Bellweather Rhapsody (5 page)

“Right, then. You.” He points over Rabbit’s head at someone in the back row, in brass. “Why do you play that French horn?”

A boy in a crisp white shirt and navy tie fiddles with the bridge of his glasses and clears his throat. “Because . . . I’m good at it?” he says.

“Wrong.” Brodie points at the girl playing third-chair trumpet. “Goldstein. Why do you play that trumpet?”

“Because it’s loud as hell,” she says, inciting a wave of anxious laughter.

“Not wrong, but not quite right either. You, Libdeh. Why do you play that viola?” Brodie pauses for a second and continues before Libdeh has a chance to respond, “Which really is the question for all time, really. Why does
anyone
play the viola? Just a violin trapped in puberty. Moving on. Or rather, coming back. Miss—am I pronouncing it correctly—Fah-chelly?” She neither corrects nor confirms his attempt. “Tell me why you play that flute.”

“My mother makes me,” she replies with a sneer, and Rabbit wonders how old she is. Her voice is young, immature. Statewide musicians are typically seniors, with some juniors, but there isn’t an age requirement. He supposes that a freshman or sophomore would be eligible, should she happen to be prodigiously talented.

Brodie crosses bony arms against his thin chest. “This piece of music,” he says, “this
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
—sounds classy, doesn’t it? That’s the French for you. But I love the French, they have their priorities right. They believe in eating fine food, drinking good wine, and fucking their brains out. That’s what this piece of music, this beautiful, classy-sounding piece of music, is about—the pursuit of lust! The
dream
of sublime satisfaction. And that’s the reason you play that instrument. You play because you get off on it.”

Rabbit giggles out loud. It’s half nervous release, half genuine amusement. He cannot picture himself, let alone any of these other band nerds—with their ties and their nervous tics and their ramrod-straight backs—playing orchestral music
because it turns them on.

“Yes. Finally!”
Brodie throws his hands up. “Thank you, Hatmaker. I knew you’d go first. You’d have to have a sense of humor with a name like that. But
Christ,
you’re a humorless lot! Maybe you
aren’t
getting off. Maybe you play these instruments too much. You know they’re a means to an end, not the end itself?”

The orchestra is completely silent, completely still.

“If a tree falls on a trombone when no one is around, does anyone care?” Brodie asks.

No one responds. Brodie frowns and points at Rabbit.

“Do you care, Bertram?”

Rabbit’s breath is coming in short little puffs now and he fears he really
is
having a panic attack, which makes his breath shorter and puffier. Because he
does
care. He cares so much about music that what Brodie is doing offends him personally, and maybe it’s the panic, maybe it’s the fear, maybe it’s the adrenaline building in his bloodstream, but in a sudden flash Rabbit Hatmaker realizes he is this orchestra’s only defense against a madman.

“
Yes.
” He stands up, planting Beatrice on the floor like a staff. “I care.”

Brodie’s head snaps back. He opens his mouth but Rabbit cuts him off.

“I don’t ask for much, and neither does Handel, or Mendelssohn, or Holst, since they’re . . . dead. But I’m not dead, I’m here, and I don’t want to get yelled at.” Rabbit feels like the top of his head will lift off. “A little respect—”

“Don’t go quoting Erasure at me, Bert—”

“My name is Rabbit!”

“Good Lord,” says Brodie. “
Rabbit
Hatmaker?”

“
Bastard,” hisses the young ponytailed flautist, and at first Rabbit thinks she is referring to
him
. But no: she is withering Brodie with a glare that wishes him dead. “You bastard,” she says again, her voice hateful and precise. It makes Rabbit’s arms prickle.

“Rabbit Hatmaker.” Brodie laughs, hooting like an owl. “Parents have a bit of an Updike fetish, do they?” Rabbit, flushing, realizes he is still standing and plunks into his chair, shaking. For a boy who treasures his anonymity, he has failed spectacularly at maintaining it, and less than an hour into the festival. Bassoonist Kimmy, beside him, gives him an approving nod and a smile. Rabbit raises his head to see the entire woodwind section twisted in their chairs toward him, all with expressions of awed compassion and gratitude. Rabbit flushes brighter—flattered and, curiously for him, emboldened.

“D’you’ve a sister named Bunny?” Brodie asks.

“My sister’s name is Alice,” Rabbit says.

“Ah, Lewis Carroll fanatics. Naturally. Tell me, Rabbit, are your parents still dealing? Because I’m going to need some heavy-grade narcotics to put up with you lot for the next four days. Bloody hell.” He raises his hands to conduct again but the hive mind has been shattered. Half the orchestra composes itself to play, while the other half glances around nervously, unsure whether this mad conductor is anyone worth following.

A smile passes over Brodie’s face like a shadow. If Rabbit hadn’t been staring at him in terrified defiance, he would not have seen it.

“Come on, children.” Brodie snaps his wrists to attention again. “I’m not rabid. And I thank Master Bertram Rabbit Hatmaker for being a sport. Perhaps he’s the only
real
musician among you.”

“You bastard.”

She says it much louder this time, and, like Rabbit before her, stands up to say it. “You megalomaniacal bastard,” she says, shaking her glossy ponytail back. “Tell me, why do you conduct?”

Brodie is taken aback. His body tenses and he doesn’t blink as he stares at the young girl in silence. This outburst is not orchestrated—not like Rabbit’s was, which Rabbit now understands. He feels duped. Used, an unsuspecting soloist.

“Is it because you’re good at it?” The girl takes apart the first joint of her flute. “Because your mommy and daddy forced you to?” Without breaking his gaze, she reaches down for her case and repacks her instrument. “Do you conduct because
you
get off on it?” She snaps the latches shut.

Brodie doesn’t speak, doesn’t move.

“I think,” she says, “it’s not the music but the
power.
Master of your miniature universe.” She stalks through the orchestra, out of woodwinds and through second and first violins, to the front of the stage, until she and Brodie are less than four feet apart, Brodie immobile and elevated on the conductor’s podium, the ponytailed girl below.

“Jerk off on your own time,” she says. “Not on mine.”

Rabbit thinks she must be older than she looks.

3

A
LICE IS MAD
as hell at Weirdo Wilson for making her late. But somewhere between watching Rabbit pelt off to his own rehearsal and pulling her new rolly suitcase up the threadbare hall carpet toward room 712, she decides to embrace it. Now it will be impossible for her
not
to make an entrance. She will open the big double doors of the grand ballroom, naturally drawing all attention from the in-progress chorus rehearsal. The whooshing air will tousle her hair and she’ll smile with her lips and her eyes and even her nose. She learned how to smile with her nose when she was maybe eight or nine, making faces in front of the bathroom mirror; it was a subtle but definite lift of the tip that, on the face of an actress less skilled, read as a mere flared nostril. Alice suspects this is a gift of genetics, the way a person can be double-jointed or have different-colored eyes.

She slides her key into the lock of room 712 and parks her suitcase at the foot of the far bed. She frowns at the limp brown bedspread, the defeated pillows. “This one’s mine,” she tells her invisible roommate, who no doubt arrived on time and has yet to realize her insane luck at being paired with Alice Hatmaker, returning Statewide superstar. Alice plans to take the girl under her wing, introduce her to everyone she knows—though most of the people she met last year were graduating seniors, there are sure to be
some
familiar faces—and everyone she only just met. There’s bound to be a party in someone’s room both Friday and Saturday nights; Alice will get this girl in. Last year, Alice’s roommate had been a mousy little nerd who played clarinet in the concert band—who was, like Alice, the only student attending from her district and therefore randomly assigned a roommate—but she hadn’t shown any interest in the underside of Alice’s wing. Or anything, in fact, other than practicing her clarinet, doing homework, and going to bed by ten o’clock.

She hangs up her dress clothes for the concert on Sunday, a neat black pencil skirt and romantically flouncy white blouse, and tucks her new shoes beneath them. Jeans and shirts and the satiny purple top she bought to wear to the various parties get folded and tucked into the giant shared dresser. And then she sees it. It stings her from the bottom of her suitcase, one unmistakable edge peeking from beneath a pair of pink pajama pants.

It is a picture of her and Jimmy Kopek. From the prom last year, the junior prom, which was a lot more fun than Alice ever expected. When you go to a school as small as Ruby Falls, the last thing you want to do on a Saturday night in late May is put on a long dress and dance awkwardly with the same fifty or so people you see five days a week, your classmates more like coworkers than friends. But Jimmy Kopek asked her. Jimmy Kopek, who was quiet and cute and nice. She and Jimmy were chemistry lab partners. He let her copy his homework when drama rehearsal ran too late for her to finish the night before. She introduced all the combustible experiments as though Jimmy were a magician preparing to amaze a rapt crowd and she was his charming assistant.

“And now,” she had said that day, the day he asked her, “Kopek the Magnificent will turn on the Bunsen burner and heat the mysterious liquid. Sir, your pipette.”

“If I promise not to saw you in half, will you go to the prom with me?” He was looking down at the gas jet, adjusting the height of the flame, his eyes hidden behind thick plastic safety goggles. Gossipy Lilah Horowitz, eavesdropping from the lab table behind them, tilted her head like an overeager Jack Russell. The tilt convinced Alice that Kopek wasn’t kidding. He had asked and meant it. It was the first time she’d ever been asked to a dance, which was something you wouldn’t expect; Kopek, when she told him this later, admitted he’d been sure someone else had beaten him to it. He had asked casually so he could laugh it off as a joke if necessary. That’s the irony of fame, she’d told him. Everyone assumes a star has already been sought by another, but nine times out of ten, she takes herself to the ball.

In the prom photo, Kopek is smiling a shy, close-lipped smile, but his eyes are crinkling, a sign he’s two seconds away from one of his snorting laughs. One arm is dangling awkwardly at his side and the other, at Alice’s direction, is thrust out proudly like a circus barker. Alice, presented by Kopek the Magnificent, is wearing a short black dress with a chevron pattern of white sequins and a bright pink top hat. She has one arm behind Kopek’s back and the other rests dramatically on the crook of a black cane. Later, after going to the Perkins on the boulevard for eggs and bottomless hot chocolate at one in the morning, when Kopek dropped her back at her house, she hooked the cane around his neck and pulled him close for their first kiss. Then she gave him the pink top hat as a souvenir. Alice was always great with props.

Why is this picture here?
she asks herself.
Who put this here? Why would they do that?

She blinks and her throat feels thick and achy, and then she remembers that she started packing for Statewide two weeks ago (she needed adequate time to determine how many and which costume changes would be required), and Jimmy Kopek broke up with her only last week. So
she
did this. She did this to herself. She cannot think about this for one second longer, so she dumps her socks and underwear and pajamas on her bed and shuts the suitcase, zips it closed, and drops it on the floor.

The door opens.

Alice doesn’t have time to compose herself before a striking girl with a high black ponytail enters. “Hey,” the girl says in instinctive greeting, and then, to herself, “Shit!” as she throws what looks like a flute case on the closer bed. It bounces and flies off the mattress to the floor.

Alice has never met this girl, but she recognizes her immediately.

It’s Jill Faccelli. She’s fourteen years old. She’s been studying the flute since she was four and has been playing as a soloist with professional symphonies since the age of eight. She has been profiled in magazines, in the
New York Times,
and all the Greater Syracuse newspapers when she and her mother first moved to the area. Alice had followed her for a while, had been fascinated by this dark-haired girl who now called the same part of the world home, who was sustained, presumably, by the same general environmental conditions as herself: the amount of fluoride in the water, nutrients in the soil, pollen and mold concentrations in the air. Her mother is Viola Fabian, whom Alice also knows by reputation as a brilliant musician and a horrendous bitch. Alice feels they ought to know each other, she and Jill, and now, standing less than five feet apart in the same hotel room, Alice thinks they
do
know each other.

Jill shakes her head and her ponytail bobs cheerfully despite her grave expression. Her hair is so black it almost looks blue, and her face is red and patchy with white. “Sorry,” she says, her eyes tracing the thrown flute case’s trajectory, and Alice understands she is apologizing not to her but to the instrument. Alice shoves her underwear in the dresser and approaches, one palm out to—what? Wave hello? Shake her hand? Proximity to fame has stunned her silly.

“Hi!” she says, too loud even by her own theatrical standards. Her pulse threads and she feels herself blushing. “My name is Alice Hatmaker. I’m your roommate.”

“Jill.”

“Welcome to Statewide!”

Jill’s eyes shift from right to left and her brow creases. She is preternatural. Alice has never stood this close to someone like Jill Faccelli, someone touched by a talent so great it creates its own atmosphere. Her ability is a tangible thing, a crackling magnetic field searching for a route through which to pass electrons to the ground. Alice has a fleeting absurd thought that this strange magic will leach like radiation into her own greedy tissue and bone. She breathes in deeply.