The second I set foot outside Burgess, I became hyperaware of my posture, the way I usually kept my elbows tucked in and my strides short. That wasn’t masculine. Was it? I loosened up and tried to walk like a dude, at which point I discovered I had no clue how dudes are supposed to walk. It took me the entire journey to figure out a gait that didn’t look like a velociraptor pretending to be a West Side Story character.
The first time I passed someone, a girl who glanced up for a second from her phone, I nearly turned and sprinted toward Burgess. She said nothing. Once she passed, I unleashed a huge breath that I’d been holding for some reason, as if suffocation would make me look manlier. This happened four more times.
I jogged down a grassy incline into the music quad, toward Arlington Hall, an elegant sculpture of weathered brick and poured beige pillars. I pushed through the backstage entrance at the side of the building, stopped outside the stage door, and waited.
At 6:15, one of the Sharpshooters emerged. He was half a head shorter than me and slender. With his neatly organized ginger-blond hair and a pastel button-up, he wouldn’t have looked out of place in the children’s section of a J. Crew catalog.
“Are you Julian?” he said, and I choked back a nervous giggle. A deep bass voice had spilled out of the kid’s tiny body. It was like a Chihuahua opening its mouth and emitting a Rottweiler bark, or possibly the Darth Vader theme song.
I cleared my throat. “That’s me,” I said, pitching my voice down. I’d gotten used to pitching up in theater classes, both for projection’s sake and to sound more feminine. I could get used to the opposite.
J. Crew Junior eyed me a second longer than he needed to. My fight-or-flight instinct burst into life, beating its wings frantically against the inside of my skull. I saw the conversation play out in quick, horrible flashes. He was going to say, “Um . . . you’re a girl,” and I would laugh nervously and bleat, “Yep! Psychology project! Ha!” at which point I would sprint out of Arlington Hall and never again let myself see the light of day, because in what possible universe could I ever have thought this was a viable plan?
But no. He just glanced over my clothes with obvious distaste.
“What?” I said, looking down. This was my most masculine outfit: worn-out tan corduroys and a blue flannel. Had they expected me to rent a tux?
The kid shrugged, smoothing a lock of his hair back into place. “Nothing,” he said, meaningfully. “Come in.” He stood aside and held the door open.
Lightheaded with relief, I folded into the backstage darkness. J. Crew Junior swaggered ahead of me, out onstage, and down the steps, tan boat shoes squeaking. For somebody who had never set foot on a boat, I had seen about three thousand too many boat shoes.
I emerged onstage and white light struck me. Scars glared from the black slick of the stage: blemishes left by screws and sets, splinters torn up by spike tape, shreds of gray missed in repainting.
Arlington Hall could have eaten three of the Palmer Theater and still had space for dessert. The house was a yawning chasm stretching endlessly ahead, and the wings to the right and left felt a few days’ journey away. I felt very small and very naked, especially without makeup, which always reassured me onstage. It wasn’t so much the feeling of wearing it as the preperformance ritual of sponging on foundation, dusting on blush, the tracing and blending of lipstick, eyeliner, eyeshadow. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even left my dorm without it.
I peered into the first row as J. Crew Junior joined six other silhouettes. Suddenly, horribly, it occurred to me that all seven Sharpshooters could be like the kid from Wednesday. How would I survive three months of that? Was the competition worth the very real possibility of me spontaneously combusting?
Another silhouette sat off to the side, his face illuminated by an iPhone screen. I recognized the beaky nose and permanently downturned mouth, which belonged to Dr. Graves, one of the music teachers.
I planted my feet, tilted my head, and ignored the way the underside of the wig made my pinned-up hair itch. A picture came to me: the wig flopping off like a dead pigeon, mid-song, onto the stage. Hysterical laughter built up in my throat.
Paper rustled somewhere. My audition sheet, probably, with the batch of lies I’d typed into their form, from fake name to the matching fake e-mail account I’d made. “Julian Zhang?” said one of the silhouettes—not the bass kid, and not Dr. Graves, who was still frowning down at his phone. This guy had a bright, amused tenor.
I nodded. Julian Zhang was a cousin in Seattle.
The silhouette attached to the voice leaned forward, allowing the stage light to tinge his features. I recognized the guy instantly, the long, rumpled hair looped back into a bun, the serious eyebrows. This kid had sung Justine Gray’s “Slower Faster” in the Sharps’ last spring concert, a raw, crooning performance that had reduced about 60 percent of the audience to pools of sexual frustration.
“Welcome to auditions,” he said. “I’m Isaac Nakahara. I’m the president.”
“Of the United States?” said my mouth, without my permission. In the hideous silence that followed this total nonjoke, I wondered how much it would cost to hire someone to stand next to me with duct tape, ready to prevent these sorts of situations.
I started to apologize, but Isaac replied cheerfully, “Yep. Leader of the Free World.” He waved at the doors. “If Secret Service tackles you outside, that’s why. Because I, the president of the United States, am never safe from—”
“Isaac,” said an unimpressed voice beside him.
Isaac aimed a quick grin at whoever had said his name. “So, how’s it going, Julian?”
I deepened my voice and tried to look nonchalant. “Not bad. How about you guys?”
A couple of laughs came from the silhouettes. Some groaning and shifting. “It’s been a long-ass day,” Isaac said.
“Mister Nakahara,” said Dr. Graves to his phone, his permanent scowl deepening.
Isaac shot a careless glance over at him. “Sorry. A long gosh-darn day, by golly.”
The other Sharps snickered. Dr. Graves tore his eyes from his screen to give Isaac a withering stare, which Isaac responded to with a thumbs-up. Eventually, Graves shook his head and returned to his phone, and Isaac returned to me. “But yeah, we’ve been here since nine a.m.”
“God.”
“You’re the last one. Not to make you nervous.” He cracked a smile. “You nervous? I was like 90 percent nerves when I auditioned. I mean, I was a freshman, but I guess it never gets better, the auditioning thing.”
Somehow, his showy, joking patter was only making my nerves worse. I wished he would fold back into the dark, just let me sing and then get violently ill somewhere, probably. “I’ve had worse,” I lied.