Chapter 1

Mindy Middlesex thought of herself as a normal, not-particularly-interesting woman. She was wrong about that. An event in her near future was about to make her life distinctly ab-normal and she was already interesting in spades.

Perhaps a little background would help.

Mindy Middlesex was twenty-six on that Saturday evening, the first Saturday in February, and was neck-deep in her dream job. She was the music teacher and Madrigals coach at Indian Springs High School in Indian Springs, Wyoming. It was her first teaching job after college, and it was as near to perfect as she could imagine it to be.

“The Springs” as it had been called for more decades than anyone could remember, was the kind of place that a pundit would have called “The backbone of America.” The town itself was small, with a population of only eight thousand, but the high school served an area that included another four thousand people. That meant some kids drove forty miles to go to high school every day. If the reader’s eyebrows just rose in surprise, or askance, you should remember (or maybe learn) that Wyoming has a total population hovering around 580,000. There are major cities in the United States that have a larger population than the entire state of Wyoming. Alaska’s population is only a couple of hundred thousand larger, and it’s six times larger in land size. Even Washington D.C.’s population exceeds all of Wyoming’s.

In other words, it’s a sparsely-populated backbone.

What that means, though, is that there aren’t enough people for things that can be called a cancer on society to easily form. Crime is rare. Just about everybody who wants a job has one. There is little free time for people to get themselves into trouble. The climate can be challenging. The latest stats on homelessness say there are 873 people in the entire state who have no permanent home.

People there want to succeed, and they’re willing to work to achieve that success. People who don’t have that work ethic tend to gravitate toward other, easier-to-live-in states.

What that meant to Mindy were things on different levels.

On one level, her students didn’t look at “Music” as an easy credit class, or a place to play video games in secret. They liked music, and they liked making music. That’s what got her madrigals section, the elite among her musical students, to the finals in the music competition she was currently at, on the second day of February.

On another level, perhaps an even more important one, Mindy could heal in the relative loneliness she enforced on herself.

What was she healing from?

A broken heart.

Mindy Middlesex, without knowing it, had already had her nickname for years before she got to Wyoming. Some guy, trying to be cute, took the Two “M”s that were her initials, and added a few more, to make her... “Mmmmmm.” Even some men who didn’t know her name, or initials, thought, “Mmmmm,” when they saw her.

This was because Mindy could easily have become a model, instead of a teacher. That part, she knew. It’s impossible for a good looking girl to make it through high school without learning that good looks attract testosterone.

She kept looking for a boy who wanted to love her mind, instead of just her breasts, and other girly parts. That didn’t happen in high school. She thought college guys would be better, more mature. Not so much. One professor even hit on her.

Like many girls, she thought giving her body to a man might encourage him to commit to her. Like many girls, she found out many men will promise lots of things to get sex ... and then break those promises.

Then she met Phil, and thought that, finally, she’d found her guy. Phil didn’t try to get her in bed on their first date. He waited until they’d been going out a month. To Mindy, that was like a year. She believed he had to be serious, and committed to their relationship. When he offered her a ring and begged her to marry him, her heart leapt.

It was then she discovered the real Phil, the Phil he’d hidden from her.

He liked sex, and he liked exploring lots of ways to have it.

Once she was good at pleasing him, he took her to a party at his frat, where there were people she’d never met.

And he tried to share her.

She’d heard of swapping parties, but thought they were a bit of twisted history, relegated to the sixties and seventies. She had no idea that his Frat’s unofficial motto was: “An orgy a day keeps boredom away.”

When she refused, he became enraged and struck her. His apologies were profuse. He blamed it on the alcohol, He’d already been making lots of hits, what with all the sex she’d given him. Now he got only one strike ... and one out. For Mindy Middlesex, the Phil ballgame was over. She was done.

She graduated from college. The bruise on her cheek had healed. It was her heart, though, that rejoiced in the fact that Wyoming was a good place to be alone. All of the male faculty members at Indian Springs High School were either married, or old enough that they weren’t looking for a relationship with a woman who looked like she could literally fuck them to death.

True, most of the boys thought of her as “Mmmmm” sometimes, but they were circumspect about it. They were polite. And most of them had girlfriends to act out their fantasies with.

She concentrated on the music. Her kids worked at making the music beautiful.

Which brings us to the second of February, and the annual Wyoming music competition with the unusual title of “The Equality State Music Rodeo.” It was held in Cheyenne, and her sixteen-strong madrigal group was pumped to the max to be there. In other states, the competition might have been known as “State Finals,” but the Wyoming Music Rodeo happened sooner than most such contests. Some fun was needed in Wyoming in February, when it was sometimes cold enough that if a kid touched his tongue to steel playground equipment, say on a dare, he had to have expert help to get it unstuck.

Part of the fun was watching other groups perform. What she was looking forward to the most was when her “Mads” were directed by a guest conductor. As part of the judging, the judges themselves gave a group ten minutes to study a piece of music, and then they directed a performance of that music. She was sure her kids would kill it, no matter what they were presented with.

Her conviction wavered a bit, after she watched four other groups go. Some were pretty good, but none really wowed her. It was obvious that this test was difficult. She had to remind herself that her sight-reading skills were honed by years of practice. For some of these students, they’d only been making music a few years, and sight-reading wasn’t one of their skills at all.

Her Mads came on stage at eight P.M. They were the last group to perform that day. The guest conductor was a judge she’d never heard of. A woman sitting next to her leaned over and said, “I’ve been waiting for this all day.”

“Why?” asked Mindy. It was a natural response to the stimulus.

“He’s the best in the state,” said the woman. “He’s also the most demanding.”

“Who is he?” asked Mindy.

The woman looked at her, surprised.

“Gabriel Batiste,” she said. “Surely you’ve heard of him!”

“This is my first year, teaching,” said Mindy. “I’m not from Wyoming.”

“Oh,” said the woman. “Well, get ready to enjoy this. He’s magical. He’ll make this group give everything they have.”

“They’ll do that anyway,” said Mindy. “I know, because they’re mine.”

Then Batiste tapped his baton on the music stand in front of him and raised both hands. The room was silent instantly.

Within ten measures, Mindy knew something was wrong. This wasn’t her group. Granted, she knew all their names, and they looked like her kids. But they didn’t sound like her kids. As she stared, her eyes picked out differences, while her ears tried to decide why they sounded different.

Her ears caught up first. They were too good ... too perfect. It was beautiful, but she knew their voices, and those voices sounded different. Of course they were singing something they’d never sung before, and had only had ten minutes to prepare. But that shouldn’t have affected the quality of their tone. Especially not in a way that made them flawless.

Her eyes registered the next bit of information. Their faces were wooden. No one showed even one bit of emotion. Her kids loved to sing. They exulted in singing. That was a huge part of what made them so good.

But this group of sixteen students was simply going through the motions, singing what was on the page in front of them, and putting little emotion into it. It was technically flawless, but it lacked soul, somehow.

A movement of the director’s baton caught her eye. It was a circular movement that ended in a Z of sorts. It made no sense in the context of when it had been made. Both motions could represent a Caesura; a brief pause, during which time is not counted. The pause ends when the director indicates. But there had been no pause. It could have also been a coda, except the music hadn’t stopped.

As she watched, he did it again. This time it seemed to be “aimed” at one particular student, a girl named Abbey Carter, who actually weaved back and forth for a second or two.