Excerpt from The Ensemble by Aja Gabel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Thank the Lord," Jana said, clasping her hands together in prayer.

"I want to get so drunk I forget it happened," Brit said.

"But then you'll have to remember all over again," Jana said. "It's the remembering that kills you, not the knowing."

"We came all the way out here. To do that."

Jana leaned down and clinked her glass against Brit's whiskey bottle, which was empty.
"Time for another."

They talked and worked through the minibar in the way Brit had imagined real college students did it, the kind of college kids who weren't practicing four to five hours a day, who weren't protecting their hands and fingers from minor injuries or cuts, who weren't banking on a clear head to get them through the next day's rehearsal, who weren't choosing friends based on their ability to play, and losing them for similar reasons. She liked to watch Jana unwind, as it usually seemed like all of her was closely rotating a center pole in her body. As she drank more, that pole became elastic, and so did her laughter, her speech. Her face, cold when she was concentrating, became beautifully angular when she was animated; her full lips and sharp jawline, like a painting of a person from a different time. Brit lay down on the floor and stared at the ceiling.

"Don't take a bath," Jana said, and they cracked up. It was an inside joke. They'd been coached once by Jacob Liedel, the aging emeritus director of the conservatory, who sat with his saggy skin and liver spots in a chair inexplicably on the other side of the room, and shouted at them the whole time. He barely let them get through a phrase before waving his hands, interrupting them, correcting them. Brit admired his old-school edge, but she knew Jana found it upsetting, and the louder he yelled, the more strained her bow arm became, until Jacob finally yelled, "Don't take a bath!" and Jana stopped playing and said, "What?" Jacob repeated: "Don't take a bath there. With that phrase." None of them asked him what he meant, but he said it two, three more times during the coaching session; afterward, at dinner, the four of them sitting in a tired silence, Henry said, "What's taking a bath mean?" and Jana and Brit laughed so hard they cried into their cheese fries and slid under the booth. Now and again they still said it to each other, with no consistency of context. To Daniel about his excessive foot tapping to count time: Don't take a bath. To Jana, when she was obsessing over the tuning of her E string: Don't take a bath.

"So, what's next is maybe a move," Brit said. "I think we have to move." She was answering a question no had asked out loud.

Jana lay down on her bed. "New York?"

Brit nodded. "No bathtubs there."

There was only one unsure element. Jana asked: "Do you think Henry will do that?"
"You'd know better than I would," Brit said. She knew Jana spent chaste nights with Henry, but she'd never asked her explicitly about it. Talking about boys wasn't really something they did together. Though they were as ingrained in each other's daily lives as significant others—even spilled over into that space—their conversations consisted of cues and crescendos and careers, not crushes. And Jana and Henry seemed more like siblings than anything else; Jana never moved or talked more freely than when she was around him, which is why this one-on-one Brit and Jana were having had been tinged with awkwardness before they started drinking. Brit realized they'd done something irritating, pairing off with Henry and Daniel as they had, girl to boy, girl to boy. Another reason to step away from Daniel, Brit thought. But toward what?

And toward what for the quartet? They were now a quartet without a country, no flag of the conservatory or the competition to stand under. A life of hustling, of trying to get signed, of starving in New York and trying to make it in the classical world, which didn't, at the moment, care that much for chamber musicians, at least not those who hadn't won competitions, or even placed.

Excerpted from The Ensemble by Aja Gabel. Copyright © 2018 by Aja Gabel. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.