Rapture Practice (23 page)

“If anyone asks, we are not
dancing
.” Mrs. Hastings is standing at the front of the drama room by a television on a cart. “This is
choreography
. There’s a
difference
. Especially to most Baptists.”

When I laugh, Mrs. Hastings smiles, her fuchsia lipstick framing perfect pearly whites. We’re sharing this joke. There is no difference between dancing and choreography. It’s all semantics.

Call it whatever you want….

The choreography we’re learning for
Christy!
the musical is a jig, based on an Appalachian folk dance. There’s a big scene at the end where my character, the drunken, angry hillbilly, finally makes peace with everybody after Christy almost dies of a mountain illness that has been ravaging the rural community. The original music composed by Mr. Green is great, especially this jig at the end—upbeat and
peppy. Mrs. Hastings had a dance instructor friend choreograph an authentic jig after researching the time period and region, and then record video of it at her studio.

We spend some time working through the steps. They’re sort of tricky, but Angela, Megan, and Heather pick them up quickly. They’re cheerleaders, after all, and used to moving their bodies in rhythm. Bradley and I are slower but get it down after about twenty minutes. Turns out jigging is really fun.

Mrs. Hastings clicks off the TV at the front of the classroom, and we move the whole rehearsal onto the stage in the auditorium so we can practice in the space where we’ll be performing. It’s a little harder on the stage without the instructor on the TV, and I hear Megan laughing on my right.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing. You look… like you’re thinking.”

“I
am
!” I say.

“You guys, shut up!” moans Bradley. “You’re messing up my count.”

“Well, at least try not to stick your tongue out and frown. It looks bad,” teases Heather.

“Might I remind you that you’re wearing
culottes
?” I ask her. Megan laughs when I say this. She’s dancing in the skirt she wore to school today.

Heather laughs, too. “Pretty sexy, huh?” She holds out the fabric of her split skirt while continuing to jig.

“Why won’t they let you wear shorts?” Bradley asks.

“The lower the hemline, the closer to God,” I say, loudly
enough that even Mrs. Hastings laughs, and we all lose the step.

“Take five, everybody,” Mrs. Hastings says. “We’ll do this one more time, and I’ll watch you guys.”

I follow Megan down the hall to the water fountain. “How was your date last weekend?” I ask.

She slowly wipes a drop of water from her lip as she stands up. Her eyes narrow, and she flips her long curls over her shoulder. “If you want to know how a date with me goes, why don’t you ask me out on one?”

She turns and strides back down the hall toward the auditorium.

“One condition,” I call after her. She stops but doesn’t turn around.

“What’s that?”

“You have to wear culottes.”

She turns around slowly and walks back toward me down the long hallway of coat hooks outside the auditorium, one hand languidly trailing along the wall, her head tilted to one side with a sweet smile.

Usually, this hallway is bursting with noise. Now I realize how quiet it is with only Megan and me, and the spin in my brain. She stops in front of me and leans in very close.

Too close.

Against-the-rules close.

If Mrs. Hastings walks around the corner right now, we’re dead.

Her lips are almost touching my ear. Her whisper is full-blast, and I can smell her Trésor by Lancôme. “If I say yes when you ask me, you’ll be so incredibly lucky, that you’ll be
thrilled
if I show up wearing culottes.”

She straightens the collar on my polo, pats my shoulder twice, and walks away.

After rehearsal, I head home to practice the piano. I start by warming up with scales: up four octaves, down two, contrary motion for two octaves out and back, then down to octaves. Up one half step. Repeat.

My fingers fly over the keys on autopilot. All I can think about is Megan’s breath on my ear. It made me feel all sorts of things. I’m trying to figure out what, exactly. Sometimes it helps to distract myself with the piano. When I fall into the music, ideas come. I can drop into focus on a particularly hard passage and forget about something that’s bothering me, or I can play easy stuff like scales and let my mind search out answers about something.

Or someone.

Someone like Megan.

It’s true: I can tell Megan likes me. It’s pretty clear she wants me to ask her out, but I don’t know that I feel excited about it. It feels inevitable somehow, like these scales I’m playing. After years of practice, I know what the next move
is; my fingers just know where to go. It feels like the next move everyone expects me to make is to ask Megan out on a date. I
want
to be more excited about it.

Bradley talks about girls with this confidence I don’t feel I have. He seems to think that I should have this same confidence, but I’m not sure I’m feeling the right thing. Maybe being excited about going out with Megan is like the piano: I’ll get better at it with practice.

I finish my scales and open the sheet music I’m working on for competition in the spring. I’m drilling the
andante espressivo
section in the middle: “a walking pace, expressive.” The notes in this section swirl around each other in competing rhythms. Sometimes they bump into one another or barely miss each other. It is a sweet, mournful cacophony. I work these twenty measures for an hour or so, until the notes pour out of my fingers like syrup, slowly, sweetly, swelling, to a place where the beautiful layers meld into a single note, repeated in triplets over and over. This repetition swells in volume and speed until tumbling back through the dissonant full-keyboard runs at the end the piece, each driving to an explosion of four chords in the last measure. When played as written, these final fistfuls of notes sound violent and jarring, as if a barrel of bricks has been dropped onto the keyboard from a great height.

Dad walks through the door from work as I’m finishing, and listens, shaking his head as I bang out the final chords.

“The sound of war is in the camp,” he teases me with a smile. I follow him upstairs to the kitchen, where Mom is
getting dinner ready. He kisses her hello, then I help him set the table.

“Is that your new recital piece?” Dad asks.

“It’s the piece I’m taking to state this year. The Khachaturian Toccata in E-flat Minor.”

“The catcha-who-what?” Dad asks with a grin, and I laugh.

I started taking piano lessons when I was four years old, and a couple of years later I begged to quit. Dad grew up on a farm, the middle son of five boys, and he told me that the way he saw it, I didn’t have any cows to milk, or chickens to feed, or hogs to slop, so the least I could do was give him thirty minutes a day on the piano. Now I’m good enough to win competitions and accompany choirs at church and school. It’s the one thing I’m grateful Dad forced me to do.

“He’s a Russian composer,” I explain, folding napkins to the left of each plate. “This is his toccata. A toccata has lots of fast-moving passages that emphasize the skill and dexterity of my nimble fingers.”

“I dunno,” Dad says. “Sounds like a big train wreck to me.”

Mom comes to my rescue as she takes a homemade chicken potpie out of the oven. “Aaron has been very diligent with this piece. It sounds incredibly difficult. I’m not sure how you even tell when you’re playing the right notes.”

“It
is
pretty dissonant,” I agree. “Twentieth-century composers use lots of clashing tones to build tension—along with lots of random emphasis on the two/four beat.” I love teasing
Dad about his rock music theories. I raise my eyebrows and smirk at him. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t let me quit taking lessons?”

Dad laughs. “What I didn’t tell you back then is that when you turned seventeen, you’d have to start paying for your lessons yourself.”

“Careful what you wish for, Dad. You wanted a son who played the piano in church. That’s what you got.”

“Glory,” Dad exclaims in a farm-boy hick accent that he uses to joke around. “Can’t you practice some of those pretty hymn arrangements? I’m not sure how much more Russian tension I can take.”

“I’m done for tonight.” I smile. “No more Russian music torture until tomorrow.”

Mom calls Josh, Miriam, and Caleb to join us at the table for dinner. After we eat, Dad reaches for his Bible as Mom grabs the Missionary Prayer Box and pulls out a prayer card for a missionary family.

I look around as Dad reads, and think about my family. As much homework as I have to do after dinner, something about this feels good. It’s nice to sit down together like this every night. Not many other kids in my class at school do this.

My family is like the
andante espressivo
section in the middle of the toccata. Sometimes I feel like the melodies of my family are always in conflict—that I’m constantly hitting the wrong notes. Often our rhythms are set against one another,
and we clash. Then there are moments like this, moments where I hear it all come together, and realize if we keep at it—keep practicing, keep searching for the right combinations—we always make an accidental harmony. Our individual notes come together in ways we never knew were possible, ways that surprise me.

Maybe the searching
is
the music.

After I finish my chemistry homework I call Daphne and tell her about Megan.

“Do you like Megan?” she asks.

“Well… yeah.”

Daphne’s soft chuckle is the response. “That wasn’t a ringing endorsement.”

“It seems like everyone expects me to ask Megan out, and I don’t want to hurt Erica’s feelings. I think Erica is really hoping I’ll ask
her
out.”

“What do
you
want to do?”

When Daphne says these words, I realize something:
No one ever asks me that.

“I want to hang out with Bradley and talk to him. Get his advice,” I say.

“Sounds like a plan. You really like this Bradley, don’t you?”

For some reason, the way she says it makes me blush. “Yeah.” I smile into the phone. “He’s the best.”

“Well, I trust you’ll introduce me to Megan and Bradley this weekend. I’m coming to see your play on Saturday.”

“Excellent. I’ll be the hillbilly with the beard and the shotgun.”

Daphne laughs. “Naturally.”

There’s a serial killer in my Bible class.

Every day after geometry, seventh period is Bible class. Mr. Kroger teaches us evangelical theology, and we memorize entire passages of the Bible for a grade in our verse quiz each week. Bradley calls it “mandatory God.”

Mr. Kroger also shows videos in class from time to time. Today’s video features Dr. James Dobson, a Christian psychologist and author who founded a a ministry based in Colorado Springs called Focus on the Family. My mom listens to his radio show every day.

On the video, Dr. Dobson is interviewing Ted Bundy, a serial killer who was executed several years ago after systematically kidnapping, raping and killing many women over twenty years. No one really knows for sure how many. He confessed to around thirty killings, but experts estimate the true number may have been as high as one hundred. Dr. Dobson doesn’t really talk to Ted about that. He’s more focused
on the big issue at hand: How does someone do this to so many people?

I expect the answer might be mental illness. Maybe Ted was off his meds?

But according to Dr. Dobson, it isn’t. The reason Ted Bundy says he did all of these things?

Pornography.

Dr. Dobson asks Ted if the pornography he looked at made him want to degrade women. Ted explains that it did. The message of the video is very clear: Pornography makes you want to hurt women and girls. If you look at enough porn, you might not be able to control your fantasies; you might start to act them out on unsuspecting women and girls. And then kill them.

There is a big ad campaign around town right now, which is funded by a church group, about the dangers of pornography. There are billboards all over Kansas City with famous sports stars, mainly major-league baseball players. They’re all smiling and happy and very clean-cut looking, wearing spotless sports uniforms. The tagline reads
REAL MEN DON’T USE PORN
.