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. 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.
