Double Tears
Chapter 124
“The string slices into the skin of his fingers and no matter how tough the calluses, it tears.”
—Melina Marchetta, The Piper’s Son
5 OCTOBER 2020
There is so much we don’t understand and aren’t being told. I didn’t know there were state-run creches—a kind of cross between daycare and an orphanage. I was so pissed last winter at the thought Francie and her baby would be separated and she’d have to serve two years without him. I wasn’t shocked that the government would do that, based on what had been happening along our southern border in the last years of the old man’s life. It just seemed like a stupid thing to do. But Francie’s service was assigned to a creche and she could take her son with her.
And what’s with Francie popping in and wanting to have sex? I feel guilty about it. Not enough that I wouldn’t do it, of course. She looks a hell of a lot hotter now than she ever did in high school. I guess she has gym time every morning. But what is she to me? She’s not part of my pod or a girlfriend. It was like sex with her was grandfathered in because we’d had sex before I had a pod. I need to talk to Rachel. She seems to understand how our relationships work better than anyone. I mean to explain them so my thick head can understand. I guess we just click on that level. I hope she doesn’t get mad at me.
Maybe she can explain Cindy, too. I should have expected that. For four months, we’ve treated her like a member of the pod. Of course, she’d become one. And with our music, I spend as much or more time with her than with anyone else in the group. I’m expecting a long talk with Mom about how to treat her. I think Mom and Dad have planned dinner with Mark and Betty again this week while the pod is all gathered out at Donna’s.
Here’s something the old man in me never understood. Being an artist, a musician, a writer, a poet, or even an athlete is hard work. He would scoff at teens who wasted their time playing instead of doing real work in a profession. Granted, I know teens in my class who do just that. They have more games on their phones than text messages. They’re chasing after Pokemon or Angry Birds or some stupidity. But I know eighty kids in orchestra who all spend as much time practicing their instruments as they do on the rest of their homework. Many of them more time. They’re serious about their music. Desi is in rehearsal for the school play more hours a week than I’m practicing cross country. And she’s serious about becoming a performer. If I want to be as good a musician and writer as the old man was an engineer, I will probably have to work harder at it than he ever worked at math.
Where and when am I going to find the time to simply understand the world I live in?
The first three days of the week were capital HARD. I wasn’t running in the morning because that was when I was getting my homework done. Teachers were getting us ready for the end of term tests next week. I was running hard in the afternoon to get ready for the sectionals on Saturday and then grabbing a shower so I could make it to orchestra rehearsal. The fall concert was Wednesday night and we were doing full rehearsals both Monday and Tuesday. I’d get home about ten and try to do homework, most of which would wait for me to wake up in the morning.
“You guys were great last night,” Rachel said at lunch Thursday. She gave Cindy a big hug and then latched onto me. I melted into her kiss and Beca finally gave us a nudge so we wouldn’t get reprimanded in the cafeteria. Then she kissed me, too. It looked like Cindy had been passed around the table getting hugs.
“You should get class off today,” Livy said. “As much as you’ve rehearsed this week it would only be fair.”
“LeBlanc is going through every piece measure-by-measure critiquing everyone in the orchestra. I don’t know how he even remembers what we played,” I moaned.
“Speaking of which, what are we playing next?” Cindy asked. “It’s already the second week of October and we don’t have a November performance set.”
“It’s too early for holiday music, that’s for sure,” Rachel said.
“Remember, you don’t have to do a whole concert every month,” Desi said. “You’ve kicked off with two major productions—Mountain Monster and Suite Buenos Aires—and could do something a little lower key for November.”
“That’s a good point,” I said. “We should take a look at how often some of the other artists are doing a production and how big it is. We all like Lindsey Stirling but she’s only releasing three or four videos a year, not one a month.”
“You won’t need to release that frequently once we get your audience established,” Livy said. “Right now, we’re attracting patrons with new material. Eventually, we’ll be able to attract listeners with existing material. Even solo work by both of you.”
“I’m cutting my regular morning concerts,” I said. “Everything on my channel will be available.”
“I might have an idea,” Cindy said. “Can we talk tonight?”
“I’ll be over after cross country practice,” I said.
“Light practice tomorrow, right?” Rachel said. I nodded. “Then I’m taking you right after practice for the night. I want to make sure you are good and rested before sectionals Saturday.”
“What about me?” Livy pouted. “I want to be good and rested.”
“I get you,” Beca said. “I want to make sure you’re good and rested but not too sore to run. You can only have Jacob after races.”
Thirteen schools competed in the sectionals at Northrop. One of the schools didn’t field a full team, so there were only twelve teams competing. Nonetheless, the top runner from the school that didn’t have a full team came in 17th and won a position at regionals. Any individual placing in the top forty got a berth at regionals. The top five teams advanced. 10 individuals who weren’t on qualifying teams also advanced.
Then it was time for the 10k. We all knew we were advancing to regionals because there were only five full teams. Those thirty runners were joined by twenty individual runners for the 10k, so fifty of us started the race and at least forty would advance to regionals. Jock talked to me right before the race and told me I couldn’t let up just because it was a short field. There would be more competition for these forty slots than for the top forty in a field of a hundred. I took his warning to heart and ran a solid thirty-six for the first time this season. Our top five runners were in the top fifteen places and we took the team honors.
Livy took first in the girls’ 5k with her closest competitor only a step behind her at 18:34. Mad Anthony took first place in all three races. We were headed to regionals next week.
I spent the night Saturday at Donna’s. She spent the night with Nanette and Beca. I just needed a place where I could sink into oblivion for a few hours. I didn’t want a girlfriend with me or anything else. I took one of the upstairs bedrooms and turned on the TV. Discovered Donna has cable for the TVs in all rooms and I found an old movie.
Ha! Old movie. V1 thought I was looking for something from the thirties or forties. William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles. No. V3 was looking at M.A.S.H. I wonder if the old adage that anything over fifty years old is an antique still holds true.
I think I fell asleep by ten. I don’t remember the end of the movie.
When I got up Sunday, I went for a gentle run through the woods, then showered and ate breakfast. It seemed strange not to be doing a concert, so I grabbed my guitar and just played for a while. I needed to remind myself that the reason I loved playing the guitar was because I loved playing the guitar and feeling the music flow from my fingertips. It wasn’t because of the fan club and subscriptions and helping Cindy. Those were all great, but what I wanted more than anything was just to feel the music.
I wondered if it was a remnant of V2 escaping from the nightmares and the forbidden love he felt. Ultimately, for him, it hadn’t been enough. I just let the music flow and wash away the tensions. I had a big decision to make. If I wanted the music—this peace and calm and creative energy—to be the thing I focused on, I needed to let something else go. Assuming I could continue to win or place in the long races, I had three more cross country meets to get me through state finals. I’d already decided I wouldn’t be running track in the spring. Running was a V3 addition to my life that made me feel good, but I didn’t need to compete. I could feel just as good with a 3k or 5k run each morning before school.
And school was another thing. Just as I’d already sacrificed math so I could focus on English and music, I was on the verge of sacrificing the rest of school.
Now here’s the thing. V1 had long held that not every person needed to go to college. There were good technical careers available that didn’t require a college degree. Many of those technical careers were understaffed because youth were turning their backs on them to go to college. The National Service was changing that. It was too early to get good statistics but, from the data I got when touring the university, enrollment was still down and fewer students were enrolling after two years of service than had coming out of high school ten years ago.
What I’d never considered was that other professions didn’t require a college degree. The degree was just a piece of paper that said you’d done the work. But when I thought of Cindy, for example, there was no more guarantee that she would be able to get a principal flautist position with a major orchestra when she got out of college than if she applied straight from high school. Of course, musicians continue to get better if they practice well.
A famous story about cellist Pablo Casals says he was asked at age 81 why he continued to practice four and five hours a day. Casals answered: “Because I think I am making progress.”
But he wasn’t taking advanced math classes to make that statement.
If I was going to make progress playing the guitar and let my fingers truly find the beauty of my instrument, other classes were going to suffer. And having C grades in chemistry, history, language, accounting, or what have you, wouldn’t get me into a fine college. What I cared about were English and music. Those were what I needed to focus on.
I said goodbye to a part of V1 that always assumed grades were important across the board regardless of his interest.
At one o’clock, I heard car doors outside and put my guitar aside. I’d been playing for four hours and hadn’t noticed time passing at all. I ran to the bathroom with sudden awareness of my bladder.
When I came out, I found most of the pod gathered as well as Ray Long, Joan’s father. The National Service had started another voluntary test and we’d be seeing it in less than two weeks. Livy was along just to report and assist. She’d taken her NSAT two weeks ago. Rachel was five weeks away from taking hers. All of us who were juniors would take the PNSAT in two weeks. Ray was there to give us all pointers.
I wasn’t sure why Cindy, Nanette, and Sophie were listening. Donna, of course, intended to pass the information on to her own students.
“The Preliminary National Service Aptitude Test is new, so we don’t have as much information about it. Since it is considered a guidance test for high school students and not a potential employee test, the Corps hasn’t given out as much information about it to businesses other than to say it is similar in scope to the NSAT that everyone takes within thirty days of his or her eighteenth birthday. The results, supposedly, are shared only with the student to assist in identifying strengths, weaknesses, and interests innate in the individual rather than those that have been learned. Based on what we’ve seen of placement in the past six years, the government considers aptitude to be a shortcut to career development.”
“Does that mean you have to go into a field revealed by the aptitude test?” Desi asked.
“As it’s shaking out, I’d have to say that is the way it’s being used. There are skills that can override aptitude. If you’ve studied something hard, practiced, worked at it diligently, you might have developed latent talents that advance that aptitude over something you might have had a more natural bent to.”
“That makes it sound like our future is predetermined,” I sighed.
“That’s what we’re trying to overcome,” Ray said. “What we want to do on the test is to bring the interest you have higher than some latent talent you might not even know about. Jacob, you discovered the danger of letting what is easy for you come to the fore when you took the readiness exam last spring. What we want to do is show you how to… control the exam so it goes in the direction you want.”
We all nodded and got down to work. We had our laptops and Ray gave us each a log-in for his company computer. He had tests loaded. According to him, we could take a given test multiple times and experiment with different answers. He warned us the test would be timed and we would be forced to answer rapidly. The reason for this was so our responses would come from immediate thoughts and not considered contemplation. The only way to manipulate the test was to make our desired responses become our automatic responses.
I thought again about how my fingers moved on the fretboard and across the strings. My answers had to be as smooth as my playing.
It’s a lot harder to scam an aptitude test than a skills test. If you look at a question and see 2 + 2 = ?, you probably know the answer. But you can torpedo your results by writing 5 in the blank. Answer wrong! When given a matrix of nine shapes with one cell empty and a list of four shapes below it, you either ‘see’ which shape completes the matrix or you don’t. And they call that ‘non-verbal aptitude.’ It’s a lot harder to answer questions you like correctly and questions you don’t like incorrectly.
A typical aptitude test is divided into sections and timed by section. So, you’ll get the non-verbal, verbal, and numeric sections one at a time. You know what aptitude you’re testing for. But not the NSAT. It mixes the categories and might repeat questions you’ve answered in a slightly different order. Add in other aptitude sections with completely different kinds of questions: mechanical, clerical, situational judgment, code breaking, letter sequencing, spatial orientation. The key element was to practice the test enough times that we could tell what kind of answer they were looking for in each kind of aptitude. They weren’t looking for something general like, ‘He has good verbal skills and average numerical skills.’ They were creating a profile that would say, ‘He should work in a chemistry lab,’ or ‘He should paint stripes down the center of a highway.’
We ran two of the shorter, fifteen-minute tests that afternoon. I could tell one thing for sure: you needed to be well-rested to take this test or you’d be answering from deep in your psyche instead of from your mind.
“Remember,” Ray said, “a lot of aptitude is attitude. Walk into the test being the kind of person you want to be seen as.”
The first grading period ended on Friday and I practiced my attitude during the tests. We were always taught that having a good confident attitude would help us do well on tests, but thinking about music when taking a Latin test isn’t necessarily a way to do well in Latin. Except in that instance, it is. All musical notation is in Italian and a huge amount of classical choral music is written in Latin. Musicians actually have a leg up in Latin.
Regardless, we survived. Friday night, true to her promise, Rachel took care of Livy. I was a little concerned when Sophie and Brittany said they were taking care of me. I needed rest before my race in the morning. I got it. They made sure I was completely relaxed, my muscles massaged, and my balls emptied, but they weren’t trying to kill me with sex. I got a good night’s sleep and was on the bus to West Noble for regionals at seven.
I like their course. It has dirt trails, winds in and out of woodland, has a bit beside a lake, and has clear visibility to the finish line from half a mile away. Of course, in my race, I had to complete the course twice. That’s how most of the schools that had 10k races were doing it.
We had a strong showing in both the boys’ and the girls’ 5k. Livy bettered her time and ran another close first (to the same girl) at 18:17. The team met stiff competition and placed second. Our guys dropped to third, including losing to one of the teams we beat in sectionals. I knew we could do better. The guys’ times hadn’t dropped below sixteen minutes yet and I knew they’d face that kind of competition in the semi-state.
I ran my best yet at 35:14 but was several feet behind a guy from Columbia City. He didn’t have a full team to run so our guys easily took first in the team category. Jock had made a strategic decision at the beginning of the season to run a full team in every race. We had a better chance of a team medal just by showing up.
Well, there were still five of the ten teams who competed headed to our semi-state next weekend. That would be a zoo, even though we were running one of my other favorite courses. Our semi-state would be at The Plex.
The close second in the race was no problem. I knew what I had waiting at home. I’d be celebrating my seventeenth birthday this afternoon.
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