Chapter 31: Anger Rising
North Shore High School. The Auditorium. Continuing.
In the front row, slightly to Owen's left, Emma Pillsbury — the school counselor, who had come to support Will Schuester's kids with the specific devoted enthusiasm she brought to everything involving Will Schuester — turned around during the applause between songs, caught Owen's eye, and gave him a small, warm thumbs-up.
Owen returned a smile.
Emma was in her late twenties, which put her in a different category from most of the adult authority figures at North Shore — young enough to remember what high school felt like, principled enough to care about it, and possessed of a genuinely open and non-judgmental quality that Owen had noted on several occasions.
Karen Jackson, who had caught the exchange, leaned over. "What was that about?"
"She overheard some of what we were talking about," Owen said.
Karen processed this. "She approves of the Steve Jobs thing?"
"She appreciated the philosophical framework," Owen said. "I think."
Karen looked at Emma's back. "She's very sweet."
"She is."
"She's also completely in love with Mr. Schuester and has no idea what to do about it," Karen said, with the effortless accuracy of someone who gathered this kind of information the way other people gathered air.
"I know," Owen said.
"Of course you do," Karen said, without heat.
On stage, New Directions transitioned from Faithfully into something with a harder edge and more movement — Any Way You Want It, the Journey back catalog apparently being tonight's organizing principle. The arrangement was good. More than good. The kind of good that made you realize you'd been underestimating something.
Owen felt the bass line in his sternum and found himself tapping his knee without quite deciding to.
He looked around the auditorium at the people who were doing the same thing — heads moving, feet, unconscious physical agreement with what was happening on stage — and thought, not for the first time, that music was one of the more straightforward demonstrations that human beings were fundamentally the same animal regardless of what else they were doing.
I should learn something, he thought.
The thought had been forming for a while. His future — the plan he was building toward, the relationships he needed to build and the person he needed to become to build them — included seven people who were, almost uniformly, more complete than the word scientist implied.
Leonard: cello, competent. Dancing, enthusiastic if imprecise — but the enthusiasm was genuine and it mattered. Warm-up dances that his various girlfriends found effortful and endearing in approximately equal measure.
Howard: beatboxing, voice impressions, piano composition. Had written an original song for Bernadette. Could do a flawless Hawking impression, which was either impressive or irreverent depending on your perspective. Probably both.
Raj: singing, dancing — in the way that someone from a culture where those things were integrated into ordinary celebration had them as baseline capacities, not performance skills.
Sheldon: perfect pitch as a child. Hand drum — deployed at three AM for unclear reasons. Recorder. Piano. Guitar. And the Theremin, which he played while singing Nobody Knows in a way that was objectively strange and somehow completely right.
Bernadette: ventriloquism. State-level pageant experience. A voice that could shatter glass in the most literal possible sense when she chose to deploy it at volume.
Amy: harp. Which she played with the committed seriousness she brought to all things.
Even Penny — who had none of the above, who was the one member of the group whose presence was entirely relational, whose talent was for people rather than instruments — even Penny had understood something true about herself: that Leonard's attraction to her was real and not contingent on her matching him academically. She'd said it out loud once, in a panic, and it was one of the most honest things anyone said in the whole run of the show.
Owen tapped his knee to the beat.
Violin, he thought. Or piano. Something foundational.
The thought settled in. He filed it under when the Existence Points situation is more stable.
New Directions finished.
The applause was genuine and substantial.
Will Schuester, in the aisle, exhaled the exhale of a man whose students had just delivered. He caught Owen's eye again, and Owen gave him a nod that he hoped communicated your kids are good at this.
The host moved to the microphone.
"Next — from Carmel High School — please welcome Vocal Adrenaline."
The curtain opened.
Carmel's Glee team was everything their Math Olympiad team had been: technically precise, visually coordinated, operating with the confidence of a group that had won before and expected to win again.
Their lead was Jesse St. James.
Owen recognized him immediately — the same composed certainty from across the competition table that afternoon, now redirected into performance, which suited him even better. He was genuinely talented. The voice was real, the stage presence was real, the command of the room was real.
Just killed a man, he sang, put a gun against his head—
And in the middle of the verse, Jesse's eyes found Owen in the fifth row.
Owen met them.
Jesse, without breaking the line, pointed — briefly, clearly, in Owen's direction — and as he sang pulled my trigger, made the gesture.
It was small. It was deliberate. It was unmistakable to anyone paying attention.
Karen, beside Owen, went still.
Owen kept his expression neutral.
The verse continued. Jesse moved on, the performance carrying him away from the moment as if it had been incidental. But it hadn't been incidental. Owen knew it, Jesse knew it, and Karen, who read rooms as naturally as breathing, knew it.
"Did he just—" Karen started.
"Yes," Owen said.
"Over the Math Olympiad."
"Apparently."
Karen looked at the stage. At Jesse, who was now deep in the chorus and brilliant at it. "He's being petty about losing a math competition."
"He's being very intelligent about being petty about losing a math competition," Owen said. "There's a difference. It was perfectly timed, deniable if challenged, and landed exactly the way he intended."
"Does that make you more or less annoyed?"
Owen thought about Sheldon's reaction when a younger, more capable competitor had appeared in his orbit — the twisting, the refusal to be generous, the private satisfaction when the competitor fell. Sheldon was a specific case, but the pattern wasn't unique to him. High intelligence and high magnanimity didn't automatically coexist. Sometimes they actively worked against each other — the more certain you were of your own capacities, the more intolerable it was to lose to someone who shouldn't have beaten you.
Newton and Edison were the canonical examples. Brilliant, transformative, and both capable of being genuinely awful to people who threatened their territory.
Jesse St. James was seventeen and had just lost a regional Math Olympiad final and had chosen to process that loss through a pointed gesture during a Glee competition.
Owen understood the psychology.
Understanding it did not make the annoyance go away.
"More," he said. "Definitely more."
Karen looked at him. "What are you going to do about it?"
"Nothing," Owen said. "Right now."
"Right now," Karen repeated, catching the qualifier.
"He's performing," Owen said. "And he's good. I'm not going to do anything petty in return during his performance."
"But later."
"Later depends on whether he leaves it here or carries it forward." Owen watched the stage. "Some people make a point and then let it go. Some people keep going."
"And if he keeps going?"
Owen didn't answer immediately. He watched Jesse hit the final note of the verse — clean, controlled, the voice of someone who had been trained to a high standard and knew it.
"Then we'll see," Owen said.
Karen looked at the stage. At Jesse. At Owen.
"For what it's worth," she said quietly, "you won the thing he's upset about."
"I know."
"And you're sitting here tapping your knee to his teammate's choreography because you liked it."
"I did like it."
"So you're not actually a petty person."
Owen considered this. "I'm trying not to be."
Karen looked at him with the expression she occasionally showed — the one that was more perceptive than she usually got credit for.
"I know," she said.
The performance continued. Owen watched it with the honest appreciation it deserved and the specific awareness of someone who had been deliberately provoked and was still deciding what that meant.
The auditorium was full and loud and warm.
He tapped his knee.
Violin, he thought. Or piano. Probably both eventually.
He filed it away and watched Jesse St. James be excellent at something, which was its own kind of data.
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