Talent Show Shakeup

By: @realBitcoinDog

The band-room upright piano had a chipped D below middle C that coughed when you hit it wrong, but Emma could land it without apology. The metronome blinked in her periphery like a lighthouse. Today the blink was off. Or she was.

From the hall came the snap of the stapler. Ms. Morales posted a fresh sheet on the bulletin board. The sound traveled through the door like a warning. Emma wiped chalky palms on her jeans and looked.

She followed the list until her throat went dry.

Lang, Emma + Reed, Lucas.

“Surprise,” Ms. Morales said, cheery with a stack of warm programs at her hip. “We’re going bigger. Synergy. Colleges love synergy.”

“I have a solo,” Emma said. Her voice sounded like the chipped D.

“You’ll be brilliant with anyone.” Morales swept on, stapling more pages. “We’re a family here.”

A dysfunctional family, Emma thought. Some mornings Emma managed to forget Lucas entirely, still raw from what happened in eighth grade. She sat at the piano and hit her opening chord too hard. The metronome jittered. She tried again.

When she was thirteen, Lucas had talked her into trying a breakdance windmill move on Coach Vega’s gym mat. “Trust the floor”, he smiled, but she landed wrong. A cool slice ran through her ring finger. For three days he carried her backpack with his guilt inside.

Months after that, someone posted a video of her private cafeteria improv from a piano practice on the school Nostr account. She felt skinned. She’d accused Lucas because she knew he had access to the nsec, and because he loved attention. He accused her of not trusting him since she sliced her finger on the mat.

Emma texted Lucas.

The typing bubbles appeared, vanished, returned.

Practice Room B was a blue rectangle with a mirror that made everyone taller. Lucas was already there at 9:57, shoulders fuller than in middle school, a maroon wristband scuffed at his right wrist.

“Ground rules,” she said.

“Shoot,” he said, half-smile, testing the floor with his shoe like it was a dance partner.

“I play piano. That’s prep. So, one, no improvising at the show. We agree on a set, metronome, under four minutes. Two, I don’t make eye contact while I’m playing. It throws me. Three, no last-minute changes.”

“Counter offer.” He slid a foot forward and back. “Four-bar break at the one-minute mark so I can hit a power combo. Tempo up from ninety-six to one-ten. Ninety-six is walking. I need a run.”

“Ninety-six is jazz,” she said. “It’s my anchor.”

“Your anchor can have wheels. Slow intro, double-time verse, drop for your show-off solo before the out. Scouts love range. And I want the eye-contact. That’s half the point of my face.”

“You’re not as charming as you think,” she snorted.

“I am exactly as charming as I think.” He sobered. “We’ve got one chance. We can do it quiet and pray, or loud and make them look up from reading their Stacker News ~BooksAndArticles. I can kick out of a four-beat pocket if you give it to me, and if you can ride the tempo change without looking terrified, we both look like we know what we’re doing.”

She wanted to say she never looked terrified. She thought of the cafeteria video. “Fine, but this room is logistics only. We don’t…” She gestured at the messy history. “We don’t do that.”

“Fine,” he said, tapping his wristband twice, elastic against skin. The sound landed in her like a remembered song.

They stood a moment, watching their taller selves breathe in the mirror.

“Emma,” he started, voice slipping softer, like on the mat that day. “I didn’t…”

“Don’t. Not here.”

He swallowed the rest, nodded, and left at a quarter past as if punctuality itself were a ground rule.

She ran a count-off under her breath. One-two-three-four. When she hit the chipped D, it sounded less like a cough and more like a throat clearing.

The gym smelled like wax and winter. Coach Vega rolled a mesh bag of red balls to center court. Her posture said I have secrets and they are practical. “Teams of six,” she said. “Captains: Reed and Lang.”

Emma stepped to the painted line. Lucas moved to the opposite side, wristband winking. “Let go of ‘me’ to trust in ‘we,’” Vega said. Odd mantra for dodgeball, Emma thought. She said it like a prayer.

The teams formed the way teams do: tall, fast, steady, wall. Vega knelt and pulled a ball that wasn’t like the others. Its red was dark, almost matte, the grip fine as flour. The lights hiccuped and resumed.

She set it on the stripe. “Heads up,” she said.

The whistle blew. Lucas was on the ball instantly. He pump-faked left, then rifled it straight.

It came at Emma’s chest and she moved forward, not away. Her palms met the ball. The ball met her like an electric fence. A current lanced her wrists. The scoreboard flickered to zeros. The court lines wavered. The gym’s roar dropped a register. Emma heard her own voice (her voice) shout “Yes!” from across the court.

She looked down. The hands on the ball were broader, knuckles nicked, veins roped. A maroon wristband bit into the right wrist. Deodorant she didn’t wear. Citrus cleaner. Under it, sweat familiar and foreign. The ball slid from heavier hands and rolled to a sneaker scuffed the way she’d watched it bounce in hallways.

Across from her, Emma saw herself, her braid and her face open in astonishment, standing on the other side in her own leggings.

Coach Vega lifted her whistle. “Play on,” Vega said, and the words landed under Emma’s skin as carry on.

Lucas’s teammates shouted, “Throw it, Lucas!” The name wore her like a coat she hadn’t agreed to.

Choice hit: Drop to the floor and scream, or breathe and pretend. Control or trust.

Emma in Lucas’s body met Emma in Emma’s body’s eyes. For a strobe beat it was a trick mirror at a fair. Then Emma, (Emma-her), nodded. Small. Enough.

Emma, (inside Lucas), crushed the maroon band until it stung. The pressure steadied her. She inhaled thin Colorado gym air. “Play on,” Vega said again.

Emma squared his shoulders and reached for the rolling ball. Rubber slapped palm, and the sound was the downbeat of a song she hadn’t chosen but suddenly knew.

The boy in the mirror raised his eyebrows back at her. A scab on one knuckle, stubble trying to become something. Emma touched the maroon band and watched the wrong wrist move. Fluorescents gave both of them the same chalky tint.

“This is not a metaphor,” she told the mirror. “This is happening.”

A freshman shrimp opened the locker-room door, saw Lucas talking to himself, and backed away. The door swung twice before it latched.

Emma pulled out Lucas’s phone. Mountain lock screen; Calder Ridge. She tried 0420, his birthday. It opened like a mouth giving up a secret. She texted her own number.

Across the hall, Emma, in Emma’s body, appeared above the girls’ room sinks. Lucas lifted her phone. “Prove it.”

Emma in Lucas’ body replied, “The chipped D below middle C. Your braid smells like cheap coconut and wind. You split my ring finger on a mat because you wanted me to ‘trust the floor.’”

A pause. Then Lucas chirped, “Bathroom B is… the boys.”

Emma in Lucas’ body scoffed, “So is my face right now. Move.”

He crossed the hallway and came into the boys room sheepish and defensive at once, which looked wrong on her. He stood with his back to the urinals like someone facing the sea.

“What did you do?” he asked, Emma’s voice carrying Lucas’s danger-joke cadence.

“Caught a ball,” she said. “Our teacher rolled it. You threw it. Physics quit.”

“That’s not how physics works.”

“Tell that to the mirror.”

The bell rang. The hallway turned to stampede. Two minutes to be in the wrong bathroom and not get caught.

“Walk,” Emma said. “Breathe through your mouth. Don’t take responsibility for anything.”

Lucas made a face, which would have been funny on any other day.

In the corridor, Ms. Morales caught them. “Run-through at lunch, Emma. Practice Room B. Scouts love punctuality.”

“Room B,” Lucas parroted, eyes over her shoulder like he was on a wire.

Outside Practice Room B, Emma and Lucas saw Coach Vega holding a canvas bag waiting for them.

“Coincidence?,” Lucas asked. “It has to be.”

“Then it’s dedicated,” Emma said. “We need to undo it.”

Vega appeared from the angle adults use for mischief interception. “You two play hard,” she said.

“You rolled a… thing,” Emma said, pointing. “The reaction trainer.”

“Did it react?” Vega asked mildly.

“Too much,” Lucas said.

“There’s no ego in amigo,” laughed Vega.

“If we could just… use it again,” Emma said. “Throw it the same way, catch it the same way…”

“Not a toy,” Vega said. She pulled the matte red ball from the bag and palmed it. It swallowed the light and held it. Then she disappeared it back into the canvas bag. “Shift from ‘mine’ to ‘ours’ to unlock the powers.” She slung the bag over her shoulder like a library book that might bite.

Practice Room B wasn’t ready for their bodies. That was the first thing they learned.

Emma tried the six-step with Lucas’s feet. On count four the floor insulted her. Second try, skinned forearm. Third try, around, late by a hair. A freeze asked for a knee she didn’t have permission to use yet.

Lucas sat at the piano like a polite patient. He lifted Emma’s hands and asked the keys for introduction, not affection. The right hand could find a melody in an ordinal-infested mempool. The left hand snapped. The ring finger, inherited ache, went prickly and then too awake.

“Independence drills,” Emma said. “Thumbs one thing, fingers another.” She tapped a pulse on the fallboard. “You are your own metronome.”

Lucas managed three seconds of left-hand ostinato before the right hand chimed in like an overeager twin. “My brain hates being two people,” he said. “I am a very good one person.”

“No kidding,” she said, then flinched at her own cheap shot. He worked the backbeat; she counted the footwork. They bartered: she clapped his left-hand time, he whispered one-and-two-and for her six-step. They caught one clean eight-count and one bar of left-hand stride.

Lucas-in-Emma sat on Morales’ bench. The lamp cast a sane yellow. Ms. Morales slid a ring splint over the bad finger and tested tension like tuning a string. “Fifteen on, fifteen off,” she said. “No heroics.”

Lucas placed Emma’s fingers like chess pieces. First attempt: left lagged, right sympathized, both caught in the same net. He looked up without asking, which was new for him.

“Again,” she said, not unkindly. A clock behind her ticked like a surgeon’s breath. He tried; the tendon hissed. “Stop,” she said. Palm under his hand. “You’re overgripping. Ice when you leave.”

The PA coughed to life. Principal Danvers, apologizing for weather. “Due to an incoming storm front, all after-school activities tomorrow are moved to tonight. The Collaboration Showcase begins at six p.m. Performers, report at four for tech.”

They headed for the auditorium, both of them limping a little, pretending it didn’t show. Above the doors, a banner read “Bring the Noise.”

Backstage is a country without maps. Tape crosses make a city grid. People are whispered at; everyone nods too hard.

Lucas-in-Emma got waved to the pit. The Steinway piano sat like a sleeping animal. Ms. Morales, a silhouette, handed him a Ziploc of ice and slid the ring splint back in place. “Climb,” she said, laying a tempo ladder on the score: 92→96→104→110. She tapped the top margin. Climb. Don’t leap.

The first tech was cruel the way mirrors are. Emma missed her spike; the followspot decapitated her. Lucas hit four bars with swagger and then the left hand choked exactly where Morales predicted. An empty house makes every error sound like the only sound in the world.

In the aisle, a woman in a navy blazer wrote without looking up. Ms. Doyle on a lanyard, Colorado State and Berkley both, folded into one imperturbable face. When Morales gushed, Doyle said, “I award on two axes: competence and courage. Anyone can practice. Few adapt.” It landed like a criterion and a dare.

Ms. Morales floated, pinning enthusiasm to people like name tags. “News 8 will film the openers,” she told no one and everyone. She moved them to Act 3 to “front-load buzz.” Warm-up time shrank from hours to minutes to the time it takes to unscrew a water bottle.

By the prop table, a plain-looking brown ball rested. Vega set her thumb on it, and the paint smudged. Underneath, red breathed, matte and patient. She pressed the ball’s curve back under brown with a thumb and looked at them. “Props aren’t toys,” she said. It was exactly what she’d said in the gym, and not at all.

Ms. Morales slipped them one more sheet. “Trust the hand you have,” she’d written on Emma’s score in her tight hand. She intercepted Emma-in-Lucas in the wing. “Tape properly,” she said, handing over a knee sleeve. “And don’t flare if you can’t land. Clean over brave.” She squeezed his shoulder. “I’m rooting for you.”

They ducked into Vega’s office for more tape and found a corkboard instead. Photos pinned like specimens. Red yarn connecting accidents to breakthroughs. In the corner, a printout of the cafeteria video screenshot. Beneath it: a sticky note in Vega’s handwriting with the school Nostr nsec.

Emma stared. The cafeteria aftershock rearranged itself. Someone had used the school Nostr nsec to post her embarrassing video. Someone who wasn’t Lucas.

They chose a plan they could survive. Music: Lucas paired the left hand to a simple composition, saving the bad tendon for one precise lift under Emma’s power combo. He penciled “Lift” where she could read his lips if she looked up. Dance: Emma dropped flare and airbaby, built a three-freeze sequence, baby, chair, pike, timed to his accents. Entry/exits drilled to muscle, not thought.

Emma twisted the maroon band in her pocket. A faint hum ran up her forearm.

“Five to house,” they heard on the comms. The building answered. The storm found the roof with a broad hand. Ms. Doyle flipped to a fresh page and wrote their names at the top.

“Places for Act One,” someone called. Actors became shadows; cables became veins. In the wing, Emma palmed the wristband and felt the small engine of it. Lucas tapped the piano twice like knocking.

Across the stage, half in shadow, Vega stood with the canvas bag at her ankle. The ball on the table gave off a heat that made no sense. Under the thinned paint, red had a heartbeat.

The curtain learned how to rise. The house lights learned how to fall.

The green room hummed. Coats dripped onto scuffed linoleum. Lucas (wearing Emma’s dress) sat at the Steinway piano. The keys stared back, too many teeth. He tried a scale. Sweat squeaked. The left hand lagged, the right second-guessed. He wiped his palm on black fabric and wanted to apologize to the dress.

Across the taped blocking square, Emma (inside Lucas) in soft joggers and the old graphic tee, rolled weight onto the balls of his feet and back. Floors talk if you listen. This one told her where applause would land if they rescued it.

Vega leaned in the doorway with the canvas bag. She didn’t lecture. She raised one eyebrow. Emma rolled her eyes, but knew what she meant, no ego in amigo.

Lucas looked in the mirror and found Emma looking back. Something in his chest clicked like a chain catching a new gear.

“The Incident,” he said. They hadn’t said it out loud since eighth grade.

“Say it,” Emma said.

“April, eighth grade. You thought I uploaded a video of you secretly practicing, but it wasn’t me.”

Back in the green room, the echo thinned and left them there: right night, wrong skins.

“It wasn’t perfect for you,” Lucas said. “I kept thinking your life was upright and orderly. But I made a bad call for you to try a windmill breakdance which sliced your finger, and you hid. Same as me.”

“And I thought your life was an action movie where forgetfulness has no cost. But…” Emma swallowed. He watched his Adam’s apple move under her borrowed skin. “You didn’t upload the video of me faltering on the piano because something in you was screaming louder. I was wrong. We both…”

“Chose ourselves,” Lucas said. “Fear chose for us.”

They looked at the ball under Vega’s arm. Old prayers rubbed along its ribs.

“We can stop pretending we’re alone,” Emma said. Saying it loosened something. She sounded less like she lived under someone else’s tempo.

“We ask,” Lucas said, turning to Vega. “One throw. During the set.”

“Magic obeys choreography,” Vega said. “Miss the count, it obeys chaos.”

“What count?” Emma asked, out of habit; the answer was already inside her.

“Yours,” Vega said. “Pick one. Say it. Trust it.”

“Bar sixteen,” Lucas said. “On the AND of four.”

“Five-six-seven-eight,” Emma said. “On my throw.”

Vega handed her the ball. It was heavier than it looked. “No second take,” Vega said, and vanished along the wing the way teachers do when they intend not to be blamed.

The college scout uncapped her pen. The room breathed into the dim. They were third on the program. A mime set went fine; the guitarist missed his high note and smiled through it.

“Remember the count,” Emma whispered in Lucas’s direction as stagehands reset. She stood with his legs warm and ready. Lucas, in Emma’s dress, sat poised over keys in the shadow of the arch. From the house it looked like a girl preparing to play. From where he sat it felt like a boy trying not to disgrace a friend.

Lights up. Room shrank. Lucas set down fingers and missed one note… small, lower register, forgivable at a house party, not here. He kept going. The second phrase stepped on its heel. Left hand thin. Right hand stubborn. He heard coughs hatch in the dark.

Emma bounced on Lucas’s feet. Bounce had saved him when music didn’t. She felt where the room was late, where applause would catch if they made it. Ms. Doyle’s pen still rested. Time narrowed.

Bar twelve. Lucas fought panic with precision: name the chord, breathe, count, breathe. He met Emma’s eyes. The piano’s gloss threw a seam of reflected light across both their faces, middle school again. Bar sixteen.

Emma lifted the ball. Shoulder cocked. Breath clean. Five, her mouth shaped. Lucas nodded. Six. Hands settled to rise. Seven. Vega’s thumb rested on her whistle like a saint touching a relic. Eight. Emma slung the ball.

It drew a neat parabola. Lucas stood on the AND of four like they’d said, slid off the bench so it wouldn’t thump his chest, turned his body into the ball. It kissed his palm mid-rotation.

Something snapped and snapped back. The feeling of breaking the surface after too long under: weight back where it belonged, breath fitting ribs like a coat on its own hook. Lucas landed in Lucas. Emma settled in Emma with a small laugh the mic didn’t catch.

The next chord righted like a boat found by a current.

Lucas let the half windmill breakdance spin into a clean halo, palms skating, legs sweeping compass-true. He let momentum carry to a freeze the floor knew. The crowd murmured—the sound of expectations changing shape.

Emma’s left hand found its voicings without looking. She reharmonized the shaky intro on instinct, slipped in a tritone where Ms. Doyle’s head lifted. She heard the invisible drum kit and made it be there with touch and time.

The piece became a conversation. Emma tossed a high C; Lucas answered with a top-rock that bragged without apology. She stabbed a staccato; he let the silence hang a half beat longer than safe, then slid to a baby freeze that left his sneakers printed against wax. The audience made that sound crowds make when they were prepared to be bored but are delighted instead.

Between beats they whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Emma said.

“Me too,” Lucas said.

“Never again.”

“Never again.” They didn’t mean never mess up. They meant never hide.

Emma stretched the last chorus, making eye contact with the crowd now. Lucas backed away with a shuffle that said your turn. She built a cluster too dense to be pretty and too joyful to be wrong, then cracked it into perfect thirds and let them ring. Lucas hit one headspin because the floor finally asked him to. He came out into a freeze, one palm down, one up to the lights: a question mark turned exclamation point by heartbeat.

Silence. The good kind.

The crowd rose to standing ovation as if something under their seats insisted. They bowed, hand in hand.

Backstage was roaring congratulations. Vega appeared with no ball. “Did you… fix us?” Lucas asked.

“I opened a door,” she said. “You walked.”

“Why?” Emma asked.

“You were my best pair,” Vega said. “Even when you stopped teaming up.” She tapped her whistle. “I like good endings.”

An hour later, with chairs stacked and the building humming toward dark, they found the ball in the trophy case by the office next to a dusty wrestling plaque, a cracked discus, and below a 1998 volleyball team in shorts that hadn’t aged well. The ball sat like a relic. Under the fluorescents, the matte red glowed.

“Got a Sharpie?” Emma asked.

Lucas always had something to write with. He popped the cap and passed it over. The case was locked. Vega’s key appeared in her hand with a conspirator’s timing. She turned it once and didn’t say a word. Emma lifted the ball, weight familiar now, and wrote along the rubber ribs, quick and sure:

She set it back.

Outside, the storm softened. Inside, the hum sounded less like struggle and more like rest. The scouts would call or they wouldn’t. Doors had opened. They could walk or not.

“Wanna go out for some seed-oil free, carnivore diet, shake-your-rancher’s-hand steaks sometime?” Lucas blushed.

Emma brushed her bangs behind her ear. “Count on it,” she kissed his cheek.

They left the ball to glow in the case like a small red moon. And they walked down the hallway together, not mirrored, not reversed, exactly themselves.

Will Schoellkopf is author of Bitcoin Girl Save the World, AND The Bitcoin Dog: Following The Scent To The Bitcoin C++ Source Code, and host of the Bitcoin podcast It's So Early! Will publishes a weekly newsletter featuring his favorite Bitcoin Posts of the week! He is anthologized in 21 Futures: Tales from the Timechain, published in print at Bitcoin Magazine, Citadel21, Stackchain Magazine, and online at Satoshi's Journal. Follow him on X and Nostr @realBitcoinDog, or email will [@] realbitcoindog [.] com