As soon as the door is closed, and despite the fact that the outer wall is half-window, things get serious.
“You okay?” Tracy asks, and all eyes are on me.
Gospel choir is my hallowed ground, the one place at school where I’m safe. The reason we moved back to my dad’s hometown, even though he never intended to. We didn’t come back just for this collection of eleven girls—ten, at the moment—but because they’re part of the network that’s been here for decades.
In a remarkably monochromatic city in the unsuspecting Pacific Northwest exists one of a handful of networks. They are communities inside the Black community, where sirens are known and protected. As usual, though, the community isn’t actually just made up of us, and neither is this gospel choir. Yes, nine of our twelve members are Black, but Tracy, for one, is a white girl and she still knows about me. More than that, she’s trusted not just with my secret, but with the mandate to mask for me. They all are, including anyone with a magical identity of their own. While they sing, my call blends safely between their three-part harmony so that I don’t have to live my life in silence. The rest of the school—even its small community of Black students—aren’t privy to my identity except for Effie, who isn’t in choir because (surprise!) she isn’t much for stage performances.
“How’re you holding up?” Tracy asks.
“My dad’s frazzled,” I say because that’s the part that matters. “And I’m not supposed to watch the news or go online, I guess.”
That gets everyone. Eyes roll, an assortment of snorts and clucks clutter the medium-sized practice room, outside of whose window the rest of the choir’s running through scales with Mrs. Cordova. I can’t hear them, but Landon McKinnon is doing that overenunciating thing he always does during scales, and it looks like he’s going to unhinge his jaw and behead the petite girl in front of him. She’s seconds from being cannibalized and she doesn’t even know it.
“Anyway.” I return my focus to our room just as Tracy squeezes my hand. I squeeze back to let her know it helps.
Or it usually does, anyway.
I’m supposed to let everything out here, according to Mom. This is how we make sure Santa Cruz never happens again. And I’m more than grateful for them, but there are just some things that not even the network would understand. That nothing short of knowing how it feels to be a siren would explain. As evidenced by what someone says next.
“It’s the Siren Trials all over again.” It’s Porsha, the smallest one in the ensemble, and the resident charmer. Even though to me it seems super cliché when she turns out to be our mind-blowing soloist, the judges are always thrown. They somehow never see it coming. Looks can be deceiving, they say. Over and over again.
“How do you mean?” I ask. “How is it like the Siren Trials?”
“Just how, in the 1960s, sirens were being outed and informed on, and when they were killed their murderers were never brought to justice.”
It’s a painfully concise description of the era that spawned the very network Porsha’s a part of. And leaves out the part where even the Black community quieted down pretty quickly following the acquittals, so as to keep the movement from losing steam and focus. After all, there hadn’t been a record of a non-Black siren since the Second World War; we were too niche a population to deserve extended support or attention.
“Right,” I say to Porsha, careful to keep my voice as light and breezy as possible. “But the first sirens to be targeted during the Civil Rights movement were activists. When they were accused, they opted to confirm their identity.”
“That’s true,” Tracy says. “Rhoda Taylor is just suspected of being a siren. She might not even be one.”
She says it like that’s the injustice—that a non-siren is being called one. Not that the suspicion was raised at the murder trial of Rhoda’s live-in boyfriend. And by the defense. Not that the whole world seems to agree that, yep, it matters whether she was a siren or not.
Because maybe she Compelled him to hurt her. Maybe it was suicide-by-boyfriend and he couldn’t have stopped himself.
“A siren made me do it” is a pretty strong defense, I guess—even if the siren’s the one who ends up dead.
“Anyway.” I take a deep breath and look back out the window. “He hasn’t gotten away with murder yet.”
I don’t say that I’ve always hated the way Siren Trials makes it sound like sirens were the perpetrators and not the victims. Despite my mom’s advice, I don’t tell the group how my stomach’s too upset to eat solid food either. I don’t tell them that even though we’re intentionally saying her name and refusing to join the media in repeating her killer’s, I’m already starting to cringe at the sound of Rhoda Taylor’s name, and how that makes me feel like human garbage but I can’t help it because I’m terrified of what could happen to me if the wrong person finds out what I really am.
I also don’t bother saying that I’ve been looking for Gramma, or why. That it’s not the first time I’ve tried to silence my siren voice, and that last time didn’t go very well.
Why bother. Why get anyone else’s hopes up when I still don’t know what finding Gramma would accomplish. I don’t know that there’s a way to purge my voice of power, or if she’d even approve. After sirens lost their lives lending their voices to a cause, maybe my grandmother would be disappointed in me. I haven’t thought that far ahead.
I swallow everything I’m not telling them and rejoin a conversation that’s shifted to the upcoming competition. It’s not long until, through the wall made equally of window, I see our missing member crossing the choir room to the emphatic delight of the class, whom Mrs. Cordova gives a bit of leniency until Naema has acknowledged them and disappears behind the solid door of our practice room. A rapping follows, and then she lets herself in.
“Sorry, sorry!” Naema’s entrance here is received pretty much exactly as it was by the rest of the choir. There’s no need to bat her naturally curled eyelashes or bat aside some of her unnaturally straightened hair. “I am so sorry,” she says, and she beams this perfect smile over us like she knows she doesn’t have to be. “Did we already warm up?”
“We wouldn’t start without you,” Porsha says through a beaming smile.
“I am so sorry,” Naema says again, only now she’s holding the small silver bell at the end of her necklace with both dark, berry-brown hands. It’s pretty obvious what she’s about to say, or what the subject will be, anyway. “Principal Kelly asked a couple of us to welcome a new eloko, and I just completely lost track of time.”
“There’s a new eloko student?” Porsha is practically bouncing, and even those with more self-restraint have wide, wonder-filled eyes.
“One more for the roster,” Naema says, sliding her bell charm back and forth along her necklace chain as though to make sure we haven’t forgotten that she’s one, too. “We’re taking over!”
And everyone laughs. Which is the opposite of how they’d react if I’d said it. They’re my network, but none of us are immune to the public distrust of sirens. Even though I depend on them to help me stay safe, to give me a place to siren call, I still don’t think that joke would’ve gone over well coming from me.