The end of the first song approached fast, the stream-of-consciousness whirl of performance stealing time from me. I pivoted into our next formation, standing by Marcus’s shoulder as he’s picked up the solo. His gingery eyelashes glinted bronze when he squeezed his eyes shut. Every ounce of his awkward energy was let loose, his voice bright and sweet, his hand clenched around his mic, pale in the stage light.
Marcus handed the solo to Isaac, whose assured tenor spun up into the stratosphere and back with perfect control. Behind him, we cut out and fell back into place, punctuated silence with bursts of sound, and he hardly seemed to breathe, holding everything together single-handedly.
Seven voices dropped out at once, leaving Isaac’s vibrato over voluminous silence. A cheer erupted from the crowd, the baritones slipped up into falsetto to back him, and Erik shifted into a slower beat, a steady thump-thump-thump. Chord by chord, we transitioned into the second song. Careful and measured as always. This whole discipline walked a tightrope—one flat note and everything unraveled. We had to glue ourselves together to make it through.
The others peeled back, allowing Jon Cox and me to go forward to the lip of the stage. Our voices locked together as we navigated a tight harmony.
“And your touch is heaven falling,
And your eyes say love is blind,
And your fingertips keep hauling
’Til the stars are realigned . . .”
Every time I changed expression, every time I hinted at a smile, pressure clamped over the edges of my eye sockets. My face was stiff and painful, my nose felt eight sizes too wide, and under the heat of the lights, I worried I was sweating away the foundation. I tilted my head up too far, trying not to think, and the center spotlights gazed like two white eyes into mine. In a flash of blindness, I closed my eyes and let the echoes of light pulse against the backs of my eyelids. My voice soared high. As I drew breath, feet shifted behind me, whispers of dress shoe to stage that were masked by thick harmonies. Pops of falsetto startled out of the melody; the deep, swinging pendulum of bass kept our time.
My eyes cracked open again. The world solidified, and Jon Cox and I navigated the solo toward its end.
“I fall into bed with my hands turning blue, And my aching head
Is full of you.”
The background textures faded as Jon Cox and I backed up into our cluster, Mama’s chest to my back, Erik’s shoulder reassuring against my arm. A second’s silence sewed us together before Nihal stepped forward, bursting the seams.
I didn’t want to focus on his voice, but when Nihal sang, I heard the personal care of my dad singing me a lullaby when I was younger. The words pierced too close, this time through.
“So I asked the clockmaker
How much it would break her,
Her cogs and bells and wooden ledges, Her painted face and gilded edges,
To turn back the dial To turn back the dial
For a while.”
The song rose and fell like a tide, and the sound turned wispy and sparse. Trav had abandoned his fancy cutouts and creative chord shifts for this transition. He didn’t need them here, cluttering up the thread of melody.
We settled into a staggered formation, four and four, as Erik dropped the percussion into a slow hiss and scrape, like the hush of a steel brush against a cymbal. I looked between the window of Isaac and Nihal’s shoulders, and I wanted to reach out to them, all of a sudden, take them and hold on, dig in my nails.
Then they shifted, and the last thoughts—the last regrets—fled my mind.
The last song arrived in unison: E major, “Halloween.” We sang with tightly closed lips, humming syllables, so that I could practically hear the piano hammers striking. My freshman year song. Trav took up the solo, and his tentative delivery knocked me into remembrance, back to the start of Kensington, back to the beginning of everything, back to this: the twisted A of Arthur’s Arch and the crows casting sharp-winged shadows as the car pulls up the drive. There I am in the back. I’m peering out of the windows up at the dappled stone, awestruck.
“A couple of weeks ago, I tried to go back
Did I tell you this before?
Back to the, back to the, back to the place
Where yours was the second drawer.”
All over again, I’m sitting in my first day of class, when Reese tells us that if she hears one of us call her by her last name, she’ll walk out the door and we’ll just have to wait, useless, for the time to run out. I’m walking out of my first audition, exhilarated, nerves jangling, and leaning against the stone wall. I can smell the autumn air baking above Palmer’s stone steps.
“I stood in the threshold,
And all of the cobwebs,
Glimmering dusty and bright,
Reminded me of the gossamer-fine
Silences we’d always tie around each other at night.”
I’m staying up late one night freshman year, having a talk with Lydia that lasts until my throat hurts, wandering through every topic that matters, faith, fear, and hope, and somehow I can’t remember a single word of it a year later; I’m on a walk in the spring of my sophomore year, one of the first beautiful days that’ll drag us kicking out of the cold, just me and the countryside and that massive sky sending breezes and sunlight down in patches; I’m all over this town, and in the winters it eats up my footprints with fresh snow until nothing’s left.
“And it still smells like Halloween,
And the way things used to be.
Will someone take ahold of me
And promise there’s something inside me
I might want to be?”
I’m leaning over Carrie’s counter, trying to pull Michael back at the shoulder as he waves vigorously, parlando Italiano, into her gut laughter, clearing the air with it; I’m holding him by the elbows on the Palmer stage, his mouth on my neck, our legs twined, my ankles resting heavy on his calves; I’m heart-swollen at his graduation. I’m standing opposite him in my kitchen in San Francisco as he tells me there’s been someone for months. There’s been Alaina for months.
“A couple of years from now,
I’ll stop looking back,
At least, that’s what they’ve all implied
Back to the, back to the, back to the time
I let you come and curl up inside.”
I’m in that kitchen for an eternity, imagining every time over those three months that I looked into his eyes and thought he was mine, only mine; then time’s jolting onward and I’m drowning in summertime, feeling na?ve and small and lost; I’m moving into Burgess alone and pinning posters to my walls alone; I’m scratching notes in black pen onto yellow college-ruled paper alone; I’m shearing off my hair and a great weight is falling from me; I am singing him away, back into my history; I am kissing someone else in a tower that pierces the sky and feeling something new; I am letting him go, I am letting him go, I am letting him go in all these tiny ways.
“I’ll find in a city,
Some gray, thirsty block
A lightning-rod building that soars:
Acquiring sky, and reaching so high,