“Good attitude.” Isaac leaned out of sight and addressed the others, a bit calmer. “He’s a Theater junior. Looks like we’ve got trumpet and choir in middle school, plus musical theater classes.”
A hazy sense of unreality sank over me. This boy, this actual human male, was talking about me like I was an actual human male. They were all buying this: the deeper voice, the wig, the too-small sports bra I’d used to strap back my already-flat chest under my baggy clothes. I hadn’t realized exactly how little I’d expected this to work until this second.
It was finally sinking in: This disguise looked convincing enough to turn me invisible. I was just some guy. Anonymous. Nobody. The world saw exactly what it wanted to see.
A different, deeper voice jerked me to attention. “Do you beatbox at all?” it said crisply.
“Uh,” I said. “No, I—”
“Any arranging experience?”
“Sorry. No.”
“Any background in music theory?” the voice demanded. It had slowly increased in volume, and the acoustics in Arlington were so crisp that it echoed from all around me. It was as if God were a baritone and had nothing better to do than lament my lack of musical experience.
I shook my head, praying the School of Music wasn’t filled with beatboxing and arranging experts. It seemed unlikely. Singers were a minority; the music kids were mostly instrumentalists. Pianists, flautists, guitarists. There were weirder music focuses, too. From the ones I’d met, I felt like every other Music kid had some focus with a name like Siberian Conducting Methods for Countertenor Rat-Choir.
“All right,” said Isaac’s voice. “Go ahead and—”
“Hang on,” interrupted Baritone God. “Do you need a starting note?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m good.”
“Are you pitch perfect?” he asked, sounding tense.
“I . . . don’t think so? What exactly—”
“Sing a middle C.” Baritone God leaned into sight. He was gaunt, with a shaved head and a pierced ear. Over his crisp button-up lay a tie in Kensington carnelian red, patterned with tiny black crows—our mascot. He looked as grave as if he were attending my funeral.
I picked a note and sang it. Baritone God drew a shiny disk from his pocket and blew into one of the apertures along the side. It whistled out a note a full third above the one I’d sung.
“Oh, well,” he said, looking disappointed. He flicked a hand and sank back out of sight.
“You done, Trav?” said Isaac, his voice smiling.
“Yeah, yeah,” muttered Trav.
“All right.” Isaac looked back up at me. “What are you going to sing?”
“I’m going to do ‘The Man for You’ by Season Sev—”
I cut myself off. Silence fell, absurd silence. I’d sung this song for two straight hours yesterday, and it somehow hadn’t occurred to me before this second—“The Man for You”?
“. . . Season Seven,” I finished, strangled.
“Cool,” Isaac said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
I breathed out the jitters. One breath, two, and then I was singing, and the tension in my body sank through my feet, forgotten.
“You came through like a hurricane,” I started, slow, steady. “You said you’d stay until the end of the rain. You never asked me where I come from, never asked me where I’ve been. I never asked you about home, or why you never let me in.”
I shifted my focus to the back wall, my head clean of everything but the basics: posture, breath support, loosening my tongue. “But you’re leaving town tomorrow, girl, now I’m feeling new,” I sang, shifting the last note around in a short run. One of the Sharps moved in his seat as I upped the volume. “I guess I never knew before, I never knew I needed you.”
I took a quick breath into the chorus, straightened my back, and belted: “And now I stop. Wait. Breathe a little, talk too late. You’re all I got, babe, and now I never want to hesitate. I’ll let you in now, I’m gonna show you how, so baby, kiss me ’til our time runs out.”
In the audience, Dr. Graves looked up from his phone.
My heart gave a panicked leap. I heightened the scratchy quality in my voice, disguising my high notes. “All I want to say is I’m the man for you, no doubt.” The notes cascaded down, down, and I ended near the bottom of my range.
The echo faded. Silence from the Sharps. Dr. Graves’s face, still tilted up toward me, was lit ominously from beneath by the white blur of his screen. Somewhere, a pen clicked.
Then Isaac said, “Thanks for swinging by. You’ll get an e-mail after dinner.”
I hurried offstage in a cold sweat.
At dinner, something jumpy and paranoid settled under the surface of my skin. Every time someone passed, I felt sure they were craning over my shoulder to stare at my face. But the nearest kids continued building a tepee out of their French fries, and not a single person gave me a second look, even ones I’d seen in class yesterday. Theater kids probably thought I was a film kid, and film kids probably thought I was a theater kid.
Kensington had two dining halls. Here on East Campus, the Film and Theater schools used McKnight Hall. On West Campus, the other three disciplines ate in Marden Cathedral, a hulking Gothic building that had been an active church until the fifties. Then they’d built the tiny, feather-gray chapel at the corner of town and converted the elegant cathedral into what had to be the fanciest cafeteria in the Western Hemisphere.
McKnight wasn’t hard on the eyes either. It felt like an experimental film set. Spindly wooden frameworks covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, mapping outlines of trees that sprawled across the glass. The walls leaned deep inward to prop up the raftered ceiling, a weird architectural choice made weirder by the paint job: dark floors and carnelian walls, to show some Kensington spirit, and also presumably to remind us vividly of blood while we chewed our questionable meatloaf.
Someone crossed close behind me. I got a whiff of lavender and stiffened—I would’ve recognized Lydia’s perfume anywhere. I angled my head directly down at my food, counted to ten, and snuck a glance upward. Her platinum hair bobbed into the distance.
Sitting out in the open was too risky. If I ever had to do this again, I would sit at the single-person round tables that lined the back wall, the lands of exile, designed for kids who wanted to read or study in peace while they ate. As far as the rest of McKnight was concerned, people in the back were invisible. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had died and nobody noticed.
I inhaled my dinner. The last bites always tasted better than the first. I slowed down enough by the end to savor the crisped texture around the edges of roasted chicken and the clean-tasting juice that snapped from fresh vegetables. Nothing here was ever canned, nothing saturated with salt or preservatives. Except the meatloaf, which consisted entirely of salt and preservatives. A real heart attack of a loaf.