Jeff came into my bedroom re-tying the necktie he’d taken off and hung on his doorknob after church earlier that afternoon. He stood in the doorway smirking as he tucked the tie back underneath the collar of his rumpled Sunday shirt. “You’re not getting out of it this time,” he told me. “None of us is. She’s coming right up to the front door of the house to get us in ten minutes.”
I sighed hard and sat up on my bed. “Why does she even care if we go or not?” I complained. “It’s like she thinks we’re all in some heart-warming old movie and she’s going to save me from a life of loneliness and debauchery by getting me to sing in her Christmas youth choir, or something.”
Jeff pushed the knot of his tie into place. “It doesn’t matter what her reasons are. She’s convinced Mum and Dad this is important and they say we’re going.”
The “she” we were talking about was Sister Giles, the music specialist from church. She was psychotically happy and harboured the insane belief that the answer to every situation – good, bad, or totally pointless – was to sing. She’d done her best to live her whole life as if it was a light opera and now she was trying to make the town’s urbane young newcomers part of the cast. Jeff clearly thought the whole thing was too ironic not to be hilarious. He looked down at me where I still slouched on my bed, and he laughed right into my sour little face.
“How can you be enjoying this?” I bawled at him. “And will you please get out of my room now? I need to put my nylons back on before she gets here.”
I had barely finished dressing when a horn began tooting musically in my grandparents’ driveway. Moments later, Jeff, Carrie, and I were trudging through the cold darkness to a huge passenger van. It was already half full of other teenagers. Sister Giles was rounding up a crowd of young, lacklustre performers for a rehearsal of the town’s annual Christmas concert.
She burst with an exaggerated gasp as I stepped up to the van. “It’s Miss Heather. We’ve got Heather. Now everything will be perfect.”
Melanie and Tawny sat near the front of the van and smiled a little painfully at me as I ducked through the door. Sometimes goals about being nice to new people can be so hard to keep. But tonight, I spared the girls my company and tried to punish Jeff in the process by falling into the seat I thought he would have preferred to sit in – the one right beside his good friend, Ben Jones.
I didn’t look at Ben Jones as I let my face sink into my scarf, all the way up to my nose. I heard him chuckle beside me anyway. “Come on now. It’s not that bad,” Ben Jones said to me. “There won’t be any country music at the Christmas concert – not this time.”
I smirked inside my scarf. “Promise?”
Ben Jones tugged at the fuzzy gray edge of my scarf, pulling it down so he could see the expression of my mouth. “Definitely,” he promised. “We just do a few traditional Christmas songs. It’s nothing tacky – except maybe that part where she gets us all to snap our fingers when we sing ‘ha’penny’.”
I groaned and sat up, out of my scarf. “I really do hate singing. Is that so wrong? And I’m not trying to be edgy or rebellious when I say that. I despise singing. Honestly, it makes me feel like I’m getting a little bit sick after a while – and I’m terrible at it.”
“Maybe you’re just singing the wrong part,” Ben Jones suggested. “Try the alto line instead of the soprano part.”
“But my speaking voice is so high,” I squeaked.
“Then don’t sing in your speaking voice, Parakeet,” he laughed. “Would you ever have guessed from listening to me talk that I sing best as a bass?”
“Hmm,” I mused. “I never thought about it. Say something else.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I know. Let me hear the lowest note you can sing.”
Ben Jones just laughed and looked down at his gloved hands. I could tell he wasn’t seeing me so I looked at him – really looked at him. When I thought about Ben Jones when he wasn’t around, he appeared in my memory looking mostly like he was made all of angles and corners. But sitting here beside me in real life, there was a softness to him. And I’d never noticed before how dark the lengths of his eyelashes looked resting against his cheeks, behind the lenses of his glasses. I’d seen it before, when I’d overwhelmed him and he had to look away from me, but I hadn’t appreciated how sweet it was until now. The vulnerability of his modesty made him kind of cute – unattainable and uninterested, but cute.
He looked up from his hands. “My lowest note – I don’t think so,” he said.
“Come on, show me,” I cajoled, bumping my arm against his. “Let me hear your bass voice and it might totally change my whole attitude about the possibility of me singing alto at this Christmas concert thing.”
“You want me to sing a super low note? Right here in the van, apropos nothing, with everyone listening?” Ben Jones’s charming vulnerability started to fade when he began speaking in Latin phrases.
Still, I insisted. “No one’s going to be listening to you but me. Right Jeff?”
“Huh?” Jeff called back from the seat in front of us where he was chatting rather woodenly with Miss Upton High School. I guess I’d been mistaken about him preferring to sit by Ben Jones.
I waved my hand at the back of Jeff’s head. “See what I mean, Jones?”
He shook his head but then Ben Jones cleared his throat. “Okay then,” he said, beckoning me closer so I could hear. I leaned my face next to his and listened – only I didn’t hear anything when he opened his mouth. “So what did you think of that?” he asked after he closed his jaws.
“Of what?”
“Of my lowest low note, of course,” he grinned. “Didn’t you hear it?”
“No!”
“Well, I’m not surprised,” he said, sitting back in his seat. “It’s so low only elephants and whales can hear it without special microphones.”
I batted his arm through his heavy coat. “That is totally cheating.”
“What? It’s not my fault it’s out of the typical parakeet hearing range.”
Something quivered at the edge of my smile. “Hey, what’s with you calling me a parakeet?”
“Hm?”
I wasn’t going to get any farther. All meaningful social interaction ended as Sister Giles started the rehearsal while still driving the van, singing vigorously from behind the steering wheel about “wassailing.”
We arrived at the big, brick Pioneer Memorial Auditorium at the end of Upton’s main street and filed out of the van as Sister Giles sang on the sidewalk. Advertisements for the Christmas concert hung on both of the heavy, wooden auditorium doors. In spite of Sister Giles’ mad rush to the backstage area, I lingered long enough to be able to read the details from the poster. I was in luck, I thought. I had a completely legitimate previous engagement. The concert was scheduled for the same night as the TacoTown staff Christmas party. It would be the perfect excuse for missing Sister Giles’ concert – and that almost made me feel like singing.