Page 84 of Always Been His

“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s hear it.”

I stand at the edge of the riser and sing with them, not over them, and listen. Really listen, the way Miss Flack taught me to listen when I was nine years old, not for what’s wrong, but for what’s there.

What’s there stops me mid-phrase.

Deja’s voice.

It comes in on the second chorus and it isn’t what I expected. It isn’t what anyone would expect from a thirteen-year-old in a Hamilton County choir room, full and low, and sitting in the chest register with a maturity that belongs to someone who has already figured out where her voice lives. It doesn’t show off. It simply arrives, certain of itself, and fills the room differently from how it was filled before she opened her mouth.

I keep singing but I’m listening to her.

Ruby threads a harmony under the verse, light and instinctive and natural, and Priya is in there too, careful and precise, her consonants clean now, holding the center of the chord. The two girls at the end, Julia and Adele, find each other in the bridge without looking at each other, their voices meeting in the middle like they’ve been rehearsing this their whole lives.

And Zo, who began with her arms crossed and her chin up, opens her mouth in the final chorus, and her voice comes out rough-edged and completely real, nothing performed about it, and it is the best sound in the room because she didn’t mean to give it.

I hold the last note until my lungs make me stop.

The room doesn’t roar. Six young girls lose their minds in the contained way of students who have been trained by Miss Flack, which means there is shrieking, and grabbing of nearby arms, and Priya pressing both hands over her mouth, and Deja throwing her head back and laughing, and Ruby grabbing the sleeve of the girl next to her. I’m laughing too, the surprised kind, the one that comes out before I decide whether to let it.

Miss Flack stands. “That,” she announces, looking at all seven of us, “is what we are working toward.”

“That bar isn’t realistic,” Zo mutters, but her voice has completely lost its edge. She sounds like a kid who just sang better than she thought she could and isn’t ready to admit it.

“No bar worth reaching is realistic until it is,” Miss Flack replies, turning back to the piano. “Now, Sienna promised one of her songs.”

The room erupts, everyone starting a different sentence.

“Which one?” calls a voice from the back row.

I look up. Deja has been the quietest one in the room for the last hour, and her voice, even asking a two-word question, has a quality that makes you pay attention to it without knowing why.

“Which one do you want?”

She sits up straighter. “‘Pieces of Me’.”

“Then ‘Pieces of Me’ it is.” I wink.

Zo, from the second row, makes a sound into her sleeve.

Miss Flack finds the key, and I stand up.

No monitor. No in-ear. No Henny on drums, no bass through the floor, no fifty thousand people in the dark creating the buzz I’ve spent eight years chasing. Just a piano with a sticky pedal, six girls with open binders, and me.

I’ve sung this song hundreds of times.

I wrote it at twenty-two in a Nashville hotel bathroom because I couldn’t sleep and the words were sitting on my chest like something physical. I wrote about performing so much that the performance starts to eat the singer, and for two years, I sang it every night on a stage while slowly, precisely, proving every word of it true.

Ruby comes in on the second line without being told.

I hear her before I register what she is doing, her voice threading underneath mine the way a harmony finds itself when someone has been listening carefully. It just arrives, and I feel it in the back of my throat, the thing that happens when another voice joins yours, and suddenly the sound is bigger than either of you made it.

Then Deja opens her mouth.

I heard it during the Lizzo bridge. I thought I understood it, but I didn’t. This is Deja in a song she loves, and it is completely different, her voice filling the room from the floor up, not loud, not performing, just present in the totally committed way that some voices are, and I turn my head mid-note because I cannot help it.

That voice is going to do something in the world, and she doesn’t know it yet.

Priya comes in on the chorus, careful and clean, her consonants landing exactly where they should, and beside her, Julia and Adele, find each other in the harmony, the way they found each other in the Lizzo bridge, instinctively..