Bellweather Rhapsody Read Online Free PDF Page B

is
Bertram Hatmaker
?”
    Rabbit dies.
    “Never mind.” Brodie tosses a hand, dismissing everything having to do with Rabbit Hatmaker in one casual gesture. “That was horror, children. Did you hear it? Horror.” He turns to the side and his profile is that of a heron or a mantis, something alien and starved. “My name is Fisher Brodie,” he says. “But you already knew that.”
    He lifts his arms and one hundred teenagers set their bows, raise their horns to their lips, and do not blink.
    Brodie lowers his arms and the orchestra relaxes.
    He raises them again and the orchestra tenses for action. Brodie smiles like this is the best game he’s ever played. He lifts and lowers his arms several times in rapid succession and the musicians snap and relax, snap and relax, jerking like marionettes.
    “Quite a hive mind you’ve got. ’Cept for Hatmaker here. Oi, Bert. B-flat.”
    Rabbit has been sitting dumbly, ignoring each of Brodie’s commands, because he can’t quite believe this is what Statewide is like. This isn’t what
any
group he’s ever played in has been like. It
does
have a hive mind, a weird humming mentality perched on the edge of action, desperate for instruction. He assumes it must be because he’s never played with student musicians of this caliber before, but he can’t tell if they’re good or bad or merely perfectly trained.
    “Oi. Bert.” Brodie waves his hand at Rabbit. It looks odd, and Rabbit’s first thought—that Brodie’s hand is strangely insubstantial, transparent as it flutters in the air—is rapidly replaced by
Shit, he means me,
and he wraps his lips gently around his double reed. He hasn’t played so much as a note all day, and Beatrice wobbles before producing a relatively in-tune tone. It is the only sound in the entire auditorium, and Rabbit, now wondering if this is how it feels to be on the verge of a panic attack, loses breath after a scant five seconds.
    Brodie tilts his head. “Well, that was inspiring,” he says. “Right, then. You should have received a packet of sheet music when you were asked to participate in this magnificent celebration of youthful artistry, and I trust you’ve all practiced until your fingers and lips bled. How wonderful for you. Wonderful but unfortunate, because we’re not going to be playing any of it.” He drops to a squat and reappears with a small stack of photocopies. “I realized that it was all shite, really. We’ll be playing this instead.”
    Rabbit, who hasn’t practiced as much as he probably should have, but who didn’t think he could be more shocked by this circus, feels gut-punched. They were supposed to be playing Handel, a Mendelssohn suite. Selections from Holst’s
The Planets
. All shite? And they were expected to learn something completely new in the space of—what? Three days, in time for the concert on Sunday?
    “Och, maybe we’ll still play ‘Jupiter.’ Your mums will love it,” Brodie mutters. He hands a stack of parts to the first-chair violin on his left, another stack to the first cello on his right. Photocopies flutter their way back down the rows. A thin girl, her hair pulled high in a glossy jet-black ponytail, takes the stack of woodwind parts and stands up to distribute them. “Here,” she says, her voice small and cold with rage as she hands Rabbit his music.
    And now he understands why. The piece Brodie is springing on them is Claude Debussy’s
Afternoon of a Faun,
and the thin black-haired girl, who retakes her seat as first-chair flute, is the key soloist. She flips her ponytail over her shoulder and inhales violently. Her back is stiff and straight and she holds her flute like a cudgel. If Rabbit didn’t think Brodie would throw something at him—a music stand, his shoe, perhaps his entire body—he would turn to chatty Kimmy and ask who she is. She carries herself like someone whom other people are expected to know, perhaps for their own protection.
    “Why do you play that?” Brodie