Bellweather Rhapsody (10 page)

Rabbit Hatmaker is in love.

His sister and Chrissy and everything in his life that was slightly or more than slightly annoying fades away to nothingness. Rabbit has been punched in the heart. He knew, he
knew
it would happen like this someday, and he thinks he will liquefy with joy, with gratitude that he is here, in this one spot on earth at this one time in history, for
this
man to be singing
this
song and for Rabbit to hear it.

“Yeah,
that’s
the gayest thing I’ve ever seen,” Chrissy says.

Rabbit snaps back.

“They’re not gay, they’re college guys.
A cappella
clubs are how you get laid if you’re not a jock,” Alice says. “Do you have eyes? Look at the lead guy. God, he’s cute. If he’s gay, I don’t want to be straight.”

Rabbit inhales sharply.

Alice pushes herself up on her toes and tries to catch the tenor’s eye.

Panic flares in his chest. Rabbit blushes and takes hold of his sister’s arm. “Hey, I’m starving here,” he says. “Let’s go eat. C’mon. Chrissy? Food? Like, now?” He needs to get her away, they all need to leave, the song is over and he doesn’t know which he is more afraid of, should the tenor acknowledge them—that Rabbit will make an ass of himself or his sister will make a move.

Rabbit enters the ballroom behind Alice and Chrissy, herding them like distracted cats toward the end of the buffet line. If he hadn’t just fallen in love, Rabbit knows he would be disheartened by the pale, wet food stretching before them, borne above small blue Sterno flames, in dented silver warming pans. As it is, he looks on the grayish slices of roast beef and the weirdly off-white mashed potatoes and smiles, happy in the knowledge that the tenor is in the world. He disturbs a layer of skin across the vat of gravy and daydreams about a situation, a moment, when they might meet. In the elevator. At the ice machine. Maybe they’re staying on the same floor. What’s his name? What school does he go to? He’s had crushes before, Mattie DeLuca was just the beginning, but this is in a whole other realm of feeling. Rabbit never believed gaydar was a real thing—but is this how it feels to fall for someone he might actually have a shot with, someone
like
him? Is it like reverse magnetism, that in order to be drawn violently there needs to be the same charge on the other end?

The ballroom is full. It takes a while for Alice to find a table with three empty seats for them to join. The scene reminds Rabbit of their cousin Patty’s wedding a few years ago, with an ocean of round tables and one long, skinny table, perpendicular to the buffet, where all the key players—the head administrators, in this case—are meant to be seated. He doesn’t see Mrs. Wilson yet. He thinks he should tell her about what happened at rehearsal, though he doesn’t know what it could possibly accomplish. But he figures Mrs. Wilson, unlike his sister, will at least listen to him.

Alice is making introductions for everyone. “Hi!” she says to the assembled souls at a table in a far corner, beneath a tall window with pendulous maroon drapes. “My name is Alice Hatmaker. I’m in the chorus, and so is my friend Chrissy Spanowitz. And this is my brother, Rabbit.” Rabbit manages a twitch of a smile as his sister swings into her seat. “So who are you?”

There are two boys from the same school near Buffalo, Nate and David, who clearly don’t like each other but are bonded by a mutual desire for familiarity. Next to David is a tall girl with close-cropped blond hair and bright pink lipstick who introduces herself as Chastity. She shakes her head like she has a tic, her long silver earrings jingling every time. Chastity is from “the city,” a fact she confirms repeatedly during dinner with comment after comment about all the crazy things she’s done in the Village. Next to Chastity is another girl, with curly red hair and glasses, who looks as if she’d rather be back in her room reading Shakespeare, and who leaves without a word immediately after half-finishing her plate of limp vegetables. The three other kids also know each other, from local county and city music festivals if not the same school—a boy and two girls, who introduce themselves as Harrison Map, Violet Smalls, and Jennifer Czerny. Rabbit thinks they might also be from New York City. They possess a worldliness that Rabbit associates with kids who grow up taking the subway and seeing homeless people on a regular basis, unlike Chastity, who he suspects may have moved there in middle school, and may not even be named Chastity.

“So what are you in, Harrison?” Alice asks, cutting a slice from her meat. “No—wait, let me guess. You’re not in the chorus, because I would remember you.” Harrison cocks his head and grins. He has brown hair that flops over his forehead, and he is wearing a light blue button-down, the top button open to reveal a white crewneck undershirt. Catholic school dropout, Rabbit pegs him. Trumpet. Band. “First violin in the orchestra,” Alice guesses.

“Nice try.” His voice is surprisingly deep. “First trumpet, concert band.”

Rabbit smiles at his pasty food. He is in love, and he cannot lose.

“Curses!” Alice shakes her fist in the air. “And
you’ve
all been here before, right? You look familiar.” Not to you, they don’t, Rabbit understands; his sister just wants them to know that she’s been here before too, that she is One of the Twice Chosen. Two of them actually
do
look familiar to Rabbit. The girls may have been sitting behind him in orchestra, in brass or percussion. His heart ices with the possibility that they will out him.

“This is my
third
year at Statewide,” Jennifer Czerny says. She’s pocket-size and blonder than anyone Rabbit has ever met. He wonders if her doll-like feet are dangling inches off the floor. “I’m what you might call a French horn prodigy.” Harrison and Violet laugh, though Rabbit has no idea why. “I’m in the orchestra,” she continues, and grins at Rabbit. “With your infamous brother here.”

Rabbit freezes. Then, flush with love, he makes a choice: to bask in this moment.

His sister skips like a scratched CD, a heartbeat of quiet absence. He feels her turn in her chair to face him with a stiff smile.

“Oh
really,
” Alice says. “My infamous brother. In the orchestra. What are you holding back from your own sister, you little punk?”

Rabbit shrugs and shovels mashed potatoes into his mouth. They’re instant and taste like salty baby food.

“You didn’t tell her?” Jennifer hunches conspiratorially in Rabbit’s direction, her tiny chest practically in her plate of food. “Bad Rabbit.”

This is
killing
Alice, and Rabbit kind of loves it. She punches him in the arm, a little harder than she really should.

“You were there.” He tips his chin at Jennifer. “Why don’t you tell the story?”

Harrison is looking at Rabbit with narrow, amused eyes. He might be cute, if Rabbit didn’t suspect him of being a humongous preppy dillweed.

“Okay—so.” Jennifer takes a sip of something pink from the glass in front of her. “Fisher Brodie’s conducting, right? And he’s late, like, really super-late, and we’re all sitting there onstage waiting for him to show up. And when he finally does, it’s clear he’s off his meds. The guy fucks with us for fifteen minutes, asking why we’re here, why we’re musicians, blah blah whatever. But then!
Then,
he says that we’re not going to be playing any of the music we were sent, that we’ve been practicing for weeks. Says it’s all terrible. And then your brother here, brave little Rabbit, stands up and is all like,
Fuck you, man. Fuck you, man, fuck your bullshit, you have no right to talk about Mendelssohn
like that, I mean, who the fuck are you?
”

Rabbit’s insides are howling with laughter. He could kiss this tiny toy girl right on her truck driver’s mouth.

Jennifer waves her hands in the air, still pretending to be him. “
Fuck you and your bullshit conductor patriarchy! You don’t own us! You don’t own the fucking music, you fucking twat prick asshole! Rarrrrrrrr!
”

Alice’s eyes are flicking from Jennifer to Rabbit, Jennifer to Rabbit, trying to figure out if
she’s
being fucked with.

“It’s all true,” says Violet. “I was there, hanging out in the back with my trombone.” Violet’s hair is done up in tiny braids that run straight back across her scalp, collected by a fat ponytail that flops from shoulder to shoulder as she speaks. “You’re one badass rabbit, Rabbit. I think you gave Faccelli the idea to get the hell out.”

“Faccelli.” The word falls from Alice’s mouth and sits on the table. It is just a word, but Rabbit knows his sister well enough to understand she is saying she is not amused.

“Jill Faccelli? You know, the
actual
prodigy at this festival?” Violet gives Jennifer’s ribs a playful dig with her elbow. “Your brother started the rebellion, and Jill finished it by walking out of rehearsal.”

“I know who Jill Faccelli is.” Alice clears her throat. “
Jelly
is a friend of mine. She’s my
roommate
.”

“Well . . .
Jelly
is having a terrible day.” Jennifer lets out a snort of laughter. Violet and Harrison join her. Rabbit can’t quite, because he knows that Alice’s pride has been wounded—and then he suddenly finds that he
can
laugh. The whole time Alice was babbling on about her roommate and her drama and her
self,
she was talking about the girl with the dark ponytail who ditched rehearsal—the very girl Rabbit had a story to tell her about, if she had shut up long enough for him to tell it. It’s kind of funny. It’s really kind of funny, and Rabbit laughs out loud too.

He feels his twin draw into herself, diminished. He swallows a few final laughs.

“Oh, come on, we’re just taking the piss,” Jennifer says, and takes another gulp of the pink stuff.

“What are you, a Spice Girl?” Alice says.

Violet rolls her eyes. “Anyway. Are we doing this thing tonight? This haunted party thing?” She’s asking Harrison, but she’s not being secretive, and Rabbit likes her for this. He likes her even better when she addresses the whole table and says, “If you’re not busy later, we’re getting together in Harrison’s room. Five-thirty-three. You should stop by.”

Chastity’s earrings jingle uncontrollably as she nods in the affirmative, and Chrissy, sensing Alice’s stock plummeting, chimes in that she’d love to go. Alice crosses her arms over her chest.

“Haunted?” she says. “Wasn’t Halloween last month?”

“So you don’t know about the
hotel
either?” Jennifer says snottily. Rabbit is beginning to rethink his urge to kiss her. “I thought you said you’d been here before.”

“I
have
—”

“The hotel is haunted.
Actually
haunted.” Violet—Nice Violet, Rabbit has decided to name her—props her elbows on the table, blocking Jennifer from another retort. “Back in the eighties, on her wedding day, a girl hanged herself after blasting her husband to hell with a shotgun. Happened right in the hotel. She’s the most famous ghost here, but, like, have you seen
The Shining
? And have you walked around upstairs by yourself? This place is
creepy
. Ghosts up to here.” She holds her palm flat above her eyes. “This weekend is their anniversary. Of their wedding
and
of their deaths.”

“Harrison has a Ouija board,” Jennifer says.

“How do
you
know about this?” Alice asks. She’s uncrossed her arms but Rabbit can tell she is still deeply annoyed—at Jennifer, and at him. The latter is a new feeling, and not entirely unpleasant. “Sounds like the kind of bullshit kids tell each other on the playground. You know, Pop Rocks and Coke killed Paul from
The Wonder Years.
My mom bought a cactus from Pier One and it exploded into a thousand baby spiders.”

“It probably
is
total bullshit. But where’s the fun in that?” Nice Violet says. She pushes back from the table. “I’m gonna get dessert to go. Everyone—around nine, nine-thirty, room five-thirty-three. BYO.” She scrunches her nose at him. “See you later, Bad Rabbit.”

Alice has pushed her own chair back and stood before Rabbit notices she’s moved. “I’m not feeling so great,” she says, addressing no one in particular. “This food is terrible. I’ll see you later.”

Rabbit is not the same person who woke up in Ruby Falls this morning, in his childhood bed with its blue-and-green-striped sheets.
That
Rabbit would have leapt to his sister’s side without thought.
This
Rabbit is sitting down and his twin sister is leaving and
he is not following
. He feels her hesitate, knows she is tugging on that strange flap of soul, the overlap they’ve always shared; but the part of him that laughed, the part of him that is still buzzing with love, knows he is not ready to leave just yet. Knows he doesn’t have to.

“See you later,” he says. He doesn’t look at her when he says it, but he knows she hears him—because she does leave, her offense receding like a car with a stereo thumping bass, losing volume as the distance between them increases.

Jennifer is leaning so far forward she
is
pressing her chest into her food. Rabbit wonders what’s in that pink stuff she’s been drinking.

“Jeeeeeesus. You had to grow up with that?” she says.

“We shared a womb,” he replies, still stunned by his daring.

Jennifer pulls a face and sits back, a lump of mashed potato clinging to her shirt. “She must’ve come from the bitchy side.”

“She got all the crazy-whore genes,” Chastity says, giddy to play this game.

“She’s not even that good,” Chrissy, the turncoat from chorus, says. “She’s okay, I guess. If you enjoy the sound of cats being thrown into blenders.”

There is something intoxicating about this. Rabbit, who has never gotten drunk, imagines this must be what it feels like, his face warm and his mind dulled, his spine and tongue loosened, his gut tingly with the thrill of doing something he has never done before.

“Or chipmunks being fed firecrackers,” he says.

Jennifer laughs riotously, as if it’s the single funniest thing any human has ever said. Harrison claps him on the back, and Rabbit wonders for a moment whether Harrison is gay too. He really is sort of cute. He isn’t the tenor, though. The tenor is out there, and Rabbit is going to meet him this weekend. He smiles.