He went back to teaching. The tension cleared. Beside me, Nihal let out a slow breath, his expression telling me this wasn’t rare.
It seemed like hardly five minutes before the bell across campus in Palmer tower was hammering nine o’clock, the deep strikes droning through the windowpanes. We passed our music back to Trav, who shuffled it into his binder.
I slipped my backpack on, but the others seemed happy to stay, even with our nine-thirty curfew creeping up. Erik settled at the piano and improvised some soothing jazz, looking unconcerned in the most intentional possible way. If he wanted approval from the older guys, he needed a new tactic—Mama and Jon Cox were already sinking back to the sofa, watching a video on Jon Cox’s phone. And Trav . . . the instant his messenger bag landed on his shoulder, he was out the door without a word to anyone.
What was the guy’s deal?
Mama jabbed his finger insistently at the screen. “Okay,” he said, “hard evidence of Haydn being the best. This is the second movement of the Surprise Symphony. Just wait for it.”
“What am I waiting for?” Jon Cox said.
“The surprise,” Mama said, soulfully. “He puts this random fortissimo chord at the end of a pianissimo theme, out of nowhere. Haydn has the best sense of humor of anyone from the Classical period.”
“I don’t know, man.” Jon Cox stretched his legs out. “Mozart literally wrote a song called ‘Lick Me in the Ass.’”
“Well, that’s just immature,” Mama sniffed, and then his phone blared an orchestra hit so loudly that, over his shoulder, Marcus nearly fell out of the windowsill.
“Hey, Julian,” Isaac said, bopping me on the shoulder. “Could I get your number?”
I jerked back to myself, remembering my disguise. I’d managed to forget I was wearing it. My number? Why did he want my number?
I straightened up, puffing my chest out. “Uh,” I said gruffly. “Sure?”
He gestured with his phone. “Cool. I’m gonna add you to the group text.”
“Oh. Sorry, right.” I deflated, mentally pinching myself, and rattled off the number.
“Sweet.” Isaac typed something and hit send, and my phone buzzed in my pocket. “Brace yourself for constant updates,” he said. “This thing is a nightmare.”
I tugged out my phone. ALL HAIL JULIAN, said the message Isaac had sent to the group.
“Julian,” said a voice behind me. Nihal was holding the door. “Are you going east?” he asked. “Want to come with?”
I was taken aback. “Y-yeah, sure.” I looked back at Isaac. “Later.”
“See ya.” Isaac took a running jump onto the sofa beside Jon Cox and Mama, who protested loudly. Leaving the Nest filled with rowdy exclamations, all warmth, light, and noise, Nihal and I disappeared into the coolness of the stairwell.
The heavy door shut behind us, nestling us in silence. Nihal adjusted the portfolio slung across his back as we descended the stone steps. “Enjoy your first rehearsal?”
“It was . . . intense.”
“Fair,” he said. “Trav’s a lot at first. Give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“I can do that,” I said, glancing at Nihal. In the dim light of the stairwell, his expression was unreadable. “Why’s he so . . . ?”
Nihal shook his head. “Family stuff. Probably best not to ask.”
I loosed a sigh. That mantra was depressingly familiar. When Michael had lost the lead role in a show after breaking his arm, he’d been the same way: Don’t ask, don’t talk, don’t even try. When his chronic pain acted up, my dad did it too: Don’t ask, don’t talk, don’t even try. But they weren’t showy about their avoidance. They didn’t go quiet or dramatic. They carried on like normal, making enough noise that you couldn’t pick out the silence underneath.
That night, I jerked awake to a text tone. My room swam in darkness as I slumped over, grabbed my phone, and stared at the time: 3:25 a.m.
It was a text from Trav to the group message. Thinking about rearranging the opening bars of Love You Forever. Don’t get married to the cutouts after the jin jahs.
“What . . . why,” I whispered. “Go to sleep.”
Even as the words slipped from my mouth, a text from Isaac ballooned up in gray: SLEEP NOW, JIN JAHS LATER
More complaints followed.
From Jon Cox: thanks, gr9 to know, ive been weighing the pros/ cons of that stylistic choice for 4 hours, thats why I’m up at 3:30 in the goddamn morning
From Mama: Wait no!! The texture of the cutouts is the best part!!!
From Isaac: SILENCE, mama, do NOT encourage him
From Jon Cox: how dare u speak to yr mother that way
From Nihal: Gentlemen. I have a test in five hours. Kindly shut up.
They took his advice. The text went quiet. I shook my head and rolled back over, but for some reason, a smile pressed at my cheeks. A feeling was budding warm in my chest, and after a second of searching, I pinned it down: the feeling of being among family.
It had been over a year since I’d felt this with my actual family, this specific blend of humor, understanding, and comfort. A year and two months, to be specific.
I remembered that day’s details—the call, the white-knuckled trip to the ER, the news about drought that had flashed soundlessly on the televisions in the waiting room—in the way I remembered those overplayed songs on the radio: the memories were suspended, dormant, in my brain cavity, waiting to surface without me needing to try. Weird, how one day your life could be swallowed up in minor inconveniences, the bad weather and late arrivals of the mundane world, and the next, nothing existed but a turning point. For some people, that would be a death, or a fire, or an overdose. My family was sent lurching out of control by something that, at first, seemed like a minuscule upset to the balance: my father getting a cough.
Here’s what can happen at the crossroads of being poor, disabled, and sick, a road that’s about as pleasant to travel as I-80 during rush hour. Let’s say, as a totally hypothetical example, you’re a paraplegic dad in San Francisco who works a checkout job, enabling your daughter’s flights out to a fancy boarding school in New England. One particular month, let’s say July, you get a nasty cough, but you need the hours, so you work through it. The cough evolves into a chilling fever. You soldier on, determined to support your family. But when that cough starts turning up blood and rattling sounds, and a fist of pressure builds in your chest, and one day you can no longer breathe without choking, you land in the emergency room with a tube draining a thick packet of fluid out of your left lung and an $18,000 medical bill accumulated before you’re conscious again.