Chapter Text
It was a hot and terrible day for band practice, which meant that Gideon Nav had her hat on backwards and shirt tied up with a ponytail holder. The sun beat down on the craggy parking lot where they practiced (because the football team, all army-brat motherfuckers, needed two fields now!) and the ground was so hot she could feel it through her shoes.
There were a couple things happening simultaneously. First. Ianthe and her saxophone cronies were trying to commit vehicular homicide while relocating the water coolers with the twins’ car. Move or be moved, bitch, that was the sax motto, since they could neither drive well nor backwards march in a straight line to save their lives. Driving around with the water was mostly an excuse for Naberius Tern to acquire a wet t-shirt and for the twins to film him in case he fell off the back of their convertible.
Second. Camilla Hect was snitching on her for losing her drill charts again, because she was an unrelenting kiss-ass. She walked over to the deer-stand that served as a podium for their brave leader, still wearing her quads, and put in some sort of formal complaint about Gideon, speaking with just her mallets. Cam was feinting that she cared if Gideon flattened someone with her bass drum as a pretty obvious excuse to spend more time barking up the drum major podium at Palamedes and wagging her tail when he agreed with her.
And then there was the other drum major. The transfer. God only knew why the new girl was made drum major with out so much as an introduction. Up on her deer stand, not bothering to fuck off and chat during break, she looked like a dark spot blotting out the sun. She was good, apparently, not that anyone cared. It’s high school marching band, how good can you be? For all her drum corps training she still had shaky noodle arms and was sadly watching Ianthe Tridentarius do donuts with the water.
And she saw Gideon staring daggers into her. Mortifying.
Camilla made her way back over to Gideon, leaning back with the weight of her quads and tapping out a rhythm on the metal rims in a vaguely threatening fashion. They had been trying to set up a line before they’d nearly collided and Palamedes called a water break. Gideon was fairly sure that despite weighing forty pounds wet Palamedes could injure her and that he would not hesitate to do so if she flattened his drumline captain. He called them back to attention with a musical and well-practiced whistle.
These were the good times, Gideon thought. Cam, despite being a hard-ass, was her best friend. They’d pried each other open like clams after they both discovered they were good at hitting stuff with mallets. Palamedes was a close second. He was a nerd, but the endearing kind, and was never far from Camilla. They had a designated lunch table, a shared Netflix account, and inappropriate inside jokes. Gideon wondered when that had all happened. She’d only had one friend until high school, and only saw her during miserable summers.
Today’s rehearsal was the drum feature, the middle movement of their marching band show, and a choreographic nightmare. The winds stopped playing to execute a few complicated marching drills while the battery of drums moved to the front to show off their guns. The most disastrous drill involved the battery crabwalking through a brass diagonal that was meant to slide through them. Theoretically, this showcased Camilla and Gideon throwing their mallets in the air and their badass brass section doing trombone flourishes, or it would, if they could stop running into each other. Cam often said they worked with a bunch of morons who couldn’t figure out how to walk in a line and that Palamedes was too nice to yell at them for it. At least one of those was true.
Gideon heard a gentle “Aw, fuck” behind her as Jeanne tried to copy her mallet tosses and dropped both of them. If she stopped and tried to pick them up, the whole line would run into each other and Jeanne would probably lose her balance and roll over her harness like a flipped beetle.
“Leave ‘em!” Gideon shouted. Jeanne kept moving and vocalized her bass rhythm loudly instead of playing, which was cute, so Gideon did it too. Before they’d taken four more steps the whole drumline was badly singing their music and the brass were laughing at them as they filed through the line.
Gideon watched Camilla nearly get brained by a trombone held by Judith Deuteros, who moved at the last second. The brass captain had a pretty good understanding that the quads would not stop until the drum major called it. She shouted back to her section, “Cover down or I’m letting the battery run you over!”
Gideon avoided a few more near-collisions, but they managed a run-through of the whole feature before—
The new girl called a break.
Palamedes gave her a look from the opposite stand—confused, but not angry. He wasn’t about to argue with her in front of everybody, anyhow. “Oh! I lost track of the time,” he said, projecting his voice all the way to the back of the parking lot, “Let’s bring it in, kids.”
Whatever verbal ass-kicking they were going to get would have to wait for the next rehearsal. Gideon and Camilla rounded everyone up with a fun cadence, assisted by the other section captains. Palamedes sat on the edge of his stand and invited his fellow drum major to come sit with him, but she declined. She stayed on her stand to glower at the rowdy crowd. She looked like someone had hauled out their Halloween decorations early.
“How’d we do, man?” Gideon shouted.
“You? Terrible. Absolutely suck-ass,”—he barely missed a flying plastic water bottle previously held by Gideon Nav—“Kidding, you know this! That drum feature is a money maker. Competition is only six weeks away, but I think we have the talent to win back our trophy from Eden High School, if we work hard and pace ourselves. I’d like to see the Class of 2011 go out with a bang. Now, please drink some water and drive safely! Dismissed!”
Someone from the back, probably Naberius, shouted “Fuck safety!” but he was barely heard as the drumline starting up another fun cadence. Gideon couldn’t stand Babs Tern but he could play Careless Whisper, so she didn’t run him off from the post-practice drum circle. She didn’t notice the little shadowpriest drum major walk up and nearly put a mallet through her pointy, evil gourd.
To her surprise and various other troubling emotions, the Hot Topic postergirl curled a little bony hand around her wrist. She nearly dropped her mallet, and blood rushed up into her ears, turning the cadence and decent saxophone playing into mushy, distant waves of sound.
“You need to take this more seriously, Griddle,” she drawled. “If you trip over yourself at competition, there’s just nothing I can do to save you.” Perhaps it had been wishful thinking that Harrowhark wouldn’t remember her. She pulled Gideon out of the drum circle with her little twitchy hand, back to the safe zone of her podium.
“Oh, my bad. Hey, I just remembered I never put you inside a timpani and rolled you down a hill like I promised. I figure it would work with a bass too. You wanna give it a shot, candy eyes?”
“Ooh,” she crooned. She pulled off her black conductor’s gloves—you have to have one hell of a god complex to wear gloves to practice, Gideon thought—extravagantly, like peeling a banana. “I really thought we were past the threats of violence. And here I was extending the olive branch to ask why you didn’t go to music camp this year.”
Neither of them noticed people clearing out of the parking lot. “Missed me, huh? I bet you cried yourself to sleep over it.”
“No, not really. I was busy at drum corps, you know, so I couldn’t go to camp either.”
Gideon had heard about the drum corps thing. She had heard about nothing else but the drum corps thing. These days, her relationship with her father was conducted entirely over social media, and this past summer John had posted nothing but blurry images of Harrow in a stupid little white uniform. There were pictures of Harrow marching while frowning into a clarinet, pictures of her standing and frowning, pictures of her frowning in bibbers, and pictures of her copypasted next to John in his corps uniform from when dinosaurs roamed the earth. They looked like the fucking nutcracker. It had been funny until John had posted that his perfect Harrow angel was transferring to the school where he taught band. But how did she find out that Gideon finally escaped music camp, if she skipped it for drum corps herself? Did John tell her?
Before Gideon could elaborate on her desire to trap Harrow inside a drum and stir her like soup, Palamedes and Camilla joined them.
“We were thinking about grabbing some early dinner,” he said this to Gideon and turned, oblivious, to Harrow, “Have I introduced you to Gideon Nav? You should come get food with us, and we can all catch up. It’s something of a band practice tradition.”
“We’ve met.” Harrow retrieved her black Jansport from under her podium and stalked off. Gideon noted with a bit of seething something-or-other that Harrow met up with John and went back inside the school.