Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Theo
Milo fist pumped. “We’re insane. I love it.”
Julian groaned. “You’re starting a brand-new group with one of the most notoriously over-arranged, vocally acrobatic—”
“—iconic,” Finnley breathed. I swore he had stars in his eyes.
“—songs of all time,” Julian finished. Then he grinned. “I call that a bold strategy.”
Zane folded his arms. “It’s a choice, but then so is chewing kitchen foil.”
Max peered at me from his rear position. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. It was true, but only on a technicality. I was like a violin string tuned past comfort, one more twist from snapping. I squared my shoulders. “Let’s get one thing straight. We—”
“If we do, it’ll be the only thing in this room that is,” Julian said with a smirk.
I ignored him. “We’re not trying to perform it, okay? Today is about listening. Locking. Let’s map entrances, get the blend in our ears, and—Milo, stop staring at the piano. Concentrate.”
Milo jerked his head back. “You’re fun.”
“I am,” I said, aiming for a deadly tone. “When people follow directions.”
He gave an exaggerated hard swallow. “Got it.”
I passed out the song sheets I’d printed that morning.
Zane chuckled. “I suppose if I used this to put under my chair leg to stop it wobbling, you’d take offence.”
Max laughed. “Don’t even go there.”
I waited until everyone was looking in my direction.
“From the top. Finnley has the first line. Elliott, shadow harmony. Julian, breathe and wait. Baritones under. Max, you and I anchor at half-voice.” I paused. “Everyone?” I fixed them with a hard stare. “Listen. To. Each. Other.” I gave Finnley a nod.
Finnley’s voice poured out, sweet and shockingly pure. “Is this the real life—”
Elliott slid in a hair late but locked fast. Liam anchored. Oliver split the third cleanly. Max’s bass rumbled, I brought my own bass in and—
Milo burst in three bars early with, “Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the fandango—”
“Stop,” Sebastian snapped. “Wrong section.”
“Don’t ‘wrong section’ me. I have range.”
“You have volume,” Julian said dryly. “It’s not the same.”
I hit my thigh with the clipboard, and it landed with a dull thwok. “Back to bar three.”
We tried again.
Julian over sang to prove a point, washing Elliott out. Oliver and Liam adjusted, but then Finnley floated up too soon to the harmony above the melody and Milo, who had been vibrating like a can of fizzing coke, couldn’t not riff over “real life,” and Zane—
I stared at him. “Are you singing?”
“I’m considering it,” Zane deadpanned. “I’m auditioning the concept.”
I counted to four in my head. Then eight. Then sixteen. “Sing.”
Zane sang, and damn it, he was good.
Annoyingly good.
“Better,” I said. “Reset.”
We reset. We reset again. We reset until the word reset lost all meaning, and my pencil had chewed marks from my teeth.
Oh my God.
Elliott apologised for everything he did, even when he did nothing.
Julian said “with love” before every critique, but the words still felt as sharp as a blade.
Sebastian asked for a metronome.
Finnley attempted a Freddie Mercury stance and knocked his own chart off the stand.
Milo called the song “a cathedral of harmonies” and then forgot to come in.
Oliver kept everyone in key by sheer force of patience.
Liam smiled and patted shoulders like a primary school teacher with a gift.
Zane announced he could only commit emotionally if he got a five-minute coffee break every fifteen minutes.
Max told a joke.
I did not laugh.
“Again,” I said.
Max moved closer and murmured, “If you keep chewing your pencil like that, you’ll end up eating the thing.”
Breathe.
I unclenched. “We’re slurring consonants. If I hear one more swallowed ‘life’ I will perish.”
“Don’t perish,” Max said. “Who would we get to laminate things for us?”
I didn’t dignify that with a response. I looked at the lineup we’d made, at the nine men who’d walked into the rehearsal with swagger and nerves and hope.
Give me strength.
“You know what you’re doing, don’t you?” Max’s low murmur filled my ear again. “You’re trying to map us like code: problem, fix; bug, patch. But this isn’t IT, and people don’t compile like programs. If only.”
I forced myself to take a deep cleansing breath.
“Group, eyes on me.” The room fell silent, and nine pairs of eyes focused on me.
Another breath. “We’re not chasing perfection today.
We’re chasing lock. That moment where the chord stops being individual voices and becomes a single sound.
If you can hear yourself, you’re too loud.
If you can’t hear yourself, you’re too soft.
Give me breath at the edges, consonants at the same time, vowels in the same mouth shape. And for the love of Freddie, listen.”
“Dad voice,” Milo whispered, visibly impressed.
“Daddy voice,” Zane corrected.
Julian clicked his tongue. “Gotta respect the Daddy voice.”
I silently counted to five. “From the top.”
We managed six bars before someone tripped over the word “thunderbolt.”
“Enunciate,” Sebastian said.
“You enunciate,” Milo flung back.
“Gladly,” Sebastian snapped, and did, slicing each consonant.
Elliott flinched at the sharpness, and Liam bumped him with a friendly shoulder. “You sound great,” he whispered.
Elliott’s colour rose, staining his cheeks and neck. “I squeaked on ‘real.’”
“Everybody squeaks on their first day. Ask my first boyfriend.” He paused. “Actually? Don’t.”
Oliver seemed the most unflappable of all of them. He made a note on the song sheet with a tiny pencil, and I had to take a peek.
Watch cutoffs bar 8.
I had to smile.
Okay, maybe there’s hope for us yet.
We tried the “Mama, just killed a man” section. Milo insisted on lead. Julian rolled his eyes and harmonised with surgical precision anyway. Zane sang a line that sounded like a smirk.
Sebastian corrected Finnley’s vowel on “gun.”
Oliver asked if they wanted barbershop bright or choral round.
Liam smirked. “Whichever prevents Theo from having a stroke.”
“I’m not—” I began, then stopped.
Maybe I was overdoing it. A little.
Max put an arm around my shoulders and spoke in a stage whisper to the room. “He’s fine. This is foreplay for him.”
“Kill me now,” I murmured.
“After we settle the sixteenth note runs,” Max said. “Priorities, right?”
I shoved him off and took centre again. “Let’s isolate. Baritones, give me your line on ‘life’ through ‘easy come, easy go.’ Tenors, hum quietly under it; falsetto, rest.”
We peeled the song apart. Oliver and Liam locked first, satisfying and solid. I permitted myself a nod. “Good. Tenors on top now, baris under. Elliott, take the melody, Julian a third above. Careful on the vibrato. Think spin, not shake.”
Elliott tried, cracked, then apologised.
I shook his head. “No need to be sorry. Just do it again.”
Elliott did, and it wasn’t perfect, but it was better.
“Falsetto,” I said. “Give me the ‘little high, little low’ like you’re wind over glass.”
Finnley smiled as though I’d handed him a poem.
Milo grinned as if I’d handed him a blowtorch.
Zane looked pained, then delivered exactly what I asked for.
Of course he did.
Sebastian’s tone rang like a bell in cold air. All four together turned the phrase into something shimmering and fragile.
An unhelpful lump moved through my throat. “Yes, like that. Hold it.”
Except they didn’t.
Milo tried a run. Zane snorted. Finnley apologised to the air for ruining the moment. Sebastian muttered something about discipline.
“Break time,” Max declared in a cheerful voice, before my eye twitched. “Five minutes.”
I checked my watch. We’d been at it forty minutes. It felt like two days and also five seconds. I hadn’t had coffee or water.
I’d had twelve tiny heart attacks, however.
I picked up a water bottle and drank from it, noticing the faint taste of someone else’s lip balm. I put it down quickly.
The room fractured into small clusters. Milo performed a dramatic retelling of his audition for a captive Liam and a politely smiling Elliott.
Zane leaned a chair back on two legs, scrolled his phone, and made dry commentary on the comments he saw. “Someone on TikTok thinks they invented harmonies today.”
Oliver and Sebastian unlidded a Tupperware of cut fruit because Sebastian had packed a snack like an overprepared ballet mum, and Oliver had brought little wooden forks.
Max drifted back to where I sat. “You’re vibrating,” he said.
“I’m fine.” Another technical truth.
“You get this way when you care too much,” Max said gently.
I shot him a look. “I care a normal, healthy amount. Like any person who creates a ten-voice a cappella group and decides their first piece should be an operatic rock epic.”
Max laughed. “Okay, Captain Clipboard. What’s the plan?”
“Isolate, rebuild, then full run. If they don’t lock today, they at least need the muscle memory of fighting for it.”
Max nodded. “You’re good at this.”
“I am not good at this.” If that were the case, I’d have gotten us to where I wanted.
“You are,” Max repeated, his tone kind. “You hear the shape of it before the rest of us. That’s a leader thing.”
“I don’t—” I bit off the rest, because the room was already coalescing back around me, several pairs of eyes turning like iron filings to a magnet.
The magnet happened to be me. I’d asked for it, I’d built it.
Now I had to be it.
“Back in,” I said, clapping once. “We’re chunking. Bars one through twelve, then twenty-two through thirty, then we attempt the ‘Galileo’ gauntlet, at which point any of you who make a bat squeak unironically will go time out.”
Milo grinned. “Kinky.”
We went again. And again. I discovered new micro-obsessions: the way Julian angled towards Elliott when he sang, protective despite the snark; the way Liam’s breath reset the room; how Oliver’s ear twitched at dissonance; how Zane’s humour always spiked right when someone needed it; how Finnley physically swayed into a chord like a plant toward light; how Sebastian’s eyebrows conducted from his forehead.