Dot Sheets

After marching band rehearsal, Andrew tells Colt about his break-up with Clara. Colt doesn't know what he's supposed to say.

Before Mr. Nosecha made it down the one-hundred forty-seven steps from the box all the way down to the field, Andrew had already cut in front of the drum majors and tucked the rolled-up dot sheets into his back pocket. He wasn’t a visual tech, but here at the Gray Avril Jr. Educational Complex, the best qualification for teaching was not having anything better to do. He also had no prior experience marching, no clue how to march, couldn’t hold a trumpet up for more than five minutes without breaking, and was only a high school junior. That was besides the point; anyone could be taught how to read a dot sheet and tell kids that they were standing in the wrong spot. Dot sheets were glorified graphs, and so was music, and there was no better AP-loaded teacher’s pet french hornist to plot these graphs than Andrew. 

Instead of correcting the freshman tuba who missed band camp, he highlighted every M1 dot so he could stalk Colt around the field and mumble his comments into his phone like a judge’s tape recorder. Andrew didn’t care about contributing to the whole, he wasn’t paid enough to. He ditched the overcrowded school bus home every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday night to watch the marching band struggle to learn ten sets in 3 hours. At the Gray Avril Jr. Educational Complex, that was the greatest application of music until December rolled by, Mr. Nosecha informed 5th and 6th period that there wasn’t enough money to go to championships, and concert season could finally dominate. Fall meant bats flying across stadium lights, phones bouncing around in fanny packs during gush-and-go’s, and pebbles of ground-up tires washing down the shower drain after long rehearsal nights where nobody could focus. 

Andrew clapped his hands three times. Colt hated how easily he was ripped away from a conversation about replacing his shoelaces. No better than a dog salivating at the ring of a bell. There was an energy about Andrew, like the cocky strut of a salesman who thought it was a good idea to give his pitch to a receptionist behind a “No Soliciting” sign. It must have been that wide stance, maybe that dead-set focus in his dark eyes that silenced the Forevermore Regiment & Colorguard faster than any staff’s bellow. Or maybe he just got away with everything because he was cute. The stage was his. Mr. Nosecha wasn’t even halfway down, yet. 

“Alright, folks!” he started. “We did some good band today. But we need to band harder if we’re going to be the best band in Best Bands International. The way that we band is the way that we make band a true band! We’ve put our best band into this band, but we must ask ourselves not what the band can do for us, but what can we do for the band?” 

Colt stopped himself from chucking his mouthpiece at Andrew. He was a section leader, now, and that meant refraining from murder. Never mind that there were only three kids in his section, including himself.

“Band… dismissed!” Andrew declared. 

The brass caption head, Mr. Benjamin Moro, stepped in. “What? No, you’re not dismissed!” 

One kid booed. 

Mr. Moro shooed Andrew away from the spotlight, who then returned to his favorite spot, Colt’s side. There was a no butts on the field rule, unless you were stretching or injured at the sideline. Even Andrew knew that. Knowing made him feel all the more exempt to the rule, and Colt couldn’t find a proper justification to yell at Andrew for it, so when a familiar weight sat itself down on Colt’s Payless clearance sneakers, Colt rested the bell of his mellophone atop Andrew’s head and waited for Mr. Nosecha to squeeze his way in front of the drum majors. 

“Alright, folks!” Mr. Nosecha started. 

It was no better than Andrew’s speech. Maybe worse, the more Mr. Nosecha dwelled on the sluggish water breaks and even more sluggish resets. Always a lack of focus. That’s what happened when the best qualification for marching at the Ray Abril Jr. Educational Complex’s Forevermore Regiment & Colorguard was having nothing better to do. A few battery members in the back took off their harnesses, which proved to be a worthy investment when more staff members chimed in about the core values of the band and the discussion devolved to a Q&A about how to build a culture of success. Every post-rehearsal meeting truly lived up to the band’s name. Andrew knew better than to interrupt the closing ceremony of adults declaring their disappointment at high schoolers’ attention spans, at this point. These were the adults that granted him permission to take home the school’s shiny Conn 8D horn every night. 

It was when the head drum major, Thomas, was finally at the front again that Andrew stood up and Colt’s feet regained feeling. Their closing chant was three claps with their band’s name yelled in dum-duh duh-dah format: 

“For!” Thomas yelled, with a clap.

“E-ver-more!” the rest of the band yelled back, with two claps. 

“Band… dismissed!” 

The kids scattered to their backpacks and water jugs. Colt, however, made his way straight forward to fulfill his duty of emptying the orange water jugs. Andrew followed. While Colt unscrewed the tops and jingled ice against plastic far enough to dump the water down the drain, Andrew chugged as much water as he could from the squirt bottles. His limit was one bottle. The rest of the bottles, he squirted down the drain. Unscrewing the top and dumping it in two seconds was no fun. With squirting the water out, Andrew got a better sense of how much water they were wasting. He was sentimental about waste and it showed in the dozens of alphabetized tabs he had opened at any given moment, the old assignments smushed down at the bottom of his backpack, and especially the mess in his room he could only tame at the end of the semester. 

When the water was all squeezed away, Andrew crunched down the slippery ice on the drain and pretended he was on an Antarctic excavation to extract a new strain of bacteria that could grow your hair back. After that, he rode on the utility cart next to Colt’s mellophone case and backpack and the orange water jugs and pretended he was sailing back home to the Americas to communicate his research findings to an academic conference of the sharpest minds only. Colt was the one pushing the cart. Then, when the cart was squeezed into its proper place in the hallway and Colt’s mellophone was tucked away into his locker, Andrew led Colt into the middle practice room and refused to turn the lights on. 

“I can’t see,” Colt complained. 

Andrew could. His eyes adjusted faster to the dark than Colt’s did because he closed his eyes as soon as he entered any dark space. The tiny rectangle of a window was blocked off with black construction paper as an emergency hiding place from school shooters. Now Andrew knew where to look if he was a school shooter. He deliberately stood in front of the light switch. 

“My girlfriend--”

“I know who your girlfriend is,” Colt said. She was a lead trumpet. He went to the same middle school as her, back when she was still squeaking horrendously on the clarinet every time she tried going over the break. Her slim fingers could never quite cover the holes properly and her knuckles went white every time she played. The trumpet was a sensible switch. She went from last chair to third chair within a couple years. “Just say you’re talking about Clara.”

“Okay. Clara broke up with me.” 

“Why would you call her your girlfriend if you two just broke up? Then, she would be your ex-girlfriend.” 

Andrew pressed the rounded rectangle button behind him. The fluorescent light flickered on. “Thirty day free trial of being single--maybe she’ll take me back.” 

Colt could see that Andrew’s sentimentality was degrading his logic, again. Clara was Andrew’s first girlfriend. They were passing period makeout buddies since freshman year. Letting go of Clara was harder than closing his tabs without bookmarking them for a later that would never come. Andrew’s only coping mechanism, at an age where the mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell was relevant, was texting in paragraphs to Clara. Colt was usually only the runner-up. 

“Did she tell you why she was breaking up with you?” Colt asked, as if Clara hadn’t been texting him about their breakup during the water breaks. He knew why and he took her side on the matter.

“She said I was stunting her growth,” Andrew said. 

That was not what Clara said, earlier, but Colt didn’t doubt it. 

“I just--I don’t know. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

It was Colt who felt exposed, even though Andrew was the one offering his heart out in his sweaty palms. He peered into Andrew’s eyes and only saw his own dark silhouette reflecting back at him, reminding him of the bubble of carbon dioxide stuck in his throat as he thought of what he could say, what there was to say in a humid practice room with no vents, no window to vicariously escape himself out of, no choice but to say something stupid. Andrew was stealing all the oxygen. Colt was stuck, tuned in on Andrew’s frequency with the volume dial cranked to 11. Only Andrew knew how to make silence loud amidst the roar of laughter muffled by the heavy metal door between them, like a makeshift border. Colt was pressed against the white brick wall with nothing clever to say. He had always dreaded sincerity, wouldn’t even sign his emails to his teachers with it. 

Colt was waiting for Mr. Nosecha to rip open the door and tell them that they didn’t have to go home but they couldn’t stay here, but he glanced down at his phone and it was only 9:48 PM. Kids were still caging their black cases behind black bars. The black bats, too, were still flying around the stadium lights because the stadium lights were programmed to shut off automatically at 10. He looked down at Andrew’s baby blue button-up and hyper-focused on the top button. Unbuttoned. The fingers interlaced behind his back unweaved themselves. That button was his new priority, not whatever tired cliche he was about to pull from the hours of reading Cosmopolitan articles about relationship stability. He slipped the little off-white four-dotted circle into its proper slit, straightened out the collar, and it became easier to think. It didn’t matter what he said, really. As his AP World History teacher would say, life sucks and then you die. 

“Don’t be stupid,” Colt told him. The gap between them was in centimeters. “Just find someone else.” 

They were closer to being 12 than they were to being adults. That was their hubris. That was what made Andrew so gullible, to think that a second chance was a lottery ticket that could bring him closer to being a millionaire. Andrew was already filthy rich, if naivety was a currency. Colt could see that, and it made Andrew all the more golden. Fluorescent lights shined like a halo atop Andrew’s dark curls. King of beasts. But Colt wasn’t going to tell him to find someone better, because that meant erecting false dichotomies and assigning arbitrary value to, what, how long someone could last in a high school relationship? And the next highest denomination was how long someone could last in a long-distance relationship, because Andrew had his sights set on some Ivy League across the country, and the next was how long someone could last on a phony marriage certificate signed in hopes of more financial aid. After that, it was senescent woes written in a Google Docs will addressed to whoever would out-live the other. Relationships were finite. 

Earlier, Clara was texting him, with her left thumb double-tapping the caps lock arrow often, that Andrew was already dissipated. Andrew had slipped away from her like a stream of sand piling at the bottom of an hourglass, and she hadn’t even noticed until she saw it was time to flip the glass around. She had that spark of eureka under the apple tree that their relationship had already passed their Best By date. They were together out of habit, not the L-word. Not to mention it’s been nearly three years and they were still calling it the L-word. Andrew was as consumed as the Edible Woman, and it wasn’t from GPA inflation. She still hadn’t figured out what was dooming him, but finally, she could bask in fresh oxygen when she decided that it didn’t have to be her problem, anymore. 

“Do you think I’m awful?” Andrew asked. 

“I do,” Colt said. “Do you not think you’re awful?” 

“I do!” Andrew swore. “But I don’t get it! Why can’t the sky be green? Why can’t the Earth be flat? Why can’t flowers bleed? Why is it that I can still find a way to be sad even when I hit all the right notes? Every day, I hit the bullseye--that little red dot within the green circle surrounded by black and white triangles--and it still feels like I’ve missed! I play all my cards face-up and I still don’t know what my hand is. I look at the solutions manual at the back of the book, and I still don’t get what the answer is. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it!” 

“What if,” Colt proposed, with a straight-legged step backwards, “you don’t have to?”

“Are you a doctor?” 

“What?” 

“Should I be calling you Dr. Colt, MD?” 

“No?” 

“So why are you prescribing me 100mg of Stupidoxyzine!”  

“Oh, screw off!” Colt would’ve rather used the F-word, but he couldn’t afford to owe any more debt to the swear jar with audition season coming around the corner. “I’d break up with you, too.” 

He reached for the doorknob, but Andrew slapped his hand over his and stopped him. 

“Do it,” Andrew dared. He looked into Colt’s eyes and saw past his reflection, saw past the slight dilation of black inside brown and saw into the sincerity Colt locked away in a tall tower surrounded by an alligator moat. “Break up with me.” 

Maybe Andrew was the best at finding the dots, but Colt would always be the best at connecting them. 

“Fine. I will.”

Andrew grasped Colt’s hand, turned the knob, and set them both free. Even in the air-conditioned expanse of the band room, Colt was still dizzy. 

Author's Note

Hi everyone! Hope you liked it! Is the formatting okay? I'll try to fix it when I get the chance if it looks too awkward right now.

Reviews

[Veracity_Fiction]

I really like it so far. I'd be super excited to see more, if you plan on continuing.