Cover Reveal: The Sound of Us by Julie Hammerle

Sound interesting? Check out this exclusive excerpt from The Sound of Us:

From the music app on my phone, Ani DiFranco belts out a choice insult just as Brie bursts through my dorm room door, crosses the room, and plops a giant cardboard box on the other bed.

“I guess we’re roommates,” she says. There were a bunch of boxes in the room when I arrived, and I wondered who they belonged to. I suppose that mystery is solved.

I scramble to stop Ani from singing anything else we both might regret later and I look up just in time to see Seth Banks crossing the threshold into my dorm room, carrying another larger, heavier box over to Brie’s side.

“Hi,” he says. “Kiki, right?” He knows my name. Seth Banks somehow knows my name.

I nod, and sneak a glance at the mirror on the wall next to my bed, assessing myself against the two model-caliber people in my dorm room. I’m still wearing the cat dress. My frizzy hair is up in a messy bun, but the effect actually works with my blue-plastic glasses. I look eccentric, but artsy, which may not be the best look of all time but it is, in fact, a look.

(You’re probably wondering who my celebrity twin is. Well, there aren’t a lot of women in pop culture who have my body type, i.e. dumpy. I’m too fat to be thin and too thin to be fat. Head-wise, I have the glasses and mouse-like features of Mary Katherine Gallagher from Saturday Night Live with hair like Hermione before someone gave her hot oil help between the second and third movies.)

Brie cocks an eyebrow at me and tucks her bottom lip under her top teeth as she picks up my backpack and drops it on the ground with a perfunctory thud. I had tossed it onto the blue papa-san chair in the middle of our room after I got back from the auditions. “That’s my chair,” she says. “My. Chair.” And then she proceeds to place a six-pack of Diet Coke into the fridge—My. Fridge.—because apparently that’s how fairness works.

Brie puts her hands on her hips and surveys my side of the room, which, honestly, does look like a tornado ripped through it. I came back to our room after auditions with the plan of unpacking all of my things, I really did. But instead I felt so overwhelmed, I had to take a few minutes to listen to Ani and decompress by writing horrible, secret poetry in my journal. But the few minutes turned into an hour, turned into me skipping dinner, turned into all of a sudden it’s 7:00 and my clothes are still strewn around the floor like party guests who refuse to leave.

To prove a point to Brie or something, I grab a stack of pictures from my desk and start sticking them up on the bulletin board. I don’t really want the pictures on my wall. I don’t need them, but I feel like they’re obligatory college student falderal, and that’s what I’m pretending to be this summer, a college student. My eyes linger over the pictures as I pin them, memories that seem so distant already. High school is a million miles away, which is kind of the point of my being in Indianapolis, so, success.