“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.