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Two and a bit years later, Beca really isn't sure why she's sitting here, with the other seniors left from that first crazy year with the Bellas and a couple newer juniors and sophomores, a week before a capella auditions, supposedly brainstorming a game plan for the year. In actual fact, what they're really doing is drinking beer and laughing about what they did over the summer, although she can't seem to get into it as much as previous years. But here she is, with Amy telling some outrageous story about her latest guy, an Australian surf star who followed her to America like a lovesick puppy and wound up falling in love with another of her boyfriends - a story which, Beca has come to learn over the past few years, is more than likely to be absolutely true. Things like that happened to Amy.
"So, okay guys, enough already," Ashley is saying, still half-laughing. "Seriously though, what do we really need out of this audition? We've got two altos, two mezzos, one soprano, and one beatboxer-alto, so another soprano or two would be nice."
"Aw, gawd, really, another soprano?" Amy fake-whines, and Taylor swats at her and misses completely.
Beca loves the girls - Amy and Cynthia Rose and Ashley are left of the old crew. Stacie left for a dance college just before last year, though she still texts now and then. Lilly had to stop when her electrical engineering degree got too intense, and the rest have graduated, of course. Now they have Taylor, who's studying Architecture and has the most piercing soprano Beca's ever heard; Sarah, who was born Steve and has a really rich contralto (and hits all the bass notes anyone could want, though it'd taken a year before she'd felt comfortable enough to do it), and Crystal, a waiflike sophomore who replaced Lilly as their "percussion section". They're all great, all amazing women, and they need another three from the auditions - at least - to round out their numbers again this year.
"We want one more soprano," Beca says definitively, because Taylor's voice pierces but it can't blend and the soprano line is suffering as a result. "And I want another mezzo, too." Cynthia Rose's voice is powerful but very distinctive, and Amy likewise - ideally, Beca wants a mellower tone on that part to balance it out. "Beyond that, I guess we'll see what shows up at auditions."
Everyone agrees with that. Beca is, after all, the director, and she knows she's right. Every now and then she worries she's being Aubrey about things, but she does take suggestions and mix things up when the other girls want. She makes sure she does.
It's just…Beca doesn't really need to be here anymore. The Bellas are all up on the interesting innovative mashups now. Cynthia Rose and Taylor could make up their own sets without her, and thanks to Ashley, of all people, they'd kept the tightness and technical precision that had pushed the Bellas into the finals despite the boring sets they'd done in the bad old days. The Bellas are one of the best groups around, and will probably stay that way, trading the ICCA trophy back and forth with the TrebleMakers and the Footnotes (whose squeaky little lead has finally hit college, and hopefully puberty) for the next decade. They don't need her to fix them, or hold them together; not anymore.
"That's the auditions," Crystal says, "but what about the ICCAs? What are we doing this year?"
"We could do rap set to music," Ashley says. Ashley loves rap, listens to it all the time, for all she can't get through more than a line of it without tripping over her own tongue. Luckily she knows that and never proposes that she be the one to front the odd rap lines they throw in.
"Yeah, but we sort of did that with the whole R&B theme two years ago," Cynthia Rose, by contrast, finds rap boring, and prefers full-throated modern pop-arias, something she can open up and belt through. Her voice is made for P!nk, Beca thinks absently.
"What about boy-bands?" Taylor says, "like, nineties stuff?"
"Or girl-bands," Sarah shoots back with a bit of a grin.
Why had she even joined the Bellas in the first place, Beca wonders, letting the girls start flinging ideas around, disconnecting from the discussion again. She knows it wasn't really her Dad's ultimatum/promise of helping her get to LA. Even at eighteen, even as prickly and scared and withdrawn as she'd been that first year out of high school, she'd had the grit to get herself to LA on her own. In fact, if her Dad had pushed harder, she probably would have done just that - packed her bags, got on a bus, picked up a shitty job waiting tables and a shittier apartment and started working her way up. But for some reason, instead of following the plan she'd had since she was fourteen, she'd showed up at those stupid auditions and sang that very personal solo adaptation of the Lulu and the Lampshades song, and launched herself down the rabbit hole of crazy, nerdy "music with our mouths".
She checks back into the argument as something catches her ear that sounds weirder than usual, but it's just Crystal going off on one of her long, involved tangents - this time about the physiological benefits of singing in unison, in response to Sarah's proposal for doing pieces where every voice was doing something different. Beca rolls her eyes and lets her attention drift again. She's half-thinking of quitting, had come to this first meeting thinking about it. With one more year to finish her degree - double-major in Music and Lit, go figure but Dad's love of academia had rubbed off a bit - and with some dedicated summer internships under her belt, she already has positive noises about a job with IAMSOUND once she graduates. Beca's kind of wondering why she's still bothering about diction and tone when she could be throwing herself into finishing off her degrees and rounding out a more mature portfolio of mixes to bring to the label.
Then, in a counterpoint to something Taylor's saying about the musical merits of late-oughts pop, Cynthia Rose starts humming a familiar tune and before long they're all, herself included, four-parting Rihanna's "Umbrella" - a song which, about a month after it hit the charts, Beca had loathed with all the hatred an overplayed chart-topper deserved. Funny how those turned into pure nostalgia, not too many years later, she thinks, dropping her voice and leaning into the fry on the chorus and feeling Sarah open up on the mid-range, and like sometimes happens, suddenly it all changes. All of their voices hit that perfection of matched tone and harmony and rhythm and it clicks and Beca can feel her heart squeezing with how perfect it feels, with how much she wishes it would never end.
Oh, right.
They all feel it, together, in the way it stops being a light-hearted sing-along and turns into something like performance, throwing the full weight of all their vocal talents together to sustain the moment. They turn in toward each other, eyes shining, smiles curling through the edges, because moments like this are precious. And that was why she'd joined. Because five years after her angry thirteen-year-old self had quit choir (because it was the thing that Dad had shared with her and praised her for and she'd been so angry with him for leaving), she'd stood naked in the dorm bathroom in front of an equally naked Chloe, suddenly oblivious to the exposure, her awareness locked into that long-lost perfection of matched voices - and her entire soul had ached with joy to be there again.
Here and now, the Bellas finish the ridiculous song and grin at each other in a silent delight for a single precious moment, before it's over and someone laughs, the people the next table over applaud, and the table two over yells at them to be quiet because this is the favourite student bar and the fratboys come here too. And with that, it's gone, fragile as a soap-bubble.
Because it's always gone. That's the point. That moment, that perfection, never lasts. It's a fleeting moment where the music takes hold and everything is flawless, and the best thing possible is finding it onstage in front of an audience, feeding on that energy and throwing it back in a feedback loop that can make you higher than any of the pharmaceuticals Beca has bothered trying. The crash sucks, of course, and the day after a performance like that feels like a hangover, or the day after a bad break-up. But the whole point of music is chasing that moment, so just like you never think about the hangover when you're getting drunk and happy at the bar, you never think about the crash when you're throwing your heart into the music.
"Guys," Beca says suddenly, sitting up straight, a beautiful idea flashing through her mind on the tail of all her thoughts of joining the Bellas and quitting choir so long ago. "Guys I have an idea!"
Her friends lean in to hear it, and she starts talking as fast as she can, humming here and there, already hearing the beats she wants, the harmonies they'll play with, trying to sketch out the music she hears so they can hear it too. "See?" she says, grinning like a fool. "We go back, to the traditional Bellas - songs by women, old songs, but instead of going all boring like they did we take new songs by women and we weave them in, like this," she half-hums, half la-la-las the phrase, and Cynthia Rose and Ashley (who are most skeptical about a return to traditional Bella style) start smiling and nodding.
"We could do a themed outfit, too," Sarah says, excited. "Marilyn Monroe style, or even go back to the flappers," Sarah starts pulling up pictures on her phone, and the others start getting into that, too, when ever since that first year the Bellas had been aggressively anti-uniforms on stage. Beca grins, already warming up to the challenge of making tired old songs new and interesting again. Chasing perfection for one more year. Finishing her term as a Bella with a bang and, she's suddenly determined, another win at the ICCAs.
Beca finds herself thinking that after, when she's graduated and moved to LA, she might just grit her teeth and find a choir to join.