I can see he’s insulted. “I thought you were into music and all.”
“I am. Just not Top 40, I guess.”
“What, you think it’s beneath you?”
Here we go. “A lot of it is catchy, but it’s not very complex. It’s all about wanting to get down, wanting to get some, wanting to be rich, wanting to get back with someone.”
“What about Radiohead? They’re complex. And emotional.”
“And white,” says Angela Diaz, smirking.
You can’t be too white at my school. And you can’t be too brown, either. It’s so paradoxical. Your parents come to America so you can be successful. They don’t even teach you their language so that you can completely assimilate, be successful, go to college, be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. So you assimilate as well as you can, and if you get anywhere, anywhere close to being smart enough, or successful enough at it, you get told you’re too white.
But there’s no point in getting into it with him. “I respect Radiohead, but it’s not my thing. So whiny and depressing.”
“They’re being ironic,” Duncan says.
“I guess I prefer a more natural sound.”
“That’s kind of the point. The music expressed the zeitgeist of the time. The fakeness of what people wanted. The artificial flavoring.”
“Then why have more?”
“You’d rather listen to Beethoven,” Duncan says. This is an accusation.
“Yeah, so?”
“My dad listens to Beethoven.”
“Your dad has good taste.”
“My dad is a dork.”
Angela Diaz smirks again.
Well, at least he’s alive. That’s my comeback. But I don’t want to say that. It’s the pity line.
I sputter instead. “Do you even know what zeitgeist means?”
Maybe there’s something wrong with me for not liking Radiohead. Or Duncan. He has all these friends, and I don’t, but he’s obnoxious. I don’t get it.
At lunchtime, I find Tash near the new tech center, where we always hang out. They never cleaned up after they built it, so the dirt’s white with concrete dust and whatever they make walls out of, and the plants look stuck into the ground, spindly and uncomfortable.
She’s sitting with her eyes closed, earbuds in.
“Earth to Tash.”
I wave my hands in front of her face until she blinks at the sun. She looks surprised. But then she tends to, because of the dots of glitter she wears at the corners of her eyes. With her white miniskirt, her orange All-Star sneakers, and tiny pigtails high on her head, she looks like a space fairy. And a freak, by our school’s standards. Which is why we hang out. We’re not preps who like hip-hop. We’re nerdy. We’re artsy. We’re a clique of two. It’s easier to pretend I’m not lonely when I’m with her.
“You have to listen to this,” she says, handing me her phone. “Tom showed it to me.” Tom is her recent crush, a boy from another school.
I look at the screen. Spiritualized. Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space.
I’ve never heard of it. Apparently Tom knows all kinds of music — seventies Afrobeat, sixties French pop, nineties post-punk. Hence Tash’s crush. I plug my earbuds into her phone — no one touches Tash’s headphones — and listen.
It’s a baroque round. A clear, bell-like keyboard drifts in, and a spiral galaxy of sound, debris aglow, revolves in my head. Heavenly. Tash looks skinny, her shoulder blades poking up a little on the back of her shirt. Where wings would be.
At the end of the song, she looks at me solemnly. “Right?”
I’m happy and sad at the same time. “Definitely.”
“I think Tom likes me,” Tash says. “Do you think he likes me? He wouldn’t have me listen to songs like this if he didn’t like me.”
Atomic debris continues to drift around us. See, that’s the thing about Tash. We dream similar things. If I were to tell her the sun changes color when I listen to Debussy, she’d get it.
Paul knows my weak spots before he even hears me play.
“Okay. Measure thirty-one. Let’s go.”
It’s been a month. The ACTs have come and gone, and while other people are tanning in the late-spring sun, I’m paling. Soon I’ll be as pale as the Korean rom-com TV stars my mother loves. But the torture — Paul’s grueling exercise assignments, the long trips to San Francisco, and seeing Tash less and less — is working. My scales feel like they’ve readjusted, as if Paul’s taken small wrenches to them, touching them this way or that, the way he might adjust slightly tilted picture frames on the way to his bedroom.
“Don’t bite your lips, hmm? You’re performing. It’s a generous sharing of yourself with the world. You want other people to want to be you or be with you. No one wants to be with an awkward girl.”
He sits beside me and a little behind, one hand conducting the air, sometimes twitching like a puppeteer, or cutting the air like an air-traffic controller. Or both hands hover like gulls over a bridge. It is reassuring, though, that someone’s there to tell me where I’m going wrong — pointing out errors as small as pedal marks and bar rests. For all his little boyish ways — his bare feet, with their triangular toe pads, his choirboy politeness, and his undone shirt cuffs that hide part of his hands sometimes — he’s unnervingly serious.
“Posture.” He touches my shoulder, loosens my arms. “Relax.”
The strap of my tank top slides down my arm, and he brings it back into place.
The feeling of his fingers on my shoulder lingers. I suddenly feel very, very awake. I press the weight of the melody onto the piano, the keys rippling. Dust motes shine and float. I don’t know if it’s the song or if it’s him that is making me feel this way, but when I look at his face when the song is over, he looks unflapped. “Not bad,” he says. “Decent. You’ll want to work on this measure when you get home. . . .”
And I do. I spend half an hour on two seconds of music. There’s no way I’m only going to be decent.
Parked in front of the community center in Burlingame, where the competition is about to start, my mom holds out a Tupperware and asks if I want something to eat. Cold pancit noodles or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This isn’t her brightest moment.
I twitch my head no.
“It might settle your stomach.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Have you eaten anything at all?”
I don’t answer. She tsks sharply. She takes out the sandwich she made this morning. “Here.”
“Later, Mom.”
“How can you compete if you don’t eat?”
I don’t answer. I look out the window at the green manicured islands dotting the parking lot, the palms brushing the cloudy sky. It’s so early that the lights of the hotel sign are still lit.
Everything seemed fine at Paul’s yesterday. We went over the pieces I’m going to play — the Bach I first played for him during my audition and Beethoven’s sonata The Hunt. They felt solid — accomplished even. Paul was encouraging. He liked the way certain parts of the melody were being sung — softer when they were typically louder — as if there was something hard about reaching those notes. “I just want to make sure you slow down a little — don’t rush. Be in the piece, you know?”