Chapter 39: Fairy Tales Are All Lies
North Shore High School. The Auditorium. Sunday.
The auditorium had filled up considerably from the morning sessions. Behind the judges' table, Owen spoke gently to the girl currently on stage — a confident brunette named Anna who had been holding her final note approximately thirty seconds longer than the song required.
"Anna. That's enough. Thank you for coming in."
Anna stopped. Looked at him with the particular expression of someone who had expected a different response and was deciding whether to be offended. Under normal circumstances, she would have had something to say about being cut off mid-performance. But this was Owen, and Owen had a way of delivering a verdict that somehow didn't leave room for a scene. She exhaled, collected herself, and walked off.
"Next!" Mary called from the end of the table.
One by one, the remaining girls came forward. Owen called each of them by name — he'd made a point of memorizing every face on the list before the day started, because forgetting someone's name mid-audition was the kind of thing that got around a school fast.
After Vicky finished, Owen turned to Becca. "What do you think?"
Becca tilted her head, considering. She'd barely looked up from her laptop for most of the day — between evaluations she'd been quietly restructuring arrangements, melodic fragments drifting through the auditorium like background weather. "The voice is real," she said. "Distinctive lower register. She's not using it fully yet, but with some work she fills out the midrange section."
"Agreed," Owen said. "She's in."
Becca made a note and went back to her laptop.
By seven in the evening, the last girl had gone.
Owen sat back, pressed his palms against his eyes, and let himself be tired for the first time all day.
Ms. Morrison set a water bottle in front of him. "You held up well."
"My head is full of names," Owen said.
"How many confirmed?"
He looked at his notepad. Counted. "Eleven. Plus me."
Morrison folded her hands. "You need twelve for competition eligibility."
"I know."
"From today's pool?"
Owen looked at the empty stage. He ran back through the day's performances — the voices he'd heard, the ones that were good, the ones that were exceptional, the ones Becca kept flagging as architecturally necessary.
Becca didn't look up from her screen. "There's still a gap in the upper section. Bass and midrange are covered beautifully. The treble is thin. One more voice — the right voice — and the whole arrangement locks."
"I know," Owen said. "I've been trying to figure out who."
He sat with it for a moment.
Then something surfaced — not from the audition pool, not from anyone he'd been considering. A voice he'd heard once, briefly, in a completely different context. Kitchen harmonies at Kevin's party, three months ago. Filed away and not retrieved until right now.
He stood up.
"I'll be back," he said.
Track and field stadium. Early evening.
The stadium was mostly empty. A few runners doing cool-down laps, the near-end lights still on. Owen came through the gate and spotted them at the far end — near the bleachers.
Paulie Bleeker, in his Pavement t-shirt, sitting with the patient stillness of someone who had decided the most useful thing he could do was wait. A bag of Twizzlers open beside him.
And Juno MacGuff — red hoodie, arms moving, voice carrying across the empty track with the specific energy of someone making a point that wasn't landing and hadn't decided to stop making it yet.
Owen waited near the gate.
After a few more minutes, Juno stopped. She looked at Bleeker, who said nothing. She shook her head, turned, and walked toward the exit.
"Hey, Juno."
She looked up. Registered him. Her expression, which had been doing several complicated things at once, settled into the flat neutrality of someone who was out of bandwidth for additional social input.
"Hey," she said, and kept walking.
Owen fell into step beside her. "Rough afternoon?"
"I'm fine."
"Okay."
"I'm fine."
"I know."
Juno stopped. Turned. Hit him with the direct, unsentimental look that was her factory setting. "If this is the thing where you ask me out—"
"It's not," Owen said. "I've never asked you out. I'm not going to."
She studied him for a second. "Then what?"
"I want you to audition for Gungnir."
Juno blinked. Whatever she'd been braced for, it wasn't that. "The choir thing."
"Yes."
"Owen." She said it with the patient emphasis of someone explaining something that should be obvious. "I play guitar. I write songs in my bedroom. I'm a band person. I am not a choir person."
"I know. That's why I want you."
"That logic doesn't work."
"Gungnir isn't a conventional choir," Owen said. "Becca Mitchell is rearranging the competition pieces from scratch — original arrangements, not covers. The structure is closer to a band than a traditional choir. And you have the voice we're missing. Specifically the upper register. Your natural tone fills a gap that nobody today filled."
Juno looked at him with the expression of someone who hadn't expected to be taken seriously about music and was recalibrating. "You heard me sing once. At Kevin's party. I was doing harmonies in the kitchen."
"I know."
"You just — filed that away."
"I pay attention to things."
Juno was quiet. She looked back at the track, where Bleeker had made his way through half the Twizzlers and was now studying the sky with the philosophical patience of a boy who had learned to wait without it costing him anything.
"I'm doing the band thing with Paulie," she said. The certainty in her voice was there, but slightly smaller than it had been a minute ago.
Owen looked at her. He thought about what he knew — not just from observation, but from the full shape of her story. The year before. What it had cost both of them. The way they'd come through it and ended up back where they started, which was supposed to be the happy ending, and which was now just — Tuesday. And Wednesday. And the ongoing reality of two people who had survived something extraordinary and were now trying to figure out what ordinary looked like.
"Can I say something honest?" Owen said.
"You're going to anyway."
"The band thing with Paulie means something to you. I'm not telling you it doesn't." He paused. "But you're also someone who needs her own thing. Not his thing. Not the couple thing. Your own work, your own trajectory. I've watched you for three months and that's what I see."
Juno looked at him.
"Fairy tales end at the good part," Owen said. "The couple runs toward each other, freeze frame, credits roll. But the credits don't roll in real life. Time keeps going. And people who don't have their own thing — their own work, something that's genuinely theirs — end up depending entirely on the relationship for meaning. Which is a lot of weight to put on a seventeen-year-old boy eating Twizzlers on the bleachers."
Juno looked back at Bleeker.
Then at Owen, with an expression that was complicated and honest and slightly tired.
"That's a very long way of saying I need a hobby," she said.
"It's a very long way of saying you have a voice that deserves to be used," Owen said. "And Gungnir is where it fits."
Juno was quiet for a long moment.
Owen waited. He'd learned that Juno MacGuff made decisions at her own pace and that pushing didn't accelerate anything.
"Paulie and I are fine," she said finally. Not defensive. Just stating it.
"I know. I'm not trying to change that."
"I'd still do the band thing."
"That's fine. Rehearsals are Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. I'll work around whatever else you have."
Juno looked at the sky. At the track. At Owen.
"What do I have to do for the audition?"
"Sing something," Owen said. "Right now. I'll tell you in thirty seconds."
Juno exhaled through her nose — the closest thing she had to a laugh when she wasn't ready to fully commit to one. Then she straightened up, looked at the empty track, and sang.
Thirty seconds of something — a folk fragment Owen half-recognized, her voice rising in the second phrase into exactly the register Becca had described as the gap in the arrangement. It wasn't performed. It was just her voice, in an empty stadium, doing what it did.
Owen listened.
The exhaustion of the day settled back. Ten hours of auditions. Sixty-something names. And here, at the end of it, standing at the gate of a track and field stadium at seven in the evening, was the twelfth voice.
"That's it," Owen said.
Juno stopped. "That's it?"
"You're in. If you want to be."
Juno looked at him for a moment. At the bleachers, where Bleeker had finished the Twizzlers and was looking at the sky with the easy patience of a boy who understood Juno well enough not to try to contain her.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"Yeah." The specific casual shrug of someone who had decided something and wasn't going to make a production of it. "I'll try it."
Owen nodded.
They walked back toward the bleachers. Bleeker looked up. Registered Owen. Registered Juno's expression — which had moved from the tight frustration of twenty minutes ago into something more settled — and tilted his head.
"Choir thing?" he said to Juno.
"Apparently," Juno said.
Bleeker nodded. "Cool."
Owen left them there and walked back toward the parking lot.
He pulled out his notebook. Wrote the name at the bottom of the list.
Juno MacGuff.
Underneath it, a single line:
Complete.
Twelve voices. One frame.
He had a year to make it work.
Let's push the story forward!
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