My eyes pool with tears. I bite on my lip, refusing to let them fall. Then when I turn on my side to sleep, they spill onto my pillow.
I don’t know if I get any sleep. I feel like I blink and then the morning’s come, and magically Sam and her light snoring are back from wherever she was, and the date on my phone is the one Friday in all of time that I’m most dreading.
It’s like I have stage fright and I’m nowhere near the stage.
I want to throw up, but my stomach is so empty and I haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday.
My head spins when I sit up, the morning light touching my face in orange, fiery stripes through the blinds. There isn’t a speck of rain spattering on the window; only golden sunshine and birds chirping.
Fucking great.
After I’m dressed for the day and have a bag packed for tonight with my post-show outfit and stage makeup, I catch Sam sitting on the edge of her bed wearing one of her old shirts and staring forlornly out the window.
“You alright?” I ask, joining her by the window.
She smirks and says, “Well. There’s this guy Tomas. Spelled without an ‘H’. And he wanted to do something with me this weekend.”
“That’s good news! Oh.” I frown. “Do you even like him?”
“That’s the problem. I mean, he’s cute, I guess.” Hearing Sam call a guy “cute” in her monotone voice is probably an experience I’ll never be able to compare to anything, ever. “But, like, he plays the bassoon.”
I lift my eyebrows. “Yeah?”
“I can’t be with someone who plays the bassoon.”
I spot the frat boys playing Frisbee in the courtyard, but today they have their shirts on. I wonder if the rain brought a cool front with it.
“There’ll be some things about the guys we’re into that we think we can’t handle,” I tell her in a wistful tone, watching as one of the guys races across the grass, nearly colliding into the fountain to catch the Frisbee. “Maybe if we tried to hear the bassoon in a new way, we might find that we can … sympathize with the bassoon. Maybe it doesn’t sound as awful as we thought. Maybe it’s even … sort of beautiful.”
Who exactly am I talking about right now?
Sam sighs her words: “You’ve obviously never heard a bassoon.”
I face her. “Why don’t you bring him to my show tonight? I have a pair of comps. I’ll set them aside for you at the box office. It’ll be safe, you’ll get to see a horrible show in which I showcase my abysmal lack of talent, and afterwards, you’ll have the perfect excuse to just come back here if you don’t want to spend any more time with him.”
“Bassoon boy,” she mutters sulkily.
I sit on my bed across from her. My bag lands at my feet with a heavy thud. “I bet you could compose some pretty songs together with your piano and his bassoon.”
“Or a flute. Or an oboe. Or literally anything other than a bassoon.”
“Give him a chance,” I tell her, “but only if you like him. I’m leaving those tickets for you, whether you use them or not.”
She meets my eyes with her big, hazel ones. She gives a short sigh, then says, “I never thanked you for all the … the clothes, and … for my hair, and … and …”
“No thanks needed,” I assure her. “I didn’t do it because there was anything wrong with you, Sam. You should be whatever you want to be, look however you want to look. Wear that old, unspeakable shirt if you want,” I add teasingly. “I … really, I just wanted to show you another world out there. I want you to see other options. I want you to wonder what causes someone to love the bassoon so damn much that he picks it as the instrument to give his music a voice.”
“Insanity, probably,” she reasons.
“Everyone deserves a piece of the world,” I go on, standing on my soapbox in this cramped little half-lit dorm room, “but we aren’t all given equal chances in life, are we? Regardless, it’s important that we do our best with what we have, despite other people’s every effort in keeping us as pressed into the ground as possible. What better way to live than to make those people’s efforts a waste?”
I wonder how many times my mother’s carefree criticism kept me from pursuing a passion of mine. I feel my beautiful sister’s cold eyes as they survey my latest failure, and I wonder how often I’ve let their efforts keep me trapped in this pretty little Lebeau box of expectations of what I ought to be.
To my impassioned speech, Sam lifts her chin and says, “I guess a bassoon can kinda sound like an English horn. Kinda. Not really.”