Tempo Change Read Online Free PDF Page A

just stared at my text messages. My text file was empty but I stared anyway. Every one of the girls in Madrigals was destined for greatness because of their parents’ or their parents’ friends’ proximity to the entertainment industry.
    No one knew about my connections. They didn’t because I didn’t want them to. Not that they would have heard of my father. People in Madrigals didn’t know what had happened in music two years ago, let alone fourteen.
    Music nerds knew who my father was. They were enthusiastic about him but they were smallish in number. Excepton the Internet, where you could find entire Web sites devoted to him—his work, along with trivia and so-called sightings. I checked in every now and then but forbade myself to log on. I enjoyed being a spectator.
    I had decided long ago that I wouldn’t trade on my father’s fame. Then again, how could I? He wasn’t famous anymore. He had dropped out of society at the height of his popularity. For a while that was the thing that made him famous, all the speculation about what happened and when he was coming back and if he was dead, had lost his mind, changed into a woman, every imaginable scenario. After a while, though, other people got famous and did crazier things, like Jeff Buckley jumping into the water with his boots on or Kurt Cobain going wild on drugs and fame and killing himself or Paul Westerberg drinking himself off the map or Elliot Smith stabbing himself in the heart. My father’s moving to a tropical island just didn’t rank up there with the rock disasters.
    My mother worried about the fact that I had his genes. She thought it was the art that made him crazy, not that he was an artist who went crazy. But she also had this part of her brain that still believed in him. She’d hear a song on the radio and say, “Your father invented what they’re doing. Right there, that riff? That thing? He invented it.”
    She didn’t really know how to talk about music but she knew when he had invented it. That was ironic to me. I said nothing.
    Mr. Carmichael came into the room. Mr. Carmichael had a sad and lethargic look. He had a weepy-looking goatee, and earrings in both ears, but was otherwise the pictureof normality. He sat down at the piano and approached it as if it were a wounded patient he needed to revive, and his efforts to revive said wounded patient mostly ended in disappointment. He was, I’d have to guess, forty, and he carried around with him some kind of desperately lost ambition.
    He said, “Okay, girls, let’s calm down and talk about music.”
    The Madrigals scattered into order and I was the only one left standing, not knowing where to turn.
    Mr. Carmichael turned to me. He said, “Are you the latest addition? Blanche Kelly?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Are you a soprano?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Well, stand on the riser next to Viv and we’ll figure it out.”
    That’s when I met Viv. I stood on the riser next to her.
    Viv barely glanced at me and I barely glanced at her.
    As far as I knew, Viv Wyler was the soccer goalie. I had no idea that she had any musical interest, let alone aspirations. She was tall and boxy and full of muscles that I’d assumed only boys had. She was pretty, but she had no grace and apparently no sense of humor. I had never seen her smile, let alone laugh. She had long, blond, unkempt athlete’s hair and a bland face.
    I looked at her but she stared straight ahead. I knew she was a bad student. At LaHa, you got to know the bad students. Rumor had it that her parents were scholars and scientists; she had two sisters who were on their way to being astrophysicists; and she somehow had the brains of a nylonrope. To the degree that she had a name for herself, she had made it in front of the soccer net. Her parents were hoping that her soccer accomplishments could at least get her into a state college.
    I tried to smile at her but her eyes just flitted across me and went back to the center of the