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clef

noun. notation at the beginning of a stave, indicating the instrumentation or pitch of a piece of music.

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PEOPLE THINK I AM ANTI-LOVE.

But I love, I do, deeply, wildly, daily. I just think if you can at all help it, you shouldn't love people. People are always going to be a liability, even if you think you know and trust someone to their core. Spouses of decades will cheat. Family members are abused by family members. Friends betray friends. Lovers drift apart. Oh, I never saw it coming, they say. I loved them so much.

I do see it coming. People hurting other people always has a non-zero probability. In fact, more than that—the aforementioned scenarios have statistically significant probabilities, especially when you're twenty-one and all your coevals are broken-hearted and weathering quarter-life crises. Your heart is just waiting to get broken if you let it.

Don't let it.

Instead, I love places and artifacts, rivers and oceans, memories and hobbies. I feel wrapped in safety when the things I love only give and give to me, instead of taking and taking, or even taking and giving (because maybe they reciprocate more or you reciprocate more or everyone reciprocates in equal quantity but the quality of the reciprocation is skewed. So many uncontrolled factors.)

There is a ruddy-cheeked Halston University student leaning over the bar.

He might be staring at my cleavage, but I choose to give him the benefit of the doubt when my name rolls off his tongue, hesitant and plain wrong. "So, Isabella—"

I smile at the man in front of me. "Baya."

"Pardon?

"Not Isabella," I correct firmly. I need to raise my voice over the cacophony in the rest of the Foxhole. Everyone mispronounces my name. I understand, the spelling is misleading. "It's pronounced Isa-bay-ah."

My name is the first thing I ever had, the first and only thing my mother from the Philippines gave me, and sometimes it feels like the only thing I'll ever have. So I defend it fiercely.

I've worked at the Foxhole since I turned twenty-one last semester, so for most of my junior year. It boasts gray slabs of concrete for walls, shot through with wood accents and illuminated maroon light panels, harking to our school colors. Overhead, low ceilings and artistic black pipes thread together, making the place feel even cheaper than it is.

The Foxhole is Halston University's student bar, located in the Quad. In Europe, all roads led to Rome. At Halston, all roads on campus led to the Foxhole. It is our pulsing heart, the warm motherly arms for the student body. If you have a bad exam and need to get drunk by dinnertime, the Foxhole provides cheap liquor. If you have outrageously early lectures in January, the Foxhole provides scalding coffee for $2 a cup (it's watery) with student association membership.

If you are looking to party on the first Tuesday—Halston's official student night, when bar and club prices drop and blood alcohol volume skyrockets—of spring break, the Foxhole provides entertainment and at least one jaded bartender.

Isabella, my name tag announces. Also known as the jaded bartender.

The student leaning far over the bar counter blinks. His eyes are red-rimmed and glassy, narrowing slowly as his flirtatious smile returns.

"Oh," he says, his chin propped up on his hands. "My bad."

"No harm." My eyes remain pinned to the shot glass in front of me while liquor trickles in.

"So..." he drawls, the last vowel dragging on and on until his lips form a perfect O. "Isabaya, I can't believe any girl is stuck working when she could be dancing. Specially you."

I get hit on a lot. I think the flirting is a combination of the low lighting, which perhaps airbrushes over my splotchy skin and too-square jawline, and the copious amounts of alcohol in people's systems. Everyone is drunk and feeling good, and they want to share the goodwill with the pretty bartender. Usually, if I'm behind the bar, I'm flattered by the attention. I like to lean in and extend my own figurative hand, turn people over like a Rubik's cube and watch their faces shift and rotate.

Besides, the longer I get them talking, the more they usually tip me.

"I'm dancing," I respond coyly, sliding the shot glass over to the woman waiting to his left. "You just can't see it behind this counter."

The salt shaker lands in front of her. "Here's your tequila," I say, reaching with tongs, "I'll just get your..."

She downs the shot before I can give her a slice of lemon, swaggering back into the arms of six screaming, cheering girls. Her friends squeal, "You did not just do that!"

Oh, yes she did.

"Oh, yes I did! Let's go dance."

The guy hitting on me has a green fleck of lettuce between his canine and incisor tooth. I ask, "So, what can I get you?"

He grins so wide his nose wrinkles. It's adorable. I take his order, he fumbles for his card. The DJ on the music stage transitions into a pulsing throwback song from the 2000s that thuds in my teeth. Just like that, I lose five people from the liquor line as they rush to relive their childhoods.

"Can I get your number?"

"I'm not supposed to give it out on a shift," I respond, feigning bashfulness. Dina, night manager, chef, and all-round marvel, won't care. If she weren't in the kitchen right now, doing an emergency load of dishes to restock the glasses, she would encourage me, so long as my interlocutor isn't dangerously intoxicated or underage.

See, now, I can't actually rule those out. Is he ruddy-faced in the daytime or is this a symptom of inebriation? Who knows? Not I.

"How about you leave yours and I'll text after my shift is over?"

I find a pen and place it down by the napkin and straw holders. The student (freshman, senior, I really can't tell) writes his number down on the napkin. Like kidnappers making an exchange of hostages, I make solid eye contact when I slide his plastic jug of beer over, retrieving his number on brown tissue paper.

"Talk to you soon," I say, my voice breathy and smile giddy. He puts a fiver in the tip jar and winks (who winks unironically? Is he getting flirting advice from WikiHow or Pornhub?), disappearing into the crowd.

When I am faced with the next customer to serve, the Foxhole bristling with chaotic energy and sweat, I accidentally use the phone number napkin to mop up a streak of water from the melting ice box and drop it into the bin. 'Accidentally'.

I lean slightly forward to check out the tip jar.

Appreciable. Not a bad night.

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The first time I fell in love at Halston University was during band camp in my freshman year, just moved into my dorm room, at sunset. It was the first evening of that one week intensive for all the aspiring Marching Red Foxes, and the first day of band camp was officially over.

As an introduction to the marching season, a few upperclassmen who drummed last year were going to perform an old piece. The late August sun was setting over the football stadium—home of the boys' football team, the Halston Foxes—like it wanted to stick around to watch the drumline perform with everyone else. Yearning fingers of orange and purple light streaked across the clouds from the horizon, toward the small crowd gathered on the bleachers. I sat way back, away from the rest of musicians who lingered to spectate instead of going to dinner. The stadium lights substituted in for the sun, bearing down on the green.

The drumline leader that year was Toby Minhas. He wore a polished marching snare, strode in front of the fifteen students that remained from last year's drumline (the rest had graduated or left band); he was leaning back, overcome with sheer passion, his snare tipping upward with his hips; he cupped both hands around his mouth, "What do we do at Halston U?"

(That's the battle cry for the drumline.)

Toby Minhas and his fifteen were hyping up the crowd—comprised of mostly band kids sticking around to watch the performance, and a few from color guard—by playing a sample from last marching season's repertoire. In a marching band of two hundred students, only a couple dozen percussionists get to play on the field during home game shows. The rest go into the pit percussion. Each of the drumline were supposed to be worth their weight in marching equipment, keeping time and holding their own against the hundreds of other musicians in the band.

At Halston only the most elite music ensembles have auditions. General marching band (the fall music elective) membership doesn't require an audition. Drumline does, pep band (the winter elective) does, Halston Student Orchestra (the spring elective) does. Just before each semester starts, you need to play an audition piece in front of the band director and section director.

Tomorrow was the audition for the coveted few spots in the drumline, whatever was leftover after the guaranteed spots went to the upperclassmen. Freshmen percussionists almost never made the drumline, though I hoped to be an exception.

After the theatrics (Toby was always the best at working the crowd; I'll miss that about him) the drummers started to play. Four wooden taps and then a gunshot strike as they launched into their piece, posture ramrod straight. The basses rumbled, the quads resonated, the snares snapped. The snare drumsticks blurred in complete unison, arcing and tracing out dynamic patterns in the air. The only way I could think to describe the sound was bottled thunder. Leashed lightning. Powerful, raw, but controlled.

And it was the control that was sexy.

That was all it took. I feel so hard. (Not for Toby, about whom I say with almost sisterly affection: gross.)

I fell in love with drumline, love of my fucking life.

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It's spring semester, so my musical schedule is comprised of pep band rehearsals on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and HSO rehearsals on Wednesday afternoons. The pep band is pretty much all the band kids who can't bear not having music extracurriculars of some form in their life, and HSO is the same demographic but make it competitive. HSO is only thirty-strong, five of those being percussionists.

I walk into the band room, spot the figure conversing merrily with Keller, the band director, and my blood pressure immediately spikes. I try to make my entry discreet, slide past him on the way to the percussion section, but he bids Keller a sweet farewell and hightails on his long legs.

Callum's hand shoots out to touch the black cover of the concert snare, two seconds before I would have been in reach.

Damn it.

That means he gets dibs on the concert snare parts today, and that I will have to settle for tuned percussion or miscellaneous, which is totally fun, don't get me wrong—

Okay, who am I kidding?

I'm a snare girl. It is my baby. Let me paint a portrait: this is a concert snare, weathered but expertly crafted, with a polished wooden barrel, glistening metalwork and a chalky drum skin crisper than the first bite out of a caramel apple at a carnival. The rimshot reverbs I can elicit from this drum echo in my mind like a lover's whisper. Shivers down my spine.

So watching Callum lovingly rub his greasy palm all across the top is going to give me an aneurysm.

"Gotta get there faster," he teases me.

Why does he make this so easy for me?

"Getting there fastest isn't always a good thing."

It takes him a moment to connect my nonchalant tone with the implied insult. Then he smirks, casually unzipping the drum cover the way I imagine he'd unzip a girl's dress. Slow. Getting his hands under to slide it off, no fear, and dropping to the floor discarded. "I get there with perfect timing."

"So says you."

"So says a long list of satisfied lovers,"

I snort, preventing my eyes from rolling. "Lovers—"

Keller, having finished her afternoon coffee (she also has a morning coffee, a lunch coffee and a teaching-class coffee), has stepped onto the little conductor's podium. She lowers her head enough to peer over her glasses at us, her blonde-gray hair frizzy like dandelion fluff.

"Ahem." She taps her baton on the metal music stand. I give her an obedient smile. It's Callum not listening, ma'am, not me. I am a good student.

All this I try to convey while speaking sideways, "—who mentioned sex? Is your mind constantly in the gutter?"

Callum sighs. "Don't be coy—"

"Ahem," Keller clears her throat harder. She crosses her arms and stares directly at us. When the wind instruments start to turn their heads back, Callum quietens down. "Thank you. Concert G everyone. Even if you do not play a tuned instrument. Roll or hit a triangle or something."

As the HSO rises into a melodious, unbroken note, Callum starts rolling on the snare, strokes blended like rainfall. Damn his stupid face. How can one play an instrument so smugly? Does no-one else hear the smugness?

I settle sourly on the mallet percussion part for this piece. Tuned percussion is okay, I guess, when there are quadruple mallet pieces. Lien Hoang is on timpani, Nate Savchenko on bass drum, and Shane Nichols flits between the various cymbals like a musical manic pixie dream girl. Throughout the rehearsal, when I look over, Callum pretends he doesn't notice my stare, but his mouth blooms into a self-satisfied grin every time. I fucking hate that guy.

At the end of the rehearsal, Keller finally announces what I've been waiting for the whole semester: section leader applications for next year's marching band are open.

"While you need to have at least one full year of band membership, seniority doesn't matter. We're looking for the best combination of leadership and skill," she says. My hands are busy packing up—slotting the marimba and vibraphone covers back on, sliding my mallets bag into the mallet bag—but my ears are pricked and eager. "Pep band and color guard have also been told the same message. If you're interested in applying, please come along to the information meeting after next Wednesday's rehearsal. If you can't make that meeting, send me an email."

Finally, Callum does meet my eyes. Like a shark in bloody water, I feel the back of my neck prickle with adrenaline. He and I are never so in tune as when we are competing. And finally, the emotion flaring in his gaze is not smugness.

It's a challenge.

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A / N :

Welcome to Double Time, everyone! 

It's so good to be writing college romance again. My usual PSA: all the books in the Halston U series are stand-alone, to be read in any order you like. The cameos are just to keep things fun for readers as they discover my extended universe. 

So, who remembers Callum? Do we have any Blackout or Nightlife readers here? Callum made appearances in both those stories and I'm very excited to shine the spotlight on him, and write about one of younger me's greatest passions: music and percussion. 

The perfect counterpart to his sunny disposition is Bay, who will definitely live up to and exceed her role as the grump in grumpy x sunshine. What do we think of her?

This story will be dual POV, roughly alternating each chapter.

See you in the next one,

Aimee x