I’ll leave those memories all the way down at the doors.”
I have all of this to keep. Two and a half years of calls home, of bundling up against the weather, of soupy morning mists and fresh fruit every night, running lines until I know them more intimately than my own name, trying to clear my head, hoping for a nod of approval from Reese Garrison, sneaking into an abandoned cinema, sipping smooth whiskey in a field under the stars, brushing Isaac’s hand in the dark, relaxing into my armchair in the Crow’s Nest. It all clings to my ankles, it drags me back. It’s mine.
“And it’ll smell like Christmas trees, The scent of something new and clean
But in all of my realities,
I’ll never forget I’ll never forget what I’ve seen.”
There is no moment of calm before the surge of the cheering, just the audience’s roar, eating up the last shreds of sound, two thousand beating hands, a thousand voices giving themselves back in appreciation.
The rest of the competition, from the other groups’ performances to the judges’ deliberation, took about thirty years. My heart was pattering like a rabbit’s by the end. Carnelian’s arrangements had been so complex that I couldn’t imagine what they looked like on a page, the Precautionary Measures had a set of soloists who could easily have outsung half the artists on the radio, and the Minuets may have been terrible people, but their performance, like all the best performances, made me want to sing.
Finally, the nine members of Aural Fixation took the stage to raucous applause. The other groups, also huddled back here in darkened masses of suits and dresses, fell silent. I edged closer to the curtain. I couldn’t see who had taken the microphone, but I assumed it was that tenor, Watson, with the cult following.
After the applause cleared away, Watson said, “First of all, wow. Thanks for inviting us into this beautiful space. It’s really an honor to visit the place that helped make our newest members into such remarkable talents.” A few hands waved from the front of their group, the Kensington alums, pandering to the crowd.
Polite applause. Watson continued, “These six groups have made our decision incredibly difficult. Please, another round of applause for the hard work everyone’s put in.”
The audience obliged with a short, impatient burst of clapping.
“With no further ado,” he said, “we’d like to announce that the group to accompany us on our winter tour will be the Sharpshooters.”
The crowd erupted. The guys and I burst into excitement. “Yes, yes, yes,” Isaac was yelling, all but lost in the applause. Jon Cox jumped onto Mama’s back, and Mama stabbed his fist into the air. Trav looked like he’d been clocked in the forehead with something heavy, his eyes blankly searching the darkness of the house, and I imagined his parents sitting out there in the crowd, swept away in everybody’s appreciation for Trav’s work.
Onstage, Aural Fixation waved us out. We ran between the curtains. Everything was bright and delirious and unreal. And then, as we came up to them to shake hands, to accept our recognition, I froze. Shock struck the smile from my face.
They’d parted. At the front of the group stood the alumni, and among them—right there, like a bad dream—stood Michael.
Michael, eyes like obsidian, copper skin burnished by stage light. Michael, tall and handsome, still himself.
My feet reacted before my thoughts, carrying me back in a rush. I made it offstage just as Watson started talking again, but the other Sharps were looking after me, and Michael hadn’t stopped staring. I dashed for the greenroom. A hand—Victoria’s hand, small and strong—caught my arm. “Hey. Are you okay?”
“Stage fright,” I managed, which wasn’t technically a lie. I darted into the greenroom, around the L-shaped room’s corner, and burst through a back door, which led me into a stairwell. My fingers clamped around the iron railing, and I levered myself to the steps, a haze settling around me, an insulating shroud of panic.
Why was he here? How could he be here like this, sprung on me like a bear trap? How couldn’t I have known?
I’d imagined him in college classes, in fancy lecture halls. Or waiting tables, maybe, going to rehearsals at night in New York City or Chicago, walking fast with his coat collar up in a pair of stiff corners, his head down and hands in his pockets. Tiny in the biggest of cities. And now he was fifty steps from me. His knobbly knuckles that he cracked absentmindedly, and the blueberry smell of his aftershave, right there. The memory of him darted across my skin like referred pain.
The call during the retreat, I realized. If I’d picked up, I would have known. This must have been what he was calling about. Maybe he’d wanted to see me when he came back to campus.
And now this. We’d won. I was days from getting on a plane to Europe, days from seeing city after city that I might never see otherwise. I’d gotten all the way to the end, even as my lifelines slipped away, the guys starting to figure it out one by one.
It didn’t matter. He was here now, and he knew, and that was it. I’d run out of second chances.
I shivered. This stairwell bottomed out in an exit, and cold leaked up toward me. I stood. I would grab my coat from the greenroom, run out, and that would be the last of it.
I grabbed the greenroom doorknob, slipped in, and collided with a suit-jacketed torso. Nihal reeled back from me as if burned.
The L-shaped room had filled to the brim.
Heads turned in a unanimous wave. Attention trapped me in the threshold. Aural Fixation and the Sharps stood opposite, and—God, why?—Dr. Graves and Dr. Caskey had appeared beside the television monitor in the corner, near the door to the stage. Dr. Graves looked like it was physically paining him to stand so close to Dr. Caskey. Connor stood at his dad’s shoulder, the button of his sport coat undone, fiddling with his red tie.
I held Isaac’s eyes, the only point of reassurance in the mass of men and boys.
“Are you okay?” Marcus blurted. “What’s going on?”
There was no use trying to deflect it. I stayed silent.
Michael cleared his throat. “We know each other,” he said. “She’s my ex-girlfriend.”
Eyebrows rose. A long moment of disbelieving silence followed.
“Wh-what?” Trav said, his voice a rasp of shock. He peered at me as if I were a bright light.
“Yeah, I’m a girl. I’m just . . .”
“Acting,” said Mama, sounding weak.
Dr. Caskey’s gimlet eyes bulged. A few of the Aural Fixation guys shifted, like they would rather have been anywhere else. Dr. Graves’s gash of a mouth was slightly open, and I wondered if he was reconsidering the whole man up suggestion.
The stares became too much. My eyes found my feet, and I studied the hard, shining lines of my shoes.