Noteworthy by Riley Redgate
for Marlene Hoirup, who gave music to my life
for Terry Hicks, who gave life to my music
and for Benjamin Locke, who taught
me what it means to give it all back
Monday morning was the worst possible time to have an existential crisis, I decided on a Monday morning, while having an existential crisis.
Ideal crisis hours were obviously Friday afternoons, because you had a full weekend afterward to turn back into a person. You could get away with Saturday if you were efficient about it. Mondays, though—on Mondays, you had to size up the tsunami of work that loomed in the near distance and cobble together a survival strategy. There was no time for the crisis cycle: 1) teary breakdown, 2) self-indulgent wallowing, 3) questioning whether life had meaning, and 4) limping toward recovery. Four nifty stages. Like the water cycle, but soul-crushing.
I scanned the list posted on the stage door for the sixth time, hoping my eyesight had mysteriously failed me the first five times. Nope. No magical appearance of a callback for Jordan Sun, junior. I was a reject, like last year, and the year before.
I moved away from the stage door with dreamy slowness. My fellow rejects and I drifted down the hall, unspeaking. Katie Woods wore a hollow, shocked expression, as if she’d just seen somebody get mauled by a bear. Ash Crawford moved with the dangerous tension of someone who itched to smash a set of plates against a wall.
All normal. At the Kensington-Blaine Academy for the Performing Arts, half the students would have slit throats for parts in shows, dance pieces, and symphonic ensembles—anything to polish that NYU or Juilliard application to the blinding gleam the admissions officers wanted. Kensington loved its hyphenated adjectives: college-preparatory, cross-curricular, objective-oriented. “Low-stress” was not one of them. Every few days, you heard some kid crying and hyperventilating in the library bathroom. I, like any reasonable person, saved the crying and hyperventilating for my dorm.
Another failed audition. I could already hear my mom releasing the frustrated sigh that spoke more clearly than words: This place wasn’t meant for you.
Familiar anxieties seeped in: that I should be back in San Francisco, working, making myself useful to my parents. That being here was a vanity project. That, as always, I didn’t belong.
There was something alienating about being on scholarship, a tense mixture of gratefulness and otherness. You’re talented, the money said, and we want you here. Still, it had the tang of You were, are, and always will be different. I was from a different world than most Kensington kids—I’d never been the Victorian two-story in western Massachusetts or the charming Georgian in the DC suburb. I was a cramped apartment in an anonymous brick building with a dripping air conditioner, stationed deep in the guts of the West Coast, and I’d landed here by some freak combination of providence and ambition. And I never forgot it.
I exited the cool depths of Palmer Hall onto a landscape of deep green and blissful blue. Ahead, marble steps broadened, rolling down to the theater quad’s long parabola of grass. To the left and right, Douglass Hall and Burgess Hall flanked the quad, twin sandstone buildings that glowed gold with noon. Nestled in the far north of New York State, a long drive from anything but fields and forest, Kensington in early autumn was the sort of beautiful that begged for attention.
Hot wind fluttered through the quad, dry heat that brought goosebumps rippling up my arms. I stood still, my too-small sneakers warming in the sunshine, as a stream of traffic maneuvered its way around me, confident hands fitting Ray-Bans over squinting eyes, shoulders shrugging off layers to soak in the heat. Neatly layered hair cascaded over even tans. Highlights snatched the sun and tossed back an angry gleam.
Over the banister, a line of backpacks wriggled up-campus toward the dining hall. I stayed put. I never skipped meals at school, but something had gone wrong with my stomach. Namely, it didn’t seem to be there anymore, and wherever it had gone, my heart and lungs and the rest of my vital organs had danced merrily after it. Holding the full interior of my body was the dull roar of a single thought: Fix this.
I rocked forward on the balls of my feet like a racer before the starting gun. I tried to take steady breaths. All this excess energy, all this drive to get something done, and nowhere to funnel it. Zero options. I would have kidnapped the cast and deported them to Slovenia, but I didn’t have sixteen thousand dollars for plane tickets. I would have sabotaged the light board and blackmailed the department into giving me a part, but I wasn’t an asshole. I would have bribed the director with my eternal love, but she was Reese Garrison, dean of the School of Theater, and I couldn’t think of anything that probably meant less to her than my affection.
I squinted back up at Palmer Hall, its peaks and crevices blacked out against that signature blue sky. Reese had posted the list only twenty minutes ago. If I caught her in her office, maybe I could wring some audition feedback out of the endless supply of needle-sharp comments that constituted conversations with her.
Given her entire personality, I didn’t know why I was so sure that Reese, at the heart of everything, wanted us to do well. Maybe it was because she respected wanting something, and there was nothing I did better than want.
With a squeak of rubber on marble, I turned on my heel and walked back inside.
Like all the offices on the top floor of Palmer Hall, Reese’s was sterilized white and too bright for comfort, small lights gleaming down from on high. At best, it gave off the atmosphere of a hospital room. At worst, an interrogation chamber from a 1970s cop movie.
Behind a cluttered desk, Reese adjusted her silver-gray frames. Her lined eyes glowed up at me, amplified by thick glass. The lady had a way of making everyone feel the height of your average garden gnome, even those of us who stood five foot ten. She never got less terrifying, but you could get used to it, in the way that when you watch the same horror movie repeatedly, the jump scares start to lose their sting.
“I hope,” she said, “that you’re not here to ask me to reconsider.”