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tempo

noun. the speed at which a passage of music is (or should be) played.

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BY TAKING A SUMMER SCHOOL course, I'm allowed to stay on campus right up until fall semester starts. The course I'm taking is one of the most popular Maths courses: Differential Equations II. It's a prerequisite for the rest of its sequence, which is itself a prerequisite for a slew of courses inside and outside the Mathematics Department. DE2 is mandated by a whole host of majors like Engineering and Physics, so it gets offered in the summer.

Halston University Resident Life moves me into one of their apartment-style accommodations so they won't have to feed me for the summer. I unpack with expert efficiency, not even bothering to remove my winter clothing like jeans and sweaters from the suitcase. I'll be leaving this room when fall semester starts and Renata comes back to campus. We're roomies again, as always.

My flatmates for the summer are all international students who are similarly stranded, but somehow they make friends with each other within the first week and start going off to do touristy summer things like visit Boston and hike the bush trails outside of Halston that potheads use as a place to smoke. (I know because sometimes my dealer wants to meet there.)

But I'm a local, technically, and I don't look around at my surroundings with an outsider's wonder.

Over the next three months, I also get a stipend to help with food and rent costs. I'm on the Discharge Support Program, a state government-sanctioned assistance program for unsupported children who aged out of the foster system. I like to think my name is the one thing my biological mother left me, Isabella, pronounced in the Hispanic fashion because she was Filipina. I can barely remember her. She left nothing else to me, unless Department of Children & Families documents about her tragic life count.

Up until I was eighteen, I was not allowed access to my own records. I spent time in various foster homes, but I was never adopted. Maybe it was because I was already five when I went into the system and families want babies that they can project their fetishized fantasies about parenting and infancy onto. Maybe it was because I was Asian and darker-skinned. Maybe they could tell before I even knew: something is wrong with me. Something keeps me apart from the rest of the people I know.

When I turned eighteen, it was the most dystopian experience of my life. Sure, the foster system wasn't always supportive or consistent, but when I came of age I could feel all obligations and systemic consideration snap in half, brittle like glass, as soon as the clock struck midnight. Thankfully, by then I was already placed in student housing at Halston University, and wasn't turned out onto the street.

My social worker gave me a manila folder full of my records. My mother migrated from the Philippines on a working visa. She was already pregnant with me, and I was granted US citizenship by jus soli, the law of the soil. Then apparently she became addicted to drugs and started leaving me unaccompanied with whoever was around to supervise me. I was removed from her care at age five, and then she died from an overdose. Police reports are in my manila folder. So are all my medical files: vaccination records, my mother's DNA test results in case I need to research my heredity, and my birth certificate. There is no father named, and the mother's name is Araceli Rodriguez.

I have nothing from her but my name.

The next thirteen years I spent being wrenched from home to home, from school to school, meeting a rotating roster of social workers. No-one stayed, everyone left eventually—even when they would have kept me longer. Something about the foster care system mandated that content children and content families be separated, because 'this is how things work'. I knew so many people who shouldn't have been in foster care: there were people in their lives willing to take them, but America's hideously outdated views on blood relations and a nuclear family kept them suffering.

I knew people who were abused while in foster care, but it never happened to me. My whole life I've seen tragedies fall around me—my mother's origins, the girl I befriended when I was nine who had cigarette burns on her cheek, the girl who mysteriously fell pregnant while staying in a group home and wouldn't name the father—and yet they don't touch me. I have this intense feeling of mathematical injustice; if every day a woman rolls a dice on her right to safety, surely I would have rolled low by now. Then I realize I probably rolled low at birth.

Renata told me this feeling is called survivor's guilt.

The foster families I stayed with weren't at all bad. Some treated me like a paycheck, and the whole experience was incredibly transactional, but again—no abuse. Some were fantastic. The best family I ever knew, the Irvings, had a son that played the drums. I was twelve, and Marlon was just going off to college, the largest HBCU in the New England area. He taught me my first rock beat, gave me free reign over his equipment.

"Why don't you learn at school?" he asked.

"I always have to leave again," I explained. "I don't want to join any bands or music clubs and have to pull out the next month." The same approach I applied to friendships.

In response, Marlon showed me all the YouTube channels and online resources for people who were set on teaching themselves. It was useful in keeping me connected to music for the next six years. And just when my guard began lowering, my social worker visited my new school unannounced.

Time to go. Again.

I remember wanting to cry in class, being called to the administration office. I never got any notice when I was relocated. I was always at the mercy of the system. Moving when and where they dictated.

Up until I was fifteen I tried so hard for one of these families to adopt me, just to feel a semblance of belonging. A person can only throw all their life's belongings into two black trash bags—opaque, unidentified—so many times before feeling like garbage themselves. Rejected. Unwanted. Disposed of.

For those six perfect months with the Irvings, I was part of a family that cared about me. I had two present parents. I had a backyard. I could leave my shoes on the porch without worrying about them going missing. I had an older brother. I had a hobby like any red-blooded American girl. It was all very Keeping Up With the Joneses.

I somehow got it into my head that if I was a 'good' foster kid I would get adopted. Or I would get to stay longer at the kind houses. I hid my depression and anxiety. I was polite and studious. I did all the chores that I could get my hands on. Trying so hard to be useful and wanted.

Never worked. By the time I came to Halston University, I had chipped that mentality out of my body like a malignant cyst.

Now: hate me, love me, whatever. I have nothing left for other people.

But those months with the Irvings lit a fire in me, some spiteful fuck-you to the world.

I got myself through my SATs and learning music theory by sheer willpower. Reading on my phone at three in the morning. Listening to countless albums and picturing myself doing the same beats and rolls. Pleading for use of the band room during lunchtimes at all my different schools. Going to local libraries to use the internet and study. Auditioning for drumline the first chance I got.

I was going to make something of myself.

Most people don't know how painful it is not only to be lacking family, but to be lacking culture. I want roots. Traditions. Summer, Thanksgiving, Christmas, always leaves me numb and aching. Often around holiday times, I dredge up elaborate daydreams and sink into my imaginary worlds.

One world I have on rotation involves becoming a renowned drummer and touring worldwide. I've never even left Massachusetts. Not only do I lack the funds, but traveling isn't desirable when you have no home to come back to. You can't do the grass is greener comparisons when you don't even have a backyard to begin with. But it's fun to fantasize about.

Then there's the fantasy I have about running into the Irvings in my later life. I didn't love them—I don't love anyone. But I'd encounter my old foster brother in Costco. Marlon would be married with a family, and he'd say, "Oh, wow, Bay! My parents are going to be so ecstatic that you're doing well. Would you like to come around for dinner?"

And for that night, I'd have siblings, a niece, parents, and a dinner table.

I just wanted someone to see me and think you belong with me, and this is how we do life. But short of finding a safe space of my own, now that I'm co-section leader, I will provide it for someone else, for thirty someone-elses.

You belong in the band, and this is how we do music.

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One day in July, a notification pings on my phone screen from Callum Vierra.

It's nothing as direct as a personal message—we avoid contact with each other as much as possible outside band activities—instead it's a new group chat for the next marching season's band leadership.

Of course he is the one to initiate such a gesture. He's probably the only one who knows all the section leaders personally. Alongside him and me, there are three woodwind leaders—Quentin for the flutes (encompassing piccolos), and two senior girls for the clarinets (also encompassing our, like, two marching oboe players) and saxophones respectively—four brass leaders, and a girl from color guard who was elected drum major.

Ten is a neat number. I go through the group member list and stare at the profile pictures of the three section leaders and the drum major who I'm not yet Facebook friends with. I debate whether to send them friend requests.

When I got to college I swore I would never please people or try to make myself desirable again. But over the last four years, I've been under pressure to revert, to conform. Flirting at your work increases your tips. Being buddy-buddy with the rest of your band makes them more likely to accept your leadership and feedback. Befriending your professors raises your grades; ideally they would be immune to grading bias, but this world is non-ideal.

I would like essays, workplaces, and musical ensembles to judge their participants based on relevant factors like academic merit, work ethic, and musical and performance capability, but humans are social creatures. Being pretty and kissing ass always trumps a number of genuinely relevant considerations. It's so shit, and it doesn't come easy. I wasn't meant to be nice.

I send the friend requests.

Callum already has a head start on me, and I can't let it widen.

Maude Keller, Mr. Scott and the other instrument directors, the field crew and captains, and the itinerant music teachers have been co-ordinating with the section leaders by email threads the whole summer. The Halston University Marching Red Foxes are two-hundred students supported by dozens more staff, alumni, and volunteers that work hard behind the scenes.

Marching Band is an accredited course at Halston University, and as more people, mostly freshmen, start enrolling through the student portal, the number of people in the Facebook group starts to grow. Meanwhile, updates appear on the Marching Band website and the Facebook group about audition videos and band camp registration.

Drumline is one of the few sections in the band that require a video submission. Pit percussion doesn't. In fact, most sections in the marching band do not require any sort of minimum musical skill. Even someone with nearly no musical ability can be put on a fifth trumpet part or taught to hit a gong. But drumline and the first instrument parts are naturally harder, and some instruments are easier to play for people of a certain stature. A petite person, if they're a beginner musician, is not going to be given a sousaphone or tuba part.

I know when Maude looks at the submitted videos, she assesses things as detailed as arm length, jaw structure, shoulder width, alongside actual technical skill. I often wonder what Mr. Scott, the percussion director, thought of my freshman video submission, how far away I was from making the drumline, but I've never asked him. Water under the bridge.

Tina Lau posted in Halston University Marching Red Foxes: "Registration for band camp is open! Fill out this form (linked) if you don't want to STARVE FOR A WEEK. (Seriously. We need numbers and dietaries for catering.) Thanks fam!"

After the deadline for the video submissions have passed:

Clark Scott posted in Halston University Marching Red Foxes: "2 weeks till Band Camp! how the time has flown. Here is the schedule for BC week again, a good idea to download this image on your phones. Prepare for an intense but rewarding week of team-bonding, marching and music :D p.s. bring water bottles..."

Meanwhile, the band leadership is sent a number of documents about our roles and responsibilities. We'll be expected to memorize the music faster than the rest of our sections, distribute sheet music in rehearsals and uniforms in performances, lead sectionals, and run interference between our musicians and the band directors. This doesn't frighten me. I can't wait for band camp to come, can't wait to prove myself. In my spare time I refresh the fight songs and the snare part for Amoretto and chip away at the stash of weed I got from my dealer.

My flatmates comes from countries that have notoriously harsh stances on marijuana, so out of consideration to them I roll in my bedroom with the windows open, then go for walk around campus just before it gets dark. My throat stings until it goes completely numb, and I suck away at the joint until embers kiss my fingers. Walking around campus means I can usually run the remaining filter under a water fountain and dump it in the nearest trash can.

Sometimes I wander past the house that Callum rents—I saw from his Facebook and Instagram posts that he's subletting his room over summer—and find myself thinking about what he's doing over the break. On his social media are posts of him at the beach, shirtless and carefree like Apollo, the sun-kissed god of music, at the skate park with Quentin and other unfamiliar faces, and on a freaking yacht sailing in the middle of nowhere, backlit by an fierce setting sun and romantic orange and pink sky.

I've seen his family before at home games. Mom, Dad, one little brother. So picturesque. His family have board game nights and take road trips. He showcases his younger brother Christian prominently, the fraternal love and pride radiating through the candid photographs and short, sweet, infuriatingly lowercase captions.

vitamin d, sun emoji.

double scoop, ice cream emoji.

new kicks, sneaker emoji.

It's wholesome and I'm bitter.

Of course, Renata and I keep up our usual close correspondence.

She's finding the realities of nine-to-five corporate work in a capitalist hellscape, unsurprisingly, draining. She tells me about different chemical tests they run on food samples. She tells me that fat, sugar, salt contents need to fall within a certain percent yield for the entire product to be safe and marketable, and how ice cream is a bitch to prepare for testing because it melts so quickly. The centrifuges and fume hoods are vastly fewer than the number of employees, so she spends a lot of her days either fighting her colleagues for bench space or waiting in line.

"But the pay?" I ask her, after being an attentive receptacle for her venting.

"So fucking good. Holy shit."

So goes the summer. I have school work, regular work, Renata, and the slowly warming engine of marching season propelling me toward the start of semester. If none of that works, then there's always the pot to sweep me away to a state of mind where my consciousness doesn't connect to the rest of my brain—not my memories or my nightmares.

Isn't that perfect?

Sometimes I wish I could wake up the next day with no memories of my past life and be given a new set of memories, in which I have a mother who let me climb into her bed after a nightmare, a father who taught me how to swim (I can't swim), and a house with scratch marks all up its door jamb, a marker of this constructed Bay's height over the years, Bay who never ever had to pick up and leave, Bay who is loved and whole and very very normal.