Bellweather Rhapsody Read Online Free PDF Page A

waved to the owlish accompanist, who began to play ABBA’s “S.O.S.”
Be unpredictable
—that was her mother’s advice.
Don’t blend and they’ll remember you
. Unlike Molly and the two other girls who had butchered “On My Own,” who were memorable, sure, but not the way they wanted to be.
    Alice sang the paint off the walls. She had never sounded this good. Not in the shower, not in her bedroom, not in the backyard or the kitchen or when following Rabbit around to annoy him. Not when her mother played in the evenings and sang with her, not even when she’d been practicing for this audition. Singing on this stage, her voice freed to fill a whole auditorium, was what Alice Hatmaker was born to do, and now that she was doing it, she knew exactly who she was. Molly Brotowski, with her shitty Eponine and her private lessons, didn’t matter; the ugliness that infected every last inch of her flesh didn’t matter; her brilliantly good brother who pretended that he didn’t look at her with pity sometimes didn’t matter. Hell, the talent show barely mattered. She was beyond it.
    Alice Hatmaker was a star.
    The Trapper Keeper open on her lap, Alice pages back through her years, more than a little in love with her own recent past. A playbill from eighth grade, when she played Miss Adelaide in
Guys and Dolls,
the first time in RFH history an eighth grader brought down the house
.
A scrap of red fabric from the dress she wore as Nancy in
Oliver!,
taped next to a photo of her in costume. God, she loved that dress. It made her body feel like someone else’s. She flips all the way to the beginning.
     
To whom it may concern,
she reads.
I, Alice Hatmaker, do solemnly swear that what you are about to read is the absolute true and unadulterated story of my life. This is only the beginning, but I’m going to fly so high, so fast, I’m going to break the sound barrier.
     
    Her signature takes up the entire bottom half of the page.
    Her name in these old programs, seeing herself in these old pictures, reading words she remembers writing, all make her feel as though she actually exists. The past is solid. She can stand on it. She can dance on it if she wants.
    The future is different. Like the remaining sheets in her Trapper Keeper, blank and finite.
    She looks at her watch and frowns. Rehearsal starts at three o’clock. It’s now a quarter to three, and they haven’t gotten off the highway yet.
    “Hey,” her brother says, his voice catching. “How much longer, do you think?”
    He’s stressed all to hell. Her nervous bunny of a brother, king of all worrywarts.
    “We’re going to be a little late to the first rehearsal,” Wilson says. “I’m sorry about that. You can blame it on me.”
    “You said it,” says Alice, glaring at her through the rearview.
    They pass it at the exact moment she realizes its faint purring isn’t the blood in her own ears. A motorcycle, a black and silver motorcycle, roars beside them. It’s heading in the same direction.
    “Take me with you,” she whispers at the window.

2
Rabbit Makes an Entrance
    R ABBIT IS BREATHING hard as he assembles Beatrice. Usually he puts his bassoon together with the utmost care—she technically isn’t his, plus she’s old and her cork is prone to flake. But the last time he looked at his watch it was twenty minutes past three, twenty minutes late to his first rehearsal, for God’s sake.
    He almost trips over his suitcase, which he hasn’t taken up to his room yet; there just wasn’t time. The Statewide orchestra is rehearsing in the hotel’s auditorium, which is beautiful and falling apart; it looks drastically older than it did just last year when he came to watch his sister perform. Three of the seats in the row where Rabbit has unpacked Beatrice have lost their spring and lay flat as tongues coated in threadbare red velvet. He sucks on a double reed and hoists his bassoon. He enters the orchestra from stage right, weaving between music stands and