Michelle Ross

Marching Season

One Sunday evening in November of my senior year of high school, after an eight-hour shift at the grocery store where I scanned wet cartons of milk and plastic-wrapped chunks of animal flesh, I folded into the faded sedan I’d inherited from my Aunt Ramona, and I drove to my boyfriend’s house. That car had the locked-in odor of a fast-food picnic on the beach in the peak of summer, so I always drove with the windows down, unless it was raining. Nights in November were chilly, but it was a dank chill that bordered on muggy. Also, at night, I could more easily smell the noxious pollutants from the chemical plants that laced our Gulf Coast town. Basically, in my last years living there (I went away for college and never came back), I felt dirty and irritable, always. Driving to Quentin’s house, though, I experienced a fleeting contentedness like lulls between intermittent pokes of a pebble in my shoe.

When I let myself into Quentin’s house that night, I found him watching our high school band’s previous spring concert.

My high school years were divided into two seasons: marching band season and sit-down band season. Quentin was Drum Major, and the culmination of marching season was the Texas State Marching Band Championship in December, just three weeks away. I was used to him geeking out over recordings of marching shows, but sit-down concerts? The video was shaky, the view of our band obstructed by the backs of heads.

“Why not just listen to the CD?” I said.

“I’m trying to see something,” Quentin said.

On the television, our band director, Mr. K, was front and center. Without his face providing context, his pointy, veiny ears looked like bats’ wings.

Other than Mr. K, all I saw clearly were the front-row woodwinds. The rest of the woodwinds, including myself, were nothing more than tufts of hair or shimmers of light reflecting off instruments.

“What are you trying to see?” I asked.

The sofa was littered with clumps of gray fur. Ghost Cat revealed only traces of himself to me—faint, gritty paw prints on the marble coffee table, moon-shaped slivers of shed claws beneath my bare feet. Quentin said Ghost Cat was just “nervous,” but given I’d been hanging out at Quentin’s house several nights a week for eight months, Ghost Cat’s shunning felt personal. I didn’t blame him, though. If I could easily hide beneath furniture, I would do it, too.

Without taking his eyes off the screen, Quentin leaned in and pecked me quickly on the cheek. Like a baby, Quentin smelled of spit—a hazard of his chosen instrument. The brass musicians shook out their spit valves after practice, flinging spit onto white cloths. The brass musicians sometimes missed. Spit stained the floors of the risers where they sat. Sometimes, I presumed, spit must have soaked into their pants and their shoes.

I repeated, “What are you trying to see?”

Quentin hesitated. He looked at me, considering. “Don’t get mad.”

“Mad or angry?” I said.

“Angry,” he said. “Either,” he said. Quentin sighed. Then, “Mr. Kirby says the way Becca Lars plays, there’s no way she’s a virgin.”

My shoulders felt like they were being ratcheted closer together by wire and pliers and the mean hands of my former orthodontist.

Quentin had always been serious about band, but since becoming Drum Major his level of seriousness had been EXTRA. Weekends while I scanned groceries, he was at the Band Hall doing whatever it took to remain Mr. K’s numero uno.

What was required, it seemed, was that Quentin entertain Mr. K’s perverted talk. A few weeks earlier, Mr. K had said of breasts, “You don’t need more than a handful.” Quentin had imitated Mr. K squeezing an invisible breast—a motion that made me think of a jellyfish pumping water in and out of its gelatinous body.

Becca Lars was first-chair clarinet and pretty much always had been, since the sixth grade. Also, she had once been my best friend, until she dumped me December of our junior year. In fact, that was largely the reason I was with Quentin. When he’d asked me out to dinner at the Olive Garden, on Valentine’s Day of all days, via a yellow Snoopy card and a droopy pink Gerbera daisy, I’d thought I was the loneliest I’d ever be in my life. It’s funny now how I’d imagined loneliness as a thing I would one day shed, a skin I would bust out of.

I said, “That’s ridiculous. What does it even mean to play clarinet like a not-virgin?”

Quentin said, “Well, she does play with passion.”

I studied Becca on the television, looking for some evidence to support Mr. K’s assertion, but I didn’t know where to direct my attention.

Quentin said, “Hey, when do you practice on the weekends? Before work? I think if you’d just apply yourself a little—”

Quentin assumed I aspired to move up chairs. I hadn’t told him I hated clarinet.

If I could have returned to the fifth grade when we were paired up with our instruments, I would have chosen percussion. I longed to beat the drums, crash the cymbals, strike the wooden planks of the xylophone. Truth is I hadn’t chosen clarinet. A mustached man, whom I later learned was the sixth-grade band director, placed a clarinet in my hands and said, “How about a clarinet for Claire?” He didn’t show me any other instruments. I didn’t know I had a choice.

Another assumption Quentin made was that I was a virgin.

It’s true I considered myself a virgin, despite what I’d done with boys at my cousin Denise’s house Saturday nights when Uncle Kenny was bartending—most, but not all of it, pre-Quentin. As strange, and sexist, as it seems to me now, I felt back then that oral sex was less serious than intercourse. That “oral sex” has the word “sex” in it didn’t faze me.

The point is, though, Quentin had never bothered to ask. My reluctance to have sex with him was all the evidence he thought he needed.

Sitting there on Quentin’s sofa, watching him watch Becca, I wondered if Mr. K, too, assumed I was a virgin. Our band director had no business thinking about the virginity of any of his students, of course, but if he was going to think about it, I didn’t like him deciding that Becca, of all people, was more sexually experienced than me. There was no other realm in which I could realistically compete with her.

I said that Mr. K had no business talking about female students like that to male students.

Quentin sat up straighter. “He wouldn’t have said that to just anybody.”

“Also,” I said, “no way has Becca had sex. She hasn’t even kissed anyone since the eighth grade.”

“How would you know?” Then Quentin said, “Sorry,” and he squeezed my thigh.

The conversations we’d had about sex boiled down to Quentin saying he thought we were ready and me saying I wasn’t so sure. What I didn’t say was his hands were clammy and when he put his tongue in my mouth, there was too much saliva. When I imagined sex with Quentin, I pictured him dumping his spit valve out after rehearsal.

Also, was having sex with Quentin, like playing an instrument, one of those things that once I started, I’d be stuck?

Quentin squeezed my thigh again. He offered to rub my shoulders.

I told him I felt disgusting from touching people’s slimy groceries all day.

Quentin said, “You don’t look disgusting.”

Junior year, right before Becca dumped me, her parents bought her a three-thousand-dollar Buffet Crampon with silver-plated keys. That’s how Becca referred to the clarinet, as in “It’s too humid out to march with my Buffet Crampon.” Every time Becca pronounced that pretentious, fussy name, I pictured a pastry—something cream-filled. Our clarinet teacher, Fred Stout, coveted that instrument. He became googly-eyed around it. The Buffet Crampon was gorgeous. The word that comes to my mind is lush, what with the way the wood blushed, the way it gleamed. In contrast, my clarinet looked tired. If my clarinet had had shoulders, those shoulders would have sagged. The corks on either end of the upper joint and at the base of the mouthpiece were so worn that I wrapped them in dental floss to get the segments to hold together without slipping apart.

I said then, “Okay,” and I turned to offer Quentin my back.

With my work shirt between his clammy hands and my skin, the pressure of his hands felt good. I closed my eyes. Soon, Quentin’s mouth was on the back of my neck, and the tension fell right out of me, like coins shaken from a coin purse. Years later, I would wonder at how an awkward, fumbling boy like Quentin could make me feel like that. I would wonder where that feeling went.

I didn’t believe sex would make me a better musician, and I wouldn’t have cared if it did, but I cared greatly about having something Becca did not. If Quentin Wilson understood this and played me, then all I can say is, well played, Quentin.

Is it weird (and dismaying) that I would consent to having sex with Quentin after that terrible confession about what Mr. K said? Yes. But I’ve done less rational things in my life.

I said, “All right. Let’s do it.”

“Seriously?” Quentin said. “Now?”

“We have to get a condom,” I said.

Quentin was prepared. From his bedroom closet, he retrieved a box of condoms that had been tucked into the folds of a sleeping bag he’d had since his cub scout years. The plastic from around the condom box was already removed. One condom was gone.

“What happened to number ten?” I said.

“Practice,” Quentin said.

I pictured him running through scales on his trombone.

“Putting one on, I mean. How do you want to do this?”

The walls of Quentin’s bedroom were wallpapered in vintage music posters. My favorite, which I had given him for his birthday, was Pat Benatar in a red leather jacket that tied in front like a hospital gown. When Quentin posed that question, I fixated on Pat’s black-gloved hands.

“Wear your winter gloves?”

Quentin screwed up his face. “Be serious.”

People often said those words to me back then when I was being exactly that. “I am serious,” I said.

Quentin said there was no way he was going to wear gloves. He reached toward the button on my pants.

Later, I would wonder why I hadn’t insisted on the gloves. If I had, surely, Quentin would have relented. He wouldn’t have let his vanity stand in the way of him chucking his virginity. But to insist on those gloves would have required a confidence I didn’t yet possess. Or do I mean recklessness? What I managed instead was to shove Quentin’s hands away from that button. “You first,” I said.

I had seen Quentin shirtless when we swam in the Gulf that summer—his pale, sparsely-haired chest; the crumpled little pocket that was his belly button. I’d seen his penis, which was slender and delicate. Quentin’s penis is what I had thought of when I’d rung up a white-tendrilled bundle of mushrooms called Enoki that a customer had set on my conveyer belt that fall. But seeing Quentin naked all at once was something else entirely. It was like experiencing a piece of furniture assembled after viewing only its unassembled parts on your living-room floor.

“I want you,” Quentin whispered as he attempted to pull my work shirt up over my head.

I don’t think he’d even kissed me before warm liquid spilled onto my stomach. I thought of Quentin’s trombone’s spit valve again.

I felt disappointed, but, also, relieved.

The way Quentin apologized as he dabbed at my belly with a black T-shirt he’d picked up from the floor, one would think he’d ruined something precious, and I suppose he had.

The slight pressure of Quentin dabbing at my belly with that soft T-shirt felt tender and attentive, and I wished he’d never stop. But soon he fell back onto the bed beside me.

“Sorry we didn’t have sex yet.”

“Keep touching me?”

Quentin lazily draped a hand onto my shoulder and squeezed a few times. Then his hand rested there, comatose.

*

My mother was already in bed when I returned home, as she often was. Her noise machine purred on the other side of the closed door. No one in my family ever spoke the word “depression.” It was only ever “I don’t feel good” or “Your mother isn’t feeling so hot.”

My father worked on an oil rig. He was gone for months at a time. When he came home, he would go on about how much he’d missed us. But within fifteen minutes, he only had eyes for his computer, where he played fantasy sports and read Consumer Reports product reviews and articles with titles like “5 Essential Products for Weathering a Winter Storm,” even though we’d never even seen real snow.

I knew my brother was out because my mother’s noise machine was the only sound in the house other than the quiet hum of the refrigerator.

The first thing I did was shower. The bathroom I shared with my brother smelled of his cigarettes and his body spray, so even after showering, I felt only mildly clean.

My family’s refrigerator rarely contained much more than condiments, deli meat, limp lettuce, and wet baby carrots; the fruit bowl on the counter—lemons. I ate so many baby carrots in those days it was a wonder my skin didn’t turn orange. Later, when I graduated college and got a job for the first time in my life that paid more than minimum wage, stocking my refrigerator with actual food that looked good and tasted good ranked above all else my money could buy.

That night, though, I ate sad baby carrots in bed while I read William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury for English class. That my boyfriend shared his name with the novel’s protagonist had charmed me at first, but I was quickly souring on both Quentins’ obsessions with virginity.

*

Morning marching practice was five days a week at half past five. By mid-October, most of practice took place in the dark—though, of course, the stadium lights lit up that dark. Come November, mornings were chilly enough that some marchers carried disposable hot packs to warm their stiff fingers.

That Monday morning after I’d consented to having sex with Quentin yet ended the night still a virgin, we learned the marching show’s final movement, which the show designer had delivered to Mr. K the day before. All that past week, Mr. K had been on edge about not having that final movement. At practice this morning, he was still on edge. Learning a new movement meant a lot of standing around as Mr. K and the assistant band director, Mr. Guitierrez, as well as Quentin and the pit percussionists, measured and marked the positions to which we would be marching. When one of the flute players, Patrick Fraser, didn’t immediately respond when Mr. K called his name, Mr. K snapped his fingers twice. “There’s no time to waste, people!” he yelled. “This isn’t track. This isn’t swimming. When you slack off, you’re not just failing yourself, you’re failing everyone out on this field.” He ordered Patrick to give him twenty pushups. Patrick, whose oblong, too-big-for-his-body face made me think of a thumbprint, wordlessly handed his flute to Sabrina Engels, and he got down on the dewy, cold grass.

Our high school was in a residential neighborhood, so when we did a run-through of the entire show, we marched to a recording we’d made inside the Band Hall and played at a low volume. Becca wasn’t even allowed to play her solo in the mornings. She fingered the notes on her backup clarinet’s keys (she marched with the Buffet Crampon only for competitions and Friday night halftime shows, and then only if the weather was agreeable). Then she rejoined the circle of clarinets and flutes just before it broke apart into a diagonal line. When we practiced Tuesday and Thursday afternoons after school and when we performed the show Friday nights during half-time, Becca’s clarinet was equipped with a tiny microphone she turned on right before her solo and then off again once the solo was finished.

From his Drum Major podium, Quentin moved his arms with such energy that morning I felt tired just watching him. Had he been so passionate in his conducting the previous week?

Also, I wondered why he hadn’t had that kind of energy with me the night before.

After practice, we changed clothes and freshened up for school, the girls in the north-facing practice rooms and the boys in the south-facing rooms. The boys changed clothes quickly. Then they took out their instruments and warmed up; or if they played reed instruments, they sucked on those reeds. A few of the boys loitered, talking about Dungeons and Dragons. The girls took their time. They brushed their hair, cleaned their faces with disposable facial cleansing wipes. They moisturized. Some of them applied make-up, including Becca, who sat on the Band Hall floor between Nanette Burns and Kate Factor, the three of them studying their faces in handheld mirrors.

In one sense, the break between Becca and me had been fast and cruel, like when I used to pull the heads off dolls and there was that satisfying little pop. I’d roomed with Becca and her mother for every overnight band trip ever, but last December, I saw that Becca had written in the names of Nanette, first-chair flute, and Kate, first-chair bassoon, beneath her and her mother’s names on the sign-up sheet.

In another sense, I’d felt the stretch between us for months, and this stretching had been mutual. That is, I’d realized more and more that Becca wasn’t who I’d thought she was. In high school, Becca began pitching her voice higher. Every word seemed molded and pinched. She said, in earnest, one day at lunch, between bites of a tuna fish sandwich with visible curls of celery, that she couldn’t marry a man her brother, Ward, didn’t approve of. Ward was a guy who boasted that he dated only girls who wore size 4 or smaller. When Becca said, “I just respect Ward so much, you know?” I realized then that to be friends with Becca required me to mold and pinch myself into something I didn’t want to be.

Still, when I saw Nanette’s and Kate’s names below Becca’s on that sign-up sheet, I felt as though something had taken a bite out of me.

From where I sat during first period, which was sit-down band rehearsal, I observed how neatly Becca’s right ear held back her coffee-colored hair while she played, as if her ear were put there for that purpose.

How at once both relaxed and focused Becca’s playing was.

I was the opposite sort of musician—tense and distracted. This is a particularly bad combination if you play clarinet, the one instrument in all the band that easily squeaks. Thinking about the night before and about what Mr. K had said about Becca, my clarinet squeaked twice during that morning’s rehearsal. The first time, a couple of kids turned their heads. The second time, Mr. K glared at me, as though I had deliberately made that awful sound.

At my locker after first period, Quentin said, “Sorry again about last night. You’ve gotten worse, not better.”

Quentin was so invested in being first-chair trombone and, in our senior year, Drum Major, I suspected that if these things were taken from him, he would have quit Band. In a way, I was a more loyal band member than Quentin.

I didn’t say anything. I focused on rearranging my backpack’s contents for the next two periods, English and physics.

Quentin said, “I want to make it up to you. How about tonight?”

I reminded him I worked a four-hour shift after school on Mondays.

“Tuesday after marching practice?”

“I have to write that essay for English,” I said.

“Wednesday?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Orgasms release tension,” Quentin whispered.

*

That afternoon, Mr. K’s wife unloaded bagged fruit onto the conveyor belt at my register.

She was barely five feet tall to Mr. K’s six feet. Also, whereas Mr. K was lanky, Mrs. K was curvy, plump. I tried not to stare at her breasts, which were much more than a handful.

The first time Mrs. K came through my checkout line, I could tell right away she didn’t recognize me, despite how many band concerts and competitions and half-time shows she’d attended. I didn’t fault her for this. As eighth-chair clarinet, I wasn’t noticeable.

On one hand, I was grateful not to be noticed. I didn’t want to be as conspicuous as Quentin on his podium or Becca in her first-chair seat.

At the same time, I was ashamed of my invisibility.

Now, however, Mrs. K smiled at me, asked if I was nervous about the upcoming State Championship. “Ronald gets so restless before these things. It’s all he can think about.”

I didn’t contradict Mrs. K. If only relaying that her husband had talked to a teenage boy about the alleged virginity or lack thereof of one of his female students were as easy as slipping a receipt into her grocery bag.

“Well, it’s not like I have a solo. As long as I get the steps right, I’m golden,” I said as I punched in the code for ruby grapefruit.

Some cashiers complained about customers who bought lots of produce—all those codes to look up, having to ask the customer to identify what the hell was in those plastic bags. I didn’t mind. I took pride in learning the subtle distinctions between things other people didn’t pay attention to. For example, I’d learned to distinguish between the different varieties of apples on sight. I no longer needed the help of the stickers.

Mrs. K, mistaking my statement as one of self-pity, said, “Your part is just as important as anyone else’s.”

“No, it isn’t. But it’s okay. Honestly, I don’t even really like clarinet. I like Band, but I wish I played percussion.”

I don’t know why I confessed this to her when I had never told anyone that. Sometimes I got weirdly chatty with customers at the grocery store. I blamed the fluorescent lights, which made me a little delirious, as though I had been up all night.

“Why not play percussion then?” Mrs. K said. “Ronald started on piano, and it wasn’t his thing. Same thing with violin. Third time’s the charm I guess.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

Last on the conveyer belt was a fruit I had never seen before. It was an exquisitely blushing pink with soft, green-tipped appendages that were slightly spiky. The fruit was shaped kind of like a pinecone, but it was solid, heavy.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Dragon fruit. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I almost dropped the Dragon fruit when the price appeared on the monitor. A single Dragon fruit cost what I earned in an hour.

“You found this in the produce section?”

“First time I’ve seen them here. They were near the papayas,” she said.

When I handed her the receipt, Mrs. K said, “You should talk to Ronald about trying out percussion.”

I liked the way Mrs. K talked to me, as though she actually believed I was capable of asking for and getting what I wanted.

*

At the end of my shift, I wandered over to the produce section half-expecting not to find any Dragon fruit, that Mrs. K had conjured the fruit out of thin air. But there were three Dragon fruits in a small bin about the size of a shoe box.

I selected one and took it to Dorothy, a full-time cashier whose nephew was the store manager. She shook her head as I handed her a ten-dollar bill. The way her short, tight curls bounced on top of her head, they made me think of curled ribbons on a wrapped gift.

As I passed my brother’s closed bedroom door that evening, he and his dumb friends laughed in a low, staccato rhythm. I smelled their marijuana and something else, something sour.

In the kitchen, I washed the Dragon fruit. It was fleshy and dense, like silicone, like how I imagined breast implants must feel if you wrap your hand around one and squeeze. On a wooden cutting board, I sliced it in half at the belly. I gasped when I saw the fruit’s interior. I don’t know what I expected, but certainly not what I found. The cut halves of the Dragon fruit reminded me of the hub caps on Quentin’s dad’s hot rod, white centers bordered in a thick circle of crimson, except the white in this case was speckled with black dots, like a starry night in reverse.

I grabbed a spoon and took the two Dragon fruit halves to my bedroom, where I scooped the soft flesh into my mouth while I watched a YouTube video about a Dragon fruit orchard in Vietnam. I learned that the fruit grew on cactuses. From a distance, the cactuses looked like stringy-fronded palm trees, but when the camera zoomed in, I saw that the fronds were not fronds. They were fleshy appendages, like the tentacles of an octopus.

When I used to sleep over at Becca’s house, her mother always cooked a big breakfast in the mornings: pancakes, waffles, omelets, breakfast burritos, huevos rancheros. Sometimes there were homemade pastries—scones or muffins or turnovers. Always there was fresh fruit—sliced strawberries or bananas, or blackberries dusted with powdered sugar. Sometimes fruits my own mother never bought—kiwis, pluots, figs. Becca would eat a few bites, then push away her plate. I always ate every bite on my plate and then I wanted more. I wanted to eat the half-eaten leftovers on Becca’s plate, but I never dared take anything more than what I was offered, except for once when Becca left the table early and her mother’s back was turned, and I snatched the crumbly remains of a blueberry muffin and shoved it quickly into my mouth before anyone could catch me.

*

Wednesday after school, I waited in the Band Hall for Quentin to finish his final trombone lesson of the afternoon. His students were from the junior high. The kid in the practice room with Quentin had long, delicate legs I wanted to bubble-wrap so they wouldn’t break.

Only first chairs and second chairs were allowed to give lessons. The rate, set by Mr. K, was fourteen dollars for half an hour, so Quentin’s hourly rate was nearly three times what I earned ringing up groceries.

When I’d been in junior high, my clarinet teacher had been Elaine Howard, a freckled, kind girl who used to tell me I had soulful eyes. Elaine complimenting my eyes was the nicest thing anybody had ever said about me, and I had been a little in love with her.

I predicted the girl in the practice room with Becca would drop Band by high school. Some weeks she showed up to her lesson in her cheerleading uniform. One of our rival bands had a French horn player who was a cheerleader. Friday nights, she departed from her squad at half-time and marched the show in her cheerleading uniform. Never in a million years would Mr. K tolerate that. We weren’t even allowed to remove our marching jackets in the stands on Friday nights in August when it was too hot to wear more than a tank top. A marching band was like a military unit, Mr. K said. It required our full allegiance, everything we had. “If you can’t commit 110 percent,” he said, “then we don’t need you.”

Besides me that afternoon, and Quentin and Becca and the other kids in practice rooms, the only other people in the Band Hall were Cody Dumfries, whose cheeks puffed out as he blew into his tuba, and Wendy Wimmer, who was practicing a complicated sequence on xylophone that required two mallets in each hand. The movement of her hands back and forth across the bars was hypnotizing.

Like all percussionists, Wendy played many instruments in addition to xylophone—timpani, snare, cymbals, the gong. When we played “Sleigh Ride” for the December concert, Wendy shook a clump of bells.

The previous spring, I’d peer-reviewed some kid’s persuasive essay for English class in which she argued the merits of breadth over depth. She quoted a source claiming that the most successful professional athletes spent ample time in their youth, if not as adults, too, playing multiple sports. They did not focus exclusively on one sport from a young age the way many parents who believe their children to be exceptional at something are wont to encourage their children do (e.g., Tiger Woods’s dad).

I wondered if percussionists had an advantage over the rest of us in that regard.

When Wendy finished, she pushed strands of jet-black hair out of her eyes.

If Jacob Greathouse had been the one practicing xylophone, I wouldn’t have dared approach him. Jacob had mean, pale gray eyes that made me think of the salty flesh of an oyster. He was a church kid, and the way he looked at those of us who weren’t, I was pretty sure it wasn’t just that he thought we were destined for hell; he prayed for it.

Wendy, with her black eyeliner and squid tattoo, was more approachable.

She handed me a set of pink-tipped mallets. Hot pink like the skin of a Dragon fruit. The tips were felt—like dense, little balls of yarn impaled on knitting needles. She said, “If Mr. Kirby catches you, I wasn’t here.” Then she gathered her leather jacket and her orange backpack and took off.

It was surprisingly easy to pick out the right bars to hit to play “O Tannenbaum,” and within minutes, I was even picking up the tempo. I was so focused, I didn’t notice Mr. K come out of his office.

“No touching other people’s instruments!” His voice was a bowling-ball-tipped mallet.

Cody Dumfries tooted out one last sound like a wet fart. Then he gaped.

I held up the mallets, as if in surrender, as in Look, nothing dangerous in these hands!

Mr. K was all “The xylophones are school property. They’re expensive. They’re not toys.” He held out his open palm.

“You play more than one instrument,” I muttered, but the validity of this point was dulled by the quaver in my voice. As if in collusion with Mr. K, one of the mallets fell from my clutch. Mr. K snatched it from the floor. Then he plucked the second mallet from my hand.

He said, “I have all the percussionists I need. My advice, Claire, is that you focus your attention on mastering that clarinet of yours.”

*

Mr. K returned to his office, which was on the other side of the front wall of the Band Hall, where years of Texas All-State Band members’ photos were on display. Becca’s photo was up there twice already and no doubt she’d be a triplet come spring.

Cody returned to tooting his tuba.

Still, I was too frazzled to wait around even just another five minutes for Quentin.

As I grabbed my battered clarinet case from its designated cubby hole, the sleek and slender case of Becca’s Buffet Crampon in the cubby hole directly above mine seemed to taunt me. I pictured the instrument resting smugly in its crushed blue velvet. Even Becca’s swab was snooty. Every day after practice, she folded it neatly into a little rectangle rather than wad it up inside the clarinet’s bell like most of us did.

How I wanted to defile the Buffet Crampon, humiliate it.

Of course, the Buffet Crampon wasn’t in its case; it was in the practice room with Becca, where she was giving a lesson to that junior high cheerleader.

Even if the Buffet Crampon had been in its case, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do anything.

*

When I let myself into Quentin’s house later that evening, I found him sitting between his parents on the sofa. Our spring concert was on the television screen again. When the auditorium applauded, Pam Wilson said, “I can’t get enough of listening to you guys play.” Richie Wilson said, “The best band in all the land.” In September, some parents, including Quentin’s and Becca’s, had gotten together and painted that very phrase on all the band-trip school buses.

Pam Wilson stood and said she had dishes to wash. Richie Wilson stood, too. He was going out to the garage to work on the hot rod.

“Why didn’t you wait for me after school?” Quentin patted the vacated seat next to him.

“Something came up,” I said. Then I whispered, “Did you tell your parents what Mr. K said?”

“What? Of course not.” Quentin turned back to the television, where we were still standing, still being applauded. He said, “You squeaked again at rehearsal this morning. Bad reed?”

I said, “Do you want to fuck Becca?”

“Of course not,” he said.

Quentin put his arm around me. “I’ve been practicing a trick.” His eyes flicked toward his bedroom.

“What kind of trick?”

“I make lists in my head. Like I list all the musicians I can think of whose names begin with ‘A,’ and then onto ‘B,’ and so on. To distract myself, so I can, you know, last longer.”

“You’re saying that to have sex with me you have to think about something other than me?” I said.

“Only because if I think about you, I get too turned on.”

It was like he’d told me that to enjoy a grilled cheese sandwich, he had to forget he was eating a grilled cheese sandwich.

I said, “Will you do something for me?”

Quentin became very attentive.

When I said, “Try another instrument. Do it when Mr. K is around,” Quentin’s face fell. He removed his arm from around my shoulder.

“Why?”

“Because he yelled at me for playing the xylophone. Because I want to know if he’ll yell at you, too.”

“Why were you playing the xylophone?”

“Because I like the xylophone.”

“I like trombone.”

“Just as an experiment.”

“I don’t want to,” he said. “We’re not supposed to touch other people’s instruments.”

I pictured Quentin’s hands gripping the body of Becca’s Buffet Crampon, his mouth around the Crampon’s mouthpiece, the reed already wetted by Becca’s mouth.

“But don’t you think that’s a dumb rule if you have that person’s permission? I bet Becca would let you try out the Buffet Crampon if you talked about how much you admire it.”

Quentin frowned. “It doesn’t matter what Becca thinks. Mr. Kirby wouldn’t like it.”

“What about what I would like, what I want?” I said.

Quentin stared at me.

Between my right foot and Quentin’s left foot, less than an inch of gray cat tail poked out from beneath the sofa. An accident. When I bent over to pet that tail tip, Ghost Cat’s tail quickly retracted.

I said, “Why didn’t you put on gloves the other day like I asked you?”

Quentin groaned.

“Maybe that’s my trick,” I said.

“Why do you need a trick?”

Seeing the puzzled expression on Quentin’s face, I felt slightly guilty about the reason I needed a trick. Also, I felt angry. Do boys ever concern themselves with the reasonableness of what they want?

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said then. “Let me make it up to you.” He leaned in and kissed my neck. He whispered, “God, I want you.”

It’s interesting how those words, which were meant to make me feel desired, had the opposite effect. They felt dishonest, too utilitarian: a key Quentin had fumbled from a pocket to unlock any resistance I might otherwise put up.

Quentin wasn’t the first or the last boy or man to say those words to me, and it would be several years before I could articulate why those words bothered me so much, but in that moment, sitting on Quentin’s sofa, my body understood what my mind did not. Any desire I’d felt for Quentin, which, admittedly, had been feeble to begin with, curdled.

Quentin motioned to his bedroom again. He tugged at my hand. He said, “What’s wrong? Is this still about the gloves?”

“I just don’t want to,” I said.

“But you wanted to the other day,” he said.

“I guess I changed my mind,” I said.

*

Two weeks later, the day of the State Marching Band Championship, Quentin was no longer my boyfriend. Also, I was no longer a virgin. A few days after breaking up with Quentin, I had sex with this guy Duff, whom I met at the animal shelter. He was the kennel technician, aka janitor. He was twenty-three, and he was weird, but also sweet and attentive. At the shelter, after walking by me several times where I sat stroking the head of a tabby cat with sad eyes, he asked if I was thirsty, then brought me a gallon jug of water and said, “There’s more where that came from.” When his shift ended, we got fish tacos. Then we made out in his car on a remote beach in Galveston. I didn’t plan to have sex with him, but the way he kissed me, the way he touched me, was generous in a way no boy, including Quentin, had ever been with me before.

I saw Duff maybe three or four more times that winter before he left town—he was never my boyfriend—but I think of him now as the first guy I was ever in love with.

When I boarded the school bus the morning of the championship, Quentin was sitting with Cody Dumfries in the last row. I could feel him glaring at me, though I avoided meeting his eyes.

I took a seat up front, draped my heavy green marching jacket over my clarinet case in my lap and set my black pillbox hat on top of the jacket, then looked out the window at the line of other kids waiting to board the school bus. When Becca, Kate, and Nanette boarded the bus together, I didn’t see where they sat because that would have required turning my head, which would have demonstrated interest. Disinterestedness was my superpower in my last year and a half of high school. Maybe it still is.

By the time Jacob Greathouse boarded the bus, the only spot left was the one next to me.

Around us, the bus buzzed with energy. I thought of a computer simulation we’d watched in physics class of excited particles in a gaseous state zipping around, bumping into each other. Jacob Greathouse and I were more like the particles in the bus’s steel body. You would have needed some fancy equipment to detect any motion in us.

When the bus passed a sign for the town of one of our major marching rivals, a band we would compete with that afternoon, a band we would lose to but that almost everybody on that bus felt confident right then that we would beat, a few kids booed. Soon, there was a chorus of booing. Mr. K, who sat catty-corner from me and Jacob, turned and grinned. When Mr. K grinned like that, blood rushed to his cheeks. His tan face flushed.

Decades later when I can no longer remember details such as who I marched between my senior year or what music we even played, for that matter, I can still close my eyes and see Mr. K’s grin burned on my retinas as though it’s tattooed there. It was his grin, I think, not my resentment of Becca or of Quentin or of the whole goddamn band, really, that I was responding to when on the field later that afternoon, surrounded by a stadium crowd of thousands, I broke formation. As the line of clarinets merged with the flutes, slowly spiraling into the shape of a wheel in which Becca would soon become the axle, Mr. K’s grin pressed itself into my mind in a way that felt violent, like a hand over my mouth. I saw that it was the grin of a man who took pleasure wherever he found it, without hesitation, without thought of consequences. A grin so big it could eat the whole world. I stepped out of the spiral. I conducted myself off the field.

It was the only time in all my years in band that all eyes were on me, and not because my instrument had squeaked.

Michelle Ross is the author of three story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award; Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (November 2021); and They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (forthcoming in April 2022). Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50, and will be included in the forthcoming Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review.