The Glaring -- Top of Chapter Three

Chapter 3

I got first oboe, which means I sit at the head of the row and pretty much lead the section.  There are only four oboists in the whole orchestra, so it isn’t that big of a deal, really, but I practiced super hard, and I’m relieved.  I would have been mortified to be beaten by a seventh grader.

When we were in fifth grade, Mrs. Gallagher, the middle school music teacher, gave a presentation about all the different band and orchestra instruments kids could learn the next year.  One after another, she held them up, and then she played the chorus of that sappy song about hearts going on from the movie Titanic so we could hear how they sounded different from one another.  In the middle of the assembly, I realized that one single lady knew how to play all those instruments—from brass to woodwinds to strings.  Watching her, I felt like twenty different languages were floating around in her head all at once.  She knew how to speak trombone and viola and flute and xylophone, and she switched between them at will.  

I think a select few people are born with a natural ability to communicate with and through instruments.  According to family stories, my great-grandmother on my dad’s side played live piano accompaniment during silent films without ever looking at a score or learning to read music.  She could just hear something and play it.  In my imagination, my great-grandmother tapped into a river of music running under the streets of Pittsburgh, and in a dark and velvety theater, she released the melodies through her fingers while deathly pale ladies in weird outfits swooned in black and white.

After Mrs. Gallagher’s presentation, I picked oboe.  My first choice was cello, but when I saw how big the case was, I changed my mind.  No way was I going to lug that beast back and forth to school every day.  Why not tattoo “geek” on my forehead and be done with it?  

For the record, I am not tapped into the magic underground river of music.  Great-grandma Ritter’s ability must have skipped my generation even though her red hair didn’t.  Next to bagpipes, the oboe is one of the most difficult instruments to play.  You’ve got to pucker up like you’re kissing a refrigerator and blow hard enough to extinguish the sun.  I didn’t make a single sound for a week and a half.  I just blew and blew until I thought my face was going to fall off.  Then suddenly I got it. I kept practicing until the thing made a sound vaguely resembling the one Mrs. Gallagher made—sort of sad and lonely—like music you’d hear drifting across a misty field just as the sun rose.  If my life had soundtrack like a movie, I’d definitely want it to be an oboe. I’d like to get good enough to play that soundtrack myself.

Anyone at Beet’s Cove Middle who isn’t a total slacker has a lane.  Most of us have gone to school together for so long, we know each other’s lanes, and we pretty respect them.  I mean, I might like to try out another lane sometime.  When we did a field hockey unit in P.E., I was sort of naturally good at it in a way I’ve never been good at any sport since kickball.  But Tracy Urban and Michelle Picou and Kayleigh McNamara play field hockey.  They all wear the skirts to school on game days, and I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little jealous.  Still, it didn’t matter that when I whacked the ball it went almost three times as far as when Tracy whacked it. My friends and I do not play field hockey because field hockey isn’t in our lane.

My lane is orchestra and grades.  Andi’s is orchestra and science, and Chris’s is singing, theater, and also grades.  Chris wants to be the first woman president and I say go for it, but secretly I know she wants to be a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader.  Not for nothing, cheerleader is not in The Glaring’s lane.  Pretty also isn’t really in our lane, but Chris totally is.  She knows it, too.  Becca is pretty in a different, hard-to-pin-down sort of way, which I think is more threatening to people like Chris and those field hockey girls than just regular prettiness.  Whether Becca was too pretty for the Glaring was a whole different issue.

Beets Cove Middle doesn’t have much tolerance for lane changers or lane encroachers.  So just what lane Becca would merge into remained to be seen.  Honestly, from the looks of her, I kind of thought she’d pave her own.  

After that first day, she sat with us at every lunch period.  Andi and I were good with it, and Ellen hung on every syllable Becca drawled.  Chris, however, was on the fence—a perch she strapped herself to from the moment in Becca’s driveway when Becca revealed she sang and did drama.  Andi once showed me a picture of this African bird called a secretary bird.  Inexplicably dumb name, but I swear if Dumbledore’s phoenix Fawkes was a real live bird, he would be a secretary bird.  When it feels threatened, the secretary bird puffs up these spiky feathers all around its head like the headdress on a Las Vegas showgirl.  If Chris were a secretary bird, her head feathers would have been on high alert every time Becca sat down with us.  Honestly, after two weeks or so I was starting to wonder if Chris would ban Becca from our lunch table entirely, which ultimately might not have been so tragic for Becca because I could tell the Osties wanted her to come sit with them.  

You know the way the Secret Service comes up with code names for the President and his family so no one knows who they are talking about when they mutter into those tiny walkie talkies inside their sleeves? Not long after we came up with “The Glaring,” we decided we needed a secret name for Tracy and Michelle and Kayleigh and those guys, so we could discuss them in public. Turns out a group of peacocks is called an ostentation.  I am not making this up.  If the shoe fits…