“Okay. Never mind,” Trav said. “One more time from the top.” He took a deep, exasperated breath.
Then he froze. Dread seeped into the room as if the coldness outside were slipping through the windows. Trav leaned past Marcus, closer to Isaac, and took a second, sharper breath through his nose.
Isaac moved back, but Trav was dropping his pitch pipe into his pocket. “Why do you smell like weed?” he said, his voice low and dangerous. “Are you high right now?”
I—and all the other guys—turned a disbelieving stare on Isaac. Jon Cox and Mama smoked in the woods pretty often, but never anytime close to rehearsal, out of sheer self-preservation if nothing else. Since when did Isaac even smoke?
A long moment drew taut, a quivering string. Isaac glanced around the circle, as if for backup, then back to Trav. “Yeah.”
“Answer something for me.” Trav’s voice was taut with control. “When are you going to start taking this seriously?”
“Calm down,” Isaac said.
“No. Not until you get rid of this new attitude, treating rehearsal like it doesn’t matter.” Trav’s voice rose. “Look at you. You’re late, you’re distracted, you show up like this—”
Isaac snapped. “Maybe that’s because this doesn’t fucking matter!”
A flinch impacted the circle, and something awful happened. We were punctured and began to deflate. I felt ridiculous, sheet music drooping in my hand. All this—it was kind of silly, wasn’t it? Singing nonsense words until they sort of fit together, trying to massage pop music into a format that lent itself to humor more than anything else? And Trav’s absolute seriousness made it ludicrous, if you thought about it too hard. I glanced around the circle and knew everybody else was feeling it, too. A sudden blast of unwelcome perspective.
“What?” Trav said. “What’s that supposed to mean?” The fury had evaporated from his voice. He sounded hollow.
“What do you think it means? Look at this.” With a toneless laugh, Isaac threw his sheet music on top of the piano and turned on the rest of us. He searched blank face after blank face. “What do you think we’re doing here? Curing cancer? Jesus, what do you think this is? Eight guys standing around making noise.” He rounded on Trav, and for the first time, it was obvious the height Isaac had on him. “I’m done with you, acting like this is life and death.”
I wanted to step in, but this had been coming since that night in the theater, since that first rehearsal when Isaac hadn’t been paying enough attention for Trav’s taste. It had been coming since before I’d even auditioned.
“Forget it. I can’t do this.” Isaac went for the door. The bang when he slammed it made tingles run down my arms.
“Jesus,” Jon Cox muttered.
“I—I can go after him,” Marcus said, “if—”
Nihal shook his head. Marcus fell quiet.
The air was still. One by one, we looked to Trav. There was nothing behind his eyes. Usually, you could see calculations, or judgments, or appraisal. Or that rare dash of happiness. Now, nothing.
“We’re done for the night,” he said, his voice raspy.
Every movement slow and methodical, he collected the music, closed his binder, and left, as silent as a shadow.
It became clear about halfway through Thursday’s rehearsal that Isaac wasn’t going to show.
We managed to do a full run of the set before the hour ended, but the difference in our sound shocked me. With Isaac’s hypersensitive ear, Trav always put him on the strangest notes, those tight harmonies that made some chords sound like they were glowing. Without those parts—and without Isaac’s soaring solo lines, which always made my heart clench, no matter how many times I’d heard him sing them—everything sounded empty. Wrong.
Trav had a hand on the doorknob at the end of rehearsal when Mama stopped him. “Trav. Look, would you like me to call him?”
Trav froze, not facing us. “No.”
Jon Cox sighed. “Man, if you’re waiting for Isaac to crawl back and apologize, we’re still gonna be standing here by the time competition rolls around.”
“No,” Trav repeated, turning now. His eyes were cold chips of black glass. “We’re not waiting for anything.”
The rest of us traded uneasy glances.
“I get it,” Nihal said gently, “but two of our arrangements have eight-part splits. We need eight voices.”
“I’ll consolidate lines,” Trav said. “Rearrange, reteach. We can take Erik off VP for ‘Clockmaker’ and ‘Open Wide.’”
I closed my eyes, collapsing into my armchair. “Trav, we just finished the set. Nobody wants to relearn it.”
“Also,” Mama said, eyeing the rumpled collar that peeked out from Trav’s sweater, “you look exhausted. You’ve put in how many hours? I mean, the Minuets have five arrangers, and—”
Trav pulled his hat on, zipped his Patagonia, and took the doorknob in a stranglehold. “Do you think I care what the Minuets do?” he said. “This is what I do. I’ll handle it. And if Isaac’s not interested in contributing, he can stay out of it, as far as I’m concerned.”
Before we could say anything else, the door was closing at my elbow, the flag rippling in Trav’s wake. I made a hopeless gesture.
Jon Cox and Mama sat down on the sofa in unison. The freshmen just stood there, staring after Trav.
“So,” Marcus said, finally. “Does this . . . has this happened before?”
“I mean.” Jon Cox glanced at Mama. “No, but I saw it coming for sure.”
Mama sighed. “They had issues last year, but last year’s seniors always put them in line.”
I tried to imagine anyone putting Trav in line. It didn’t work.
“Same with the year before that,” Mama said. “Trav’s a transfer, so he joined the same year I did, which made it sort of weird. Maybe it would’ve been better if they’d been freshmen together.”
I caught the two freshmen trading a glance. Erik looked startled, like he hadn’t considered the fact that he’d be in the group with Marcus for four long years.
“Okay, um,” Marcus said. “I’ve got this composition homework to do, so . . .”
“Me too,” Erik said. He cleared his throat. “You, um, you want to work together?”
Surprise and doubt warred on Marcus’s expression. Eventually, he said, “S-sure, that’d be, yeah. Let’s.”
“Right.”
They headed out, both their heads ducked. Nihal hopped up on one of the arms of my armchair. We sat opposite Jon Cox and Mama, silence suspended between the four of us.
Nihal nudged me. “What ended up happening the night of the prank?”
“What prank?” Mama asked.
“Um.” I cleared my throat. “Me and Isaac had this plan to get the Minuets back after Bonfire. We were gonna steal the Golden Bear—”
Jon Cox spluttered. “You what?”