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.
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 bookcases 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.