Top Three Ain’t Nothing

By eleven, Milan Sadie had warmed up in the bathrooms of four Ramadas, two Marriotts, a VFW hall, and the basement of a Baptist church in Camden, and she had opinions. Tile was good. High ceilings were better. The Ramada off Route 9 had a handicapped stall so live you could hear your own voice come back to you with its mind made up, and she had stood in it that afternoon in her socks and her slip, running scales while a woman at the sinks washed her hands slower and slower and finally just stood there, holding her paper towel, listening.

Milan noticed. She always noticed. She kept singing like she hadn’t.

The lessons had started three weeks after the winter concert, because when Mrs. Toomey said soon, Etta Sadie heard now. The real teacher turned out to be Mr. Leon Vann, who had spent thirty years singing behind people whose names everybody knew, with his own name on nothing, and who taught voice out of his front room in Hawthorne Park with an upright piano, an egg timer, and no mercy whatsoever. He never once told Milan she was special. He told her to breathe from the floor. He set the timer and made her sing the same eight bars until the bell went off, and when she finally got them perfect he said, “Again,” and when she asked when they got to the good part, he said the scales were the good part, the rest was just company. Four years of Saturdays. She hated it the way you hate a thing you would fight anybody for taking away.

The competitions came with the lessons, and the family turned into a traveling operation. Kevin drove — through rain, through shore traffic, through one ice storm Etta still brought up in arguments — with the directions printed out and a thermos of honey tea riding shotgun where his coffee used to go. Etta ran everything else: the schedule, the entry fees, the garment bag hung in the back window, the emergency kit with its safety pins and clear nail polish and a needle that lived already threaded, because hems only ever gave out twenty minutes before check-in. Milan had fired her mother as her manager exactly once, at nine, over creative differences — a phrase she had gotten off television — and rehired her by dinner, after it came to her attention that the manager also made dinner.

The trophies went home to a shelf in the den. Etta arranged them by height, the sensible way. Milan rearranged them by a system she never explained to anybody, which had nothing to do with height and everything to do with what each one had cost her to win. And Kevin, who maintained out loud that the whole shelf was Etta’s project, dusted every one of them on Saturday mornings when he believed the house to be asleep.

And in the back seat, on the good days, there was Gigi.

Gianna Holder lived close enough that Milan could be on her porch before anybody finished saying go ask, and as far as either girl could remember they had never actually been introduced. They had simply always been. Etta set a fourth plate on competition nights without anyone asking her to, and kept a stash of the orange soda Gigi liked in the refrigerator door, which Milan was not allowed to touch on the grounds that it wasn’t hers. And once, in the third grade, when half the lunchroom laughed at Gigi for singing flat in the spring assembly, Milan — who never in her life raised her voice off a stage — had gotten loud enough to be sent to the office for the first and only time, and had refused, on principle, to say sorry to anyone but Gigi. Neither girl ever brought it up. Both of them kept it.

Gigi came to competitions the way other people went to the movies — with snacks, with commentary, with a magazine she read out loud at the boring parts. She was loud in lobbies where everybody else whispered. She did an impression of Mr. Vann’s egg timer that could make even Kevin’s shoulders shake at a red light. And when Milan sang, Gigi clapped the loudest, first on her feet, two fingers in her teeth, loyal in a big, public, absolute sort of fashion, as if loyalty were itself a category you could place in.

That day’s contest was the Garden State Junior Vocal Showcase, in a Cherry Hill hotel ballroom with a judges’ table, a rented sound system, and forty children aged ten to twelve wearing numbers pinned to their fronts like tiny marathoners. The emcee said her name like the city in Italy. “It’s mih-LAHN,” Milan said into the microphone, sweet as church punch, and the ballroom laughed warm, and she planted her feet where Mr. Vann had taught her to plant them and sang the old song he had picked precisely because no other child would dare touch it. For two and a half minutes the ballroom belonged to her, the same as the cafeteria had, the same as every room had since.

She knew she had sung it clean. The judges, it turned out, were voting on something else.

First place went to a twelve-year-old from Teaneck named Brielle, who had a costume change, a backing track with a key change built into it, and a machine that rolled fog across the front of the stage until it curled around the judges’ ankles. The judges loved that weather more than they had ever loved anybody’s voice. Milan stood on the second-place mark in her sparkly dress, holding a silver trophy with a little silver singer on top, and clapped for Brielle the polite amount, and counted. Brielle’s applause ran eleven seconds. Hers had run seven. Nobody had asked her to do that arithmetic. She did it anyway, and filed it where she filed things.

In the lobby afterward, a grandmother in a poinsettia brooch stopped in front of Gigi — who at that moment was holding Milan’s trophy up against her own shoulder, posing — and told her congratulations, sugar, all that hard work paid off. And Gigi said thank you. Said it easy, smile and all, and only handed the trophy back when Milan walked up, already talking fast about the fog machine so that the grandmother never did get it straightened out. Milan laughed about it half the night. That was just Gigi. Gigi would say thank you if you congratulated her for the moon landing.

The rain found them again on the turnpike going home, wipers keeping their own slow count, the trophy on the seat between the girls with its little silver singer facing nobody. Milan sat very straight in her sparkly dress and watched the wet lights of New Jersey slide past, and did not touch the wrinkle the seatbelt was pressing into the skirt, which in itself should have told everybody something.

Kevin tipped the rearview until he found her. “Who hit the high note tonight,” he said. “Her or you?”

“Me.”

“Then they gave the tall one to the wrong kid.” He put his eyes back on the road, that being, for Kevin Sadie, a complete closing argument.

It should have fixed it. It didn’t. The sour thing had been sitting in Milan’s chest since the seventh second of Brielle’s applause, and somewhere on the dark stretch past Exit 9 it finally came up and out of her mouth.

“I don’t want to be the first of the losers.”

“Milan Renee Sadie.” Etta turned all the way around in her seat, a thing she did only for felonies. “Second in the state, out of forty children, and you want to sit there in your good dress and call yourself a loser.”

“Second is just the first one that didn’t—“

“I heard you the first time.” Etta let the wipers go back and forth twice. “And let me tell you something about that child and her machine. That child brought weather. You cannot out-sing weather, baby. Next time, we bring a hurricane.”

Milan tried to hold her mouth flat and lost. The laugh came up out of her sideways, the kind she didn’t choose, and Gigi said, “I’m the hurricane,” around a mouthful of pretzels, and that finished the job; both girls went down in a heap against their seatbelts.

When it got quiet again, Etta reached back between the seats and tugged the wrinkle out of Milan’s skirt with two fingers, the same hands that had hot-glued snow to poster board, and she said the rest of it without turning around this time, easy, to the windshield.

“Top three ain’t nothing, baby. But I know you. You wanted the crown.”

Milan looked out the window and let the wet lights blur, because eleven is too old to cry over a trophy and she was not about to start cataloguing exceptions. Her mother had it exactly right, was the trouble. She ran the night back in her head the whole dark ride up the turnpike — where a key change could have gone, what the stage would look like with no second-place mark on it anywhere — and she was still running it when Gigi spoke to her window, sleepy and small.

“When you’re rich and famous, don’t forget the little people. I’m the little people.”

“You’re not little people,” Milan said. “You’re my people.”

Gigi didn’t answer that. Somewhere in the dark she had gathered the trophy up off the seat and onto her lap, both arms around it, the little silver singer tucked up under her chin while the rain beaded down her window. So it wouldn’t rattle, she said, when she caught Milan looking.

She held it the whole way home.