life like a tornado.

My parents tracked my school performance like baseball nuts tracked the World Series. I never told people about it. A fun side effect of being Chinese is that people assume this about you already. It felt weirdly diminishing to admit it about myself, as if it simplified me to just another overachieving Asian kid with one of those moms, even if I was in fact Asian and did have one of those moms.

I weathered her tirade for a few minutes, cradling my phone between my ear and my shoulder. "Okay," I murmured halfway through one of her sentences, not thinking. She broke off.

"Don't 'okay,'" she said. "It's always 'okay' this, 'okay' that. Don't 'okay' me. How about you explain why this keeps happening?" A disbelieving laugh. "It's every single audition since you've gone to that place! It's not just singing. Why don't they put you on the, those, the regular plays?" I imagined the agitated fluttering of her hand as she tried to grab the words, put them in the right order. Mom's English tended to fracture when she didn't give herself time to breathe.

"Because," I said tiredly, "mainstage straight plays always have, like, eight-person casts, and the parts always go to seniors."

"I don't know, Jordan. I just don't know. All we get is bad news. What do you expect us to think, ah?"

"Mainstages aren't everything," I insisted. "I can find a student-led show in October. And my GPA's fine, and everything else is fine, it's just ..." that you've trained yourself to sniff out my weak spots. The sentence I could never finish. Even this much talking back was pushing it. My mother and I had the sort of relationship that operated the most smoothly in silence.

She heaved her knowing sigh. I could picture the slow stream of air between her lips, her mouth framed by deep, tired creases. The sound punctured me.

Silence spread across my room. I'd been one of twenty Burgess residents to draw a single this year. It was twice the size of my room at home. Everything I owned stretched thinly across the space, making it look like an empty model room you might find, three-walled, sitting in the middle of a furniture store. I'd pinned my two posters, Les Misérables and Hamilton, as far apart as possible, thinking that it might make the white cinderblocks look busier. It hadn't worked.

The only thing I had in numbers were books. They lined up single-file on the shelves, quietly keeping me company. It was impossible to feel alone in a room full of favorite books. I had the sense that they knew me personally, that they'd read me cover to cover as I'd read them.

My mother had always been aggressive about getting me to read, scouring garage sales and libraries for free novels, plays, or biographies. She'd always wanted me to learn more. Do more. Be more. She spent her life hoping for my way up and out.

"I'm sorry," I said, my voice tiny, and for a horrible second, I thought I was going to cry. She never knew what to do with that.

I searched the photos I'd tacked to the corkboard above my desk, trying to distill reassurance out of the patchwork of familiar faces. Near the top hung my best friends in San Francisco, the four of us, arms slung around each other's shoulders. Shanice pandered to the camera, pulling that picture-perfect sun-white grin. Jenna had her eyes crossed and her tongue stuck out, and to the left, Maria and I were in the middle of hysterical laughter, both of us shaded brown by the end of the summer.

I took a stabilizing breath. "How's ..." I started, tentative. "How's Dad?"

"Fine. We're fine." She sounded weary. I didn't reply. If they'd been fighting, she wouldn't have told me, anyway. And what did it change, for me to know whether they were in a peace period or a war period?

"I need to make dinner," Mom said, her voice softening. "Bye. Talk soon, okay?"

"Yeah, I—"

Click.

I dropped my phone, my whole body heavy. At least it wasn't ever anger with my mom—just anxiety, a nerve-shredding worry on my behalf that made me feel inadequate like nothing else could. Every time I dropped the ball, it made visible cracks in her exterior.

It felt like my parents had been gearing up their entire lives for next fall, my college application season. Last year, I'd read a one-man show for Experimental Playwriting in which a man decides over the course of forty-five minutes whether to press a button that will instantly kill somebody across the world, a random person, in exchange for ten million dollars. If you'd handed my parents that button and told them the reward was my admission to Harvard, I swear to God they would've pressed it without a second thought.

And if you asked them why? "Because it's Harvard." Conversation over.

In a way, I was lucky that they banked on name recognition. Their faith in the arts as a legitimate career path hovered around zero, so if Kensington hadn't been nicknamed "the Harvard of the Arts" by everyone from USA Today to the New Yorker, the odds of my going here also would've hovered around zero, scholarship or not. I was fourteen when I convinced my parents to let me apply to Kensington, and—when I got the full ride—to come here. I'd cajoled them into it every step of the way. But they would never be happy until I was the best. Here, you were more likely to have several extra limbs than be the best at anything.

I slid off my bed and measured my breaths. Stop thinking about college—stop thinking at all—give your brain a rest. It was always busy in my skull, always noisy, a honking metropolis of detours and preoccupations.

I hunched over my desk, studying my corkboard. There hung a creased picture of my dad and me, his knees leaning crookedly in his wheelchair, one of my hands set on his shoulders. Beside it was a shot of my mother standing on our building's crumbling stoop, stern and stately, wearing a summer dress with a red and green print. The pictures were three years old. They seemed to be from a separate lifetime. Before Kensington, before the fighting, before Michael, a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror, every layer of difference adding a degree of warp.

The corner of a stray picture glinted to the side, snagged behind a family photo. I swiveled it into sight and yanked my fingers back. The image of Michael's face made something clench in my chest. His dark eyes peered out at me accusingly.

Why did I even have that? I could've sworn I'd put all those pictures in the garbage, where he belonged.

The flare of hurt withered into disgust. Three months, and I was still circling the carcass of our relationship like an obsessive buzzard. The worst thing about breakups was the narcissism that trailed after them, the absolute swallowing self-centeredness. Every movie about heartbreak had turned into my biopic. Every sentence about aloneness, every song lyric about longing, had morphed into a personal attack.

I snatched the photo down, crumpled it, and chucked it across the room at the trash can. It missed, landing beneath the open window. The dark ridges of the balled-up photo shone. Outside, a yellowing harvest moon was rising over the treetops.

I approached the window, flicked the scrap of glossy paper into place, and gazed through the glass at the moon. For a second I lost myself in the sight. For a second I could breathe clearly, the first instant of clarity since that morning.

Kensington was beautiful through everything. When I didn't have anything else, I had this castle in the countryside, this oasis, this prize I'd snared. Some days it was a diamond, and I almost couldn't understand how lucky I was to have stumbled upon it. And other days it was a living thing, trying desperately to free itself from me.

2

"What an impertinent thing is a young girl bred in a nunnery!" Lydia jabbed an accusatory finger at me as she approached. "How full of questions! Prithee no more, Hellena; I have told thee more than thou understand'st already." Lydia Humphreys, my ex-roommate, had a football-helmet-shaped bob of platinum blonde hair and a voice that bounced off the amphitheater steps like a solid object.

I flashed a coy smile and sauntered backward. "The more's my grief. I would fain know as much as you, which makes me so inquisitive. Nor is it enough to know you are a lover, when ..." I grimaced and rewound. "To know you are a lover, when ... shit."

"Should I start again?" Lydia said, drifting out of character.

"I don't think it'll help. I'm so sorry, I should know these."

She waved it off. "It's a short scene. We have until Friday."

"Yeah. I'll get it together. Sorry."

"Really, it's fine," Lydia said. I hunted her freckled face for a trace of displeasure and came up empty. She looked mild and unbothered, but then again, she always looked mild and unbothered. Lydia had grown up with her grandparents and inherited all of her grandmother's mild, unbothered facial expressions. When she took the stage, her face full of life and outrage, she was unrecognizable.

I drifted into a sitting position on the rough stone of the amphitheater stage, eyeing the graduated rings that rippled up and out from us. Weeks at Kensington-Blaine all followed the same trajectory, a sine curve of stress that peaked on Wednesday afternoons. You got the sense, Wednesdays, that even if the Gods of Time came down from on high and magically inserted eighty-two extra hours into that evening, finishing your work would be a stretch. But I needed to find time somewhere to memorize this, get it into my muscles. If you had to think about your lines, you weren't doing it right.

This past weekend's audition had put a permanent twist in my focus. Since my conversation with Reese, whenever I talked, I resented my voice. What did you do with a problem you couldn't solve?

I could tell that Lydia wanted to ask what was wrong, but she stayed quiet, tentative. This was fair. We hadn't had a real conversation since freshman year, which was absolutely my fault, since I'd turned into that apocryphal girl who gets a boyfriend and vanishes into the ether. I wasn't proud of it.

I rubbed the heels of my palms into the seams of my closed eyes, exhausted. Suggesting we rehearse here had been a terrible idea. I saw Michael everywhere in the amphitheater. As last year had dwindled toward summer, we'd snuck out every other night, ducking up the quad fastened at the hands, and we'd always wound up on this stage, a stone circle that glowed like a second moon. We stayed until our voices buckled and our eyelids drooped, because soon he was going to graduate, and it'd be NYU for him and junior year for me. Soon there'd be no more secret hours to steal. Now, there was his ghost at the edge of the stage, six foot two of burning presence as I remembered him: a muscular knot of motion. Watching him move was like watching a firework twist up into the evening before it bursts.

Lydia broke the silence. "I'm sorry you didn't get cast."

I glanced up at her. I'd forgotten how blunt Lydia was, in a way that was never cruel, never for selfish satisfaction. It was so you knew she was always what she appeared to be. She could take a scalpel to a conversation, work it down to the bone, spot your fractures before you could describe them to her.

She smoothed the edge of her skirt. Splashes of pink on white. Lilly Pulitzer, a Humphreys family favorite. "It really is subjective," she said. "Seeing how Reese chooses people is actually very eye-opening." Lydia was assistant-directing the show, which seemed like a brave move. I would never have subjected myself to that quantity of Reese Garrison.

"For real," I said. "What's she looking for?"

"It's different for every part. Way fewer guys audition for the musical, so for guys' parts she's basically like, okay, which of these people can actually sing a high A and sound good? Whereas for girls, there's another whole checklist of stuff."

"God, maybe that's why Michael got leads three years in a row," I said, and instantly hated myself for bringing him up. It was a weird compulsion, like picking at a scab.

"Well," Lydia said, "he was also great. At everything."

"Yeah, I know." Michael could pull on a persona like a well-fitted costume piece. Accents especially—teachers sat up straighter when he did them, taken aback even after twenty years of teaching. He had a flamboyant Italian character he'd nicknamed Angelo and a simpering Frenchman I'd dubbed Pierre; he used to tug them out over the tables at dinner. And he did such a pitch-perfect Dublin accent, burbling out the corner of his mouth, that it was obvious he'd spent three summers in a row there, badgering all the Dubliners to speak more slowly so he could slip their words into his pockets.

His favorite was the noir detective, all flattened and nasal and fast-spoken in a transatlantic twang. Last year, he'd watched about six noir films in a row and then considered himself an expert. He whipped up vaguely hard-boiled-sounding lines about kids and teachers, dragging us into his made-up worlds. "Reese Garrison was a dame whose legs went ahhhn 'til next Tewsday," he'd drawl over my shoulder as I tried to write. "I gave 'er my essay, and she gave me three bullets, one for every danglin' modifier ..."

And I'd groan, or I'd laugh. Or—mostly—I'd let him distract me. "It rained that summah," I'd drawl back in my smokiest femme fatale voice, playing along. "It rained 'til my conscience felt damn neah clean again." Then he'd reach forward and mess with my computer, and I'd swat at his hands until he'd take my wrists and pull me in, everything else forgotten. Characters abandoned. There we'd be in private closeness, silent all of a sudden and real.

I could still text him. I could break the three-month silence.

The second the thought came, I stood. Get over this. "Okay," I said, yanking the folded script pages out of my back pocket. They were an inked, highlighted disaster. I had notes annotating my notes. "Can we maybe run lines?"

"Sure," Lydia said, tucking her phone away. Instantly, I felt selfish for asking her to stay, but before I could offer her an exit strategy, she started the scene. "What an impertinent thing is a young girl bred in a—"

Noise spilled into the amphitheater. Lydia broke off, and we looked up. A group of vaguely familiar-looking boys was jolting down the steps, a herd of pastel shorts and tank tops. They caught sight of us and faltered but didn't stop. Soon they were pooling around the front of the stage, and a pair of them jogged forward.

"Hey there, ladies," said one of them, dark-haired, with even eyebrows that winged out over hazel eyes. He was unreasonably tall and unreasonably good-looking, and he'd also said the phrase, "Hey there, ladies," which obliterated any potential interest with the merciless speed of a plummeting guillotine blade.

"Are you leaving soon?" said the other boy, a redhead who was a more acceptable sort of tall, and whose words sounded so bored it was a miracle he'd mustered up the interest to open his mouth.

"Actually, we're in the middle of a rehearsal," Lydia said, the picture of neutrality.

"Like, just the two of you?" Tall looked at Taller and laughed. "Okay ... uh, when's your big important rehearsal gonna be over?"

Lydia's lips pressed together almost imperceptibly. The Grandma Humphreys equivalent of taking out a shotgun. As my cheeks filled with heat, I remembered, suddenly, where I'd seen these guys: onstage, at their concerts. They were the New York Minuets, Kensington's douchiest a cappella group. This was an impressive title to hold, since the Kensington a cappella scene was a shade or two less friendly than the mafia, and a shade or two more exclusive. I wondered if the exclusive vibe was something they manufactured on purpose, or if they just fundamentally lacked the ability to befriend people who didn't spend all their time singing nonsense syllables.

"Don't you guys have music buildings to practice in?" I asked.

"Don't you have a theater to use?" said Taller, adjusting his perfect hair.

"Yes," I said. "You're standing in the middle of it."

Tall lifted his freckle-spattered hands. "Okay, calm down."

"I am calm," I said, thinking that there was no faster way to enrage a calm person than by telling them to calm down. These music guys had some nerve, anyway, trying to boot us out of a space specifically built for the School of Theater.

To be fair, near the back of their group was a kid I vaguely recognized from the theater school. Even though it was dominated by music kids, a cappella was technically extracurricular. Anyone in any discipline could audition for the half-dozen groups, and as a result, a cappella had become one of the few things that tied Kensington's five schools together (the others being the newspaper and a universal disdain for the administration). Even Visual Arts kids, who hardly ever stepped off the Northwest quad, could be spotted at a cappella concerts, begrudgingly jamming along to some remixed version of a pop song by Justine Gray or Sam Samuelson. The fall Sharpshooters concert was like our version of a Homecoming game—the guys' octet was our oldest group, and, if possible, even cultier than the rest of them.

Behind these two, the rest of the New York Minuets aimed questioning looks at me, murmuring to each other in an inaudible rumble. Tall glanced up at Taller, looking for guidance.

"Look," Taller said to me, in a clearly-you-don't-understand-the-gravity-of-the-situation sort of voice. "We have a competition we're preparing for. So if you could just—"

"You mean the one in December?" Lydia said flatly. "Three months from now?"

Taller looked at her. He seemed to have lost the ability to speak. Lydia's blue eyes were flinty beneath the blunt line of her bangs.

We'd gotten a bottomless pit's worth of e-mails about the competition. Aural Fixation, an a cappella group made famous by competition-style reality TV, was visiting Kensington right before winter break. Since their latest lineup had a couple of Kensington alumni, they'd be picking one of our a cappella groups to open for them during the European leg of their international tour over winter break. This, hilariously, meant two straight weeks of sold-out stadiums in London and Rome and Madrid and Lisbon. For concerts that consisted of people pretending to be musical instruments. Unreal.

There was no logical reason for a cappella to have exploded like this. It was the geekiest thing in the world, filled with terrible pun names and obscenely technical singing. It'd been born out of barbershop quartets and doo-wop, for God's sake. Its DNA was filled with strains of undiluted nerd.

Taller found his voice. "See? Even you've heard about it," he said, dripping condescension.

Lydia and I traded a disbelieving look. Even us! Mere plebeians!

"So," he continued. "You get why we need to practice."

"Right," I said. "In this space, specifically. Because there isn't an entire campus's worth of space just on the other side of those steps."

"Right," he agreed, and flashed a brilliant smile. I narrowed my eyes at his perfect teeth.

Lydia and I stood in deadlocked silence across from Tall and Taller. For a minute, I was determined to stand there until the natural world eroded me to dust, but then my eyes fell to the other Minuets' hopeful faces, and guilt crept into me. Maybe Tall and Taller weren't the nicest human beings, but these other kids just wanted to get on with rehearsal. There were more campus spaces for two people than sixteen, and anyway, at this point, it seemed like the options were to back down or waste another half-hour testing out new ways to explain the words "go away."

I sighed and relented. "Come on, Lydia. Let's find somewhere else."

There was a smugness to the way Taller said "Thanks" that made it sound distinctly like "I win." Although, to be fair, his entire persona oozed "I win." This kid was really leaning into the Kensington type. When people heard "Kensington-Blaine," they envisioned an alarmingly specific person: He was a third-generation legacy from New England with great bone structure; he was a he, because the school hadn't gone coed until 1985; he was white, with a name like Oliver or Henry or Phineus; and his trust fund was roughly the size of Iceland's GDP. With Kensington's aggressive diversity initiatives, though, the type was transforming, blurring out of boxes and categories by the year. They were a diminishing breed, the Olivers, Henries, and Phineuses (Phinei?).

As Lydia and I climbed out of the amphitheater, her hand was tight over the navy tote bag that hung on her shoulder, and I plucked hard at the patches of wear in my jeans. With every step, I got angrier at myself for backing down. Why did it always end up like this? Why was I always the one to cave? Why did I feel guilty that we'd stood up for ourselves, even temporarily?

I tried not to hate the dark-haired boy down the steps, because anger didn't do anything, and besides, if I let myself hate him, it wouldn't entirely be for the way he'd acted. It would be for selfish reasons. All my failings were his successes: He could ask for what he wanted without feeling like an inconvenience. He could be totally sure of his own importance, not second-guessing a word out of his own mouth. That kid was handsome and rich and had a voice I remembered, a soaring tenor that was everything it should be. It's too simple to hate the people who have doorways where you have walls.

That night, in my room, I scrolled through the flood of back-to-school audition advertisements. The e-mails had slowed to a trickle and finally stopped over the weekend, and I'd been glad at the time, but now I imagined turning back the clock and trying for any of these, instead of throwing away my chance on the musical. I could have run sound or lights for one of the senior capstone projects. I could have auditioned for Trazba, an experimental two-person play inspired by 1950s science-fiction films, in which one of the people is pregnant and the other person plays the fetus, because I guess every other idea for a play was already taken.

The e-mail system refreshed, and the thin stripe of a new e-mail appeared at the top. The subject line read, "Audition Call." My heart leapt, my mind yelled, FATE! and my finger stabbed the clickpad.

The message loaded. My excitement died. A cappella again.

In a black-and-white photo, eight boys in sport coats and ties sprawled in bored-looking positions on the steps to the Arlington Hall of Music. Stone lions flanked the steps, prowling on the columns that guarded Arlington, carved muscle rippling beneath their alabaster skin. Calligraphy font across the photo read The Sharpshooters, and beneath, the audition notice said:

ONE SPOT HAS OPENED IN THE SHARPSHOOTERS, KENSINGTON-BLAINE'S PREMIER ALL-MALE A CAPPELLA OCTET. WE INVITE TENOR 1S OF ANY YEAR TO SIGN UP FOR AN AUDITION SLOT USING THE FORM BELOW.

Below that, they had an honest-to-God coat of arms, which displayed a pair of crows peeking around a quartered shield. Each crow carried a corner of a banner in its beak, stretching the cloth out to display VERBIS DEFECTIS MUSICA INCIPIT. I forced back the urge to laugh.

To be fair, the Sharps had been around since the 1930s, so the crest and the Latin hadn't been these guys' idea. Besides, with the way the school treated them—basically, with the type of reverence usually reserved for religious figures—how could we expect them not to have egos the size of your average planet?

Something about the Sharps made people lose their minds. The all-girls' group, the Precautionary Measures, packed Arlington Hall for their concerts, but for some reason it wasn't quite the same. Our whole student body—girls and guys alike—fawned over the Sharps; they were a blank canvas that people could write their dreams onto, a blend between boy-band obsession and artistic admiration. Even Michael had harbored a secret dream of joining the Sharps up until graduation, not that he'd ever had time to audition.

Maybe that was why the Minuets were so unpleasant. An inferiority complex. The thought pleased me a little more than it should have.

I scrolled back up and paused over the photo. The Sharps looked nothing alike, but something about them was identical. The crisp lines of their jackets, maybe, or the loose way they held their heads and hands and bodies. Or maybe just their expressions, which wore the thoughtless confidence that came with practice.

I would've bet all my worldly possessions that the Sharps would win that December competition, and just like that, they'd have a shot at fame. The envy in my mouth tasted hot and bitter. Liquid gold.

Then my eyes fell to the audition notice, to the words TENOR 1, and my hands went flat on the keyboard as an idea hit me like a thunderbolt. An idiotic, impossible idea.

"Your range," echoed Reese's voice, as I straightened in my seat. "It's just so deep."

It could never work. Of course not.

Could it?

The feeling of failure still itched across my skin, a brand I was desperate to claw away. How hard will you work to get what you want? demanded Reese's voice. I remembered that kid from this afternoon sneering at me, and now, eight impassive faces stared out from this audition notice, daring me, questioning if I had what it took: Could I be a Sharpshooter? Could I be hyper-confident, hyper-competent, all my self-consciousness forgotten?

For the sliver of a chance of performing across the sea, maybe I could.

This competition was three months out. Find my way into the Sharpshooters, stay under the radar for ninety measly days, make damn sure we won, and there was the springboard to my future. An international tour would be a shining star on my college apps—something not every other overachieving arts kid would have. It was downright depressing, the lengths it took to feel special when you wrote yourself out on paper. All As? Who cared? That was the standard here. Some shows, some activities? Big deal. How were you changing the world?

Sometimes, when I wasn't too busy, I wondered why we had to change the world so early.

I went for my wardrobe and yanked it open, eyeing myself in the full-length mirror. From my dresser, I grabbed a tissue and rubbed off my purple lipstick, my eyeliner, my blush. Cheap chemical remover stung the air. Barefaced again, back to monochrome tan, I flipped my hair up the back of my skull and over my forehead, the fraying tips hanging above my eyes.

Everyone told me I looked like my dad. Never my mom, who had a delicate nose and chin. I had Dad's prominent features and his stubborn mouth. But I'd inherited Mom's height, plus a spare inch that had come from God knows where. "American food," she'd said, shaking her head, when I'd growth-spurted past her at age fifteen.

I released my hair. As it fell halfway down my waist, I remembered the endless row of wigs in the costume shop. I could even picture the one I wanted—short, shaggy, black. We were supposed to sign them out, and for only three days at a time, but if anyone ever confronted me, I could say I'd forgotten ... innocent mistake, right?

I worked my dresser's top drawer, gummy with age, out of its slot and rummaged around for the finishing touch—a blunt-tipped pencil, worn down by use. I started filling in my eyebrows, shading the ends out with the tip, making my brows thick and serious.

I gathered my hair up and postured in the mirror, hooking one hand into the pockets of my jeans. Legs swiveled to shoulder-width apart. Tilting my head, I stuck my chin out.

"Hey," I said to myself, and again, deeper. "Hey. What's up?"

I was unrecognizable.

For the first time since Monday, I didn't hate the sound of my voice. I couldn't fix it, but I could use it. I'd solved the unsolvable problem, kept my answer and rewritten the question.

Two knocks came on my door, and I flinched. In the mirror, my shoulders buckled in. I shrank two sizes.

"Hey, lights out," called our prefect, Anabel, from beyond the door. Heart pattering, I flicked the switch, but my desk lamp still shed a remnant of buttery light. As I turned back toward the mirror in the dark, lifted my hair back up, and pulled my guy-stance back on, limb by cautious limb, I felt free and empty and new.

This had the potential to be the most embarrassing stunt in Kensington history, but I had nothing to lose except my dignity, and I'd lost so much of that in June, the prospect hardly fazed me. Besides, theater was all about risk. Risk wasn't scary. Insignificance was terrifying.

The light drew streaks down the thick lines of my arms. I rubbed one elbow, my throat tight. Michael Jordan, they'd taunted me every other day in middle school—not so much the girls as the boys. Incredible Hulk. Hey, Jordan, can you sell me some steroids? Whatever you're on, I want some. Early growth spurts and a thick frame had gotten me so much shit back then. I'd come out of middle school thinking, that was it, I was done caring what anyone thought.

Of course, if I didn't care, I wouldn't still be trying to prove myself, would I?

I wouldn't still want to win.

3

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.

4

The Prince Music Library was Kensington's oldest building, perched at the southwestern tip of campus. Tall and elegant, with slender colonettes running up its dark walls, the library looked like a watchtower. A coppery sign stood outside, burnished by 160 years of terrible upstate New York weather, explaining the building's historical significance: A slightly important soldier had stayed here for a night, one time.

I made sure my wig was secure, my hair curled into locks and pinned beneath, and pushed through the ancient doors. As they boomed shut behind me, I stopped.

Most of Kensington's Gothic-style buildings were beautiful on the outside, but their interiors had walls the color of oatmeal and carpets the undecided green-gray of ditchwater. The interior design smacked of dentist waiting rooms. Not Prince Library. Here, copper-bracketed sconces on the walls peeked out from book-cases that loomed like beasts. Overhead, miniature spotlights aimed their beams at artful positions to avoid shining on the books, drawing pools of light on a weathered oaken floor.

I wound through the imposing bookcases toward the center of the building: a sunken lounge space outlined by red sofas. Above, the ceiling was conspicuously missing. Instead, the hollow expanse of the music library stretched up overhead. Upper levels with wooden railings gazed down on where I stood. Iron staircases glinted on the corner of every floor.

This, I thought, was the Kensington they'd had in 1850, when nobody like me could have set foot inside. This was the unchanging part of this place that belonged to the older world, the part that I could only ever spy on.

Shaking off the feeling of having time traveled, I headed for the basement door.

I was early. I waited. I'd half-expected to find ancient catacombs down here, lined with flickering torches and maybe some disturbingly humanoid skulls, but the basement wasn't as old-fashioned as the rest of the music library. The underground halls had the shabby appearance of something built on a whim in the seventies and totally ignored ever since, with chintzy still-life paintings dangling here and there.

After a few minutes, a tall kid shouldered his way out of practice room 003—my competition. He was handsome in a baseball-player sort of way, with a round face and floppy chestnut hair. He nodded to me before disappearing upstairs.

Shit. Did the Sharps care how good-looking the auditioners were? That was part of their whole shtick, right? Being stupidly attractive? Maybe I could pass as a guy, but I somehow doubted I could pass as a hot guy.

J. Crew Junior wasn't hot, I reassured myself. But that was because he hadn't looked old enough to be hot yet. Even he was pretty, like one of those weirdly old-looking Renaissance babies from art history slides.

I should've found a suit. A suit could turn a 6-out-of-10-looking dude into a solid 8.

My watch's second hand ticked across home base: seven thirty. I knocked, and deep within practice room 003, a muffled voice called something that the soundproofing blurred into nothing. I cracked the door and slipped in.

The room was bigger than I'd expected. Filing cabinets were lined up along one wall, and a grand piano sat against the other, sleek and black, lid down. Isaac Nakahara sat on the lid, legs crossed. Baritone God—Trav—was perched at the piano bench with the ramrod posture of a soldier. He was even more solemn up close. His face looked as smooth and unlined as marble, like he'd never smiled in his life.

Dr. Graves was nowhere to be seen, but the other Sharps littered the room. They weren't all hot, thank God. Mainly, they were just intimidating, eyeing me with such obvious evaluation that I got the urge to somersault under the piano.

The seven of them made up a decently representative sample of Kensington kids: majority white, but not by much, overall well-dressed, and covered in symbols of the Kensington "middle class," which was a pretty ill-defined term around here. They wore crisp neon running shoes, Mizuno or Asics or Nike, barely broken in, a new pair bought every season or so. On wrists gleamed watches that bore zero resemblance to the scrap of Walmart plastic on my arm. These were a different species, muscular chunks of silver with miniature dials set into their generous faces, which made sense, because if your watch is as expensive as multiple watches, why not get a few extra dials in there? And tossed over shoulders were Kensington hoodies from the bookshop, soft and thick.

I only envied the school gear. Everything emblazoned with the Kensington logo was marked up obscenely for no other reason than that it was part of this place, and if you wore it, then you were part of this place, and eighty dollars—for most kids here—wasn't too steep a price to belong a little more.

"Julian!" greeted Isaac from the piano, with so much familiarity in his voice, you'd think we'd known each other for years. "Great to see you."

"Y-you too."

"You have a good weekend?"

"It, um, yes, good," I blurted, and resisted the strong urge to whack my forehead repeatedly on the door. God, get it together.

Isaac grinned, showing pointy canines. "Well, welcome to callbacks. First, let me tell you a bit about us." He flourished a hand at the guys. "We are the Sharpshooters. Originally, the group was called the Wing Singers, and they performed at the cathedral services, but that was ages ago. We've been here since Kensington added the music school in 1937. I mean, not us specifically, we haven't been here since the thirties." He reconsidered. "Except Trav, who has absolutely been here for eighty years."

Trav closed his eyes. "Isaac ..."

Isaac shot him a grin and barreled on. "In terms of workload, we practice every night from eight to nine. We've got two gigs for the school in fall, another three in spring. And this year, we have that competition in December against the other groups, and if we win, we'll get to tour in Europe with Aural Fixation."

From the corner, J. Crew Junior let out a snicker. "Oral," he said.

Isaac looked like he was trying not to laugh. "Yes, Erik, thank you for your contribution." He unfolded his legs, letting a mile of dark wash denim hang over the edge of the Steinway. Scanning his outfit, I felt a sudden flash of insecurity about how I looked in my cheap, formless disguise. I hated how sensitive I'd become to minuscule markers like the Polo player on Isaac's gray V-neck. It wasn't that I wanted to care about brand names, but they were loud. When I met one of those kids wallpapered in brands, it felt like they wanted me, specifically, to know they were wearing a thousand dollars' worth of cashmere or cotton or silver or leather. It was the least I could do to acknowledge it.

Trav lifted the lid from the piano keys. It creaked very slowly. When he spoke, it was with sinister softness: "We will win that competition. Or else."

Isaac nodded. "There's that lighthearted attitude we love so much."

I suppressed a laugh. Isaac looked at me in time to catch the tail end of my grin. "I think that's it," he said, looking satisfied. "Questions?"

I shook my head.

"Then it's all you, Trav."

"Mm." Trav's nose wrinkled. "Off the piano."

Isaac rolled his eyes but jumped off the lid. He leaned deep into Trav's personal space, pulling one of those boy-stretches that showed the flexing sides of his underarms.

Trav sighed, shoved Isaac away by the shoulder, and looked back to me. "Let's get started," he said, in the tone that most movie villains would use to say, "Prepare to die."

The other Sharps leaned against the wall as Trav guided me through a range test, marking my results in a leather-bound journal. He played a series of notes on the piano and ordered me to sing them back, adding a new note to the end with each repetition. Finally, he played a set of chords and asked me to sing the top, middle, or bass note.

His facial expression didn't flicker, offering no clue as to how well I was doing. Finally, he scribbled something in his journal and flipped it shut.

"Circle up," he ordered, standing. "One last thing. A blend exercise, to see how you sound with the group."

The Sharps came forward from the wall. I hesitated before joining the circle. It was one thing to fool them from a stage, another to do it a foot in front of their faces. I stood between Trav and a boy wearing a turban, keeping my face tilted downward.

"Erik, lights," said Trav. The tiny bass hit the light switch and darkness clamped down. The sudden invisibility felt freeing. I waited for a pitch, for a direction, anything.

Then a hand grabbed me.

"Hey." I twisted away from the contact, staring blindly around. Another hand landed on my shoulder. One grabbed my arm. "Dude," I said, stumbling back. "What—"

"Shut the fuck up," said Trav's voice, calm and steely. It shocked me so much I went still. Someone's hand found my face, and a piece of cloth stretched over my eyes in the dark, back behind my head.

What the hell?

I prayed the wig would hold. The clips were strong, but not that strong.

The tugging sensation stopped. The blindfold stayed in place, and the wig hadn't budged, thank God.

"What ar—" I started, but a hand hit my back, shoving me forward. My hands shot out instinctively, feeling for the empty space in front of me.

The hand pushed me again. I stumbled into a walk. Soon, threads of dim light framed the top and bottom of my vision, creeping in around the blindfold's edges. I focused on the feeling of my sneakers padding on the tiles of the practice room hall, then up the stairs, then over the moaning floorboards of the main library. The scent of yellowing pages and dust descended.

The shock had faded into a frenzy of disbelief. Initiation.

I wondered for a split second if they were going to make me wrestle a bear, but on second thought, bear-wrestling was way cooler than most hazing I'd heard about. Usually, it sounded pointless and humiliating, like chugging hot sauce, or swallowing live goldfish, or sitting on blocks of ice naked until certain body parts went numb. If they even tried the goldfish thing, that was the end. I had limits.

We clanked up the iron steps that led from library floor to library floor. I bumped my shins repeatedly. I could already picture the watercolor of bruises that would be my legs tomorrow. After three staircases, a door clicked, the air cooled, and the floor scraped under eight pairs of feet, summoning up an image of worn stone. We walked up more stairs, steeper this time.

A hinge ahead whined. The hand at my back guided me forward and stopped me still.

I waited for a minute. Footsteps creaked and shifted in the darkness—and another sound, the distinctive strike and hiss of a match. Then a hollow shhh noise I couldn't identify.

A slight pressure worried at the back of my head, and the blindfold fell from my eyes. I blinked rapidly, praying my eyebrows hadn't smudged. Thank God I'd used enough setting spray to freeze a ferret in place.

The room was circular, like the top of a fairytale tower. The shadow of an upright piano stood opposite the door. Sheets of heavy cloth covered patches of wall where the windows must have been, creating thick darkness. The beat-up pinewood floor, scarred and uneven with age, reflected the only source of light: the line of long candles in the Sharps' fists. Thin, dripping candles, propping up curls of flame that danced at the tips of their chins.

About eighty smartass comments jumped to the tip of my tongue.

There must be some mistake, I wanted to say. I auditioned for a singing group, not the Freemasons.

Wait, shit, I wanted to say. I forgot to bring all the goats I raised specifically for sacrificial purposes.

All right, I wanted to say with a sigh. Which one of you do I have to exorcise?

None of it came out. Their faces lit from beneath by the firelight, the Sharps looked weirdly menacing—even J. Crew Junior, who, true to form, was wearing salmon-colored shorts.

Directly in front of me, Trav—the only one without a candle—held an open book. I squinted through the flickering light. A list of names, handwriting leaning every which way, was splattered down the aging pages. One cursive scribble read "Demetrius Dwiggins," and I blinked at it several times, expecting the name to disappear, sure that it was some terrifically ridiculous stress hallucination. Near the end of the list were Trav's name, neat and printed, and Isaac's, extravagantly looped.

"Um," I said. "Should I sign this?"

Trav stared ahead as if he hadn't heard a word. I took half a step and heard a gentle trickling, clicking sound. I looked down. My feet were surrounded by a spread of tiny cardboard fragments: an unassembled jigsaw puzzle.

I scanned the Sharps and their candles again. Each candle was a different length. I understood at once: finish putting this together before all six burned out, or ... or what? Was some poor goldfish awaiting its fate in another room?

No time. I stepped out of the spread of pieces, crouched, and got to work.

The pieces were a chaos of bulbs and corners, layers of compacted cardboard loosened by years of hurried fingers. The first candle had already gone dark by the time I pieced together the border, an intimidatingly large rectangle.

I sorted the mess of black and white pieces by color and started forming patches. The activity was weirdly hypnotic, a mindless cycle of testing curves against each other, searching for a perfect fit. Time slipped away. Forming Rorschach blots against the floorboards, I nearly forgot where I was.

Then the distant Palmer bell chimed eight o'clock, and I glanced up to find that half the candles had already died. When I went back to the puzzle, the half-light started doing its work. Black and white both started to look like dark gray. The edges of pieces blurred. In the twitching shadows, their shapes became uncertain.

Then I linked two patches together and saw, suddenly, what this was. The fragment formed a sloppy but distinctive letter T. The puzzle was some sort of message.

A fourth candle burned down to a wax-coated fist, and the wick sputtered out.

My knees ached against the floorboards. My eyes were strained and watering. I squinted and rubbed them, focusing in.

Soon the first word was finished: THE. I bricked together an R near the bottom left and a K in the right corner. I shuttled an island of completed puzzle around, rotating it, trying to force the lines to match up. Then it joined to form THE CROW'S.

The light seemed to lurch. I looked up. The fifth candle had gone out. One left.

As the glowing tip of the fifth candlewick faded from red to nothing, Trav hummed a note, and the Sharps began to sing.

"Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling ..."

The solemn arrangement of the Irish folk song was so full, so startling, that I couldn't think. With the words curling into my ears, splintering my focus, I looked down at the mess of cardboard under my fingers and started to panic.

THE CROW'S ... the crow's what? With this music distracting me, finishing the puzzle was all but shot—could I figure it out with a guess?

No. I'd made it this far. I didn't need to guess—I needed to work harder.

I gritted my teeth and hunched to the side, throwing my shadow away from the remainder of the puzzle. Problem pieces that hadn't seemed to fit anywhere started slotting into place, even as they turned into fragments of nothing beneath my clumsy fingers. Fighting the Sharps' serenade, I formed B, then E. I already knew what the phrase was by the time I pressed the last puzzle piece into position. THE CROW'S BEAK.

Our mascot was somewhere in this room, and it was carrying something for me. I shot to my feet, peering into the music-filled dark, when something tickled the back of my neck. I reached to scratch or slap it and my hand froze. A thick lock of hair had uncoiled from its bobby pins, slipped out of the wig, and fallen down my back.

The darkness offered cover. I twirled the lock of hair around two fingers and prodded it back into place under the wig. If the Sharps noticed, they didn't show it. As they sang, they gazed uncannily ahead, their eyes out of focus, as if they'd left their bodies.

I tried to swallow and nearly choked. My mouth was drier than the yellowing pages of the initiation book. The final candle was barely a stub now, lighting up Isaac's sharp chin. I turned—and found the crow.

Behind me was the door, painted red. On it hung a massive black flag with the Sharps coat of arms embroidered in gold. It looked disproportionately impressive in the flicker of the firelight, and the two crows stretching out their Latin motto looked almost alive. I reached for the birds. A patch of soft cloth was sewn below one of their beaks, and from the deep pocket, I extracted a silver fountain pen, its barrel cool and heavy.

I turned back to the seven boys, strode up to the initiation book, and scribbled Julian Zhang at the bottom of the list just as they finished a verse.

For a second there was silence.

"Aaand cut," said Isaac, swiping the book from Trav. He snapped it shut.

The Sharps broke into enthusiastic exclamations. One of them stripped away the heavy cloths from the walls, revealing four round windows that framed porthole views of the darkening campus in thin iron. A wooden chest sat beneath one window, a cable peeking out from the lid, two black sound monitors keeping guard beside it. One of the Sharps broke the puzzle back into a box and slid it behind the chest.

Isaac blew out the last candle, which turned to an undramatic finger of wax in the evening light. A few of the guys closed around me to clap my back, and a nervous laugh dislodged from where it had stuck in my throat. I held my neck rigid, urging my hair not to come loose, overwhelmed by the whirl of chatter.

"—did it by yourself," crowed a huge boy with dark flyaway hair. "Man, Nihal and Jon barely finished with two people—"

"Fucking nailed it," said a tall blond kid at his side, and gave me a vicious high-five that definitely sloughed off a layer of skin or two.

"Marcus, lights," called Isaac, and a boy with shaggy brown hair scampered over to plug in a power strip near the door. Lighting flickered into life: white-gold strip lights that encircled the stone wall, dim orange globes that dangled near each window, a rope of Christmas lights wrapped around one of the rafters. The place warmed a few degrees in the gold wash of light, and the boys became real all of a sudden, solidifying, their eyes bright and their hair shining. Isaac sprang onto the piano bench, rose to his tiptoes, and slid the book of signatures onto a crossbeam.

"So I'm in?" I said, breathless. My eyes prickled with the flood of light. I blinked hard several times.

"You are in," said Trav, perching on the bench beside Isaac's feet. "Initiation used to require the rookies to climb out a window onto the roof, too. Fifty-foot fall, if you slip. That's been phased out."

"What, did someone die?"

"It's just the hazing policy," Isaac said. He hopped down from the piano bench. "No one likes fun anymore."

I looked around. "Is this a reading room?" There wasn't a library book in sight, but an aging leather sofa stretched out beside the piano and matching armchairs flanked the door.

"This is the Crow's Nest," Isaac said proudly, flopping into an armchair. "It used to be a bell tower, but they took the bell out in the seventies, and it's been Sharps territory since then."

"Crow's Nest," I repeated. "Like a ship lookout?"

"Yep," Isaac said. "Except instead of a ship, we're looking out for the most haunted building on campus, and by the way I've definitely seen ghosts here before."

"Shut up, you have not," said the tall blond kid from the sofa.

"Scared?" said the dark-haired guy with the flyaway hair, and they engaged in a flurry of elbowing.

Realizing that the Sharps had all found seats, I went for the open armchair. With a creak of ancient springs, I sank a mile into the scraped leather cushioning.

My hair tickled with heat. I brushed a finger around the line of the wig. Still safe.

"So," Isaac said. "Now that you've proven yourself, initiate, let's do some introductions." He made a sweeping gesture around the room that involved his whole body. Somehow everything he did seemed to involve his whole body, every motion of the hands, every sentence he spoke. The way he moved reminded me of very giant dogs who think they're very small dogs and are accordingly careless with themselves.

He lifted a hand. "Again, I'm Isaac, your president. And the one who always looks like he just sniffed paint is your fearless musical director, Traveler Atwood."

Trav's nostrils flared. He said nothing.

"You met Erik yesterday." Isaac pointed at J. Crew Junior. "He's on bass and VP."

"VP?" I said.

"Vocal percussion," Erik said proudly, tilting his nose up. The light glinted on his freckled cheeks. Where everyone else was sitting, Erik was on his feet, stance comically wide, elbow postured against the wall. It really didn't make him look any larger. I wanted to offer him some of my height.

"Beatboxing," Isaac explained, interpreting my silence as confusion. "Drum noises. Weird explosion sounds. Whatever we need." He nodded to the boy with shaggy brown hair, who had curled up to sit in the windowsill. "Other freshman, go."

The boy waved. He was stocky, and his shoulders were slumped so low it looked uncomfortable, the sort of posture that suggested he wanted to disappear. "Hi. I'm Other Freshman, apparently." He gave a nervous laugh and cut himself off with a cough. "I'm Marcus Humphreys, and ... yeah." Marcus's searching, desperate eyes landed on the sofa. "J-Jon Cox?"

"Hey. Jon Cox," introduced the guy sprawled over one arm of the sofa. His golden hair fell over one side of his high forehead, brushing one wingtip of his tortoiseshell glasses. Jon Cox looked more like a mental image of the Sharps than a real person—tall and handsome, with prominent cheekbones. The undone collar of his Polo showed a flushed patch of skin at the divot between his collarbones.

"And I'm Theodore Pugh," said the guy sitting next to him, whose bulk took up a good third of the sofa. His deep, resonant voice smacked of movie trailers, and his eyes were a startling light blue.

Jon Cox gave Theodore a laughing look. "Bro, don't even try. You're never going to get rid of it."

"Get rid of what?" I asked.

"His nickname," Jon Cox said. "Call him Mama. Everyone calls him Mama."

Mama aimed a scowl at Jon Cox. "Why are you so gung-ho about this?"

"'Cause you keep wet wipes in your backpack," said Jon Cox patiently, "and it's important that people know this about you."

Mama folded his arms. "I like clean surfaces!"

The boy at the sofa's other end, the boy with the turban, cleared his throat. He had patchy facial hair growing in on his chin and jawline, but puberty didn't seem to have mustered up the energy to give him a mustache. "I'm Nihal Singh Sehrawat," he introduced, in the driest deadpan I'd ever heard. "Your fellow Tenor 1. Welcome to the falsetto club."

I nodded, trying not to look at his turban. I'd seen this kid around campus once or twice—it was hard to forget the number of people staring at his head. I didn't want to be the next in a long line of turban-gawkers.

"Before you ask," he said, still in that flat tone, "I'm a Sikh, not Muslim; and I'm Indian, but I'm actually from New Jersey. So. Do with that information what you will."

"Cool," I said. "Good to meet you." I straightened in my armchair, trying to keep their names from slipping away. "I'm Julian. I'm a junior from San Francisco."

"Juniors, represent," Mama said. "Why didn't you audition our freshman year?"

I shrugged, faking unconcern. "Trying to focus on theater stuff."

Mama scoffed and scrubbed a hand through his dark hair. "Theater."

"Um, sorry, what?" I said, defensive.

Nihal Singh Sehrawat intervened. "Theodore is convinced that everything that isn't music is an inferior discipline, which is why I was mercilessly hazed all of last year."

Mama gave a luxuriant roll of his blue eyes. "I didn't haze you, you asshat," he said. "I just said that it's a national embarrassment that you don't know what parallel fifths are."

"See what I have to deal with?" Nihal said to me. "Asshat. I will never recover."

I decided not to admit that I also didn't know what parallel fifths were. "You're not School of Music?" I asked, relieved.

"No," Nihal said. "Visual Arts."

"Nihal actually doesn't even sing," Isaac said, his eyes sparkling with enjoyment. "We just hired him to Photoshop our posters so they look like Beatles album covers." Sprawled in his seat, his legs spread obscenely and his hands tracing circles over the chair's leather arms, Isaac looked like an emperor surveying his kingdom.

Nihal raised one eyebrow. "If you want to look like a Beatle, Isaac, you may have to get your first haircut since you exited the womb."

"Yeah, over my dead body," Isaac said, one hand flying defensively to his man bun.

Trav cleared his throat. Everyone fell silent.

"To business." Trav turned his eyes on me. They glinted brighter and harder than the stud in his ear. "For rehearsal tomorrow, arrive at least five minutes to eight. Lateness is not acceptable." Trav fished a thick spiral-bound journal from his backpack. "Don't schedule anything over the eight to nine o'clock hour. Ever. And yes, we do rehearse Friday and Saturday night. If you need an exemption for any reason, talk to me well in advance—two to three weeks." He tapped the journal. "I keep everyone's schedules here, but Sharps should always be your priority."

"Got it," I said, wondering about the air of obsession that hung around this guy like a strong cologne. Was he getting paid for this?

"Other things," Trav said, stowing the journal. "Firstly, our faculty sponsor is Dr. Graves, but don't bother asking him anything. To put it generously, he's very hands-off. Secondly, we take a three-day retreat at the beginning of Thanksgiving Break. Talk to your parents; factor it into your flight plans."

I nodded. It wouldn't be an issue. With the obscene cost of flights around Thanksgiving, I stayed at Kensington for break every year, so my parents never had to know if I left campus.

"Thirdly," he continued, pointing at a scrap of paper nailed above the piano, "don't discuss our competition set with anyone. You're bound to secrecy. And fourthly ..." Trav tugged a black pouch from his pocket and tossed it to me. I caught it, pulled the drawstrings loose, and tugged out a silver key.

"That's a key to this room," Trav said. "Prince automatically locks at midnight, but one of the practice rooms has a broken window lock. Easy to sneak in. So, this place is always open for you, 24/7, 365." His voice grew stiff and uncomfortable. "The Nest is like a second home for most of us. That's how it is."

"Aw, Trav," Isaac said, with a lopsided grin. "I'm getting all warm and fuzzy."

"Fifthly," Trav added loudly, "ignore everything Isaac ever says. President isn't a real job."

Laughs bounced off the high ceiling like the sound of pealing bells. With my sound lost in the mix, I let my voice rise high.

The moon was a bright disk outside my dorm, and I sat across from my mirror with a pair of scissors. The empty swirl of a new wig sat on the desk. I'd swapped out the first for a copy of my hair as it looked now, waist-long and simple, straight locks stitched tightly into the cap.

I'd been sitting here for minutes, waiting for the urge to hit. I couldn't trust my hair to stay put, so the solution was obvious: cut my long hair short, swap out a short wig for long, and use the wig to look like a girl instead. But cutting my hair felt so irreversible, a symbolic sign of total commitment. There'd be no rewinding, no panicking, no second thoughts. I'd be halfway through college before this regrew.

I narrowed my eyes at myself in the mirror. I was already committed. I was initiated. I'd conquered auditions, solved the puzzle, weathered Traveler Atwood's icy stare for a truly inhumane amount of time. It wasn't going to be for nothing.

My hair swung around my shoulders and face, crumpled by the grip of the pins. I let myself touch it for a minute. Then I lifted the scissors, took a steady breath, and cut. The metal brushed my jaw, a little sting.

Tinny shearing sounds tinted the air. I accelerated, snipping ends at angles, scything it all away. Years' worth of hair fell into the trash can between my knees, forearm lengths of it. I was weightless. My mother loved the thickness of my hair—"you'll never go bald"—but in the San Francisco summers it always glistened, oily, a heavy beacon for the sun.

Cut by cut, my new reality settled around my head. Every kiss of the scissors was a goodbye to what I used to be. The only thing left was December.