Me, Cinderella?

by Rose, Aubrey

  Eliot smiled gently over at me, but continued to play. I quickly collected myself and rejoined him, relaxing my finger muscles and applying a lighter touch to the melody. He moved from chord to chord and I moved with him, learning his rhythm as he learned mine.

  By the last measure of the first page we played in tight synchrony, and I lost myself in the song. I wasn’t in the midnight piano room any longer. I was young, seven years old, and I could hear my mother humming the melody in my ear as she played the bottom chords, the extended octaves too much of a reach for my small hands.

  I joined him in the last chord softly, the sound trailing off into the muffled walls of the room.

  “Who taught you to play?”

  “My mother.”

  “Is she a musician? Professionally, I mean? You have a talent for it.”

  “She’s— she was a musician. She traveled around and played for special events. Weddings, conferences.” My eyes watered at the thought of her saying goodbye to me before leaving.

  “She is gone now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She died in Hungary when I was young.” A pang of sorrow shot through my heart as it always did when I spoke of her, but nothing else.

  At these words Eliot raised his eyebrows.

  “I’m sorry.” He put his hand on mine, and again I felt the inescapable thrill of desire run through me. When he withdrew his hand, I had to stop myself from reaching out. He looked back at the music sheets on the piano. He put his hand out and began to play the Satie again, with a lighter touch. The first chords struck at my heart now that I heard them clearly: so simple, so elegant.

  “Hungary is my homeland,” he said, his voice distant.

  “I thought so,” I nodded. “You sound kind of like my grandmother. Your accent.”

  “I have an accent?” He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, his fingers continuing into the first slow crescendo. “Have you been to Hungary?”

  “No,” I said. “I’d like to. Her whole family was from there. She always told me it was beautiful.”

  “And your father?” The first low dissonant notes came in from the bottom.

  “He’s in Hollywood with his new wife. They’re very famous.” I couldn’t help but frown, tensing as I thought about the other side of my family, and for a few moments Eliot was silent, letting the music flow from his hands. The softness of the notes relaxed me.

  “Fame is not always nice,” he said finally, launching into the second part of the melody.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, although it did. “I live with my grandmother. I’m nobody to him. Or to anyone.” The bitterness in my voice surprised even me.

  Eliot stopped playing in the middle of a measure, and silence spilled across the distance between us. He took a deep breath before speaking, his words tracing a slow tempo in the air.

  “You are a mathematician,” he said. “And a musician.”

  “I’m not anything,” I said. “I’m just—” I’m just Brynn. I cut the words off quickly, frightened suddenly that I might slip and give away my real name. “I’m normal. Not really great at music or math.”

  Eliot laughed softly and began to play again. The chords sounded lighter this time around.

  “You have years to become great,” he said, letting the space draw out between notes. “No need to rush. See how badly I play? And I’m even worse at math.” A sparkle of teasing glimmered in his eye, but I could not tell if he was teasing me or himself.

  “Most people are bad at math,” I said.

  “True. So perhaps we have a long way to go before we are satisfied. We have plenty of time.” His eyes caught mine, and the second meaning behind his words made my breath catch in my throat. I coughed and looked up at the piano score, pretending to follow along with the notes. He played the second coda perfectly, hitting the exact right balance between lightness and emotion. I closed my eyes for the final two chords, letting my heart swell as they resolved upward and faded into the air.

  “Valentina.”

  The brief pause before my look of recognition must have given me away, but he seemed not to notice. He was lost in himself.

  “Yes?”

  His eyes lowered, unwilling to meet mine, and his fingertips ran along the ivory keys slowly, tentatively.

  “You play beautifully.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small brass key. He handed it to me, turning his head up, and my lips parted when he pressed his palm on top of mine. His eyes were fierce, demanding, as though he had made up his mind about something.

  “What’s this?”

  “The key to this room. So you can become great a bit more quickly.” He smiled, his hand still on top of mine. “I’ll let the music professor know you’re allowed to play.”

  “I—I don’t know what to say.” It was the most fabulous gift I’d ever received. I thought of how all the music majors would gape as I walked by them to the midnight piano room. How I would sit down at the keys, the deep, rich tones of the Bosendorfer flowing from my fingertips. Mine!

  “Say you’ll practice this piece. I’ll leave it for you. You have a talent for the melody.”

  “Thank you.” My voice was a whisper as I turned the key in my hand. I could not understand why he treated me so kindly. He brought one finger up under my chin, tilting my head up to meet his gaze. His touch weakened every muscle in my body.

  “Promise me you’ll keep playing.”

  “Of course.” At that moment, I would have done anything he asked. I wondered why I trusted him. Perhaps it was because he trusted me. Even though I had lied to him. In that instant, I wanted to take it back, to tell him my real name, but I did not know how.

  “It’s easy for mathematicians to lose touch with the world around them. Too easy.” He smiled, but there was a sadness in his eyes.

  “I’ll practice a lot. I love the Gymnopedies,” I said. And now I had an excuse to learn them.

  Eliot reached over and closed my hand around the key, his long fingers covering mine. My heart beat fast as he brought both of our hands up to his bent head. His lips pressed against my knuckles and I felt the heat radiate from my fingers through my entire being as he kissed my hand. An emotion I could not let myself feel pooled inside of me, and I ached with it. Stranger still, I felt his desire through his hot lips on my fingers, even as he released them.

  “The Gymnopedies—they’re not hard to get right, just hard to get beautiful. The spaces in between the notes…”

  He meant something more than the music, I could tell. I clasped the key in my hand tightly.

  “May I take you out for a coffee?” he asked. “Let me repay your generosity.”

  “Now?” I wanted to go with him, would have gone with him, but it was so late, and the test for the internship prize loomed in my mind.

  He shrugged. “Whenever you wish.”

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “Maybe some other time. It’s just that I have a test tomorrow.”

  “On a Sunday?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s a special thing, for some internship.” I saw a strange look pass over his eyes, but it was gone before I could name it. He rested his hands on his lap and looked back at the sheet music.

  “Good night, then,” he said, nodding slightly in my direction. The room felt colder, his voice flat, and I wondered if he had changed his mind about me. Maybe he thought I was lying about the test. I paused before turning to leave.

  “Good night.” I left him there, sitting alone at the piano. As I walked through the music hall, I could hear the Satie floating through the air at my back, the ghostly notes finding their way to me in the darkness.

  The next day I met Mark in front of the auditorium, the events of the previous night still playing through my mind like a vivid dream. I fingered the small brass key in my pocket. Maye it would bring me good luck on the test. Above us in the sky, gray clouds gathered menacingly, and the wind whipped through the campus, tossing the treetops from one side to the oth
er. With my red hoodie pulled tight over my dark hair, I took the steps two at a time on my way up.

  “Ready?” Mark stood on the steps under the awning, waiting for me.

  “I’m never ready for these things.” Even after years of being at the top of my class, my stomach still turned over at the thought of being tested. Of being judged, and found wanting. Right now every nerve in my body stood on high alert.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll do fine.”

  “Where’s Quentin?” A few students filed into the auditorium, but Quentin was nowhere to be seen.

  “He’s already inside. Wanted to get there early and sit in front. His roommate said the guy who won last year sat in front.”

  “So he’s trying to set up the perfect initial conditions.” I rolled my eyes and Mark laughed.

  I pushed my hood back from my head as we entered the building. Inside, a hundred students milled around the auditorium. Quentin waved to us from the front of the auditorium, and we walked toward him. Nobody else wanted to sit in the very front, it seemed, and Mark and I slid into the row right behind Quentin. Every other seat had the desk extended with a tablet resting on it.

  “Check it out,” Quentin said. “Tablets like in the major hall lectures. Think they’re going to be watching us while we do the problems on these? My roommate didn’t say anything about working on a screen.” The tablets alternated on every other desk, so Mark sat down two seats over from me. He poked at the tablet, but the screen was locked.

  “Wow,” I said, scanning the room. “I didn’t know we had this many math majors in our class.” I didn’t recognize half of the people there.

  “There’s some physics and engineering people, looks like,” Mark said.

  “Computer science too,” Quentin said. “Doesn’t matter. All of the past winners have been math majors.”

  “Guess everyone wants a shot,” I said. My hopes withered. It seemed impossible that I could beat out all of these people for the prize. Even if I wanted it the most out of anybody there.

  “I wonder what the questions will be.” Mark had given up on the tablet and leaned back in his chair. He looked so relaxed, like he was laying out on the library lawn in the summertime instead of waiting for the most important test of the year to start.

  “Rick said that it was mostly number theory and combinatorics last year,” Quentin said, his arm draped over the back of his seat. “Starts easy, gets hard. Super hard. And the guy running it is a hardass. Kicked one person out last year before the test even started for asking if he could use a calculator.”

  “No calculators?” I had mine in my jacket pocket.

  “I don’t think we’ll need them anyway. The questions are mostly proof stuff. That’s what Rick said.” Quentin kept talking, the nervous energy coming out in his voice. “Hey, it’s nine already. Wonder where the proctor is? I wonder if he’s really that much of a jerk.”

  “Good luck,” Mark said to me. He held out his hand toward me jokingly for a handshake over the empty seat between us. I shook it, and noticed a curious expression on his face. Like he wanted to beat me, but he also wanted me to win. He knew that for me, the stakes were high.

  “Good luck.”

  I sat, tension plucking my nerves, in the moment just before something good happens, where the promise of what could be meets the worry of what might not. Like the day you go to a new school, or the seconds backstage before you walk out and say the opening line that you’ve been practicing for months and months. Like the moment when you first open a book, uncertain of whether or not you’ll enjoy it. You decide to read the first page, and word by word it draws you in until you’ve reached the end of the first chapter without realizing it, then the second. Could the rest of the story live up to the promise? You’d have to wait and see.

  “Oh, there he is,” Quentin said. “Wow, he does look like a hardass.” I turned to see the man walking into the auditorium and my heart stopped.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Eliot. He held a tablet loosely in his hand as he walked down the aisle to the front of the auditorium. I sunk down in my seat, my throat suddenly seized up in terror.

  “Don’t worry,” Mark whispered over to me. He mistook my reaction for fear of a different kind. “You’ll do fine.”

  “Good morning,” Eliot said, his voice booming through the auditorium. Most of my professors needed a microphone to lecture in this hall, but his voice carried across all of the rows without any problem. Standing in the front of the room, he seemed much taller than before, more menacing. Everybody was instantly silent.

  “My name is Dr. Herceg and I will be administering the test for the internship prize. Welcome.”

  As his gaze scanned the audience, I bowed my head. Blood rushed to my face and I scrunched down even more, trying to use Quentin to block myself from view. Eliot was still talking, but his voice seemed to come from far away and there was a buzzing in my ears. I couldn’t pay attention.

  Him! Eliot! It was his internship! The pieces clicked into place just like a mathematical identity. Of course. Why hadn’t I realized earlier? His accent. The piano. But more importantly, what do I do now?

  I tuned back in. “You will be given the problems one by one. If you finish a problem early, continue to solve it in as many different ways as possible. I will be able to see all student work from here, anonymously.” He tapped the tablet in front of him. Quentin glanced back at Mark and raised his eyebrow.

  “If I do not like what I see, you will be dismissed.” He held up his tablet, a red box reading DISMISSED on the top of the screen. His shirt was rumpled, his eyes red, and I wondered how late he had stayed at the piano. Echoes of the Satie lilted through my mind as he spoke. “If you are incorrect, I will dismiss you. If you are slow, I will dismiss you. If you are sloppy, unorganized, or uncreative in your work, I will dismiss you. Are there any questions?”

  His eyes scanned the room, and before I could duck behind Quentin again, he saw me. I swallowed hard. He caught himself, doing a second take upon seeing me, then turned back to the other students.

  “No? Then we will begin.” He moved back to the blackboard behind him and wrote the problem on the board, then read it to us out loud, the problem appearing on the top of our tablet screens. “Write all partitions of the number 13. Begin.”

  My mind flashed back to my first discrete math class. I had always been good at math, but it was discrete that made me realize I loved it more than anything. And partitions were easy—just different ways of writing numbers as sums. Thirteen could be written as 10+3, or 5+6+2, or thirteen ones all added together.

  I took a deep breath. The students around me scribbled furiously on their tablets, and I was worried about going too slow, but I was also worried about being sloppy and missing a partition. And to top it all off, I was worried about Eliot figuring out who I really was. I thought we would have to register at the beginning of the test, but he’d said it was anonymous—would he ask for our names at the end? Did he already know the student list somehow? Did he already know I had lied to him? Take it easy, Brynn. Step by step.

  There were so many partitions. Start with the basic ones. 13. 12+1. 11+2. 11+1+1. I settled into an easy rhythm, breaking up the numbers in order and writing them down in separate columns. Not so bad, once I got everything organized. 10+3. 10+2+1. 10+1+1+1. I heard a chair behind me creak as a student got up. Dismissed already? Well, the physics majors probably didn’t even know what a partition was. I felt better, more certain, and I kept on working steadily. 9+4. 9+3+1. I had gotten down to the line of fives when a voice broke my concentration.

  “Next question.” Eliot’s voice startled me. He erased the question from the blackboard and began to write another. My tablet screen blanked out the question as well as all of my work, and the second question appeared.

  “What if we aren’t finished yet?” a student from a few rows back called out.

  “You’re still here, aren’t you?” Eliot said. “Then you’re finished. Next qu
estion.” He drew a circle on the board and began to sketch out chords between the points on the circle. “Let M be the midpoint of the chord PQ…”

  I knew this proof. The butterfly theorem. The chords sketched out drew the shape of a butterfly in the circle. I quickly wrote out the proof, adding in the missing perpendiculars. I finished in only a few minutes and looked around the auditorium, surprised at what I saw. Already a third of the room had been eliminated. I leaned back in my chair but then remembered what he had said. We were being tested on creativity, and my proof was the most straightforward version. I panicked and went back to the problem. There must be another way to do it. I scrambled to think of another proof, maybe one based on angles. Maybe projecting the circle, or maybe thinking of it as a conic section…

  Math was wonderful for me. It was an escape from the world which was messy and full of vague ambiguities a frightening muddle, into a new world of perfection. A world of lines which had no end, and points which were infinitely small, of curves that reached out always further and further into the plane, functions that repeated themselves in undulating waves which had no beginning and no end.

  It was only in this clean, perfect space that I felt comfortable playing. In my imagination I could drift off into daydreams, and in math I could construct the realities that I wanted to live in. I worked for twenty more minutes until Eliot called time, but couldn’t finish a second proof.

  “Next question.” I sighed as my tablet blanked out again. I must be doing okay, but this test stressed me out more than any other I’d ever taken.

  The next question was even harder, involving some partial differential equations that I had just learned. I worked on it without success for a half hour, but when time was called I wasn’t even close to an answer. I gulped, waiting for the red DISMISSED bar to appear on my screen, but it never did. Eliot wrote the next problem on the board and we continued working on our tablets. Students left the auditorium throughout, a stream of dismissals at the beginning of every problem that trickled down as time went on.