Crossing Read Online Free PDF Page A

cane. His face pinched like an imploding papier-mâché. “Get out! You’re wasting my time!”
    I could still hear the voices. “I came in…to…try…try…” His eyes suddenly widened, naked with ridicule. “For the tryout? To audition?” He pushed his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose. “To audition? You? ” His craggy eyes moved up and down my person, incredulous. “Well, speak up!”
    Mr. Matthewman carried with him a reputation of being a piano maestro long past his heyday, a man whose considerable gifts were never fully realized because of some scandal when he was a professor at Julliard. Now he was only a shell of the man he’d once been, full of sour spit and rancid breath.
    “Here for the audition?” His voice was still incredulous.
    “Speak up or get out of here.”
    And before I really knew what I was saying, I heard myself say, “Yes. Here for The Man from Bethlehem .”
    “Jerusalem!” he barked at me. “At least get the name straight.” His eyes seared through me as he walked slowly back to the piano, muttering. He thumbed his way through a stack of music sheets. “You know that the lead position has already been filled?”
    “Yes.” In fact, everyone knew. The name Anthony Hasbourd had become synonymous with Lead Singer in School Production. He was a mediocre singer whose parents had the misbegotten idea that he was the next Josh Groban. He flaunted and preened every year on stage, conveniently forgetting that he had “won” the lead only because his parents financed the productions. So nobody bothered to audition against him since it was simply assumed the role belonged to him.
    Matthewman squinted his eyes at me, shriveling me down. “Are you sure you want to audition?” He waited, his body hunched over.
    I didn’t say anything; he coughed into his hands, then flung his arm out. A sheet of music hung on the end of it, stiff and crinkly. I took it, staring dumbly at it.
    “Very well, then. Let’s do this.” His fingers touched the keyboard and began to play. His eyes were fixed on me. He was curious.
    It had been many years since I last sang. There was a time, back in my village in China, when I sang all the time. Whole days spent fishing with my father on the Chengzi River, my voice rising with the dawn sun; then through the hot afternoon, in cadence with the lazy sound of water lapping against the wood boat. Mine was a beautiful voice, so my father used to tell me, as mesmerizing as a thousand shooting stars. And my parents wanted me to sing all the time, I remember, especially in the hot summer nights when the town lost electricity and the small bedroom fan stood limp and useless. Sing us to sleep, Xing , they pleaded. Help us forget the heat . And I would sing soft lullabies in the dark until they stopped wiping sweat from their brows and kicking at invisible blankets at their feet. Sandwiched between them, feeling their body heat humming against me, I never felt safer, never felt calmer, than when I sang into the night even after they had fallen asleep. But after I arrived on the shores of America, I did not sing very much. Something seemed to lodge itself into my throat, inhibiting me. In the cacophony of foreign sounds flooding my ears, I lost my ability to speak, much less sing. I became quiet; I diminished. Over time, I sang less and less, until all those songs I’d once cherished disappeared somewhere within me. And one day I stopped singing altogether.
    Mr. Matthewman’s eyes blazed into me, as if daring me. His fingers danced gracefully across the keyboard like a separate animal.
    I stared down at the notes in my hands. They looked as foreign to me as English words once had. I stood very, very still. The stillness of the clueless.
    And when the moment came, I made as gallant an effort as I could.
    There are a number of ways to describe the noise that scraped out of my voice box. A pigeon’s beak scratched across the blackboard, a shard of glass scraped