Isaac chuckled. “Aaand there’s the verdict from the pretentious peanut gallery.”
I thought for a second. My words kept falling apart before they reached the front of my mouth. “But—I mean—” I took a deep breath. “The Precautionary Measures are really good, though.”
Isaac nodded, spinning the lid of the mason jar around his thumb. “No, definitely, they’re great musicians. But believe me, they’re not winning this thing.” He shrugged. “Girls’ groups have a reputation.”
“What reputation?”
Isaac went back to his matches, picking around the words carefully. “Some people would say, um, that they don’t really . . . it’s a vibe thing. If we’re looking at musicality, the Precautionary Measures are obviously better than the Minuets. But the Minuets sell it. There’s comedy, you know?”
Drop it, warned a little voice. Let it go. But I couldn’t. “Why can’t girls’ groups have comedy?” I blurted out. Jon Cox, Mama, and Isaac looked at me with confusion, obviously baffled about why I was fighting them on this. Nihal had stopped sketching.
“Guys’ a cappella is just funny,” Jon Cox said blankly. “A bunch of music nerds jamming out pretending to be instruments.”
“To be fair,” Nihal said, his voice a quiet reassurance, “that is the same thing that girls’ groups do.”
Mama waved his hand. “I think we’re all kind of missing the point. Again, let’s look at the music.” He pointed at me and Nihal. “You two sing up to what, an F5?”
I glanced at Nihal. “I can kind of get a high E out,” I said reluctantly.
“G-ish on the better days,” Nihal said.
“Well, yeah, then,” Mama said.
“Well, yeah, what?” I said.
Mama shrugged. “Even girls’ groups hardly ever write parts that sit on a high F.”
With a snip of the scissors, Isaac finished guillotining the last of the matches. “The Measures obviously have ranges above that,” he added. “I think a couple of them have the F an octave up, which is wild.”
“Well, yes,” Mama said patiently. “But nobody’s ever going to arrange anything up there for more than about two seconds. Having bass gets you a hundred times more mileage than being able to sing notes from, like, Die Zauberfl?te.”
Jon Cox grinned. “Here’s a fun game. Try to make Mama go a full conversation without name-dropping Baroque music.”
“Oh my God,” Mama said. “Die Zauberfl?te is Classical Era; I’m embarrassed to know you.”
“Really digging yourself deeper here, Theodore,” Nihal said.
Jon Cox raised his hands. “Yeah, sorry my parents aren’t music professors.”
They kept bantering. I stayed quiet. Discomfort had settled like a bed of needles beneath my skin. My teeth were clamped tight together to keep the words in. I almost wanted to go to the Precautionary Measures right now and vent to them, but I sat there, wondering. Were the Sharps right? They knew more about music than I did—was my reaction a knee-jerk denial that girls’ groups were necessarily worse than guys’? It was true that all the songs we covered were bass-heavy, from recent thudding pop songs all the way back to the jazz standards from the thirties, whose double bass plucked along beneath flaring horn sections. Obviously, girls’ groups had a different sound quality.
How could it be objectively worse, though? Plenty of songs in the coed and all-guys’ concerts were missing something, too, not innovative enough to hook an audience in either. That seemed like the real battle—making each song engaging moment to moment. Not something as indefinable as “vibe.”
It just didn’t feel right. Music aside, didn’t they hear what they sounded like, with all the vague talk about comedy? It smacked of the same old argument that “girls aren’t funny,” as if all girls had one specific sense of humor and the Powers that Be had decided along the line that it missed the mark.
I didn’t want to fight the guys on it. All I wanted was for them to think a little bigger. For the first time, sitting among them, I felt inadequate, struggling to reach some tier they’d put themselves on. This was supposed to be the place where I was finally good enough.
I felt eyes on me. I glanced over at Nihal, who gave me a resigned-looking shrug and went back to his sketchbook.
Before rehearsal, the guys asked me to pull “After All” from the archives—a classic Sharps song, originally by sad indie boy Hendrix Bird. Since I didn’t know where the archives were, Nihal led the way. We wound down into the practice room where I’d done my callback, opened a filing cabinet, and started rummaging.
Nihal’s careful hands drew out two bursting manila folders. He shouldered the filing cabinet shut and placed the folders gently on the piano lid. “Here we go. The esteemed Sharpshooter Archives. You check this one.” He angled a folder my way.
“Not alphabetical?”
Nihal’s lips quivered, making his beard twitch. He didn’t bother answering.
I opened one of the folders and flipped through the clutter of arrangements. “God, there’s so much.”
“Mmhmm.” Nihal licked his thumb and started paging through the arrangements with a caution that verged on tenderness. “There’s twelve years’ worth of music in here. Everything after they stopped teaching by ear and before they started arranging digitally.”
As my fingers flipped aging pages, rivers of handwritten notes splashed across yellowing staff paper, a glimpse of memory folded against my vision. Last year, Mr. Rollins had asked me and Michael to alphabetize his cabinet of audition sides, its drawers crammed with photocopied excerpts from A Streetcar Named Desire and The Aliens and Much Ado About Nothing. I remembered sitting on the floor cross-legged in this sort of quiet. Easy and natural.
Nihal asked, “Do you have friends in the Precautionary Measures?”
“Why?”
“You seemed a bit—” He made a strained face. “—earlier.”
I kept my tone casual. “It’s nothing. I just didn’t think the guys were the type to throw shade.”
Nihal hummed his usual little chuckle. “They probably didn’t even realize they were,” he said. “Isaac, Jon Cox, and Theodore are delightful people who tend to get so far up their own asses they lose sight of daylight.”
I laughed, but my smile faded fast. I was doing exactly what I’d said I wouldn’t do. Random afternoon car rides with the Sharps, long conversations, feeling betrayed by opinions that distanced me from them—this was too much.
But I didn’t want to pull back. It was hard to miss isolation.
“Hey,” I said quietly. “Do you have a lot of friends in the Visual Arts school?”
Nihal’s hands faltered. “Why?”
“No reason.”
Nihal glanced at me. He had the kindest eyes, hazelnut brown, tapered at the edges as if in a permanent smile.
“No, really, it’s nothing,” I said. “The Sharps are so—” I broke off, shrugging. “Everyone’s so tight.”