Crushes, Codas, and Corsages #4 Read online

  In the back of the band hall was a long shelf lined with trophies. Those were for Sweepstakes, which meant earning a Superior rating from all six judges on stage and in sight-reading. Millican had a lot of them, but not for every single year—I’d already looked. I really wanted us to add another trophy this year.

  Mr. Dante began moving through the rows, placing a sheet of music facedown on everyone’s stands. Leaning to my left, I nudged Brooke Dennis.

  “You guys got Sweepstakes last year, right?” I whispered. Brooke was in eighth grade and had been in advanced band last year, too.

  She nodded. “Mrs. Wendell was really excited, since it was her last year. I think that was the fifth time in a row we got Sweepstakes.”

  My stomach twinged with nerves. Mrs. Wendell had been the band director at Millican practically forever, but she’d retired last year. I wondered if Mr. Dante was anxious about UIL, too, since it was his first year teaching here. If he was, he sure didn’t show it.

  “Let’s talk a bit about sight-reading,” Mr. Dante said cheerfully, placing a sheet of music on Liam’s stand. “Yes, Gabby?”

  Gabby lowered her hand. “What’s the point of them judging us on music we’ve never even seen before? Especially since we’ve already been practicing the other songs so much.”

  “That is the point.” Mr. Dante handed music to the percussionists. “The music we sight-read will be quite a bit easier than our other music. But it’s a way for the judges to hear how good our fundamentals are—tone, rhythms, technique. I want to try it today, so there are a few rules we need to go over.”

  He stepped back up to the podium and started to explain the process. After a minute, my eyes were pretty much bulging out of my head.

  The judges would set a timer. Mr. Dante would have a few minutes to talk to us about the music, but he couldn’t sing melodies or clap rhythms. Then the timer would go off, and he’d get a few more minutes where he could sing or clap rhythms, but we still couldn’t.

  We couldn’t play at all, just move our fingers along while he conducted. If we accidentally played a note or something, we could actually get disqualified. And when the timer went off again, we’d just . . . perform it. The entire song, without stopping, for the first time.

  The whole thing was confusing, not to mention terrifying.

  I glanced around the room. Most of the seventh-graders looked as anxious as I felt, but the eighth-graders didn’t. And they’d done this last year. Maybe it wasn’t as scary as it sounded.

  “Let’s give it a shot.” Mr. Dante set a timer, then opened his score. “Go ahead and turn over your music.”

  I flipped the page over. Well, it did look a little easier than our other music. I tapped my fingers on the valves while Mr. Dante talked us through it, stopping occasionally to point out difficult parts and remind us about the coda—a separate, final few measures at the bottom of the page.

  When the timer went off, I glanced at Natasha. She shrugged.

  “Looks easy enough,” she whispered, and I nodded.

  Mr. Dante raised his hands, and everyone sat up to play. At first, we sounded pretty good. We made it through almost half the page with just a few wrong notes and one misplaced cymbal crash.

  Then the trumpets came in a few beats early, and their melody didn’t line up with the clarinets.

  Then all the saxophones except Gabby missed a key change, and she insistently squawked the right notes louder and louder.

  Then literally, like, half the band missed a repeat sign while the French horn part only had rests, so all four of us lost count and didn’t know when to come back in.

  I was completely freaking out, my eyes darting back and forth between the music and Mr. Dante. He looked perfectly calm, cueing sections that sounded lost and gesturing for Gabby to stop honking. For a minute, we actually did start to play together again. But I only just remembered about the coda in time. I skipped down to the last line and played the last few measures, finishing just as Mr. Dante lowered his baton.

  Most of the band was still going. They stopped pretty fast when they realized he wasn’t conducting anymore.

  “Okay, guys,” Mr. Dante said, smiling around at us. Seriously, how was he still so calm? “Can someone tell me what it says above measure ninety-eight? Sophie?”

  “To coda,’” Sophie Wheeler replied.

  “Right,” Mr. Dante agreed. “So where is the coda? Holly?”

  I squinted at my music and found the coda symbol.

  “Measure one-twelve.”

  “Exactly.” Mr. Dante nodded. “So after we take that repeat, we play through until we see ‘to coda,’ and then we jump down to that symbol. I’ll do my best to cue you, but you have to watch out for those signs.” Opening his folder, Mr. Dante pulled out another score. “Let’s take out ‘Labyrinthine Dances,’ please.”

  “That’s it?” Gabby blurted out. “We’re not going to work on this one anymore?”

  Mr. Dante smiled. “Sight-reading, Gabby. One shot. We’ll be sight-reading several times a week until UIL, but it’ll be a different piece every time. So tomorrow we’ll address some of the problems we ran into today, and give it another try with a new song.”

  Natasha and I exchanged nervous glances. He was right—one shot. And if that had been our sight-reading performance at UIL, no way would we have gotten a Sweepstakes trophy.

  Half an hour so wasn’t long enough for lunch. With everyone catching up after spring break, plus resuming our ongoing Warlock card game, we could’ve used at least an hour. And my fried brain really needed more of a rest before facing more projects and final-exam preparation.

  I sat crammed in between Owen and Natasha. Owen, Trevor, and Max were already swapping cards over their sandwiches with several other Warlock players. On my right, Natasha was holding her phone across the table to show Seth her Disney pictures. Next to him, Julia glanced at a photo and started choking on her cookie.

  “Hang on,” she sputtered, grabbing the phone. “Is that—you went bungee jumping?”

  “What?” I cried, looking up from my Warlock cards. Natasha shook her head.

  “No, it wasn’t really bungee jumping,” she said. “More like a slingshot. You get strapped into this thing that’s attached to two giant towers, and then you get pulled back and . . . catapulted.”

  “That’s awesome,” Seth told her, right as Julia said, “That’s insane.”

  “I was kind of nervous,” Natasha admitted. “But I promised myself I’d go on any ride that looked scary. And it’s over really fast, too—way faster than a roller coaster.” She grinned. “It was like flying. So cool. I’d definitely do it again.”

  I smiled. This was the happiest I’d seen Natasha since . . . well, maybe ever. At the beginning of the year we didn’t like each other at all. And even after we were friends, things were weird between us because we both liked Aaron. Then she’d started dating him, and while she seemed happy, it had been more of a nervous kind of happy. Like during lunch, when she used to go sit with Aaron and his friends and I’d get the feeling she’d almost rather stay with us.

  Out of habit, I glanced over at Aaron’s table. He was laughing and talking to some freckled eighth-grade girl I vaguely recognized. Wait . . . were they holding hands? I squinted, but then she stood to take her tray to the trash, and I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined it.

  Maybe Aaron was already dating someone else. If so, I hoped Natasha wouldn’t be too upset.

  “Your turn, Holly.”

  Looking up, I realized Owen and the other Warlock players were waiting expectantly. “Oh!” I glanced from the pile of cards in the center of the table to my own deck, then tossed a chimney-gnome card down. “Hey, I still want to see what you worked on in San Antonio,” I told Owen as Erin Peale used a cursed-broom card to snag my gnome. His expression brightened.

  “Oh right!” Settin
g his cards down, Owen opened his backpack. I glanced over to make sure Julia wasn’t giving me any goofy faces like she usually did around Owen, but she and Seth still were looking at Natasha’s photos.

  Owen opened his sketchbook. “So we started with motion sketches—drawing a character going through one motion. See?”

  I burst out laughing. Twenty stick figures holding baseball bats covered the sheet in four neat rows. From left to right, I could see the progression as a ball zoomed toward the stick figure and he swung the bat and . . . missed. Which, I had to admit, happened more often than not when Owen was on the JV team. He hated baseball, but tried out just to make his parents happy.

  “The workshop got me out of the last game,” Owen said with a grin. “I figured this was a good tribute.”

  Snickering, I flipped through several more motion sketches. When I got to a page filled with waddling penguins, I stopped. “These don’t look like yours.”

  Owen glanced down. “Oh yeah—Ginny drew some of this stuff.”

  “Ginny?”

  “My partner,” Owen explained. “They put everyone in pairs to work on the final project.”

  “Oh.” I nodded, doing my best to look indifferent. But imagining this Ginny person drawing penguins in Owen’s sketchbook was kind of irritating. When I flipped the page, all the penguins were paired up and dancing.

  Make that very irritating.

  The bell rang, and I handed Owen his sketchbook. “So you guys made an actual cartoon?”

  “Yeah!” Owen gathered up his Warlock cards. “I’ll show you on Thursday. If you’re still coming over after school, I mean.”

  “Definitely.” I stuffed my cards into my backpack. “I bet we’re going to have lots of work to do on Alien Park.”

  Alien Park was our science fair project—kind of like Jurassic Park, but with aliens instead of dinosaurs. I wasn’t wrong about the work, either. When we got to science class, Mrs. Driscoll handed back our project outlines. And just like Mr. Franks with the research papers, she’d probably gone through a whole pack of red pens.

  “Revisions due next Monday,” she said, and I sighed. Sometimes I wondered if our teachers forgot we actually had other classes. Mrs. Driscoll spent most of the class period going over the new unit we were starting, on organisms and their environments, but I was kind of distracted. By Ginny and her stupid dancing penguins.

  “So let’s talk about habitats,” Mrs. Driscoll was saying. “Some animals live in rain forests, others live in deserts, and some even in live the Arctic. We’re going to take a look at their physical characteristics, as well as things like shelter and food available in their habitats . . .”

  Owen leaned over. “This could help with our project. Like the Mars habitat,” he whispered.

  I nodded, and he started taking notes. After a few minutes, I realized I hadn’t heard a word Mrs. Driscoll had said. And instead of notes, I’d doodled a penguin. But it just looked like a football with a beak.

  By Thursday, my school stress levels had tripled. Mr. Hernandez had assigned us a new project—creating a brochure in Spanish for visitors to Millican. I had a math test coming up, an illustrated timeline to put together for history, and a PowerPoint presentation for computer lab. And all that was just for next week.

  My sheet music for “Labyrinthine Dances” looked like a blur of swimming notes by the time we finished running through it during band. I rubbed my eyes as Mr. Dante flipped on the metronome.

  Boop . . . boop . . . boop . . .

  After a few seconds, he flipped it back off. “That’s the tempo we started with at the beginning of the year,” he told us. “And here’s the tempo you just played at.”

  Boop-boop-boop-boop-boop

  I blinked. Whoa. At the beginning of the year when Mr. Dante had given us this song, I thought there was no way we’d ever be able to play it well. But gradually over the year, Mr. Dante had increased the speed. And we’d just run through the whole thing up to tempo, like it was nothing.

  “One step at a time,” he said, smiling. “I bet you guys didn’t realize just how much progress you’ve made this year. When you work on something consistently, every single day, sometimes the improvement seems so small you don’t even notice it. But it’s happening. And on that note,” he added with a cheesy grin, and several kids groaned, “it’s time for a little sight-reading.”

  I watched Mr. Dante hand out another new song for sight-reading practice, thinking about what he’d said. Maybe this was why he didn’t seem stressed about adding another Sweepstakes trophy to our shelf. After all, UIL wasn’t tomorrow—we still had plenty of time to get better at this whole sight-reading thing.

  One step at a time. Probably a good way to think about the rest of the school year, I thought. It made me feel a tiny bit better about the pile of homework I was facing.

  When I got to the cafeteria after band, Julia tugged my arm before we reached the table.

  “Look,” she whispered, pointing. I glanced over and saw Aaron and the freckly eighth-grade girl standing in line for the soda machine. No question about it this time—he had his arm around her. They definitely looked like a couple.

  I winced. “Do you think Natasha knows?”

  “No idea.” Julia wrinkled her nose. “Should we tell her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Natasha would probably find out pretty quickly one way or the other. But I didn’t want to be the one to tell her. She’d been so happy all week, free from worries about things like boys and jealousy and dancing penguins.

  But as it turned out, we didn’t have to tell Natasha.

  “Sophie told me Aaron has a date to the dance,” she informed us, cutting up her sandwich. “Carmen Matthews.” She pointed with her fork at the freckled girl, now sitting next to Aaron.

  Julia and I glanced at each other.

  “Sorry,” I said tentatively. Natasha looked back and forth between us.

  “Don’t look so worried, guys!” she exclaimed. “She was always nice to me, but I kind of had the feeling she liked him. I’m not upset or anything.”

  “Really?” Julia asked.

  “Really.” Natasha popped a sandwich piece into her mouth. “I mean, it’s not exactly a great feeling. But I’m okay.”

  “Good,” I said, relieved. “Any idea who you want to go to the dance with?”

  “Actually, I’ve kind of been thinking about going by myself,” Natasha told me. “Like you and Gabby did for the winter dance.”

  I smiled. “That would be really cool!”

  “Very cool.” Julia glanced down when Seth plopped a book on the table before taking a seat next to her. “Oh, did you finish that? Holly wants to borrow it.”

  “Almost done,” Seth said. “I’ll finish it tonight.”

  “Julia’s reading horror, Natasha’s riding roller coasters . . .” Sighing, I shuffled my Warlock cards. “I knew one day I’d lure you guys over to the dark side.”

  “This book’s not that scary,” Julia insisted. “Nothing like your horrible bees-in-the-mouth movie.”

  For the rest of lunch, I split my attention between their conversation and the card game with Owen. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how different Natasha seemed now. She really, truly didn’t seem jealous at all about Aaron’s new girlfriend, even though she’d only just broken up with him a few weeks ago.

  So how come I couldn’t stop thinking about this Ginny girl? Owen hadn’t even mentioned her since Monday. And he was just my friend, anyway. I was being ridiculous.

  Tossing an enchanted-teapot card on the stack, I decided Natasha had the right idea. From now on, I wouldn’t waste my time feeling jealous about something that didn’t even matter.

  It turned out my brain had a hard time getting the rest of me to figure out I wasn’t jealous anymore. I’d only been in Owen’s game room for ten minut
es, and already I was trying to learn more about Ginny. She was in seventh grade, too. She was from Dallas. She also liked to paint. I was trying not to be too obvious about it, but it was hard not to ask Owen questions about this girl.

  “So Ginny drew that, too?” I asked, smoothing out an open page in the sketchbook. Owen’s dog, Worf, lay at my feet, gnawing on a bone.

  Owen glanced over from his computer screen. “Yeah.”

  I studied the picture closely while he typed, scratching Worf behind the ears. They must have been working on setting or something because there were no dancing animals or people in this one. It was just a pencil sketch of a waterfall, surrounded by trees and tropical flowers. The water looked like it was actually moving on the page, crashing down onto the rocks with a spray of mist.

  Ginny was really talented. Well, of course she is, I reminded myself. She’d won the same contest Owen had. Good for her.

  That’s what my brain said. But my hands were itching to tear that picture right out of his sketchbook.

  Especially when I realized that she might have some of Owen’s drawings in her sketchbook, too.

  “So this is the . . . Holly, are you okay?”

  I glanced up to see Owen staring at me. “What?”

  “Your eye’s kind of twitching.”

  “Oh . . . no, I’m fine.” I pointed to the screen. “That’s the cartoon?”

  Owen nodded. “It’s really short, but it came out pretty good.”

  He tapped PLAY, and we watched. The cartoon was just a few minutes long, a super-short story about a bird trying to build a little nest on a traffic light when the wind kept blowing the twigs all over the place. I’d never really thought about making cartoons before, but looking at the way the traffic lights kept changing colors while the bird darted around trying to catch the sticks, I realized how much work it must have taken.