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forfeiting.”
    “Yes, ma’am. Sorry,” I said with a sigh, trying to sound sad that I would have to give up my drum captain position if someone beat me. Really I was ecstatic. I’d been saved!
    And I’d arrived at just the right time. She wasn’t making me forfeit. If she had, I would have been dead last in the snare drum line, which could have been a fate worse than being first. Then I would have had to stand between some scared freshman on snare and a timid sophomore on quads. I had a tendency to frighten underclassmen.
    With everyone staring at me, including Will, and a couple of juniors, Jimmy and Travis, who were making a point of looking bored to death, I pitched everything I’d been carrying off the top of my drum. Sunscreen, bag, drink, towel, Pop-Tarts. Ms. Nakamoto watched the process like she’d come to count on this sort of thing from me. Then I started the part of the drum cadence that we used for tryouts.
    As my too-loud notes echoed around the stadium, I felt that high I loved so much. Playing drum stressed me out a little, because there was no room for mistakes, and mistakes were pretty much my modus operandi. But when I was under pressure, I loved to put things in their proper places, like bubbling in the correct answers on a standardized test. Beating a snare drum was the ultimate pastime if you occasionally enjoyed precision in your otherwise scatterbrained life.
    But this time there was a catch. I had to be very careful to make a mistake. Otherwise I’d end up right back where I’d started, as drum captain. And because everyone else had already taken a turn without me here to listen, I didn’t know whether to make a bunch of mistakes or just one. In the end I settled for missing the syncopated part that tended to trip people up in the middle. I’d never heard Will play, but something told me my pirate hadn’t missed a note.
    Sure enough, a moment after I was done, Ms. Nakamoto made a mark on her clipboard, then read off the new order. Will was first on snare, and the new drum captain. I was second.
    My hero! I could have relaxed all summer if I’d known that my knight in shining armor would ride out of nowhere—Minnesota, actually, which amounted to the same thing—to save me from my own success, and my certain failure.
    There was a lot of confusion as drummers reordered themselves according to Ms. Nakamoto’s ruling, purposely knocking each other with their drums as they reshuffled. Then they took off their harnesses and set down the heavy drums. Now that the challenge was over, we were just waiting for Ms. Nakamoto or DeMarcus to pull us into the proper position for the first set. We didn’t need to wear our drums for that. Eight snares, four bass drums, three quads, and four pairs of cymbals lay on the grass like the excavated skeleton of a dinosaur. The drummers themselves borrowed space on towels to sit down with the trumpets and trombones near the back of the band, or moved up front and tried to tickle the majorettes.
    Normally I would have made the rounds and talked to all my friends whom I hadn’t seen during the summer. But I wasn’t passing up the perfect opportunity to question the mysterious Mr. Matthews on the percussion skills he’d suddenly acquired. I retrieved my towel from my pile of stuff and spread it out on the grass. “Join me?” I asked him.
    “Ssssssure.” He eased his big frame down onto half of the towel and leaned back on his elbows, showing off his abs. The guy had a six-pack. Every girl in band—and some of the guys—turned to stare, then faced forward again like they’d just been looking around casually. It wasn’t that six-packs were unusual at our school. Athletics were important. But the chiseled chest was less common in band.
    Allowing the uncomfortable silence to stretch on, I smoothed sunscreen across my arms, legs, and face. I held the bottle toward him. “Need some?”
    “We’re in the shade,” he said.
    True. The high bleachers on the