First-Year Orientation by Eric Smith

Author:Eric Smith [Lauren Gibaldi and Eric Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781536231588
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been a college student for six days now, but so far, college isn’t too different from high school. Just bigger. Today is the start of first-year orientation, but as we come to the end of band camp, I’m feeling pretty oriented already.

Gripping my sax, I face the conductor’s podium and march to my mark. The notes I play accent each step. Sforzando. Snap to front. Crescendo. And then I march backward in time with the music—left, right, left, right—until I hit my next mark.

In the helicopter view of this, our bodies are in the shape of one large skyscraper amid a cityscape. The trombones, stationed at the top of the skyscraper, keep “accidentally” rounding out the peak of the skyscraper, making it look like a big, long—

“Yo!” our section leader shouts as he approaches me. “Dane, we’re moving!”

I stumble and leap to my left, rolling my ankle on the jump. For this part, we launch across the field fast, six steps to every five yards on the football field, which means . . . Yeah, I picked the worst time to zone out.

A whistle blows, and our sharp lines dissolve into messy waves. Though, it was probably a mess before. We’ve run this drill about a hundred times this week and it’s never quite worked.

“The lines are looking better,” Dr. Morris, the band director, admits, but I wonder if he’s just being kind. We’re all exhausted and sore. He continues: “Let’s break into sections and practice the runs into the key change. We’re still not getting them. Trombones, I won’t say it again: this is a family show, and I’d like to keep my job.”

Chris, our section leader, sighs. “If Dr. Morris didn’t want the skyscraper to look like a dick, he probably shouldn’t have put the trombones up there, of all people.”

He looks at me with a cheeky smile, and I roll my eyes in response. That is, after taking a few extra seconds to admire his sharp jawline.

“So all trombones are like that?” I ask as the other saxes form a circle for section work. “I assumed it was just the ones at my school.”

“Unfortunately,” he says, before pointing to a few boisterous boys down by the fifteen-yard line. “Tenor saxes are like that, too. They’re probably pissed they didn’t think of it first.”

“Okay, hold up.” Another first year squeezes in between us.

Her name tag says Kiersten. When she catches me staring at it, the sting of embarrassment pulses through me—I’ve spent six days with the band and sat through dozens of icebreakers with them, yet I still don’t know their names.

“In defense of the trombones, I want to say this,” she continues, pulling out the drill chart for the song we’re playing, “Uptown Girl” by Billy Joel. “To refresh: we form the letters B-J, morph into a phallic skyscraper, but before we go into our last formation, the color guard runs through the top of the ‘skyscraper’ waving white flags? I’m sorry, but B-J, phallic skyscraper, and .

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