Under The Fireworks
A Secret Baby Romance
Chapter One – Becca
Music school was supposed to be easy.
At least, that had been the consensus before I started, not only among my parents but also among most of my friends, who teased me with jokes before my entrance exam about how it was impossible to fail a music test, but then seriously asked what there was to get wrong.
It was harder than they thought, but in most ways, not for me, which was the paradox of trying to defend myself against their taunts or answer their questions in a serious way.
Much of studying for and doing well on the entrance exam had to do with memory, especially of the audio variety, which was where I did well naturally, so it was probably easier for me than it might have been for someone else, particularly if they were tone-deaf.
But none of my non-music friends understood just how hard I’d worked throughout school. Crazy nerd that I was, I’d studied not just one instrument but all of them, at least in theory, and I enjoyed finding out how the most common and popular pieces had come to be that way. Such was the lot of the conductor.
I not only did well on the entrance exam but, once I got into music school, I also excelled at most of it. It wasn’t that it was easy for most people, but it was that the field of study suited me well.
The test portions of the classes were like hieroglyphics with a dash of arcane magic, the symbols conjured from the tip of an erasable marker on the whiteboard, as if a pure white field of potential was affixed to the wall. I usually knew what all the symbols meant. But that wasn’t shocking, since somehow music had always come naturally to me.
To the surprise of just about everyone, I could sight-read music by the time I was 10. Much of the wonder stemmed from the fact that the only time anyone in my family had ever heard music was during the one winter when my dad worked as a piano mover. But somehow, I was attracted to it, and good at it.
Just about every kid thinks they know what they want to be when they grow up. But these are aspirations that almost invariably change over the years. My brother went from fighter pilot to astronaut to rock star to magician between the ages of eight and fifteen.
The fact that he ended up the manager of a bank seemed mildly tragic in retrospect. I always knew what I was going to be, though.
My interest in being a conductor had been clear and unwavering, ever since my parents let me stay up way past my bedtime to watch a performance by a philharmonic orchestra. They were probably just astounded that I would be so interested but they invited me to talk to several musicians after they were done playing. A seed was planted, and I never looked back.
Now I’d made it through almost all of music school and it was almost the end of my last semester. It was also almost the start of summer. And boy was I glad—which seemed to be a sentiment that was clearly shared by most of my classmates as well.
It had been a long, wet winter, as tended to happen in Seattle. Not that that stopped anyone from complaining about it.
But it all habitually came to an abrupt halt when summer really started to roast. Then everyone switched to complaining about that, if with a touch less zeal.
I could always tell it was starting to be summer when the t-shirts came off and the tube tops came on. Some of my fellow students were going to class in what amounted to beachwear.
Not that the professors were much better. If the college had a dress code, it was merely that people had to be dressed.
One of my favorite professors came to every class, no matter the weather, in a t-shirt, Dickies and Vans, which were procured from his youngest son, who got them for free on account of being a pro-skater.
The student body was approaching this year’s start of summer even more enthusiastically than most in the past, though, since we had been under lockdown for most of the school year thanks to the Coronavirus pandemic. And their appreciation was obvious.
It had already been a few months since campus had opened back up and allowed all of us to gather together again—albeit in a slightly different way than before, what with social distancing and other safety precautions in place—and work on our music together.
But this was the first time, weather-wise, that the tube tanks could come out, and people seemed to be reveling in their ability to wear them even more so than during past seasons.