Marching season is out, but the competition is only heating up.
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Section leader applications for the next marching band season at Halston University are officially open, and percussionist Bay Rodriguez wants the role.
Bay's only competition is Ca...
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.
