Bellweather Rhapsody (4 page)

When Alice spoke or sang, though, she became her true self. Technically, Rabbit had been the first to speak, but Alice compensated for the delay with sheer quantity. She made adults listen to her, made other kids listen to her, made her brother listen to her, and when she smiled back at them and continued to talk, she held them. She sang with the radio (more like
at
the radio), in the shower, with her mother at the piano—she sang anything at any time, anywhere, to make herself feel good.

It wasn’t until she first sang on a stage that Alice began to understand her full potential. Ruby Falls held a school talent show every winter. It was a joke. The district (and the talent pool) was so small that the same kids were always performing the same acts: Holly Wilcox would do a gymnastics routine to that “sail away” Enya song; the McCallister brothers would lip-synch to a Beastie Boys song. Alice had never tried out, had never been even vaguely interested, until she overheard Molly Brotowski bragging in the cafeteria about the private voice lessons her parents got her expressly so she could make her debut at the talent show.

“I can sing Molly Brotowski into next week,” she told Rabbit. Rabbit had a mouthful of pudding cup but nodded vigorously. “She’s not so special,” Alice muttered. In truth, Alice was incredibly jealous of Molly’s private lessons, and when she complained over dinner that night that her parents didn’t take her singing seriously enough, her father called her bluff. “Try out,” he said. “If you get into the show and go through with it, we’ll talk about lessons.”

Auditions were held on a Tuesday afternoon in the junior-senior high auditorium, where the show itself would take place in a few short weeks. Alice had never set foot on a stage before—a real stage, with real curtains that could be drawn aside by ropes and pulleys, facing a real audience of empty seats in old blue upholstery tattooed here and there in Bic by bored study-hall students. The moment felt enormous. Her heart began to pump wildly and she paused at the top of the steps, her foot in midair, before stepping firmly on the blond wood.

She was home. The sensation was immediate and powerful, and Alice, eleven and glowing in the low lighting, her throat itching with song, didn’t feel anything but gorgeous. She waved to the owlish accompanist, who began to play ABBA’s “S.O.S.”
Be unpredictable
—that was her mother’s advice.
Don’t blend and they’ll remember you
. Unlike Molly and the two other girls who had butchered “On My Own,” who were memorable, sure, but not the way they wanted to be.

Alice sang the paint off the walls. She had never sounded this good. Not in the shower, not in her bedroom, not in the backyard or the kitchen or when following Rabbit around to annoy him. Not when her mother played in the evenings and sang with her, not even when she’d been practicing for this audition. Singing on this stage, her voice freed to fill a whole auditorium, was what Alice Hatmaker was born to do, and now that she was doing it, she knew exactly who she was. Molly Brotowski, with her shitty Eponine and her private lessons, didn’t matter; the ugliness that infected every last inch of her flesh didn’t matter; her brilliantly good brother who pretended that he didn’t look at her with pity sometimes didn’t matter. Hell, the talent show barely mattered. She was beyond it.

Alice Hatmaker was a star.

The Trapper Keeper open on her lap, Alice pages back through her years, more than a little in love with her own recent past. A playbill from eighth grade, when she played Miss Adelaide in
Guys and Dolls,
the first time in RFH history an eighth grader brought down the house
.
A scrap of red fabric from the dress she wore as Nancy in
Oliver!,
taped next to a photo of her in costume. God, she loved that dress. It made her body feel like someone else’s. She flips all the way to the beginning.

To whom it may concern,
she reads.
I, Alice Hatmaker, do solemnly swear that what you are about to read is the absolute true and unadulterated story of my life. This is only the beginning, but I’m going to fly so high, so fast, I’m going to break the sound barrier.

Her signature takes up the entire bottom half of the page.

Her name in these old programs, seeing herself in these old pictures, reading words she remembers writing, all make her feel as though she actually exists. The past is solid. She can stand on it. She can dance on it if she wants.

The future is different. Like the remaining sheets in her Trapper Keeper, blank and finite.

She looks at her watch and frowns. Rehearsal starts at three o’clock. It’s now a quarter to three, and they haven’t gotten off the highway yet.

“Hey,” her brother says, his voice catching. “How much longer, do you think?”

He’s stressed all to hell. Her nervous bunny of a brother, king of all worrywarts.

“We’re going to be a little late to the first rehearsal,” Wilson says. “I’m sorry about that. You can blame it on me.”

“You said it,” says Alice, glaring at her through the rearview.

They pass it at the exact moment she realizes its faint purring isn’t the blood in her own ears. A motorcycle, a black and silver motorcycle, roars beside them. It’s heading in the same direction.

“Take me with you,” she whispers at the window.

2

R
ABBIT IS BREATHING
hard as he assembles Beatrice. Usually he puts his bassoon together with the utmost care—she technically isn’t his, plus she’s old and her cork is prone to flake. But the last time he looked at his watch it was twenty minutes past three, twenty minutes late to his first rehearsal, for God’s sake.

He almost trips over his suitcase, which he hasn’t taken up to his room yet; there just wasn’t time. The Statewide orchestra is rehearsing in the hotel’s auditorium, which is beautiful and falling apart; it looks drastically older than it did just last year when he came to watch his sister perform. Three of the seats in the row where Rabbit has unpacked Beatrice have lost their spring and lay flat as tongues coated in threadbare red velvet. He sucks on a double reed and hoists his bassoon. He enters the orchestra from stage right, weaving between music stands and folding chairs and stepping over cello posts. There is one empty seat in the second row of woodwinds—his seat, since he is the last to arrive, of course. He takes it and looks around. He was so concerned with sneaking in as quickly and quietly as possible that only now does he notice how loud the auditorium is, full of the din of musicians warming up. Piccolos spike, basses saw lazily. The trombones, who all seem to know one another, occasionally break into “Louie Louie.” And in a flush of relief and confusion, Rabbit realizes he is not the last to arrive after all.

The bassoonist on his right, a chubby girl with fat yellow curls, smiles at him. “No one knows where he is,” she whispers. “They’re all running around like crazy trying to find him. Like, how hard is it to show up on time?” She bobs her head. “Sorry. Didn’t mean you. But you’re not the conductor.”

Rabbit smiles weakly. Talkative seatmates make him uneasy.

“I’m Kimmy,” she continues. “You must be Bertram Hatmaker. That’s an incredible name. Like something out of
Masterpiece Theatre.
” She points at the top of his music stand, where he notices two parallel pieces of tape wrapped over the edge. “We all have our names taped to the top of the stands, facing out. I hear it’s because Brodie likes to get personal when he yells at people.”

“Brodie?”

“Yeah, the conductor? Fisher Brodie? He’s totally crazy. I’ve never been in a group he’s conducted before, but my friend Joe goes to Westing and has him for a few ensembles and says he’s
majorly
disturbed.”

Small-town Ruby Falls naturally insulates Rabbit from the gossip of the larger student musician community, and he is fine with that. Alice, however, has made it her business to know everything about everyone, and now Rabbit remembers his sister gasping when she learned who would be conducting the orchestra. He should have paid attention, but Alice gasps so often, it’s impossible to tell when it might be for a good reason.

A bang comes from out in the auditorium, barely audible over the cacophony. Rabbit cranes his neck, but his view is blocked by the oboist in front of him, or rather, by the oboist’s hair, which is twice as wide as it ought to be. There is another bang, louder than the first, and then someone barks, clear over the noise, “OI!”

And Fisher Brodie is suddenly
there,
like he’s bounded the length of the auditorium and up the conductor’s podium in one enormous stride. Rabbit’s first impression of Brodie is of a human spider, a wide-eyed daddy longlegs, and when Brodie props his spindly arms on the stand at his podium and barks “OI!” again, just as loud but so much closer, Rabbit wishes he were anywhere in the universe but here.

Everyone stops playing, transfixed by the strange new creature in their midst, this wiry man who has yet to blink in their presence. He stands up straight and says, “Now tha yuhv had yer coodly warmoop, whyn’ we spill sum blud?”

Rabbit has never heard a Scottish accent in person before, and it enters his brain on a two-second delay.
Blood?
he thinks, but Brodie has already moved on. “Haggerty!” Brodie shouts at a lanky girl hunched over the timpani. “Set some eighths on a C!” Haggerty flinches but complies. “Schwenk! Sixteenths on B-flat!” is hurled at a boy cradling his tuba like a life preserver. Brodie flings instructions like knives, and the musicians, trained to respond without a thought, spew forth a horrifying sound, a deep and dreadful noise. It goes on for too long, it lurches and growls. It seems that Brodie calls upon everyone. Everyone except Rabbit. And just when Rabbit thinks he has escaped forced participation in this aural nightmare, Brodie looks straight at him and shouts, “Hatmaker! Give me—”

Brodie stops, then crosses and thrusts his arms to the side. The orchestral beast he has created slumps over in a jumble of honks and bleats.

“Bloody hell kind of name is
Bertram Hatmaker
?”

Rabbit dies.

“Never mind.” Brodie tosses a hand, dismissing everything having to do with Rabbit Hatmaker in one casual gesture. “That was horror, children. Did you hear it? Horror.” He turns to the side and his profile is that of a heron or a mantis, something alien and starved. “My name is Fisher Brodie,” he says. “But you already knew that.”

He lifts his arms and one hundred teenagers set their bows, raise their horns to their lips, and do not blink.

Brodie lowers his arms and the orchestra relaxes.

He raises them again and the orchestra tenses for action. Brodie smiles like this is the best game he’s ever played. He lifts and lowers his arms several times in rapid succession and the musicians snap and relax, snap and relax, jerking like marionettes.

“Quite a hive mind you’ve got. ’Cept for Hatmaker here. Oi, Bert. B-flat.”

Rabbit has been sitting dumbly, ignoring each of Brodie’s commands, because he can’t quite believe this is what Statewide is like. This isn’t what
any
group he’s ever played in has been like. It
does
have a hive mind, a weird humming mentality perched on the edge of action, desperate for instruction. He assumes it must be because he’s never played with student musicians of this caliber before, but he can’t tell if they’re good or bad or merely perfectly trained.

“Oi. Bert.” Brodie waves his hand at Rabbit. It looks odd, and Rabbit’s first thought—that Brodie’s hand is strangely insubstantial, transparent as it flutters in the air—is rapidly replaced by
Shit, he means me,
and he wraps his lips gently around his double reed. He hasn’t played so much as a note all day, and Beatrice wobbles before producing a relatively in-tune tone. It is the only sound in the entire auditorium, and Rabbit, now wondering if this is how it feels to be on the verge of a panic attack, loses breath after a scant five seconds.

Brodie tilts his head. “Well, that was inspiring,” he says. “Right, then. You should have received a packet of sheet music when you were asked to participate in this magnificent celebration of youthful artistry, and I trust you’ve all practiced until your fingers and lips bled. How wonderful for you. Wonderful but unfortunate, because we’re not going to be playing any of it.” He drops to a squat and reappears with a small stack of photocopies. “I realized that it was all shite, really. We’ll be playing this instead.”

Rabbit, who hasn’t practiced as much as he probably should have, but who didn’t think he could be more shocked by this circus, feels gut-punched. They were supposed to be playing Handel, a Mendelssohn suite. Selections from Holst’s
The Planets
. All shite? And they were expected to learn something completely new in the space of—what? Three days, in time for the concert on Sunday?

“Och, maybe we’ll still play ‘Jupiter.’ Your mums will love it,” Brodie mutters. He hands a stack of parts to the first-chair violin on his left, another stack to the first cello on his right. Photocopies flutter their way back down the rows. A thin girl, her hair pulled high in a glossy jet-black ponytail, takes the stack of woodwind parts and stands up to distribute them. “Here,” she says, her voice small and cold with rage as she hands Rabbit his music.

And now he understands why. The piece Brodie is springing on them is Claude Debussy’s
Afternoon of a Faun,
and the thin black-haired girl, who retakes her seat as first-chair flute, is the key soloist. She flips her ponytail over her shoulder and inhales violently. Her back is stiff and straight and she holds her flute like a cudgel. If Rabbit didn’t think Brodie would throw something at him—a music stand, his shoe, perhaps his entire body—he would turn to chatty Kimmy and ask who she is. She carries herself like someone whom other people are expected to know, perhaps for their own protection.

“Why do you play that?” Brodie says it conversationally, casually, to the dark ponytailed girl. “Why do you play that flute?”

She responds by glaring at him.