Chapter one
The opening chord of the music exploded in Dennison Hall,
shattering the silence.
And Iz Beaufort, sitting there in the audience, suddenly burst
into tears like a complete idiot.
“Shut up,” she was whispering furiously to herself.
But as the music gained momentum, she found herself getting
more stupidly worked up, not less.
It was the way the chord looked.
All charcoal grey and black, streaked through with sullen blue,
with flashes of slicing silver. It was like some multi-storey building
that loomed and morphed in Iz’s head.
Meanwhile, Audra Allen started kicking the back of her chair,
saying, “Hey new kid, some of us are trying to watch the show.”
Which was a joke, because Audra Allen had been going around
telling everyone how boring this concert was going to be.
“Sorry,” Iz muttered.
She hunched down in her chair, crossed her arms furiously and
protectively, trying to get the music out of her head. But the trouble
was, Iz and music were totally complicated. It was like some rela-
tionship in which they were always fighting or making up or ghost-
ing each other.
Mostly ghosting for the last two years, actually.
That was when she’d shoved her guitar under the bed and vowed
not to play it again. It was right after she’d been in a really bad foster
home, where playing the guitar had led to horrible things she mostly
tried not to think about now. It had been a survival thing, hiding it
away, going undercover, pulling a kind of fog around herself, and
trying not to stand out.
And she’d mostly succeeded.
But here in Dennison Hall, at the most unlikely of moments,
this extraordinary chord was smashing doors open in her head.
Memories were spilling out.
She was thinking about the curve of her guitar under her arm.
She was thinking about placing her fingers on the frets in places
that were homes.
She was thinking about the way she could pick out one melody
line, then add others and see them like threads she was twisting
together into some complex piece of weaving.
“Hey! New girl!”
Iz swung around.
Audra was smirking at her, and the other kids were doing that
thing where you pretend not to laugh but you also want the person
to know you are pretending not to laugh.
“Everything . . . okay?” Audra said.
“It’s great,” Iz said tersely.
“’Cause we’re getting a little worried back here.”
“Sorry about that,” Iz said.
She twisted back around to the front, ignoring their giggles.
Audra Allen had picked Iz out on the first day Iz arrived at the
school. Audra, like so many other bullies, had kind of sensed that
something was not quite normal about Iz. And, restless and bored,
hunting around for something to dominate, Audra had settled on
her, because she had known Iz wouldn’t fight back.
She was right on all counts.
Iz was absolutely no good at normal. Other people didn’t seem
to get all tangled up like she did when they listened to music. They
didn’t seem to picture it as a kind of structure with additions and
passages you could go down. Nor, as far as she could tell, did they
spend all their time fighting with themselves, wrestling between
rebellion and fear and a weird kind of frustrated grief.
Applause exploded over the auditorium.
Iz raised her head then.
The musicians dropped their arms and grinned at the audience.
They turned and slapped hands together, laughed, threw an arm
around each other’s shoulders. Released from the focus and precision
of that wild performance, they were now loose-limbed and utterly
cheerful.
And she realized with surprise—
They were scarcely older than she was.
They were kids.
A man strode onto the stage, amid the applause. He was tall,
with a mop of black hair. He moved easily, like he was completely
comfortable in himself.
When he spoke, his voice drifted out mildly, as if he was stroll-
ing around some flower show.
“Good afternoon! I am Dr. Aaron Perlinger, and this is
Manifesto, from The Métier School. Let me introduce them. From
the left—Becky, Ahmed, Rina, Jasleen, Kwame, Teo, Will, Bijan,
LaRoyce.”
Applause burst out again while the performers shuffled around
grinning somewhat self-consciously now.
Dr. Perlinger continued, “Everything is written and performed
by these extraordinary young musicians. But that is not the most
important thing about them. They support each other. They build
each other. They hold each other up.”
“It all comes from you, Dr. P,” said one of the girls onstage. She
was standing beside a large instrument that looked like an over-
grown violin. “That’s what makes Manifesto what it is.”
“Ha! I just walk alongside you all, Jasleen,” he said. “I just en-
courage what’s there already.”
Iz was staring, trying to make sense of this conversation. Who
were these kids who could write something as endlessly powerful
and complicated and multifaceted as that chord? And who was this
man who directed them and spoke about how they all looked after
one another? Why did they beam at him like they loved him?
A pain erupted in her out of nowhere, so strong she was bent
over with it. It was a woken-up, broken kind of longing. Because she
had the strongest feeling suddenly that if she tried to explain herself
to these kids, to this man, they might actually understand.
Dr. Perlinger said, “That piece you just heard was called ‘Post-
Punk Beethoven.’ It’s the creation of Ahmed and Will and Kwame
here. Tell us about it?”
He ushered three boys to the front, who were shuffling around
and bashful but with eyes like intelligent arrows.
They started talking at top speed, filling in each other’s thoughts.
“Yeah, we were kind of riffing on the idea of rebellion.”
“And post-punk is like rebellion on top of the original rebellion
of punk. Joy Division, Talking Heads, The Cure—”
“Then there’s Beethoven. He ushered in a whole new era by
basically blowing up the rules for how you write music—”
“So we kind of mashed them up together, like rebellion on top
of rebellion on top of rebellion!”
Rebellion on rebellion on rebellion.
She had seen that in their music—piled-up strata that were all
about refusing to accept the way things were and fighting against
what held you back.
Maybe that was why she had burst into tears.
Because it had been like seeing her own complicated self looking
back at her.
All at once, she wondered—what would her life have been like,
if Dominion Children’s Care hadn’t spiraled her through twenty-six
foster homes and fourteen schools? What if she had not learned to
be afraid of writing songs and playing her guitar because of what
had happened in That Place? What if there had been a group like
Manifesto for her to join, and a leader like Dr. Perlinger to walk
beside her and bring out of her what was already there?
For the first time in ages, she longed to actually take out her
guitar. She longed to play alongside them.
It was like that chord was the Big Bang or something.
The universe inside Iz was suddenly expanding outward at an
unthinkable speed.
