Chapter 36
North Shore High School. The choir practice room. After school.
Will clapped his hands twice. "Okay, that's it for today."
Nobody moved particularly fast. The energy in the room had been off for most of the session — distracted, slightly anxious, the specific quality of a group that had something on their mind that wasn't the music.
Will noticed. Will always noticed.
"Hold on," he said. "Everyone stay a minute."
They stopped, turned, looked at him with varying degrees of guilt.
"Talk to me," Will said. "What's going on? You've been somewhere else for the last hour."
Finn was the one who said it, because Finn was usually the one who said things directly without calculating whether he should. "Today's the day Gungnir officially opens recruitment."
Will paused.
Then he smiled — the measured smile of a teacher who had prepared a reassuring response and was deploying it. "Okay. And that affects your practice because—"
"Because it's Owen," Noah said from his chair, slouched at an angle that suggested he'd given up on posture sometime around ninth grade. He had his arms crossed and the expression of someone delivering an honest assessment they found mildly inconvenient. "The guy is — I don't know what he is, but he's not normal. You can't just assume he's going to fail."
"He's from—" Kurt started.
"Don't," Tina said.
"I was going to say he's clearly strategic," Kurt said, with dignity.
"He's the Olympiad captain," Artie said. "He won regionals. He does things and then they work out."
Will looked around the room. At the uncertainty — real, not performed — on faces that he knew well. He clapped his hands again, more deliberately this time.
"Let me put this in perspective," he said. "The Glee program at this school has always operated on the margins. You know how hard it was to get enough members to compete. Owen Carter wants to recruit twelve girls — twelve girls with genuine vocal talent — from a school where joining the choir is still considered social suicide by about seventy percent of the student body." He paused. "That's not a knock on him. It's just arithmetic. It's almost impossible."
Quinn, from her seat near the back, glanced sideways at Santana. Santana looked at the ceiling. Brittany looked at her phone.
"Almost impossible," Quinn said quietly.
"Quinn?" Will said.
"I'm just noting the word almost," Quinn said, with the careful neutrality of someone who knew more than she was saying. "Owen's other nicknames — besides Olympiad captain — are things like the social situation that Will was probably aware of in a general way but hadn't fully mapped. His pull with people, specifically with the female population of North Shore, was — a documented phenomenon."
"One of a kind," Santana confirmed, with the flat certainty of someone reporting a fact they found personally irritating.
"If Owen said he wanted twelve people," Quinn continued, "I would not automatically assume he can't find twelve people."
Will looked at Rachel.
Rachel had been unusually quiet for the entire practice — which, for Rachel Berry, was the behavioral equivalent of a weather alert. Rachel's default state was engaged, opinionated, and audible. Quiet Rachel meant Rachel was processing something significant.
"Rachel," Quinn said, with a half-smile that contained several things. "You're being very quiet."
"I agree with Mr. Schuester," Rachel said, too quickly and too smoothly. "The recruitment challenge is real. The vocal talent pool at North Shore is limited. I think we focus on our own work and not—"
"Did you get a text?" Brittany asked.
The room went slightly still.
"What?" Rachel said.
"Owen's been sending audition texts," Brittany said, with the easy candor of someone who didn't fully understand the weight of what they were saying. She held up her phone. "I got one. It's an invitation to audition for Gungnir."
Three phones buzzed almost simultaneously.
Brittany's. Quinn's. Santana's.
The room looked at the three phones. Then at each other.
"Holy—" Noah started.
"Language," Will said automatically.
"He texted them," Noah said, with the genuine admiration of someone recognizing a move he hadn't anticipated. "During practice. He timed it for during practice. That's — I don't know whether to be offended or impressed."
"Impressed," Noah answered himself. "Definitely impressed."
Finn's jaw had tightened in the way it did when he was working something out. He looked at Quinn — who was reading her text with the composed expression of someone who had half-expected this. At Santana, who was typing something back and then stopped and put her phone away. At Brittany, who was already composing a response with the enthusiastic speed of someone who typed the way she thought: immediately and without filters.
"Brittany," Santana said.
"I'm just saying yes to the audition—"
"Brittany."
Brittany put her phone in her pocket with the expression of someone making a significant sacrifice.
Finn looked at Rachel. "Did you get one?"
Rachel held her phone up. Screen empty. "No."
Finn exhaled — the specific exhale of a complicated emotion resolving in one direction. The tension in his shoulders dropped slightly.
Rachel looked at her phone again.
Her expression did something small and carefully controlled that Quinn, watching from two seats over, clocked with absolute precision.
Rachel Berry had not received an audition text from Owen Carter.
And Rachel Berry had feelings about that.
Quinn looked back at her own phone, and permitted herself a private smile that she kept entirely off her face.
Mercedes and Tina compared empty notification screens with the solidarity of people who had been excluded from something and were managing their dignity about it.
"What even are the criteria?" Mercedes said.
"Unknown," Tina said.
"That's rude."
"Extremely."
Meanwhile. A classroom on the second floor.
Owen sat with his phone, working through the list he'd been building for two weeks, sending each message individually — not a mass blast, but targeted, specific, each one slightly personalized.
Brittany Pierce: genuinely talented, genuinely sweet, and completely underutilized in New Directions because her stage presence was enormous and her voice was stronger than people gave her credit for. The fact that she was currently in New Directions was a complication, but the audition text was an invitation, not a contract.
Quinn Fabray: post-pregnancy, post-drama, and in possession of a voice that had improved dramatically in the last few months for reasons that Owen understood better than most. Also in New Directions, also a complication.
Santana Lopez: the most technically skilled singer in New Directions who wasn't Rachel Berry, and the one most likely to say no on principle while being privately interested. Owen had texted her anyway.
The others on his list were from elsewhere in the school — a junior who sang in the school musical, a sophomore he'd heard humming in the library with perfect pitch, a girl from the swim team who had performed at a community event last summer and stopped a room.
He was looking for voices that could carry a performance even if he was standing at the front of it. The frame needed a painting behind it.
The concept was simple enough that it was almost funny: one male performer, twelve female voices, an arrangement built around contrast and presence rather than conventional lead-singer-plus-backup structure. The front of the stage belonged to Owen — movement, energy, the thing the audience watched. The music behind him belonged to twelve people who could actually sing.
It was, when you thought about it, a format that existed in American music already. Boy bands had done versions of it. Hip-hop had done versions of it. The MC at the front, the vocalists holding the harmonic structure.
Yo, yo, yo was not a strategy Will Schuester would recognize, Owen thought, because Will thought about Glee in terms of Broadway and classic rock and Journey. He didn't think about it in terms of what happened when a room full of people felt something before they could analyze why.
Owen sent the last text, put his phone in his pocket, and opened his notebook to the vocal exercise sheet Ms. Morrison had given him for Thursday's session.
The System was quiet in the back of his mind, doing its patient accounting.
Twelve voices, Owen thought. Find the twelve. Build the frame. Point it at Jesse St. James.
Gungnir didn't miss.
That was the whole point.
The hallway. End of day.
Joanna fell into step beside Owen at the lockers, without preamble.
"You sent audition texts during New Directions practice," she said.
"News travels," Owen said.
"Marcus told me. He heard it from Kevin. Kevin heard it from someone in New Directions." She looked at him. "Deliberate timing?"
"I wanted them to know Gungnir was serious," Owen said. "If they heard about it during their own practice, that communicates something words don't."
Joanna considered this. "That's either very smart or unnecessarily provocative."
"Probably both."
"You seem comfortable with that ratio lately."
"The ratio is consistent," Owen said. "I've always been both."
Joanna stopped at her locker, worked the combination. "The twelve female members thing," she said.
"You heard that too."
"Word travels fast when it's interesting." She pulled her books out, turned to look at him. "You're going to be the only man in a choir of twelve women and compete against the best high school Glee program in Illinois."
"Yes."
"And your voice currently—"
"Is a work in progress," Owen said. "Ms. Morrison is handling it."
Joanna looked at him for a long moment with the expression she used when she was deciding how to weight something.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"You won the Olympiad when we weren't supposed to," she said. "I'm not going to preemptively write off the choir thing." She closed her locker. "I do want to be on record as noting that this started because a boy pointed a finger gun at you during a performance."
"That's accurate."
"And your response was to build a competing institution."
"Also accurate."
Joanna picked up her bag. Walked.
"For what it's worth," she said, without looking at him, "Brittany Pierce has a genuinely extraordinary voice. If she auditions, you should take her."
Owen looked at her.
"I listen to things," Joanna said simply.
They walked down the hallway together, the after-school noise of North Shore surrounding them, Gungnir three weeks old and already in motion.
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