Back in the foyer, it’s show business as usual, students swerving around each other, and studio doors slamming as everyone tries to get to class on time. Lauren Rose has been forgotten, but Miss Duke’s message is loud and clear: play her game or suffer the consequences. I need to get my head in the game. Like in High School Musical. If I’d ever seen that (like, a hundred times, which I definitely won’t admit to while I’m in this place).
Someone crashes into me, knocking me clean over. I quickly un-sprawl myself off the floor, feeling ridiculous (and winded).
“Oh no! I’m sorry. Are you all right? Here.”
The voice belongs to a tall, good-looking white guy with light brown wavy hair. He’s carrying a battered leather satchel and a guitar. He holds out his hand to help me up. As I take it, I notice how rough it is. His nails are bitten, and his fingers are square and calloused at the ends.
“Thanks.” I smooth my dress down at the back to make sure it hasn’t got hitched up somewhere. “I should have been looking where I was going.”
“No, it’s all me. I’ve got my first lecture over in the other building, and I was rushing to get there on time. I missed registration today, but I heard the ‘speech’ was a long one, first day of term and all that. Sorry.”
“It’s fine, really. Er…” I look down at my hand, which he’s still holding.
“Oh God. First I charge you down, then I cling on to you like a weirdo. I’m basically horrible.”
I laugh as he lets go, and my face feels strange. I haven’t laughed for weeks. As he walks toward the front doors, he turns around again, grinning.
“What’s your name?”
“Nettie.”
“I’m Fletch. See you around, Nettie.” He disappears into the crowd.
I watch him go, the last embers of a smile still on my face. Right. Get to class.
I run up the stairs to the top of the building where my changing room is, find a spot on a bench, and start to get dressed for jazz.
The tall blonde girl who tripped over my bag in the foyer is there. She catches my eye in the mirror and strides over.
“Just so you know, you shouldn’t be talking to second-year boys,” she says loudly.
The chatter subsides as everyone stops to listen. “Pardon?”
“You were talking to Fletch. He’s a second-year. You’re a first-year. It’s an unwritten rule.”
Fletch? The guy with the guitar?
“I’m not really sure what you’re—”
“Just leave him alone, all right?”
The bell rings and she storms out of the changing room. The other girls scatter to their lessons, whispering to each other while I try to get my head around what just happened.
“Don’t worry about her,” says a girl who’s still hanging in the doorway. She’s taller than me, mixed race, with auburn hair and hazel eyes. And so, so beautiful.
“Yeah,” I say, trying to smile.
“She’s just a second-year diva. Plenty of those around, I’m sure…”
“Right,” I say.
“First days are so scary,” she says. “I had the shits and everything this morning. Still, I might lose a couple of pounds. See you in a bit.” She slips out of the door.
I like her.
Glancing at my schedule, I see I’m in Studio Five with someone called Darren Walker. I scramble out of the changing room and down the stairs, two at a time.
The girl who had the shits this morning is already in the class. She smiles and gestures for me to join her in the back corner.
Darren Walker enters the room, bag slung over his shoulder and coffee in hand. It’s not long before a loud beat starts playing and he begins doing what I can only describe as the most complicated warm-up ever. The students in the front couple of rows (presumably second- and third-years) copy him immediately. The girl next to me catches my eye and we follow suit (the only difference being that I’m two counts behind everyone else).
After sit-ups, press-ups, planks, and splits in all directions, he beckons to us to go to the back corner. I ignore my shaking legs and arms—I can’t be soft on my first day. He demonstrates a complicated pirouette exercise and the students do it across the room, one by one.
I’m the last one to do it. I start well enough, I think, getting through one side without any major problems. As I begin the second side, however, I clock Miss Duke through the window to the corridor outside, staring at me intently again.
I lose my footing and fall out of my double turn, the bridge of my nose hitting the barre at the side of the studio. It must be bad because no one laughs. In my confusion, I look back at the studio window, but there’s no one there.
Darren rushes over.
“Go and get cleaned up. The office’ll give you an ice pack. Find somewhere quiet to sit for the rest of the morning.”
My top lip feels wet. I do as he says, too sore to think about how much I just embarrassed myself.
Miss Paige, the secretary, rolls her eyes at my bloody face as I enter the room and shouts back to her colleague, “Linda! Can we have an ice pack, please. Another first-year injury.”
I take the ice pack and traipse back up to my changing room, hoping I don’t end up with a black eye. Not helpful when you’re trying to be unobtrusive. The rest of the girls will be back up soon and I can do without being stared at. Where else can I go?
The library, of course. It’s right at the top of the building, another flight up from my changing room, and full of books only a third-year doing their dissertation would want to read. I reckon I’ll be safe there.
It’s a small room, stuffed floor to ceiling with books, papers, programs, sheet music, scripts… I should be resting, but I can’t resist. Double-checking to make sure there’s no librarian lurking around, I grab a chair and reach up to the very top shelf, skimming the top of a pile of sheet music with my fingertips.
I tug at the corner of a page too quickly and it pulls out a load of other papers with it, which cascade off the shelf and all over the floor. Seriously, I really need to get it together today. Talk about tragic.
There’s too much of it to put back in order, so I just start to sweep piles of it from all around the room into my arms. As I’m picking up the last pages, I notice something yellow sticking out from the bottom of the bookshelf. I grab at it, and pull out a brochure for an old production of Oklahoma! barely held together by its ancient staples. Thinking it must be something an ex-Duke’s student performed in, I stick it on top of the pile of sheet music and take it to the table in the middle of the room.
I start trying to sort out the papers but something catches my eye in the program, which has flipped open on the center pages.
There she is.
She’s smiling up at me. Not the Mum I remember—a younger version, surely no older than twenty, with long black hair going all the way down her back. She always said she couldn’t remember much about her career as a dancer. I’d no idea she was in this production. Thumbing through the program, I see a section entitled “Oklahoma! Cast Discovers Denmark!” which shows them all frolicking across the North Jutland coast, posing beside the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Copenhagen, and lined up in arabesque in front of Rosenborg Castle. I find Mum in another snapshot, her head thrown back in riotous laughter (preceding a snort, I bet), arm in arm with a tall, pale-skinned, dark-haired girl, who is also mid-laugh. The caption underneath reads:
Best of friends: Anastasia Delaney-Richardson and Cecile Duke sharing a joke.
Cecile Duke.
What?
I drop the program in shock. They were friends. Best friends, if the program is to be believed. How could I not have known? Why did she never mention it? She knew I had my heart set on going to Duke’s.
The facts are mounting in my mind, like little yellow Post-it Notes, one by one, faster and faster:
1. Friends help each other out.
2. Friends help each other’s children out.
3. Friends turn a blind eye to said child’s terrible audition and give them a place at their college regardless.
Oh, God. I’m a fraud. How can I have been so naive? Of course there was a reason I got in. That must be why Miss Duke keeps staring at me. She’s looking to see if I can dance like Mum. Well, she’ll be disappointed.
I don’t deserve to be here. I should get my things and go home right now. That’s what I should do.
But…does any of it even matter? I mean really matter? Who cares if my audition was terrible, if—deep down—I know I’m good enough? It’s true my voice hasn’t been the same since the audition, but I can sort myself out. Nobody needs to know about Mum’s friendship with Cecile Duke.
Nobody except me.
I start rifling through the rest of the papers, searching for more pictures of Mum; a clue, anything that’ll help me to understand this thing I’ve just uncovered.
“Excuse me, is this seat taken?”
Oh, God, it’s the cute guitar player. Why does he have to show up right when I’m having a major existential crisis?
“It’s Nettie, right? Fletch. We met this morning?”
Sweet that he thinks I won’t remember. He’s still carrying his rough leather satchel and guitar, this time in a case.
“Yes—sorry, let me shift this.” I hurry back to the table and heap all my stuff into one pile.
“Thanks. Bit of a shock, huh, starting at Duke’s?”
“That’s an understatement.” I smile. Inwardly I’m rolling up into a ball of cringe. He must think I’m a proper geek, sifting through a load of Duke’s memorabilia on my first day.
He smiles back and pushes a strand of hair out of his face, revealing straight, even teeth. I need to stop looking. He’ll think I’m staring at his mouth in a sex way.
“I was ready to leave after my first day,” he says, oblivious. “But here I am, a year later.” He pulls a huge stack of manuscripts out of his satchel, and a few stray papers escape and float under my chair. I go to retrieve them, but he stops me.
“No, you’re good. I can reach.” Fletch bends down and fumbles around under my chair. The effort of trying to grab the errant papers wafts them further away and ten seconds later he’s still feeling around for them underneath me. His face is really close to my thighs. I know I’m going red. (I blush really easily. It’s a curse.) “Sorry. That was awkward.” He resurfaces and sits back in his seat. “Nice boots, by the way.”
I briefly look down to check which boots I’m wearing (green, suede, vintage), murmur an embarrassed, “Thanks,” and go back to sorting the spilled papers. Right now you could fry eggs on my cheeks and they’d be fine to eat.
He sifts through the enormous pile of tatty papers until he finds what he’s looking for. Then, after some noisy searching in his satchel for a pencil, he begins working.
I try to continue with what I’m doing, but I can’t concentrate. There’s a Mum/Miss Duke soup sloshing around my brain. And I’m curious to know what Fletch is writing. I give it a couple of minutes before sneaking a glance over at his work. It looks like he’s jotting down music. While I’m trying to decipher the notation, he looks up.
Busted.
“Can I try something out on you?” he says, totally out of the blue. “It involves me making a bit of a noise.”
“Uh, yeah, sure.” I hope I sound casual, rather than relieved I haven’t been caught nosing.
“I can’t get the end of this song right.” He grabs his guitar and spreads the pages along the table so they’re all visible. “I could do with another pair of ears. Do you mind?”
I shrug and nod my head. Then, worried it looked like a no, I shake it vigorously.
“Is that a yes, you don’t mind?” His eyes sparkle at me.
“Er, sorry, yes.” I. Am. Ridiculous.
“OK. So, it’s a rough version, but you’ll get the gist. I’m going to play two endings. Here’s number one.” He starts to play a few chords. “I’ll come in after the bridge. I won’t bore you with the whole lot.”
He plays the first ending, picking out arpeggios with his fingers tingling among the soft chords. I barely breathe, he’s so good.
“Right, remember that,” he says, without giving me time to say anything. “Here’s the other one.”
The second one is different—less resolved, more melancholic. Equally brilliant.
“What do you think?” he says.
“Uh, they’re both great.” I’m trying to pull off not-too-impressed and yet incredibly knowledgeable. Not confident I nailed it. “Really great. But the second one was more… intriguing. It’s difficult to tell without the words.”
“Good point,” he says. “You haven’t heard the lyrics.”
An overwhelming curiosity creeps over me. “Maybe if you could tell me what it’s about?”
He puts his guitar down on the floor and looks back at me. His eyes are a warm brown, the color of really strong tea. “It’s about loss,” he says.
“Loss…” I feel scared but I don’t know why.
“Loss and a kind of longing, I guess. Hoping that someone will come back but knowing that they never will.” He breaks away, looking back down to his sheet music.
I need to hear this song. I’m not sure why, but I need to.
“It’s hard for me to help without hearing the whole thing,” I venture. “Maybe—would you sing it?”
“Definitely not.” He breaks into a grin again. “We’ve just met; it would be unbearably self-indulgent of me.”
“Oh no, I’d love to hear it.”
“Seriously?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, OK. If you’re sure. But feel free to stick a hook around my neck at any time.” He picks up his guitar and looks up again with raised eyebrows to double-check. I nod, my heart thudding at about one-eighty per minute.
He starts singing, and I have to mask an intake of breath. His voice is beautiful. Like, the best voice I’ve ever heard. It’s lyrical, melodic, warm—I mean, one-hundred-percent, sweep-you-off-your-feet gorgeous. If it’s possible to fall in love with a voice, I have, right now, in the library.
I need to get over his voice and listen to the song.
Omigod.
He’s singing about me? It’s my song.
My life.
I’ve always secretly longed for a Roberta Flack moment—hasn’t everyone? But now, here it is, and it isn’t killing me softly—it’s battering me to death. I’ve heard songs that touched my heart before, but this has crawled into my marrow. It’s every “fine” I replied when someone asked me how I was doing; every woman I chased down the street thinking it was Mum; every scream I ever uttered in my bedroom at night, begging her to come back. It’s the memory of her singing me to sleep. It’s every morning waking up and forgetting for a split second that she’s gone, until the realization hits me with a dull thud. It’s waking every morning to that dull thud.
He strums the final chord and looks up. Silent tears are streaming down my face.
“Sheesh, was it that bad?”
“Sorry.” I wipe my cheeks and try to pull it together. “Just…emotional.”
“Are you OK?” he says.
“Yes, just about.” I manage a little laugh in an attempt to make myself seem less weird. “Ugh. Sorry. Embarrassing.”
“No, it’s nice to get a reaction—assuming it wasn’t my playing that made you cry.”
“No! It’s just… Oh, never mind. It’s silly.”
“Please.” Something about the way he says it makes me continue.
“It’s just that, well… OK, so my Mum died last year—” (deep breath) “—and for ages I had these thoughts that I couldn’t shake. Like a feeling you can’t get rid of, right? It sounds weird, but…,” I falter. “You probably think I’m ridiculous.”
“No, please—I know what you mean. Please—don’t stop.”
I swallow.
“Well, she died of cancer. And for months after—like months—I kept imagining that her oncologist called me in for a meeting. Like, really imagined it, for huge chunks of the day. I’d arrive at his office and he would tell me that Mum hadn’t died—she’d been secretly sent to America to try out a new controversial drug, and that she was OK—she was cured and coming back home. I know it doesn’t make any sense—it doesn’t even make sense to me now. It sounds like something a four-year-old would make up. I mean, why would she get her oncologist to tell me that she was fine? She would just come home and tell me herself, right? And doctor–patient confidentiality wouldn’t allow it… I’ve been through it all. Every scenario. I’d get lost for minutes at a time, so when I’d finally come back to reality, it was like losing her all over again…”
I should stop now—it sounds even worse when I say it out loud—but he’s looking at me so intensely that I carry on.
“I guess, in a long-winded way, what I’m trying to say is that for me, your song makes perfect sense.” I know I’m babbling but I can’t stop now. “It’s hard to make people understand what it’s like to lose someone when you’re young, but you’ve summed it up pretty perfectly there. I mean, I don’t even know if the song’s about that kind of loss, but…”
It’s the most I’ve said in months. It feels strange to hear my own voice.
“It is,” he says. His voice sounds tight. “My brother was killed in a motorbike crash four years ago. I guess every song I’ve written since then is about him, in one way or another.”
He gets it.
He holds my gaze for a moment, clears his throat, and goes back to his writing. I watch him for a while, desperate for him to speak. But he doesn’t. Or can’t.
So I do instead. “I—I liked the second ending—the one you played just now when you sang.”
This almost-change-of-subject is enough to get him back. The spark is back in his eyes as he looks up.
“How so?”
“Well, it sounded unfinished. And the lyrics kind of make you think that the person is never going to give up hope, even though it’s hopeless. So they know they’ll never get a resolution.”
“You’re right—the music is unresolved. I hadn’t even thought of that when I wrote it. I just liked the feel of an imperfect cadence. Right, it’s in. Thanks—I need to credit you as cowriter.”
The bell rings.
“What’s your next class?” he asks.
“Musical Theatre.” My stomach does an involuntary churn.
“Me too.” He grabs all the sheet music and stuffs them into his satchel. “I’ll walk you there.”
As I pack up my things, it strikes me that I’ve never opened up about Mum like that before. I follow him down the stairs and out through the front doors, wondering if the moment we just had was as huge for him as it was for me.