Audition & Subtraction (9 page)

“If you've finished question one, please go on to question two,” Mr. Howard called.

Aaron tapped the worksheet. “We're supposed to cut open Sam's mouth. You want to?”

My frog empathy evaporated in a little hum of excitement. I kind of liked cutting things open. Maybe it was having a big brother, but Andrew and I had cut open Barbie dolls and Beanie Babies and nearly every toy that came in a Happy Meal when I was little. I knew Aaron really wanted to do it, but I also knew he'd let me. “How about I start?”

We both pulled on our latex gloves. They clung to my palms like Saran Wrap and made sticky noises when I flexed my fingers. I grabbed the scissors and carefully sliced through the hinge of Sam's mouth.

“What's it like?” Aaron asked.

“Like cutting a piece of chicken.”

We grinned at each other. I handed him the scissors. “Here, you do the other side.”

He leaned over Sam, positioning the scissors.

“You know they're dating,” I said.

“Lori and Michael? Yeah.”

I flicked a fuzz ball off the table. “He didn't waste much time.”

“Guess not.”

“He also got the practice-room schedule changed so he could have more rehearsals.”

Aaron's eyebrows shot up behind the screen of his hair. “Mr. Wayne did that for him?”

“He did it for Lori,” I admitted. “She's the one who asked.” I drew scratchy zigzags in the tray's paper liner with the straight pin. “I saw his solo music this morning. He picked something really hard, and now he wants Lori to help him. Instead of practicing with me yesterday, she helped him with rhythms.”

“That's not cool.”

I wiggled the pin through a tiny hole in the liner. “She couldn't say no. He's her boyfriend.”

Aaron looked up, the scissors still in his grip. “That's total crap.” Then he took aim and cut through the rest of Sam's mouth. Instead of flopping open, the jaw stayed in place. But the smell suddenly got a whole lot worse.

“That's disgusting,” I said. “Talk about not moving a muscle.”

“Rigor mortis,” Aaron said as he made a note on the worksheet.

I ripped a slash in the paper. “Mr. Wayne said I should do a solo.” It was the first time I'd said the words out loud. I still hadn't told Lori … or Mom and Dad. But it felt okay telling Aaron—he always acted like I could handle a solo with one hand tied behind my back. Still, my heart sped up just putting the words out there. “He
picked one out for me,” I added, glancing at my backpack where I'd stuffed the sheet music in my English notebook. Mr. Wayne had handed it to me after band yesterday—
just in case
, he'd said. I hadn't even looked at it. But the harder I tried to forget, the more I couldn't stop thinking about it.

“You going to do it?” Aaron asked.

“It's too late to learn a solo.”

“Wimp.”

I elbowed him in the arm. “I'm not a wimp. I just need Lori to get focused.”

“Like that's going to happen.”

Before I could draw breath to argue, Mr. Howard raised his hand from the front of the room. “After you finish step two, you may begin to clean up. That's all we have time for today.”

“We'll get it together,” I said in a low hiss. “We always do.”

“She blew you off yesterday to practice with Michael.”

“She'll make it up.”

“And she skipped your first play-through for Mr. Wayne.”

“She didn't skip it; she was late. And I'm going to stop telling you things if you're just going to throw them back at me.”

He opened the frog's mouth with his gloved fingers. “I'm just saying. It sounds like she's flaking out.”

“She's not flaking out.” I reached for a handful of pins. “At least, she doesn't mean to be.”

While he held the jaw in place, I pushed in the straight pins to tack down Sam's mouth. “It's just different now that she has a boyfriend. He's always around. Even when he's not supposed to be.”

“Like when?” Aaron asked.

“Like this Friday night.”

“What's Friday night?”

“Basketball game. Lori and I signed up weeks ago to work concessions at halftime. Now he's going to want to work it with us.”

Aaron made another note on the worksheet. “So hang with me instead.”

I blinked, surprised. “Huh?”

He turned on his stool until he faced me, his navy board shorts skimming my knee. “At the basketball game. We can walk over together.”

“But …” I took a breath. “I always go with Lori.”

He tilted his head, studying me, his expression unreadable. “Maybe if you're not waiting around for her, she'll notice you're missing.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don't need to do anything like that.” I peeled off a glove. “Lori already feels bad. She made a big deal at lunch today that I had to come over after school. I know she wants to make it up to me. So”—I shrugged—“thanks and all. But I'll see you there.”

He twisted back toward the desk. “Sure. Whatever.” Then he reached for the tray. “I'll take this up.” A second later, he brushed by me, his eyes on the tray as he carried it to the front of the room.

I watched his stiff back and felt like I'd said something wrong. I just wasn't sure what.

I loved Lori's room.

With orange walls, a pink comforter on her white poster bed, and yellow pillows, it felt like I'd landed in a tub of rainbow sherbet. Best of all, there were two big cushy green chair pillows—the kind you could lean back on—set up in the corner.

Lori wasn't a star geek like me, but she'd let me stick a glow-in-the-dark galaxy on her ceiling anyway. Next to her bed, she had a calendar with pictures of the two of us on every month. I'd made it for her birthday. April's picture showed us in midair jumping off the Van Sants' diving board. We were holding hands and laughing.

I dropped into a chair and sighed. “Today took forever.” I popped open a can of Diet Cherry Coke. Between the two chairs, Lori had set down a plastic bowl of
microwave popcorn—the low-fat, air-popped kind. I missed the old days when we'd have had a bowl of grapes and a pack of Ding Dongs each. We'd finish the Ding Dongs, wad up the foil wrappers, and play marbles with them. The last time we did that was just after Thanksgiving. It made me sad now that I thought about it. No one warns you when you're doing something for the last time.

I munched a handful of tasteless popcorn while Lori grabbed a bowl of beads and the necklace she'd been working on. She'd made me an anklet last week as nice as the ones you buy at the mall. “Did you know that if you don't get enough salt in your diet, you can develop a goiter?” I said.

She blinked at me. “A goiter?”

“You know, a bulge on your neck. We learned it in science.”

“That's disgusting.”

“True. It's one of the things I love most about science. The disgusting factor.” I wiggled my fingers around another handful of popcorn. “Speaking of necks, you should see Andrew's beard.”

“Still growing?”

“I'd say like a weed except weeds are natural, and this thing definitely isn't.”

She laughed as she worked a blue bead onto the wire. “Is the baseball team still winning?”

“Yeah, but today's game will be the big test.”

She paused and rolled a yellow bead between her fingers. “Did you want to go?”

“You kidding?” I said. “I'd rather hang out with you.”

She set the beads back in the bowl. “I'm so glad you came over. I still feel bad about not practicing with you yesterday.”

I almost shrugged off the apology, but I stopped myself. Aaron was right—it hadn't been cool. “Yeah, me, too.”

“Michael really needed the help.”

I fiddled with a kernel of popcorn. “Funny how he needed it right when we were supposed to be practicing.”

“Are we back to that again?” I heard the edge of annoyance in her voice, but I was annoyed, too.

“I just think it's suspicious. Why does he always seem to call when we're practicing, unless he's trying to sabotage me?”

“Sabotage?” She rolled her eyes.

“I'm serious. If he screws up our practices, then I won't be as sharp at auditions, and he has a better chance of making it.”

Her jaw dropped. “You think he's just going out with me to mess you up?”

Hearing it back like that … I winced. Maybe it hadn't come out right. “I didn't mean it that way.”

“Then exactly how did you mean it?”

“I know he likes you,” I said carefully. “I'm just saying the timing was suspicious.”

“It wasn't suspicious,” she shot back. “Michael tried to get a room later in the day, but Mr. Wayne didn't have any other openings.”

“Okay, sorry, I didn't know.” I tapped her foot with mine. “Forget I said anything.”

She looked away a second, her fingers gripping the armrests. Then she sighed and turned back. “I'm sorry, too. But this means a lot to Michael.”

“I know—it means a lot to me.”

“But it's not just District Honor Band.” Lori pulled her hair into a pony and twirled it around a hand. I could sense her sudden nervousness, feel it thrum through me as if we were connected. “Michael really wants to impress Dr. Hallady.”

“So do I.”

“But you don't,” Lori said. “You hate Dr. Hallady.”

“I don't hate him.” I curved my arms around the fuzzy sides of the chair. “I hate that he's scary, and he makes kids cry during practices.”

“Which is why it's good that you'll be in concert band with Mr. Gibbs—he's supposed to be really cool.”

The thrumming inside me grew with my own nervousness. “Maybe I don't want to be in concert band. Mr. Wayne thinks I have a chance to make Wind Ensemble.”

Surprise flashed in her eyes. “He said that?”

“If I do a solo and nail it, yeah.”

“But you're not doing a solo.” She stared at me as if she'd never seen me before. “What's going on with you, anyway? You never said anything about Wind Ensemble before this.”

“Because I never thought I could make it. But I've been getting better—even you said so. And Mr. Wayne noticed, too.”

Since the day I talked with Mr. Wayne, I hadn't been able to stop thinking about Wind Ensemble. It was as if he had lit this tiny flame inside the pit of my stomach … the beginning of a fire that hadn't quite caught hold yet. I'd been wrapping my arms around it all week, fighting my own worry to keep it alive.

Mr. Wayne believes.
The flame glowed brighter, warmer, with the thought. But it wasn't enough on its own. I needed Lori to believe it, too, because if she did, then it would be real. I licked my lips, thinking that now I could tell her, make her understand. Now—

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony blared from the pocket of Lori's backpack. “Sorry,” she said, crawling past me and reaching for her cell phone. “Hang on.”

She looked at the screen and smiled. “Michael,” she said, as she started typing. “He's getting his hair cut. I told him not too short.”

She hit Send, then sat back down, reaching for her soda. “So what were we talking about?”

Me. Wind Ensemble. District Honor Band …

Before I could say a word, she waved a hand in the air. “Oh right. Michael and Wind Ensemble.” She sighed. “I'm so glad I can talk to you about this and you understand.”

I crumbled a kernel of popcorn in my fingers. “Understand what?”

She reached for my wrist and squeezed. “That you're my best friend, and that's not going to change no matter what.”

“Oh-kay,” I said, wondering why that made me more worried than relieved. “Is something going on?”

“Sort of, but nothing to freak out about.”

I pulled my wrist free as my heart yo-yoed into my throat. “Why would I freak out?”

“Just promise me you won't.”

I was now officially past freaked and hovering near panic. “Lori, what?”

“It's not going to change anything,” she said, staring straight into my eyes. “Really. You and I are still on track with our duet.” She took a breath. “But Michael asked me to do a duet with him for the audition, too. I couldn't say no.”

“He asked you to do WHAT?”

“Don't get mad!”

“Too late!” I snapped. Anger pulsed through me, and I shot to my feet. I paced in a circle—one hand pressed to my forehead—mostly so it wouldn't explode. “I told you he was trying to sabotage me.”

“It's not like that. He's having a hard time with the solo. That's why he wanted me to help him yesterday. And it was a mess, Tay, embarrassing even. What could I do?”

I paused to fling my arms wide. “Tell him to keep practicing.”

She gasped. “He's my boyfriend.”

“And I'm your best friend.”

“Do I have to choose?”

I paced another circle, then faced her again. “It's
District Honor Band, Lori. We're competing against each other.” Angry tears pressed at the corner of my eyes. “You know he's my main competition and that if he gets in, I don't. And now you're going to help him get in?”

“It's not like that,” she said. She punched a hand on the arm of her chair. “Would you please sit down so I can explain?”

I circled one more time, just to make the point, but then I gave in and sat down.

“I'm just his duet partner, Tay. He gets judged on his own playing.”

“But you were my secret weapon.”

“I still am.”

“Not if you're playing for both of us.”

Her shoulders suddenly drooped, and her eyes filled with tears. “This whole thing is so awful, Tay. I'm miserable.”

I slid my hands to the carpet, trying to find something to hold on to. My head spun, and I felt like a balloon caught in a gust of wind … as if Lori had just let go of the string and I was spinning out of control.