Playing music is easy on guitar; I have been doing it for years. This new creature in my hands is a missile erupting in the most ear wrenching screams every time I put my lips to it. I fold my lower lip over my teeth and close my trembling lips around the mouthpiece with effort. It is like a shaking leg after gym class; I have a hard time sustaining my ambeture. Somehow I made it further than the other kids and wound up in second chair anyways. Felicia is in clear view now more than before. Her french horn is like farts underwater as far as I am concerned, but my proximity to Mr. Pethoud is like her kryptonite. I don't see the attraction personally, and look at his red rimmed eyes with a certain scrutiny that never once uncovers what she so desires. He has thinning blond hair, an invisible body, strange worn brown loafers that I feel sure stink when he takes them off, and a pallor not unlike a sick person. Still, he commands attention and we try so hard to please him when he asked us to perform. He also plays french horn as his primary instrument, and I wonder if she chose it on purpose just to be close to him. He is married, after all, and at least twenty five years older than us.
Band is like a family, a club that no one on the outside wants to belong to but it is only because they have no idea what we are. They have no place of comfort like this, no comraderie, no common goal. Our beauty is in how we all don't fit anywhere but fit inside this room. We fit inside music, and it is something so strong that it captures most of us for life. Let them make fun, for they have no idea the fun we really have. I feel like it is my armor, my shield from the mean girls and the bland teachers working off of crepey yellowing notes. I wear my scarlet letter in my hot little hand: my black clarinet case brandished by my side, parting the seas of pubescent cruelty.
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