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. a compact drumming pattern that constructs longer percussive music pieces.
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WOULD YOU BELIEVE ME IF I said that Bay and I used to be friends?
Before the sudden freeze of freshman year, we used to find each other at parties and keep each other company because of the mutual band connection. I remember one such party, probably in October, where I'd gone out onto the back patio and seen Bay sitting on a wicker chair. The pounding bass of the music shook the wood beneath my feet, I smiled, and took the empty chair next to her.
"Bay. Are you okay?"
Her cheeks were flushed red, and she held a red solo cup. At that point the party punch was laden with so many spirits; it wouldn't have been out of place in an organic chemistry lab.
"Hi, Callum," she'd smiled—see? Our dynamic was warm at one point—"I'm great. Better than great. A girl has given me her number."
Turns out she was bisexual, and I was bisexual, and since graduating from my New-England, ridiculously repressive private school, I hadn't met many people who were as blunt and expressive about their identity as Bay is. Was. I think she was one of the first five people I ever came out to, excluding my family and Quentin.
"Thank you for telling me," she said. "I hope I remember in the morning."
I laid my head back against the chair and gazed at the stars as we started analyzing each other's sexuality, what was the same and what was different, passing questions between each other.
"When did you know?"
"What's your type?"
"What's your ratio?"
"Is it a coincidence that your type and your ratio are the most heteronormative expression of bisexuality?" (That was what Bay asked me when I said I would fuck a guy but not date him, and that 80% of the time my attraction leans towards women.)
I caught her watching me in her periphery, and she clarified, "I just recently read a study about how queer attraction is still heteronormatively-conditioned. Like how gay men really like straight-presenting gay men. And like the butch-femme dichotomy. Why does someone always have to be the straight man?"
"That's true, I guess," I said, laughing in surprise. "I mean, my school was really conservative. I definitely have to think about it."
She swerved to talking about the classes we were taking that semester, perhaps sensing that she'd overstepped some social boundary.
Soon after that, she hated me, and we never talked about 'deep' things again.
But I learned more in that exchange that I learned that whole semester. Bay is a rarity: someone who likes to catch her friends out with a conversational trip line. Someone who takes an emotional, vulnerable moment and shines a clinical light on it. Someone who inspects others like psychological specimens. Someone who sees the fabric of society and has to resist the urge to tear it up.
