You’re starting a new school tomorrow. You pace around your room, hoping to god this time will be different. You had to move halfway through the year, partly because of your mom’s work, and partly so basketball season can be the backdrop of the story. Your mom promises it’s the last time she’ll relocate before you graduate. Meaning: this is your last chance to make a friend in high school.
Your mom wears a suit and has a high-profile, unspecified job. She’s just a caring, single mom trying to navigate the corporate world while raising her teenage daughter. Beyond that you don’t really know anything about her. She makes enough money that you can afford to live in an enormous house in an upscale neighborhood, and she clearly hired an interior decorator because there’s no way she arranged this furniture herself. Even though you moved in a few days ago, twinkling lights hang along your wraparound front porch and an impeccable rose garden glistens in your front yard.
Your room has double French doors that open out onto a private balcony. It has a king-sized, canopied four-poster bed and a reading nook the size of a living room. Your mom must’ve given you the master suite. Who were you to argue when she told you this could be your room? In the evenings, you like to sit in the overstuffed wing-backed chair and stare lovingly at a page in a thick book. You don’t know what her bedroom looks like; you’ve never bothered to go in there.
Tonight, you examine your unblemished complexion in the mirror of your gold-framed vanity and wonder if maybe, just maybe, someone will accept you this time. You’ve always been the smart girl, the girl who cared too much. The girl who couldn’t make any friends.
It’s not fair to judge yourself right now, lounging in your most casual clothes. Your dry-cleaned baby blue Juicy Couture sweat suit with a lace-embroidered sweet-heart neckline camisole framing your soft, round breasts, that signature golden J on the zipper dangling just below them. Your hair pulled back into a low ponytail so your loose, thick curls cascade down your back. Oh god, could you imagine if they saw you like this?
Hopefully you can look at least halfway presentable tomorrow. Luckily you have a walk-in closet full of the most fashionable ’06 styles. Luckily, you’ve never had a pimple in your life, and you’ve mastered makeup contouring. You’re pretty much interested in maintaining the status quo, and it can’t hurt to have the world’s cutest dimples. Luckily, you’re the most beautiful fifteen-year-old alive today and someone could slip a napkin holder around your waist.
But will that be enough to make a friend?
#
You thought this was a “small town high school,” but the facilities are so large and state-of-the-art that there’s got to be thousands of students. Every one of them is beautiful, but not quite as beautiful as you. Will one of them see you for more than a science geek?
Bells are constantly ringing here and you spend most of your day in the hallway. You only seem to be in class at the very beginning or the very end—either way, there’s always another bell about to go off so you can be ushered into the hallway.
There’s that boy. You’ve met him before. Your souls connected at a New Year’s Eve party during a karaoke duet you were both coerced into by a crowd of teenagers who more likely could’ve cared less if anyone sang at all. You both knew the song, though it had never been released. You started out timidly, but soon you no longer needed to look at the lyrics on the screen—somehow, you knew the words.
You don’t believe in fate. But your new school is the one that karaoke dream-cake goes to. And out of 2,000 students, you’re put in the same fifteen-person homeroom. He’s trying to flirt with you, but you’ve got to keep your guard up. This isn’t Magic Karaoke Night. This is high school. He’d never go for you. It wouldn’t make sense if the most beautiful boy in school dated the most beautiful girl. He plays basketball and you enjoy science class, remember? And he doesn’t just play basketball—he’s the coach’s son.
Besides, no boy has even glanced at you before, despite how the sheen of your lip gloss never fades.
#
Should you and the hot basketball boy audition for the upcoming musical? The only things you know about each other are that you have great stage chemistry, can harmonize together with no practice, and pick up a tune instantly and lyrics telepathically. Would it make sense for you to sing the lead duet together for the audition?
No—there’s too much at stake. Your reputation, for one. It’s a new school and the only thing worse than Science Girl is Musical Theater Girl. You couldn’t do both. High school is about choosing one thing and sticking to it vigorously. That’s what your mom did, and she may be divorced (or widowed? You’re not really sure) but she has a job where she wears a suit so she’s clearly successful.
You decide to focus on science, so you join the academic decathlon. Change people’s minds about you? Who were you kidding? You’re fifteen years old. It’s way too late for that kind of reinvention. Might as well resign yourself to nerdy glasses forever. Too bad you have 20/20 vision.
#
When the coach catches you and the boy flirting on the court one day after school, he screams at his son in front of you because he should be focusing on basketball, not frivolous flings. The boy tries to politely introduce you, but his father scoffs at you like vermin. Is he racist? You know being the most beautiful, smartest girl in school would be a hard sell for any boy’s parents to accept, but you didn’t expect a grown man and a school employee to be quite so rude. Yet you know how essential this interaction is, since it helps reinforce the importance of basketball while widening the ravine between you and your potential soul mate.
#
But the two of you do want to audition together. Last minute, caught in whispers in the back of the auditorium, the director tells you no—it’s too late.
Then the composer—an off-beat girl who has done more work composing an entire musical in her spare time than most musicians complete in graduate school—spills her sheet music all over the stage floor. You and the boy help her pick the pages up and set them on the piano.
There’s a softness in your eyes. The composer can probably see you’re not another drama queen. She knows you’re right for the part, but she has no power.
You and the boy put your sight-reading abilities to work and sing in perfect harmony—tenderly, sweetly, infused with feeling. You’re doing it for yourselves, because you’re the only ones left in the auditorium. You do it for the love of the song.
But the drama teacher is conveniently hidden just out of view so, in fact, she does count your song as an audition and grants you a callback.
#
You assume the callback will be the next day, since the show should probably be cast ASAP so rehearsals can start, but it turns out you have several weeks to practice your callback duet. Your life becomes a montage of practicing, meeting with the composer, sneaking off from your decathlon duties so nobody finds out you’re a talented singer. Nobody can find out. The boy does the same, trying to hide these little rendezvous with the composer in the music practice room from his basketball team and his dad. Nobody would ever suspect you two would be there, so it’s the perfect hideaway. You also love to meet at the school’s secret rooftop garden.
Your love for him is probably growing, though not much is expressed besides the occasional dreamy smile. This is a hallway romance, out of sight, in bits and pieces. That’s why the montage format fits so well. He’s still going to basketball practice, and you’re teaching all the other academic decathlon students how to make smoke come out of a beaker. Maybe you two really can have it all: basketball, science, music, love. Is it too good to be true?
#
Why, oh why did you sing that heartbreak solo through the empty halls during lunch period? Probably wasn’t the best move for someone trying to keep it low-key, but you couldn’t help it. Blame the hormones. Blame the trendy outfit and kitten heels begging to be paraded around. Blame the boy making you feel these things that can only be expressed in a slow female ballad.
#
It all comes together on the same day: the boy’s big basketball game, your decathlon, and the callbacks. The tension couldn’t be higher. Your decathlon best friend and the boy’s best friend put aside their differences for the sake of your love, the sake of the music, the sake of all that is unjust in high school cliques. Yes, only a couple scenes ago they were sabotaging your relationship, but they’ve suddenly seen the error of their ways. Yes, they are both Black, and yes, they become romantically involved by the end. They come together to help you come together like good Black best friends do. Your boy is white, but you are Latinx, so maybe it’s not that bad? Besides, it’s just the way your life worked out. It’s not like anyone had control over race and ethnicity representation here.
Since there is no actual musical happening anytime soon, the callbacks themselves become a performance, the grand finale of this whirlwind first few weeks at your new school. Those two sneaky, ultimately well-intentioned friends organized the whole thing. A power outage, a last-minute assembly, an uncharacteristically willing high school audience. Your mom even happens to be there, on account of the decathlon. She wanders in partway through the song and stands in the back doorway looking on proudly. She must’ve taken the day off from her corporate job. She won’t sit down though; maybe she can’t stay long. She also missed the first half of the song—where was she when everyone else was filing into the auditorium? Did she get lost? Did she have to take a work call? And why aren’t there more people in the auditorium? What happened to all those people crowding the stands at the big basketball game? Also, what basketball game is at 3:00 PM?
No, forget all that. Focus on the music. You sing the song flawlessly, partway through shedding your white lab coat and revealing a stunning party outfit you make look school appropriate. Oh, the symbolism of the lyrics! Of your lab coat, and his basketball sweatshirt, both cast aside like the labels you’re trying to discard. The kids go wild. It was music, all along, that would bring everybody together, not tear them apart! Why didn’t you see this coming?
#
You get the part, but no one will ever see the musical. You try not to let this bother you. The point has been made, and you should be grateful. You got the prize any teenage girl would want: a boyfriend who plays basketball.
You cheer on the sidelines for your boyfriend—that moniker still foreign, slipping off your tongue like a shoe that’s too big—and after he drops you off that evening, you go to your bedroom suite and stare lovingly at a page in a book, a smile plastered on your dewy face. But when the camera finally pans away, you recite the lines of your scrapped monologue under your breath, imagining your lost debut, how you would’ve burst onto the stage and transformed from porcelain to embers, your rage glittering off you like sunlight on asphalt, your body at last becoming the body of someone in love.
Quinn Forlini (she/her) has writing published or forthcoming in Catapult, X-R-A-Y, Jellyfish Review, Longleaf Review, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from the University of Virginia and lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. You can find her on Twitter @quinnforlini.