Charlotte's Guitar
Episode 2 of The Belles of St. Anthony's
Good evening. Time for another episode, this time profiling Charlotte, another of the central characters. This jumps back a few weeks from Halloween to the school talent show. The stories will start off going back and forth in time a little to get everybody properly introduced, but it will eventually settle into chronological order.
If you’ve been paying attention to my other short fiction, you’ll recognize a couple of names here. Zeke, Lucius, and Bonnie from my comic and short story “Sick Day” are all students at St. Anthony’s, and will put in regular appearances in this series. It’s actually why I posted that story—I’d just made the decision to retcon them in.
Each story is generally going to have a different first-person narrator. This time it’s Lucius; other times it will be some other anonymous student; sometimes it’ll be one of the central characters themselves.
Anyway, enjoy the story!
Zeke and I had a scene prepared from a play by Neil Simon, and Charlotte was right ahead of us. She was holding a lemon-yellow Fender Stratocaster and a spiral notebook, and had an amp and pedal sitting next to her. Everybody wanted her in their band, but I'd never actually heard her play before, and I was looking forward to watching her shred.
Everybody backstage had nerves grinding against our bones and the judgment of our peers ahead of us, plus we were still kind of in shock from Mayla the Barnowl's performance. Charlotte had been quiet all night, only speaking to her friend Helena, and even then only in whispers.
She and I wound up sitting next to each other on the bench backstage, and I don't like to keep quiet too long. "What song are you playing?"
"An instrumental," she said. She was staring forward with grim determination, and her voice was steady and calm. If she was nervous, she was doing a great job of hiding it.
"What's Helena playing?"
"Nothing." She started tuning one of the strings. "It's a solo piece."
"Ah, cool, a guitar solo." She was pretty confident to go up by herself after Esslie and her band had already thrashed out that Franz Ferdinand song. "Is it a cover?"
"Nope, original composition." She flipped open her notebook. Inside were intricate, elaborate webs of musical notes and chords, with guitar tabs between them. "I've been working on it since summer. Not sure about that suspended chord, but it'll do."
I'd never even realized a guitar sheet could be so complicated. "You did that all yourself? I thought guitar solos were... were..."
"Improvised? Yeah, that has its place. But I didn't just want to riff. I wanted to write."
"Respect," I said.
The crowd out there clapped for a duo singing an old Broadway tune. A senior went out with his beatbox. "Say, why aren't you in any bands, if you like guitar so much?"
She scrunched her nose thinking about it. "It's just different philosophies. I'm trained in classical guitar. They just want to play regular rock 'n' roll. They all want to be the next Joan Jett, or Janis Joplin, or Kate Bush, or whoever."
I'd heard of maybe the first two. "And you?"
"The female Emerson, Lake, and Palmer."
"Who?"
Another round of applause, and Ms. Kreuzer called Charlotte to the stage. Zeke and I got up to wait our turn.
She took a music stand with her and set it up in front of the audience as Helena carried over her amp and pedal. With the notebook open in front of her, Charlotte plugged everything in, let Helena return backstage, then adjusted the mic. "This piece is 'Untitled' in A minor. Good luck, everybody."
And she began.
Now, I'm no musician, but I was impressed. Anybody in the world would be ecstatic to have her in her band. Her fingers were hovering over the strings so lightly they hardly looked like they were making contact, yet the sound was crisp, the chords crunchy, the melodies tasty. Just when you thought she was getting repetitive, she moved on to a new rhythm, even a new style. I was seriously starting to groove along with it.
She turned the page.
And there were more sounds, more chords, more melodies.
She wasn't stopping.
Zeke tapped my shoulder. "She knows we only get five minutes, right?"
And I thought Barnowl had the shocking performance of the night.
Helena was standing by the stage and beaming. Out in the audience was a "Whoop" that had to have been Augusta. Of course her friends would be into this, but they weren't everybody else!
Now even Ms. Kreuzer was looking troubled. She kept glancing at us, no doubt thinking the same thing: at this rate, we were never going to perform.
Charlotte turned another page.
Finally Ms. Kreuzer stepped out and interrupted. "Very good, very good, Charlotte. Up next--"
"I'm not done yet." Charlotte flipped two pages further into her notebook. "See?"
Ms. Kreuzer flipped back, pointed at the corner, and stormed off the stage. "I told her. I told her--just an excerpt!" And she marked something on her clipboard.
Charlotte resumed her performance with an ugly scowl on her face the whole time. And when she got to the end, she scratched out the worst possible chord, ending it on such a flat and sour note that it could only have been intentional. She growled out a "You're welcome," gathered everything, and glared at Ms. Kreuzer as she returned.
I was of course embarrassed for her. Charlotte had just played out any performer's worst nightmare. But as Helena comforted her, saying, "They'll understand someday," Charlotte still had that scowl on her face, a scowl right out of a portrait of Beethoven. This wasn't a girl who'd been humiliated in front of hundreds of people. This was an artist who'd been disrespected. I could already see this becoming a scene in her biopic.
"Lucius and Zeke, you're up," Ms. Kreuzer said.
Zeke and I checked each other's costumes, adjusting each other's coats. "Yeah, let's try and follow that," Zeke said. You ready?"
"I don't know," I said. "I think her guitar made me forget my lines."