Emme screams. “Ben, that’s so fantastic!” She gets up and hugs him.

Jack laughs. “Just think about it. A year from now, I’ll be in sunny LA, fighting off the advances of the all-bikini-clad female students at CalArts, while the rest of you will be freezing your butts off, this one in the Midwest and you two albinos here.”

Emme takes one more bite of the protein bar. She looks at it for a couple seconds and runs over to a garbage can to spit it out.

“What, Red, are you sick to your stomach over the thought of being so far away from me? I’d say you should come to LA, but I think you’d probably spontaneously combust if you stepped into the sun.”

I ignore Jack and run over to Emme.

“Sorry, it tastes like chalk.” She hands it back to me. “I’ll be fine … once, um, the auditions are over. I hope.”

She whips out her water bottle and takes a big sip. She turns her attention to Ben. “Ben, you have to tell us everything. What did the letter say? When did you find out?”

Ben hands us a copy of the e-mail he got just a few minutes before. “I had to run to the computer lab to print it out. It seemed like a joke.”

“That’s really great.” I give him a big hug.

I don’t know why I haven’t been stressing about college acceptance as much as everybody else. I mean, let’s face it, I’m never the calm, cool, collected one. I guess I figure that I’ll get in somewhere, although I really want to stay in New York and go to Juilliard with Emme. That’s my dream world. Pretty much everything involving Emme and the future is a dream, one that I know won’t necessarily come true.

I know I want to write songs and I’ll be happy doing it at a prestigious college or for three people at a coffee shop. Not like I don’t think I could learn something at Juilliard or any music college; it just isn’t as important to me as it is to everybody else.

But seeing the look on Ben’s face, I’m thinking that maybe it should be. I’ve never seen him happier. “Thanks,” he says. “It’s like this huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I don’t have to stress about …” He stops himself. Because the three of us still have our auditions and fates to worry about. “Well, we still have the showcase. Are we ready?”

We run through my song a few times; it’s something we’ve been playing for a while now. Of course, that doesn’t stop me from messing up the lyrics twice, but everybody else sounds great.

After we’re all satisfied, our attention turns to Emme’s song. I move my mic stand down several inches so the microphone can reach her.

She tentatively approaches the mic and adjusts it for way longer than she needs to. She finally turns around. “Um, okay. I guess we’ll start. So I was thinking that it would be best for me to start first.” She strums several chords and then nods for the rest of us to join in. We get to the part where she’s supposed to start singing and she simply keeps playing the song. “Obviously I’ll sing here,” she says as she moves closer to the drum kit and farther away from the microphone.

Jack stops drumming. “Red, you’ve got to own the song and the mic. Go all ‘Beat It’ on it!”

“I’m embarrassed.”

Jack groans. “If you can’t sing in front of us, how are you going to do it at the showcase?”

“I don’t think I can do it.” Her voice is barely a whisper.

“Can we take a break?” I ask. Both Jack and Ben leave the room. Emme remains frozen.

I wrap my arm around her. “You can do this.”

“I don’t know why I agreed to audition in the first place.”

“Obviously, the board saw something in you.”

She nods for a few minutes. “I’m not used to singing anywhere besides your studio.”

“Okay, so close your eyes.”

She looks up at me and it kills me that she doesn’t trust me enough to just close her eyes.

“Please trust me.”

She closes them.

“Okay, pretend that we’re in my studio. Sing.”

“I feel silly.”

“Not as silly as you’ll feel if you become a mute onstage.”

She feels around her guitar and strums until she finds the first chord. She starts playing and then she opens her mouth. Her lovely voice comes out and floats and twists in the air. Granted, she hasn’t had the years of training that the singers in the vocal department have had. So she’s not a technically proficient singer. But what makes her special is her soul. She makes the song hers. You don’t need to leap ten octaves to do that. You just have to feel it. I’m mesmerized when she sings. I’m only inches away from her while she’s lost in her song, breathing every inch of her in.

She finishes and I make her start again. She plays and I do my best to navigate my awkward, gangly body as quietly as possible to get Jack and Ben back in the room. The door makes a tiny squeak, but she doesn’t stop. Jack and Ben come in and Jack stops dead in his tracks as he hears her sing. His mouth drops open and mouths, “Oh my Red!”

As she strums the final chord of the song, she smiles and opens her eyes. She looks over and her cheeks grow hot when she sees Ben and Jack.

Jack starts to clap. “Red, is there a reason you haven’t been singing all this time? We could’ve been the band with the hot chick singer. Man. Although there’d be more dudes at the shows, so I guess this is a good thing. Not like the girls that fall over this one are anything to write home about.” He winks at me.