Choir Boy Read Free Page A

after that performance.”
    “What’s the worst he can do?” Berry asked. He thought George must already be suffering enough as it was.
    “Yo, Mr. Allen can flay with a look,” Marc said. He pulled his ear away from the door just before it opened.
    George and Mr. Allen walked out together. George looked both crushed and relieved. Mr. Allen looked resigned to a friend’s death. The boys parted to let Mr. Allen pass, but he stopped in front of the group and said, “George’s voice has broken. Happened faster than expected—but there’s no way to put off the inevitable. George will move to the men’s section and sing alto from now on.” Then Mr. Allen walked out into the parking lot to see if any homeless people had peed on his car today.
    “A man,” George said through phlegm. “I’m a man now.” Everybody looked at him as if he were an alien.
    Berry poured his punch all over the tie Marco had given him. He glanced down at the spreading stain on tie and white shirt. “Shit.” He pointed the mess out to Wilson, who was too busy watching Lisa Gartner walk past.
    “There are still things to look forward to,” Wilson said without taking his eyes off Lisa. Her church skirts formed lacunae around her slender legs, almost down to her sandals. Wilson’s gaze followed her until she reached her mother’s car. “So like happy birthday.”
    “Thanks,” Berry said. He sipped punch dregs and thought about manhood.
    2 .
    The station wagon loaded with ruckus crawled up the winding mountain roads. The boys in the back seat heckled the driver, a bass named Maurice, to speed up. They made revving noises and called Maurice “feather foot.” A large man with a pointy beard, Maurice turned up his Puccini tape to drown the commotion. He’d given up on drawing his choirboy crew into a game of “name that anthem” with a different tape.
    In the Dodge’s “way back,” Berry hunched between backpacks and gym bags. He watched the road twist downward and tried to forget his soul-shriveling summer. The full choir had just sung together for the first time in six weeks, to thank the congregation for raising money to send it to camp. Every August, the choir rented the Peterman School, three hours from the city. The choir had use of Peterman’s dorms, soccer fields, swimming pool, and most importantly, chapel for a week.
    Berry pretended he was a prisoner of war, his will broken by torture. He’d spent the summer break alone, since Marco and Judy couldn’t afford to send him to any other camps. Berry’d had the whole summer to contemplate George’s voice-dive. He’d wandered his parents’ crumbling neighborhood, kicking garbage and singing to himself. Every day, he’d done vocal exercises and monitored every notch in the scale for blemishes. Treble voices die from the middle and the decay spreads both ways. The bottom of the upper “head voice” range is the first to go. Promoting George to alto only showcased how bad his mid-treble had gotten, since that was the peak of the alto range.
    That summer had scorched away Berry’s hope. Berry had looked at his life to come and had seen boredom and revulsion. Marco had broken the television in May, and Berry’s allowance could handle only one or two movies a month. So he’d read any books he could find at the library or in his parents’ bookshelves. He’d listened endlessly to the same dozen or so used CDs: Choral Fugue State, Blissed Out Boys Sing Britten, etc.
    And he’d locked his door. He’d ignored his mom saying things like, “The only reason you don’t physically abuse me is it would require concentration.” And his dad saying, “Your animal guide told me to burn all your pantyhose.” Berry had gotten so strung out he’d considered getting a job. Somewhere in the middle of that awful asphalt-cracking, benzine-scented, sandmouthed permanent headache of a summer, Berry had come across the phrase in a book: “Boredom is a valid reason to kill yourself.”