Chapter 1
Dot Sheets
Before Mr. Nosecha made it down the one-hundred forty-seven steps from the box all the way down to the field, Andrew had already cut in front of the drum majors and tucked the rolled-up dot sheets into his back pocket. He wasn’t a visual tech, but here at the Gray Avril Jr. Educational Complex, the best qualification for teaching was not having anything better to do. He also had no prior experience marching, no clue how to march, couldn’t hold a trumpet up for more than five minutes without breaking, and was only a high school junior. That was besides the point; anyone could be taught how to read a dot sheet and tell kids that they were standing in the wrong spot. Dot sheets were glorified graphs, and so was music, and there was no better AP-loaded teacher’s pet french hornist to plot these graphs than Andrew.
Instead of correcting the freshman tuba who missed band camp, he highlighted every M1 dot so he could stalk Colt around the field and mumble his comments into his phone like a judge’s tape recorder. Andrew didn’t care about contributing to the whole, he wasn’t paid enough to. He ditched the overcrowded school bus home every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday night to watch the marching band struggle to learn ten sets in 3 hours. At the Gray Avril Jr. Educational Complex, that was the greatest application of music until December rolled by, Mr. Nosecha informed 5th and 6th period that there wasn’t enough money to go to championships, and concert season could finally dominate. Fall meant bats flying across stadium lights, phones bouncing around in fanny packs during gush-and-go’s, and pebbles of ground-up tires washing down the shower drain after long rehearsal nights where nobody could focus.
Andrew clapped his hands three times. Colt hated how easily he was ripped away from a conversation about replacing his shoelaces. No better than a dog salivating at the ring of a bell. There was an energy about Andrew, like the cocky strut of a salesman who thought it was a good idea to give his pitch to a receptionist behind a “No Soliciting” sign. It must have been that wide stance, maybe that dead-set focus in his dark eyes that silenced the Forevermore Regiment & Colorguard faster than any staff’s bellow. Or maybe he just got away with everything because he was cute. The stage was his. Mr. Nosecha wasn’t even halfway down, yet.
“Alright, folks!” he started. “We did some good band today. But we need to band harder if we’re going to be the best band in Best Bands International. The way that we band is the way that we make band a true band! We’ve put our best band into this band, but we must ask ourselves not what the band can do for us, but what can we do for the band?”
Colt stopped himself from chucking his mouthpiece at Andrew. He was a section leader, now, and that meant refraining from murder. Never mind that there were only three kids in his section, including himself.
“Band… dismissed!” Andrew declared.
The brass caption head, Mr. Benjamin Moro, stepped in. “What? No, you’re not dismissed!”
One kid booed.
Mr. Moro shooed Andrew away from the spotlight, who then returned to his favorite spot, Colt’s side. There was a no butts on the field rule, unless you were stretching or injured at the sideline. Even Andrew knew that. Knowing made him feel all the more exempt to the rule, and Colt couldn’t find a proper justification to yell at Andrew for it, so when a familiar weight sat itself down on Colt’s Payless clearance sneakers, Colt rested the bell of his mellophone atop Andrew’s head and waited for Mr. Nosecha to squeeze his way in front of the drum majors.
“Alright, folks!” Mr. Nosecha started.
It was no better than Andrew’s speech. Maybe worse, the more Mr. Nosecha dwelled on the sluggish water breaks and even more sluggish resets. Always a lack of focus. That’s what happened when the best qualification for marching at the Ray Abril Jr. Educational Complex’s Forevermore Regiment & Colorguard was having nothing better to do. A few battery members in the back took off their harnesses, which proved to be a worthy investment when more staff members chimed in about the core values of the band and the discussion devolved to a Q&A about how to build a culture of success. Every post-rehearsal meeting truly lived up to the band’s name. Andrew knew better than to interrupt the closing ceremony of adults declaring their disappointment at high schoolers’ attention spans, at this point. These were the adults that granted him permission to take home the school’s shiny Conn 8D horn every night.
It was when the head drum major, Thomas, was finally at the front again that Andrew stood up and Colt’s feet regained feeling. Their closing chant was three claps with their band’s name yelled in dum-duh duh-dah format:
“For!” Thomas yelled, with a clap.
“E-ver-more!” the rest of the band yelled back, with two claps.
“Band… dismissed!”
The kids scattered to their backpacks and water jugs. Colt, however, made his way straight forward to fulfill his duty of emptying the orange water jugs. Andrew followed. While Colt unscrewed the tops and jingled ice against plastic far enough to dump the water down the drain, Andrew chugged as much water as he could from the squirt bottles. His limit was one bottle. The rest of the bottles, he squirted down the drain. Unscrewing the top and dumping it in two seconds was no fun. With squirting the water out, Andrew got a better sense of how much water they were wasting. He was sentimental about waste and it showed in the dozens of alphabetized tabs he had opened at any given moment, the old assignments smushed down at the bottom of his backpack, and especially the mess in his room he could only tame at the end of the semester.
When the water was all squeezed away, Andrew crunched down the slippery ice on the drain and pretended he was on an Antarctic excavation to extract a new strain of bacteria that could grow your hair back. After that, he rode on the utility cart next to Colt’s mellophone case and backpack and the orange water jugs and pretended he was sailing back home to the Americas to communicate his research findings to an academic conference of the sharpest minds only. Colt was the one pushing the cart. Then, when the cart was squeezed into its proper place in the hallway and Colt’s mellophone was tucked away into his locker, Andrew led Colt into the middle practice room and refused to turn the lights on.
“I can’t see,” Colt complained.
Andrew could. His eyes adjusted faster to the dark than Colt’s did because he closed his eyes as soon as he entered any dark space. The tiny rectangle of a window was blocked off with black construction paper as an emergency hiding place from school shooters. Now Andrew knew where to look if he was a school shooter. He deliberately stood in front of the light switch.
“My girlfriend—”
“I know who your girlfriend is,” Colt said. She was a lead trumpet. He went to the same middle school as her, back when she was still squeaking horrendously on the clarinet every time she tried going over the break. Her slim fingers could never quite cover the holes properly and her knuckles went white every time she played. The trumpet was a sensible switch. She went from last chair to third chair within a couple years. “Just say you’re talking about Clara.”
“Okay. Clara broke up with me.”
“Why would you call her your girlfriend if you two just broke up? Then, she would be your ex-girlfriend.”
Andrew pressed the rounded rectangle button behind him. The fluorescent light flickered on. “Thirty day free trial of being single—maybe she’ll take me back.”
Colt could see that Andrew’s sentimentality was degrading his logic, again. Clara was Andrew’s first girlfriend. They were passing period makeout buddies since freshman year. Letting go of Clara was harder than closing his tabs without bookmarking them for a later that would never come. Andrew’s only coping mechanism, at an age where the mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell was relevant, was texting in paragraphs to Clara. Colt was usually only the runner-up.
“Did she tell you why she was breaking up with you?” Colt asked, as if Clara hadn’t been texting him about their breakup during the water breaks. He knew why and he took her side on the matter.
“She said I was stunting her growth,” Andrew said.
That was not what Clara said, earlier, but Colt didn’t doubt it.
“I just—I don’t know. I don’t know what I did wrong.”
It was Colt who felt exposed, even though Andrew was the one offering his heart out in his sweaty palms. He peered into Andrew’s eyes and only saw his own dark silhouette reflecting back at him, reminding him of the bubble of carbon dioxide stuck in his throat as he thought of what he could say, what there was to say in a humid practice room with no vents, no window to vicariously escape himself out of, no choice but to say something stupid. Andrew was stealing all the oxygen. Colt was stuck, tuned in on Andrew’s frequency with the volume dial cranked to 11. Only Andrew knew how to make silence loud amidst the roar of laughter muffled by the heavy metal door between them, like a makeshift border. Colt was pressed against the white brick wall with nothing clever to say. He had always dreaded sincerity, wouldn’t even sign his emails to his teachers with it.
Colt was waiting for Mr. Nosecha to rip open the door and tell them that they didn’t have to go home but they couldn’t stay here, but he glanced down at his phone and it was only 9:48 PM. Kids were still caging their black cases behind black bars. The black bats, too, were still flying around the stadium lights because the stadium lights were programmed to shut off automatically at 10. He looked down at Andrew’s baby blue button-up and hyper-focused on the top button. Unbuttoned. The fingers interlaced behind his back unweaved themselves. That button was his new priority, not whatever tired cliche he was about to pull from the hours of reading Cosmopolitan articles about relationship stability. He slipped the little off-white four-dotted circle into its proper slit, straightened out the collar, and it became easier to think. It didn’t matter what he said, really. As his AP World History teacher would say, life sucks and then you die.
“Don’t be stupid,” Colt told him. The gap between them was in centimeters. “Just find someone else.”
They were closer to being 12 than they were to being adults. That was their hubris. That was what made Andrew so gullible, to think that a second chance was a lottery ticket that could bring him closer to being a millionaire. Andrew was already filthy rich, if naivety was a currency. Colt could see that, and it made Andrew all the more golden. Fluorescent lights shined like a halo atop Andrew’s dark curls. King of beasts. But Colt wasn’t going to tell him to find someone better, because that meant erecting false dichotomies and assigning arbitrary value to, what, how long someone could last in a high school relationship? And the next highest denomination was how long someone could last in a long-distance relationship, because Andrew had his sights set on some Ivy League across the country, and the next was how long someone could last on a phony marriage certificate signed in hopes of more financial aid. After that, it was senescent woes written in a Google Docs will addressed to whoever would out-live the other. Relationships were finite.
Earlier, Clara was texting him, with her left thumb double-tapping the caps lock arrow often, that Andrew was already dissipated. Andrew had slipped away from her like a stream of sand piling at the bottom of an hourglass, and she hadn’t even noticed until she saw it was time to flip the glass around. She had that spark of eureka under the apple tree that their relationship had already passed their Best By date. They were together out of habit, not the L-word. Not to mention it’s been nearly three years and they were still calling it the L-word. Andrew was as consumed as the Edible Woman, and it wasn’t from GPA inflation. She still hadn’t figured out what was dooming him, but finally, she could bask in fresh oxygen when she decided that it didn’t have to be her problem, anymore.
“Do you think I’m awful?” Andrew asked.
“I do,” Colt said. “Do you not think you’re awful?”
“I do!” Andrew swore. “But I don’t get it! Why can’t the sky be green? Why can’t the Earth be flat? Why can’t flowers bleed? Why is it that I can still find a way to be sad even when I hit all the right notes? Every day, I hit the bullseye—that little red dot within the green circle surrounded by black and white triangles—and it still feels like I’ve missed! I play all my cards face-up and I still don’t know what my hand is. I look at the solutions manual at the back of the book, and I still don’t get what the answer is. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it!”
“What if,” Colt proposed, with a straight-legged step backwards, “you don’t have to?”
“Are you a doctor?”
“What?”
“Should I be calling you Dr. Colt, MD?”
“No?”
“So why are you prescribing me 100mg of Stupidoxyzine!”
“Oh, screw off!” Colt would’ve rather used the F-word, but he couldn’t afford to owe any more debt to the swear jar with audition season coming around the corner. “I’d break up with you, too.”
He reached for the doorknob, but Andrew slapped his hand over his and stopped him.
“Do it,” Andrew dared. He looked into Colt’s eyes and saw past his reflection, saw past the slight dilation of black inside brown and saw into the sincerity Colt locked away in a tall tower surrounded by an alligator moat. “Break up with me.”
Maybe Andrew was the best at finding the dots, but Colt would always be the best at connecting them.
“Fine. I will.”
Andrew grasped Colt’s hand, turned the knob, and set them both free. Even in the air-conditioned expanse of the band room, Colt was still dizzy.
Chapter 2
Untitled
When Andrew apologized for the mess in his room, he meant it, but never enough to clean it. It was not modesty. Every book he and his parents had ever collected were crammed into the shelves opposite of his bed, and every relevant textbook was opened to a different page on the floor, in fairy circles of laundry he couldn’t commit to washing because he had only worn them once. He did his readings on the floor and his homework on the bed because his tiny cherry wood-painted desk was reserved for his laptop and uncapped bottles of rotary valve oil most likely stolen from the band room’s lost and found. As Colt maneuvered his black instrument case in the slim opening between the door frame and the door, which only opened partially because Andrew thought the best place to keep his french horn was within the radius of the door so he could better remember to bring his horn to school, he noticed two darts sheathed side-by-side on the dartboard’s bullseye on the wall adjacent to Andrew’s bed.
That queen-sized bed was the guiltiest culprit. There was an irregular rectangle of free space where Andrew could actually sleep, but the right side was taken over by root beer cans and more dirty laundry and half-used notebooks and empty plates from past dinners and two types of painkiller bottles and fast food napkins. On the windowsill was a moon cactus with her name, Marcy, written in shaky Sharpie cursive on the brown plastic pot. Beside her, was an old water bottle Andrew had never finished, repurposed as Marcy’s water supply. There was a lot more nuance to the mess, like the notes written in dry-erase marker on the sliding mirror door to the closet and the love notes from Clara still taped on the door and the alarm clock that was taken apart and meticulously laid out on the desk chair, but Colt was busy trying to strategize an area for them to study. He couldn’t. He could understand better, though, why Andrew hadn’t responded to any of his texts since last night. It was written on the walls. The corner wall which Andrew’s bed was shoved into had pencil drawings, graphite against white paint, of disembodied hands in various poses.
Colt set his mellophone case down, as close to Andrew’s horn case as he could. He balanced his backpack on top of it. “Let’s clean your room,” he said.
“I can’t,” Andrew said. “I need to preserve this. It’s my process, Colt. Don’t you trust the process?”
“I trust the process with my first-born child. I would die a fiery death for the process. There is no sweeter fragrance than the hot breath of the process at my ear, whispering to me all the processes to ever process. The process is my lover. I would fuck the process,” Colt told him. It was sweet relief to be free of the swear jar’s tyrant rule, but he still double-checked that the door was closed behind him. “But, c’mon. You gotta clean your room, one day.”
“Not today.”
“Well, maybe one day at a time.” Colt started with the root beer cans on the bed and placed them in an empty laundry basket. The hand sketches on the wall kept drawing his eye. He almost didn’t notice the silver can at the bottom of the pile. “Your mom doesn’t drink, where’d you get this from?”
Andrew was scooting his textbooks aside with his foot to make more room for his guest of honor. “Oh! That’s from my new AP Physics teacher!”
As if Colt didn’t already know that every class he was taking was AP—he could’ve just called it his physics class, because in the real world, knowledge isn’t categorized by whether there was a four-hour exam about it in the spring or not. Colt had Andrew’s schedule memorized since orientation, and he distinctly remembered seeing AP Physics for 6th period instead of Brass Fundamentals. It was the class they always had in common since freshman year. Now it was his gossip period with Clara while Andrew’s chops deteriorated away in exchange for page-long arithmetics about 10kg boxes sliding down a slight incline, or something.
“Your physics teacher gave you a Bud Light?”
“She gave me a Bud Light,” Andrew corrected.
“Oh no, you got me there, I’m a sexist pig!” Colt raised his hands in surrender. “I assumed that only a man could be stupid enough to provide alcohol to high schoolers!” He chucked the beer can at Andrew’s head, but he caught it. Damn it. “Idiot. I wasn’t even implying your teacher was a man. But what happened to Mr. Diaz? It’s only the second week of school.”
“He got hit by a bus. Twice.”
“What the hell? No, he didn’t.”
Andrew walked over to his dartboard to pluck the darts out of the cork. The path from the throwing spot to the dartboard was considerably easier to navigate through with the textbooks pushed aside. “Yeah, no, I wish. Stupid colorblind-ass.” He backed up seven feet, marked by a paperclip next to his bed. He laid down all but one dart on the foot of his bed, then bent the cardboard flight into the proper X form with 90 degrees at every corner. “He got terminated for sending dick pics to one of the students in the class.” He drew back his hand, locked his eyes on the red bullseye, then whipped his arm and flung the dart. He hit the bullseye on his first try.
“What? Really? How do you know this?” Clara would’ve brought it up in between B flat Remington reps if the rumor had already been spread.
Andrew didn’t want to answer that part. “The new physics teacher—she’s a genius. I love her.” The next dart he threw stabbed the wall, high above the dart board. Oops. There went another prick added to the galaxy of missed shots, another little black hole interrupting the white paint. “I thought she was just a substitute, because all she did in class was assign reading while she cut up papers into tiny slivers, but I stuck behind after class to ask her some questions.” He fiddled with a new dart, poking his finger on the steel point, daring it to break through his fingerprint and leak red. “She told me that everything I had ever learned, even in AP, was going to be watered down and there wasn’t enough time in the school year to teach everything she really wanted to teach.” He threw the dart. It hit the green felt, mere millimeters from the bullseye occupied by his first dart. “I told her I’d make time.”
“So, she gave you a beer?”
“No, she told me she’d quit drinking. She just took out a beer can from her purse and emptied it into the classroom plant.”
“And you kept it?”
“I was gonna recycle it, but I forgot.”
The story checked out. Today wasn’t the day Colt sat in a backwards chair with a backwards hat and lectured on the dangers of alcohol. “You think she’ll give us her old alcohol stash if we ask?”
Andrew handed Colt the remaining three darts. “I don’t wanna get her in trouble. She said she was going to tutor me after school, starting when she got one week sober.”
Colt squinted at the bullseye, and tossed the dart forward. After a disappointingly low arc, it stabbed into the wall far below the dartboard. The dart was stabbed too shallow to stay stuck, and fell. The next dart, he threw harder, and it actually stuck: to the left side of the dartboard, but this was a game of improvement, not accuracy. His final dart bounced off the metal wire holding the dartboard together, into the laundry basket of root beer cans.
“Wow, you suck.”
“That’s why I do band.”
Andrew went to pluck the darts out of the board and his poor wall and clattered through the aluminum cans for the last dart. He laid the darts at the foot of his bed, again. “Back up a little more.” His hands went to Colt’s waist as he gently guided him backwards. “It’s all in the grip, I’d say.” He took Colt’s hand and pinched the thumb, index, and middle finger together. “You wanna hold the dart with these three fingers.”
Andrew rubbed the callous at Colt’s thumb, right at the first knuckle, hardened from supporting his mellophone. It was obvious that Colt had been picking at the dead skin, trying to reveal the original shape of his thumb underneath, but all the scraping and grinding and moisturizing is nothing to a bad habit of being too tense. Andrew had a similar callous on his own thumb from holding his pencil too hard, along with a more noticeable one on his middle finger. Nothing compared to a percussionist’s callouses, though; Daria’s hands would be disfigured for life just because she wanted to be center marimba. Andrew rubbed the crease inside Colt’s thumb, also rough, but from mornings of lugging around his mellophone case from his house to the bus stop and all around his classes until 6th period Brass Fundamentals. He squeezed the fleshy part at the base of Colt’s thumb and pretended to analyze the muscle structure for scientific reasons only.
“You have to aim a little bit higher than the bullseye. And keep your stance steady. And put some muscle into it, too.” Andrew squeezed Colt’s biceps. “I know you’ve got muscles. I watch you during PT.” He rolled up Colt’s black T-shirt sleeves for emphasis.
“You watch me all the time.”
“You’re better than Netflix!” Andrew placed a dart into Colt’s fingers. “I can’t wait to watch you demolish the vets at auditions. You already bought the audition packet, right?”
Colt threw the dart, which landed at the very bottom edge of the dartboard. “Not yet.”
“Why not?” Andrew asked. He knew why, it was because Colt was afraid of aiming high, but he had to ask why not. He wanted to stab ambition into Colt and bleed success out. This year, especially, was the best year to audition: the Ray Abril Jr. Education Complex was hosting the Atlantic Wave Drum & Bugle Corps’ auditions this year and there was a 50% off discount to their students. Colt didn’t have his usual excuse of auditions being too far, this time. “You want this. I think you should do this.” A summer away from shattered plates and wads of money hidden in empty spice bottles sounded lovely, even at the cost of $4000.
“There’s been ten sexual abuse allegations against the brass caption head.”
“Since last year?”
“Since the last five years.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean…” Andrew couldn’t find the devil’s advocate without being a complete idiot. “Dammit, that is a fair point.” Educators that abused their power dynamic ruined everything. He had almost dropped out of AP Physics, himself, because of Mr. Diaz. He placed another dart into Colt’s hand. “You could march somewhere else, though. Just send a video audition.”
“They all have sexual abuse allegations. There was a secret spreadsheet circulating around with all the corps that had allegations against staff members before a cease and desist was issued.”
“Dammit!” Andrew cried. He took the dart out of Colt’s hand and chucked it at the dartboard. It landed on the outer edge of the 20 zone. “Why don’t we make our own drum corps, then? But instead of marching, we’ll money launder!” He threw the last dart, which landed only millimeters away from the previous dart in the outer 20 zone. “You and me, Colt—we’ll fold DCI! Let’s return the power to the people!”
It was another fever dream ambition, but Colt let him go on. He liked listening to the pretty pictures Andrew painted with his words, as fast as a stenotypist and as reckless as a drunk driver. Andrew made a show out of his grand gestures, motioning to an invisible future in the air only he could see. The passion made him stumble over his words, st-st-stuttering while he tried to catch up to what auditions would be like at the Forevermore Drum & Bugle Corps, and he was tagging Colt’s name at the end of his phrases like a crutch, like Colt would get distracted by a butterfly if his attention wasn’t constantly being begged for. Colt liked the way Andrew pronounced his name, how harshly it came out of Andrew’s front palette, trying too hard to project to an audience hardly two steps away. Better than Spotify.
“And what kind of buses are we gonna have?” Andrew asked. Rhetorically, of course. He was the architect of their blueprints. “Of course we’re not gonna have buses! Th-That’s just—Who the hell has money for buses? Not me, not you, and definitely not our parents. The only bus we’re taking is the one that’s a dollar-twenty-five for a day pass!”
“Oh, shut up,” Colt laughed out. He meant the exact opposite, and Andrew already knew that. “I hate you.”
“I hate you too,” Andrew shot back without a second thought. “Glad we’re on the same page.”
That was their rhythm—speaking in ironies embellished with exaggerations and interspersed between casual confessions of admiration. The year has already burned into late September, but in the light behind Andrew’s dark eyes, Colt found a torrid July: fireworks and sunshine and frothy seafoam disappearing into wavering reflections. Andrew was a master of distraction. It was no wonder he couldn’t bother cleaning his room—how could he, when he was busy redesigning reality?
Andrew distracted Colt from the writing on the wall, and that’s exactly what they both wanted, to look away from Colt’s bad cursive asking what the point of life is.
***
Colt started his English homework while Andrew practiced sketching hands in different expressions on the back of old assignments he still had in his backpack from junior year. Andrew experimented with pointy fingers, blocky fingers, sausage fingers, but whenever he tried to draw a hand in context, he reverted back to his original style. He looked up at Colt every so often for a live reference, but Colt had a sense for knowing whenever Andrew was looking at him and that ended with Andrew forgetting his original intention. Andrew once asked him how he always knew when he was being looked at. Colt told him it was because Andrew was loud at everything. Andrew kept trying to stare more quietly but it was thwarted every time.
He pulled out the sheet of physics problems he did during class, the hurried arithmetic interrupted by sketches of long fingers in the loops of scissors. The new AP physics teacher didn’t have the same sense Colt had, or if she did, she didn’t care if she was being stared at. She was cutting up a single piece of paper into impossibly thin shreds, no thicker than a millimeter in width, and didn’t even get through a quarter of the paper before the shrill school bell rang from the intercom. She had an air of authority about her that set her apart from the young female substitutes who didn’t know how to control a classroom, though she made no attempt to quell the chatter. Andrew remembered how she scanned the classroom with a tired look offering a compromise, “Don’t bother me and I won’t bother you”, before announcing that Mr. Diaz was gone and reciting that day’s busywork. She never introduced herself, didn’t even have her picture ID and job title on a black lanyard around her neck that showed she had the proper clearance to fill in for Mr. Diaz.
Most of all, Andrew remembered how quickly his dismal mood lifted when she dropped her scissors, took his college-ruled lined paper showing his work for Practice Problem 7a from him, and told him that the first step to solving Practice Problem 3a was to write more legibly. She couldn’t distinguish his 4’s and 7’s and 9’s from each other. She joked that his work looked like her prescription for Xanax. She tried to backpedal and claim that she definitely did not have a prescription for Xanax, because she didn’t mix medication with alcohol, then tried to backpedal again and claim she was unfamiliar with both substances, but the damage was done. Andrew had fallen in love with her, already.
Maybe it was shallow, probably also spiteful, but he was glad how different she was from Mr. Diaz. Mr. Diaz was suspiciously charismatic and made too many jokes at the expense of his wife. Andrew had always resented how mindlessly his classmates laughed at Mr. Diaz’s jokes. Just because a slightly-handsome man was insulting his wife in front of a captive audience didn’t mean any of them had to laugh. Mr. Diaz had a dry, deadpan manner that let him get away with quips like that and it had always rubbed Andrew the wrong way. The new AP physics teacher was similar in that manner, but she spoke as if her words were only meant for her own ears, and had a paranoid consciousness of every possible mistake she made as if she was on the verge of being exposed as a random lady who had simply walked into the empty classroom and stayed.
Andrew compared the sketches of his AP physics teacher’s hands to the ones of Colt’s hands. They were practically identical, out of Andrew’s bad talent. He drew all hands the same way, like an amateur with no depth perception. Translating 3D to 2D was harder than translating dots and lines to music, so much more frustratingly elusive.
(TO BE CONTINUED)