“I am calm,” I said, thinking that there was no faster way to enrage a calm person than by telling them to calm down. These music guys had some nerve, anyway, trying to boot us out of a space specifically built for the School of Theater.
To be fair, near the back of their group was a kid I vaguely recognized from the theater school. Even though it was dominated by music kids, a cappella was technically extracurricular. Anyone in any discipline could audition for the half-dozen groups, and as a result, a cappella had become one of the few things that tied Kensington’s five schools together (the others being the newspaper and a universal disdain for the administration). Even Visual Arts kids, who hardly ever stepped off the Northwest quad, could be spotted at a cappella concerts, begrudgingly jamming along to some remixed version of a pop song by Justine Gray or Sam Samuelson. The fall Sharpshooters concert was like our version of a Homecoming game—the guys’ octet was our oldest group, and, if possible, even cultier than the rest of them.
Behind these two, the rest of the New York Minuets aimed questioning looks at me, murmuring to each other in an inaudible rumble. Tall glanced up at Taller, looking for guidance.
“Look,” Taller said to me, in a clearly-you-don’t-understand-the-gravity-of-the-situation sort of voice. “We have a competition we’re preparing for. So if you could just—”
“You mean the one in December?” Lydia said flatly. “Three months from now?”
Taller looked at her. He seemed to have lost the ability to speak. Lydia’s blue eyes were flinty beneath the blunt line of her bangs.
We’d gotten a bottomless pit’s worth of e-mails about the competition. Aural Fixation, an a cappella group made famous by competition-style reality TV, was visiting Kensington right before winter break. Since their latest lineup had a couple of Kensington alumni, they’d be picking one of our a cappella groups to open for them during the European leg of their international tour over winter break. This, hilariously, meant two straight weeks of sold-out stadiums in London and Rome and Madrid and Lisbon. For concerts that consisted of people pretending to be musical instruments. Unreal.
There was no logical reason for a cappella to have exploded like this. It was the geekiest thing in the world, filled with terrible pun names and obscenely technical singing. It’d been born out of barbershop quartets and doo-wop, for God’s sake. Its DNA was filled with strains of undiluted nerd.
Taller found his voice. “See? Even you’ve heard about it,” he said, dripping condescension.
Lydia and I traded a disbelieving look. Even us! Mere plebeians!
“So,” he continued. “You get why we need to practice.”
“Right,” I said. “In this space, specifically. Because there isn’t an entire campus’s worth of space just on the other side of those steps.”
“Right,” he agreed, and flashed a brilliant smile. I narrowed my eyes at his perfect teeth.
Lydia and I stood in deadlocked silence across from Tall and Taller. For a minute, I was determined to stand there until the natural world eroded me to dust, but then my eyes fell to the other Minuets’ hopeful faces, and guilt crept into me. Maybe Tall and Taller weren’t the nicest human beings, but these other kids just wanted to get on with rehearsal. There were more campus spaces for two people than sixteen, and anyway, at this point, it seemed like the options were to back down or waste another half-hour testing out new ways to explain the words “go away.”
I sighed and relented. “Come on, Lydia. Let’s find somewhere else.”
There was a smugness to the way Taller said “Thanks” that made it sound distinctly like “I win.” Although, to be fair, his entire persona oozed “I win.” This kid was really leaning into the Kensington type. When people heard “Kensington-Blaine,” they envisioned an alarmingly specific person: He was a third-generation legacy from New England with great bone structure; he was a he, because the school hadn’t gone coed until 1985; he was white, with a name like Oliver or Henry or Phineus; and his trust fund was roughly the size of Iceland’s GDP. With Kensington’s aggressive diversity initiatives, though, the type was transforming, blurring out of boxes and categories by the year. They were a diminishing breed, the Olivers, Henries, and Phineuses (Phinei?).
As Lydia and I climbed out of the amphitheater, her hand was tight over the navy tote bag that hung on her shoulder, and I plucked hard at the patches of wear in my jeans. With every step, I got angrier at myself for backing down. Why did it always end up like this? Why was I always the one to cave? Why did I feel guilty that we’d stood up for ourselves, even temporarily?
I tried not to hate the dark-haired boy down the steps, because anger didn’t do anything, and besides, if I let myself hate him, it wouldn’t entirely be for the way he’d acted. It would be for selfish reasons. All my failings were his successes: He could ask for what he wanted without feeling like an inconvenience. He could be totally sure of his own importance, not second-guessing a word out of his own mouth. That kid was handsome and rich and had a voice I remembered, a soaring tenor that was everything it should be. It’s too simple to hate the people who have doorways where you have walls.
That night, in my room, I scrolled through the flood of back-to-school audition advertisements. The e-mails had slowed to a trickle and finally stopped over the weekend, and I’d been glad at the time, but now I imagined turning back the clock and trying for any of these, instead of throwing away my chance on the musical. I could have run sound or lights for one of the senior capstone projects. I could have auditioned for Trazba, an experimental two-person play inspired by 1950s science-fiction films, in which one of the people is pregnant and the other person plays the fetus, because I guess every other idea for a play was already taken.
The e-mail system refreshed, and the thin stripe of a new e-mail appeared at the top. The subject line read, “Audition Call.” My heart leapt, my mind yelled, FATE! and my finger stabbed the clickpad.
The message loaded. My excitement died. A cappella again.
In a black-and-white photo, eight boys in sport coats and ties sprawled in bored-looking positions on the steps to the Arlington Hall of Music. Stone lions flanked the steps, prowling on the columns that guarded Arlington, carved muscle rippling beneath their alabaster skin. Calligraphy font across the photo read The Sharpshooters, and beneath, the audition notice said:
ONE SPOT HAS OPENED IN THE SHARPSHOOTERS, KENSINGTON-BLAINE’S PREMIER ALL-MALE A CAPPELLA OCTET. WE INVITE TENOR 1S OF ANY YEAR TO SIGN UP FOR AN AUDITION SLOT USING THE FORM BELOW.