Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin Page A

since she was in high school, and some nights, when the girls are hanging out with the boys of OTR, she still can’t believe she’s actually there.) Divisi organized Secret Santa—ten dollars or less—and each girl quietly placed her gift beneath the Christmas tree. But Keeley had her own game planned for that night. In a last-ditch effort to light a fire under the new girls, she’d brought the competition video with her, the one with Lisa Forkish and Divisi performing Usher’s “Yeah.” She popped it into the computer. It was eye-opening. Andrea Welsh, sipping her pink champagne, kept getting close to the screen and then stepping away again. “I’m so nervous,” she said. She didn’t use the F-word, but she was probably thinking it.
    Keeley saw the look in their eyes. And it wasn’t hunger—it was fear. Unfortunately, the one girl who might have inspired Divisi to rise to the challenge felt too out of place that night to say much of anything.
    Marissa Neitling, a fifth-year, is petite, with big bangs and bigger eyes. She’s a modern-day Mary Tyler Moore. Wacky things just sort of happen to her. Like freshman year, when she accidentally wound up living in the university’s lone designated twenty-four-hour -quiet dorm. “I was this little bubbly girl who likes to stay up late,” she says, “and I was living with these superquiet kids.” She joined Divisi in the victory lap year—the year after the ICCAs—and she loved it. Lisa Forkish was still running things. Even though Divisi wasn’t competing, “the hard work came first,” Marissa says. “Then the friendships.”
    There was so much Marissa wanted to say that night at the Christmas party—about unity, about the old Divisi, about what the new Divisi could be. “My mom always says to me, I’ve been your age but you haven’t been mine,” Marissa says. “And that’s how I felt.” But because Marissa is too polite, because she felt some of the new girls might misinterpret what she had to say, she kept quiet. Besides, having missed so much rehearsal herself that semester—she’d landed a featured role in the campus production of Sondheim’s Company —she wasn’t sure she’d earned the right to say anything.
    There was more to the story, of course, more going on behind the bangs.
    Marissa had been a precocious kid, always more of a tiny adult than a child. When she was in the first grade, she was called down to the principal’s office. “Your mother is here to pick you up,” the receptionist said. Marissa’s eyes welled up with tears. Her grandfather had been sick and now, walking out to her mom’s car, she feared the worst. “What happened?” Marissa said, opening the passenger-side door. “Get in quick!” her mom replied. “We’re going to miss the two-thirty showing of Edward Scissorhands .”
    Which sort of explains how Marissa ended up double-majoring in math and theater. Growing up, Marissa always loved to perform. She’s had many music teachers over the years, and they’ve all said the same thing: Don’t think, just sing. But quieting that analytical part of her brain, giving herself over to the performance entirely—that’s always been Marissa’s problem.
    This 2006-2007 year is Marissa’s final in Eugene, and she’s at work on her thesis—an autobiographical one-woman show that includes (among other things) the story of an ex-boyfriend, the first love who broke her heart in the way only that first one can, the one who just seven months after the breakup was already married. (He is Mormon.) But mostly, the play she is writing is about acceptance, about letting go.
    Ten years ago, Marissa’s dad, a brilliant orthopedic surgeon, had his license suspended. The official report said he’d been diverting all sorts of medication from his patients, which was another way of saying he was an addict, smart enough to get drugs any way he could. But he went into a recovery program. And, just as suddenly it seemed, life