Chapter 149

“Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed.”
—Emma Cline, The Girls

I DIDN’T IGNORE Desi and Brittany. Once we were sure we had shown our senior girlfriends how much we loved them, we left them cradled in each other’s arms and moved to the other bedroom. There, I tried to show the two of them that I loved them just as much as I loved Rachel and Livy. When I could no longer rise to penetrate, my tongue continued to lap at their juices, my fingers continued to invade their tight little pussies. And when I was finally exhausted to the point of passing out, the two girls had one more round with each other and passed out sprawled across me.

Like at last year’s prom, the rest of our girlfriends joined us after we were showered and presentable in the morning. The ten of us went to brunch, sharing our adventures and excitement.

“You have another record number of downloads already for last week’s concert,” Beca announced. “We released it on YouTube last night and there’s another spike in viewers. Like always, a spike in viewers means an increase in sales of the tracks and of merchandise.”

“How do you get that information so fast?” I asked. I pulled my little girlfriend close for a hug.

“Joan! She gets so excited when you release a new video that she stays up all night watching the action,” Beca giggled. “Then she calls me before I’m ready to wake up in the morning. Which is okay because she always talks us through a nice come before we talk business.”

“You girls are too much!” Rachel laughed.

“What would I need to do to be included in one of those early morning calls?” Donna asked. We all laughed but I saw Beca wink at her.

“So, what’s next?” Cindy asked, looking at me.

“We need to put together our playlist for the audition,” I said. “We are to have a selection of pieces that meet specific criteria that we are ready to simply play when they say something like ‘Desiertos Ladeado, please.’ We need to prepare our instruments and start playing. And that includes solo pieces in addition to things we play together.”

“Do we really need to do this, Jacob?” she asked. I’d seldom seen Cindy seem so uncertain.

“Are you not wanting to do this, my Pied Piper?”

“No, I do. I’m sorry. This seems like so much more pressure than we usually have for a performance. I don’t want to mess things up for you,” she said. I nudged Desi and she quickly traded place with me so I could sit next to Cindy. I put my arm around our youngest girlfriend.

“I want this for you, sweetie. We’re dreaming of something big. I’ll be your partner for as long as you want me, but I want to launch you into a career that will be everything you dream of. Don’t worry about me.”

“That’s exactly what you should both be doing,” Sophie said. “You are both launching each other. I hope you are launching something together. But it’s always helpful to stay focused on making your partner look as good as possible. That’s what we do in dance, too. And you could be leading all of us into something big. Do it for yourselves, but do it for all of us.”

“Thank you, Sophie,” Cindy said. “I appreciate the way you reduced our stress there.” We all laughed, but having Cindy make a joke about it was what we all needed. And I needed to be aware of the fact that Cindy’s wasn’t the only life I was affecting. I’d been struggling to reconnect with my pod since Pey’s death. When I looked at the nine women around our table and thought of Em and Joan, I just overflowed with love for them.

17 May 2021

I’m trying to figure out if the school schedule could be made in such a way that could more effectively ruin our holiday. We have two weeks of school left before Memorial Day. Then we’re off for a holiday weekend and come back on Tuesday to start final exams. Like, who is going to enjoy the holiday when we’re all trying to get ready for finals?

And, I admit, I’m a little worried about the audition schedule. We’ll be leaving for Lawrence, Kansas for the Ren Faire on June 23rd. We need to have our program ready for that, too, and I don’t even have an instrument for our troubadour performances. I can hardly ask Riley to give me another lute guitar. I’m thinking I need to bite the bullet and buy a mandolin but I don’t know if I can learn to play it well enough before the faire to make it worthwhile.

I’m going to ask Herr Richter to help me order the right viol this afternoon. If nothing else, I want to be ready to include it in our repertoire during the audition. I think we’ll be carrying a lot more instruments with us than we’ll actually need. Donna said not to worry about transportation. Our camera crew has agreed to join us for the trip and Sophie is working with the audition contacts to get the taping approved. Donna’s hired the camera crew—just two of them since we won’t be streaming live—to travel to Kansas with us. But then Cindy and I will have a week apart while I join Em for her last week of service and to help her move home.

At least I’ll have that week with Em so I won’t feel guilty about not spending as much time with her when we get back and Cindy and I have to spend every available minute prepping for the audition. I sympathize with Cindy about the stress she’s feeling. There are just so many unknowns. We were told to both prepare solo pieces as well as our duets.

And I want to spend as much time with Livy as I can before graduation. She leaves the next week to start her service. In fact, I need to head out now to meet her so we can run together this morning and then get a shower together before school. She’s under as much stress as we are. I love that girl and I’ll do whatever I can to help her succeed.

Well, life sure isn’t allowing me any time to mope about.

I was back in a routine as we counted down the days of the school year remaining. If it weren’t for having huge papers due for English and creative writing, I would have pretty much checked out. Latin was mostly rote memorization though we had to read and comprehend more of Virgil for the final exam. I was dredging most of chemistry up out of my V1 memory. At least he was useful for something. I was functioning pretty well in accounting and John was giving me time to work with my team on putting together a plan for how we’d do our reality special this summer. I was really glad I took this advanced photography class even though I spent more time in front of the camera than behind it. I learned a lot about staging and camera presence. I know it was helping me when I worked with Cindy.

And that was the other thing—working with Cindy. LeBlanc was focused on the chamber section, basically a pared-down segment of the orchestra that would travel to the State Orchestral Competition in Indy right after commencement. Cindy was in it but I wasn’t. He dismissed the rest of the orchestra to a practice room where we basically jammed when we were doing anything creative at all. Most of us studied other subjects.

After school I had an hour with Herr Richter. I was beginning to learn the drone and loved what it did to the tone of even a simple piece. Monday, we spent most of the time together finalizing my order for a viol of my own. Dad transferred the insurance money for my guitars directly to my account so I could order what I wanted. As soon as we got the viol ordered—to be delivered to Herr Richter so he could examine it and verify it was what I wanted—we did a search for mandolins.

I could see that over the course of a few years, I was going to have a lot of different instruments. I’d assumed I would get a lute but there are a hundred different kinds and tunings and music is harder to come by. LeBlank and Richter both advised me to look at a mandolin as my medieval instrument because the standard tuning was the same as a violin and there was a lot of music I could use for that. We chose a bowl back mandolin with eight courses (strings) tuned in pairs. The two major differences in playing the instrument were the tuning in fifths instead of fourths and flat picking. I didn’t care for flat picking the guitar because it has only one tone at a time and depends on speed of moving the pick. Herr Richter said the mandolin has more depth in flat picking because of the twinning of the strings so you pluck across two strings tuned to the same pitch. The other alternative, of course, is strumming chords and if I wanted to do that I’d become a rhythm guitarist in a rock band. We called Vinnie and told him what I was looking for and Vinnie said he’d take care of it. And even with the viol and the mandolin, I had enough money in my account to pay for the guitar Vinnie had loaned me. I was getting to like it a lot, especially for Spanish and flamenco music.

Cindy and I met each day immediately after my practice with Herr Richter. We spent as much of our time with pencils, listing and categorizing our repertoire, as we did actually practicing. We worked in the practice room Monday and Tuesday so our video crew could get some footage. Wednesday, we left school and went to Donna’s. Most of our pod was already there for our normal Wednesday study session. We needed to keep working and occasionally burst into music. I saw Donna and Sophie in a close consultation and they called Rachel and Beca, along with us, to Donna’s office.