Marching season is out, but the competition is only heating up.
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Section leader applications for the next marching band season at Halston University are officially open, and percussionist Bay Rodriguez wants the role.
Bay's only competition is Ca...
noun. musical punctuation to prolong a note beyond its normal duration.
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AFTER CALLUM'S PARTY, WE SLIP back into our usual hostility.
Yelling at each other never warrants some type of heart-to-heart or apology, because it is par for the course when it comes to us. If—whenever—Callum tries to go soft on me, I only fight harder.
On Tuesday's pep band rehearsal, which has more people than the Halston Student Orchestra, I avoid Callum on the drum kit (we divvy the parts up by song) and set up camp beside Shane at her keyboard, rhythmically shaking a tambourine. He and I don't look at each other the whole time. From warm up to pack down, our eyes and bodies slide past each other like water and oil. When he rises to leave the drum kit and I walk near—I play drums for Bruno Mars' Treasure—his shoulder brushes against my forearm, and I push away the hot flush crawling up the back of my neck with a vehement glare.
I take comfort in the cycles of our conflicts. It always goes: altercation, radio silence, little barbs, big barbs, altercation again. It's familiar, predictable. Each stage has something useful about it. For instance, at last Friday's party—altercation—I get to sink into the role of Bad Guy and vent anger. In the radio silence phase, I don't have to hear Callum's irritating voice. Little barbs require me to witty, suave, and big barbs demand that I read him well, to know which insult will really stick.
Callum is my hardest mental exercise.
The rivalry is all because of me, of course, but I didn't intend to start it. I would say our enmity truly flourished in the spring semester of our freshman year, but the seeds were planted months before, at a party much like the most recent: the one where we kissed.
This party was at the old percussion section leader Toby Minhas' house. The rooms were fit to bursting; more than just alcohol was entering people's bloodstreams; the music vibrated through our bodies like a jackhammer; and in this chaos, Callum found me, took my hand and said, "Be my strip beer pong partner?"
(He wouldn't love strip beer pong so much if he didn't have his body and his face.)
I'd laughed, gleeful, because that's not a sentence a girl hears often, from a guy that looks and behaves like Callum. This—band friends, loud music, drinks and exhilaration soaking every cell of mine—felt like a movie moment, those instances when I considered my own life not completely meaningless.
"Do we strip and drink if we lose, or is it choose one penalty?" I asked, receiving the cans of gin and tonic he pushed into my hands. I cracked one open and starting pouring into the pyramid of cups.
