The Sound of Us Read online

  Like I said, a problem.

  “So, find your trios,” Mr. Bertrand is saying.

  Trios? What trios?

  In my haze, I follow the herd. The other campers walk around, talking to one another, splintering off into groups. A jolt of electricity runs through my body and knocks all thoughts of the cute, preppy drummer from the basement aside. They’re forming trios. All the other campers are forming trios. I shake my head clear and focus on finding people I know. Where’s Norman? Where are Seth and Brie? But they’re all in groups already. Norman’s with earrings girl and some other dude and Brie and Seth are with the spritely little guy who sang after Seth at the auditions.

  I scan the room again. It looks like the trios have already formed. I’m the odd man out. Shit. There has to be some duo looking for a third. The voice teachers wouldn’t have deliberately put us into trios unless our numbers divided equally into threes, would they? Maybe they would. Maybe this is our first test and I just failed. Goodbye, Kiki. No one wants to work with you.

  Then I see them, two mousy girls hanging out alone off to the side. One of them has frizzy hair like mine, but in a dirty dishwater blond hue. She’s like pre-Sex and the City Carrie Bradshaw, but with less fashion sense. The other one is remarkable only because of the tear-dug rivulets running down her cheeks. She appears to have been crying for days.

  They seem about my speed.

  “Are you looking for a third?” I ask.

  The blond one nods.

  “I’m Kiki,” I say.

  “Mary.”

  The sad one says her name, but it goes in one ear and out the other.

  “What are we supposed to do?” I ask, wincing. I really should’ve been paying better attention. This is not how you get a scholarship, Kiki.

  The sad one hands me a small booklet. It’s sheet music in three parts.

  I wait for one of them to take charge, but it appears that’s not going to happen. “I’m a soprano,” I say.

  “She’s a mezzo.” Mary points to the sad mezzo.

  “Do you mind singing the alto part?” I ask. “Or I could do it.”

  Mary shrugs.

  It’s been two minutes and I already kind of want to tear my hair out with these people. A flash of the Nutty Bar guy and the basement piano and our beautiful, effortless music rips through my brain, but I shake it away.

  I glance around. The room is mostly empty. “Where is everyone?” I ask.

  “Practice rooms,” says Mary.

  “Well, let’s go up there.” I take a step toward the door.

  On the way up, I make small talk. “Where are you from?”

  “Fort Wayne,” says Mary.

  Sad Mezzo says, “Cleveland,” and immediately bursts out crying again.

  Mary whispers, “She misses her boyfriend.”

  “Oh.” That explains things.

  Then, while Sad Mezzo blows her nose into her cardigan sweater, Mary gives me a huge, exaggerated eye roll and I snort out a laugh.

  Mary smiles. “Who’s your roommate?” she asks.

  “Brie,” I say.

  Her eyes go wide. “Wow. Brie, Brie?”

  “Is there any other?”

  “What’s she like?”

  I shrug. “She’s fine. Intense.”

  Mary nods.

  “What about you? Who’s your roommate?”

  “Some girl who’s here for basketball camp.”

  “I saw some sports teams,” I say, thinking of the guys I saw running beneath the practice room windows yesterday. “It’s weird to think there are people here for other things besides music. We’re so in our own little bubble.”

  Mary nods. “And the numbers are uneven, so some of us music campers have to live with sports people or people who are here for academic classes. It’s fine, though,” she says. “My roommate’s nice.”

  Naturally my mind starts wondering about my drummer guy and why he’s here, maybe golf, maybe not. I start glancing into practice rooms as we pass by, wondering if I’ll find him in one of them. I don’t.

  The girls and I find an empty room and head inside, where I immediately take charge and sit down at the piano. I play through the piece once with all three parts, and then I play through each line individually. I let Mary sing through her part a few times, then Sad Mezzo, then me.

  “Should we put it all together?” I ask.

  I stand up and play the first note. We all start together and we stay in harmony for the first page, but by the second one, Sad Mezzo has gone off the rails. I hold up my hand. “It’s like this,” I say, playing and singing her part again.

  We begin at the top of the page, and again Sad Mezzo can’t find her note.

  The door to our practice room creaks open and I look up to find Mr. Bertrand tiptoeing in. My heart thumps like crazy and I feel my face go hot. Why is Bertrand here? Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. He smiles at us girls and waves for us to keep going as he sits in the armchair next to the door. He holds a pen and clipboard at the ready.

  I take a deep breath and play all of our parts again from the top of the page. “Listen to Mary,” I tell Sad Mezzo. “She’s singing the note you’re trying to find almost immediately before you have to sing it. If you hear what she’s doing, you’ll get it.”

  I play our notes again. We stay in tune for the entire second page and most of the third, where Sad Mezzo loses the plot again.

  “It’s only a half-step,” I tell her, playing the interval. Then I sing it. And Mary sings it. Then we’re all singing it. I feel flushed again, but it’s not from nerves. It’s from the excitement of making music that’s actually starting to sound like music. I’ve almost—almost—forgotten that Mr. Bertrand is in the room. And thankfully the Nutty Bar guy has faded into the dark corners of my mind. “Let’s try it again.”

  The three of us get through the page with no more mistakes and we make it to the end of the song in harmony and on pitch. My heart is pounding the whole time. I try to get a sense of what Mr. Bertrand is thinking, but his face is blank.

  He stands up. “I want to hear the whole thing,” he says, “but this time, Mary, you take the alto part while Kiki sings the melody.”

  I swallow and nod, turning back to the beginning of the song. I play our note and count out the rhythm and the three of us start singing. Sad Mezzo falters a little bit here and there, but Mary and I hold our own. I somehow manage to get through the whole piece without making a single mistake. In fact, I sound good. Really good.

  After we finish, the girls and I stare at Mr. Bertrand, whose eyes are down on his clipboard. He makes a few notes, flips a page, and makes a few more. I glance at Mary, who’s mesmerized by whatever the voice teacher is doing. After what feels like five minutes, he stands up and leaves the room without a word.

  Mary, Sad Mezzo, and I look at one another wide-eyed, wondering what the hell just happened.

  My stomach in knots, I say, “That can’t be good.”

  *

  A giant pit hangs out in my gut for the rest of the day. I know I did my absolute best on that trio. That was peak Kiki. Still, it wasn’t enough to impress Mr. Bertrand.

  I didn’t realize how much getting into his class meant to me until I saw his unenthusiastic face in that practice room. With all of my sister’s talk about Mr. Bertrand’s superhero voice teacher powers over the years, he’s become a mythic figure to me. On some level, I came here thinking that I’d get into his class and somehow (probably by sprinkling me with fairy dust) he’d turn me into a star. I believed that just by virtue of making it into Mr. Bertrand’s class, I’d be assured a career as a musician.

  That scenario no longer seems likely.

  When classes end that afternoon, I lock myself in one of the practice rooms to work on stinking “Vergebliches Ständchen,” even though I have to ask myself, what’s the point? This evening, the voice teachers are going to lock themselves away in an office somewhere, drafting us campers into their classes. I wonder who will pick me—Mr
. Zagorsky, Ms. Jones, someone else? What will that mean for my scholarship chances? Probably nothing good. The scholarships always go to Bertrand’s students. Everybody knows that.

  I put on my headphones and open up YouTube to listen to recordings of “Vergebliches Ständchen” while reading through the lyrics. I’m actually starting to get the German. The song is finally sticking in my mind. Yeah, having listened to the song and knowing the words is not the same as getting up in front of other people and performing it from memory, but at least it no longer sounds completely foreign to me. So there’s that.

  After listening to “Vergebliches Ständchen” a few times, I click on one of the sidebar videos. It’s another Brahms piece, something from his requiem. I let the first movement sink in. It feels like a lullaby, which I guess is what a requiem technically is, the ultimate lullaby.

  I find myself closing my eyes as the harmonies settle into my pores and the crescendos wash over me. I tap my feet in time to the music and hum along to the soprano part, feeling where it goes. By the end of the first movement, I’m near tears.

  Okay, Brahms, maybe you don’t suck.

  I press play on another video, and then another and another.

  During the fifth movement, a notification pops up that someone on Twitter has mentioned me. I ignore it while I watch a middle-aged soprano in a turquoise taffeta dress belt her way through “Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit.” I try to imagine myself in her place, commanding a massive stage in front of a thousand people, but I can’t do it. I bet this lady has never once been cast as somebody’s aunt. I bet Bertrand totally would’ve picked her for his voice class, no questions asked. If opera camps were a thing when she was in high school, she definitely would’ve been the Brie.

  I close YouTube immediately and click over to see what’s happening on Twitter.

  Winnie Dixon @Windry87: @kikeronis Did you see the alternate endings?

  I’m not sure what she’s talking about, so I do some digging. Apparently Project Earth has released three alternate endings for season five, which just ended a few weeks ago.

  I watch them all on my phone immediately, right there in the practice room. They’re terrible. They’re an affront to the entire TV series. They’re exactly the distraction I don’t need right now.

  I write back to @Windry87.

  Kiki Nichols @kikeronis: @Windry87 Barf.

  Winnie Dixon @Windry87: @kikeronis I knew we’d be on the same page.

  Winnie Dixon @Windry87: @kikeronis I’m writing an essay on it now, but Doug being an alien was the only possible ending.

  Kiki Nichols @kikeronis: @Windry87 THANK YOU. No way is Dana dead. And no way did Dave kill Lisa’s husband. Bullshittery of the highest order.

  Eric Damien @TyrionsBanister: @Windry87 @kikeronis Ladies, you forgot to mention Ethan hooking up with Jenna. Talk about barf.

  Winnie Dixon @Windry87: @kikeronis Hey, how’s opera camp going?

  Ugh. And we’re back to reality.

  I turn off my phone and toss it across the room. I can’t believe I just wasted an hour listening to a bunch of songs I don’t need to know and chatting about Project Earth on Twitter. No wonder Mr. Bertrand doesn’t want me in his class.

  I pull out “Vergebliches Ständchen” again and start reciting the words again. I can’t concentrate. I keep thinking about Calliope Pfeiffer, the actress who plays Dana, the lead on Project Earth.

  I once watched an interview where Calliope talked about being cast in the show. The women called to audition for the part of Dana were all blond, blue-eyed, and white. “It looked like a cattle call for a Vanna White biopic,” she joked. Calliope Pfeiffer, a black woman who was not a size two, wasn’t invited there to read for the role of Dana. She was supposed to audition for a different part—the same kind of best friend role she was always being offered.

  Calliope explained, “I was sick of being boxed in, so I decided to do something about it. I was called in for the Lisa role, but instead I walked into the room and told everyone I was Dana. I believed it myself, and I tricked them into believing me.”

  She tricked them into believing her.

  I remember being so impressed by her confidence, like I could never advocate that strongly for myself.

  Or could I?

  Could the same thing work for me? Could I trick Mr. Bertrand into believing I’m the best singer here, that I’m worthy of being in his class? It might be worth a shot.

  I shove all my stuff inside my backpack and head off to find Mr. Bertrand. After searching the voice teachers’ offices and the lounge, I find him alone in Room Y106 down on the first floor. He’s sitting on the piano bench.

  With a deep breath, I knock on the doorjamb.

  He looks up for a fraction of a second before glancing down again at the music in front of him. “Come in, Ms. Nichols.”

  I step cautiously through the doorway. “Hi,” I say. “I was wondering if you’d finalized the voice classes yet.”

  He shakes his head, still not looking at me.

  “Oh good, because...” I stop in front of the piano. “I really hope you’ll consider me for your class.”

  Now he looks up.

  “My sister has said nothing but good things about you and I—I guess it’s always been a dream of mine to be in your class.”

  He stares at me for a few beats. “Why do you want to be an opera singer?” he asks.

  Good question. I stall for a moment, feeling like I’m in a job interview. I basically am. I give him the answer I know he wants to hear. “It’s always been my passion, music. I’ve always sung around the house, you know, with my sister and my friend. We’d belt out songs from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” I grin. These were some of my best times with Beth, the times that made bearing through all the other stuff seem worth it. I miss those times, I do.

  “We teach classical music here, Ms. Nichols, not Broadway. This is not School of Rock. Why do you want to study classical music, specifically?”

  I start to pull my hands up in my sleeves, but I stop myself. Calliope Pfeiffer had to become Dana to get the part. She had to trick herself into believing it as well. I have to become an opera singer to make it through this conversation, let alone this camp. I think about Brahms’s requiem, which I just spent an afternoon devouring. Maybe “Vergebliches Ständchen” doesn’t do it for me, but the requiem does. That can’t be an outlier. I’ve never really given classical music much of a chance. There has to be other stuff out there that will transport me in the same way. “I want to be that diva up on stage. I want to feel my voice soar into the rafters. I want to break glass.”

  He hands me a stack of music from atop the piano. “Sight-read this.” He gives me the first note.

  The note—a G—echoes through my head as I scan the first few measures. With my fingers tapping against my outer thigh, I “loo” my way through the song. Finally, at the end of the piece, I raise my eyes to Mr. Bertrand.

  He’s frowning at me. “Your sister could never do that,” he says. “She was a terrible sight-reader.”

  I suppress a grin as I hand the music back to him.

  “How badly do you want this scholarship?”

  I think of Beth back home, how she told everyone that the only reason I got in was because of my sister. I think of the soprano singing the piece from the requiem. I think of the Nutty Bar guy. I don’t know what any of it means or how all of it will add up to who I am and what I’ll be, but I know I want to see where this goes. “Everything,” I tell him. “It means everything.”

  He stands up. “No promises.” He stands at the door. “You’re one of the better musicians I’ve seen here, Kiki. I’ll tell you that much.”

  I step outside Y106 and Mr. Bertrand closes the door behind me.

  Maybe I’m not out. Yet.

  *

  Back in the practice rooms, I straighten the “Vergebliches Ständchen” papers on the piano after singing through the song for what felt like the trillionth time today.
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  I went back upstairs as soon as I left Room Y106. I figured, since I’m not out of the running for a spot in Mr. Bertrand’s voice class, it was probably in my best interest to spend as much time as possible learning the song I was supposed to have memorized months ago. Aside from the few minutes I spent with Bertrand earlier, I’ve been in the practice rooms since class let out at three o’clock. It’s now seven. I skipped dinner. I haven’t eaten anything since lunch.

  I guess this is what being a real opera singer feels like: starvation.

  A few minutes later, there’s a knock at my door. “Come in,” I yell. I can’t see who’s there because of the paper in my practice room window.

  The door creaks open to reveal Brie and Seth. Brie’s face is green, like she’s about to vomit or die or something. Seth is behind her, looking similarly ill.

  “What is it?” My stomach has dropped to my knees.

  “The voice class assignments are up,” Brie says.

  I draw in a breath. It’s the moment of reckoning. Did I trick Mr. Bertrand into believing I was right for his class? “And?” I ask.

  “Do you want to go look?”

  I nod. “Yes.” I’m ready. Whatever happens, I can’t say I didn’t try.

  We head down to the first floor, which is pretty empty right now. Everyone else probably went back to the dorms hours ago. Mr. Zagorsky, the teacher with the Guy Fawkes beard, is tacking a list to a bulletin board at the end of the hall. He looks over when he hears us.

  “Couldn’t wait to see?” He grins and steps aside.

  Brie, Seth, and I approach the paper in a line. I can feel the nervousness bouncing between our bodies. I let them go first. They spot their names right away.

  “We’re in Greg’s class!” Brie squeals, grabbing Seth’s shoulders.

  I squint to find my name, as my mind pings between how unimpressed Mr. Bertrand was with my trio performance and how he said he thinks I’m a good musician. Was he just blowing smoke up my butt? Was he just like, “Tell this crazy lady whatever she wants to hear so she’ll leave me alone?”