“Good,” I say. “They deserved it.”
But I don’t know if I’m talking about them or Carter or myself right now. Everything inside me is like a mangled mass of cars on the highway, and I’m waiting for the paramedics to come untangle them.
Chapter Eleven
PIANO INJUSTICE
“We need more scientists,” Mr. Christie declares from the front of the classroom.
He’s standing, but he places a foot on the seat of a chair. He kind of leans into the chair, placing his right hand on his right knee, in emphasis or something, as if this position makes him a more passionate lecturer. It can only mean he’s about to dispense a new assignment, especially since it’s the start of a new week—our second full week of classes.
He strokes his reddish beard, pushes his wire-rimmed glasses back up on his nose. He wears corduroy slacks, a button-down shirt, a shabby jacket. I wonder if he wishes he were at Williamson instead, if he’d rather be a college professor, but then I’m sure like all the others he thinks Themis is its own sort of heaven. Tenure awarded after just a few years, the wildest assignments you can dream up, and a whole army of students to sing and dance for you.
“Thomas Friedman says we need more scientists,” Mr. Christie says, elaborating in his deep baritone. He pauses. He pauses a lot in his lectures. I bet when he writes his lectures he puts pause here in his notes. “Do we need more scientists?” he asks. “Is that what our world needs? As the world gets flatter and we run in place faster just to keep up, do you”—he pauses again, this time to point at all of us in the room—“agree?”
We don’t know. We haven’t read the book. But he’s about to assign it to us.
Still rocking back and forth against his right leg, he says, “Tonight, I want you to begin reading The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. And I want you to think about what we need most. You can agree or disagree with Mr. Friedman.”
Of course. It’s encouraged, in fact. We’re not expected to agree with teachers or texts or the conventional wisdom. We are expected, however, to back up our dissent with facts and arguments and logic. Mr. Christie teaches history, but not the pilgrims and tea party kind. He teaches world affairs. He says he’s concerned with what’s happening today in the United States and in the world and how we got here. That’s why he’s not going to assign any textbooks this semester, he says. Instead, we will read modern works by modern writers on the modern world and come to modern conclusions, he says.
“Please read the first five chapters before the next class,” Mr. Christie says. “For each chapter, I want you to write a ten-word statement on what each of you deems the most cogent point in that chapter—no more, no fewer than ten words. You need to be able to distill your thoughts and impressions succinctly and be prepared to present them in a lively discussion.”
He pauses, paints a smile on his face. He looks pleased with himself, as if he can simply decide by fiat that the discussion will be lively. Make it so, Mr. Christie, make it so.
“Class dismissed.”
I reach for my backpack and sling it over my shoulder, ready to leave with T.S., until Mr. Christie calls me over. He’s my junior advisor. I walk to the front of the classroom as the other students file out. “Alex, let’s chat for a minute,” Mr. Christie says.
He still hasn’t moved his leg off that chair. He rests his hand on his knee, as if he’s a statue. Maybe there’s glue on the bottom of his shoe. Maybe he realized it when he parked his foot up there and now he’s too proud to admit it. Maybe he’s going to ask me for a knife or an X-Acto blade to slide between the bottom of his shoe and this chair. But then he takes his foot off the chair and stands like a normal person. Well, as normal as any Themis teacher can be.
“Let’s talk about your spring project,” he says. Another deep pause. “What would you like to do? How would you like to make your mark on Themis Academy?”
I picture a dog, a naughty little beagle pup named Amelia, whizzing on the carpet, making her mark.
“This is kind of going to be a big surprise and all, but I thought I’d do something music-related.”
He misses the sarcasm, just beams instead. His eyes are like saucers, as if I just said the most creative, delightful thing a student has ever uttered.
“Music-related! That’s genius!”
Who would have thought the piano girl would do her project on music? It’s mind-blowing!
“Tell me more, Alex.”
I’m about to utter the name of my favorite symphony, then I stop. Because Beethoven betrayed me last week. And then I betrayed him with the way I played. How can I do my spring project on Beethoven after what we did to each other? He didn’t even write a piano part in the Ninth Symphony, for God’s sake. He wrote a million piano concertos but just happened to leave out my instrument from the greatest piece of music ever written. How’s that for injustice?
Then I realize it’s perfect. Injustice. It’s the perfect subject because it suits me right now.
“I want to do my spring project on the injustice of Beethoven not writing a part for the piano in the Ninth Symphony. Did you realize that, Mr. Christie? He left the piano out. It’s scored for the largest group of instruments of any Beethoven symphony and yet he left out the best instrument ever in the entire world,” I say crisply. “He included trumpets and horns and oboes and violins and even a bassoon of all things. There are vocals in it too. You can be a singer and sing ‘Ode to Joy’ in the Ninth Symphony. But what do we get? Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Mr. Christie nods, several times. Then he narrows his boring brown teacher’s eyes and assumes a thoughtful, contemplative look. “I think that’s simply a brilliant idea, Alex.”
He holds up his index finger, then places it against his mouth. “You can research scholars, music experts, interview great classical pianists….”
Blah, blah, blah. As if I don’t know how to do research.
“But how ever will we have you perform it if there’s not a piano part?” Mr. Christie asks, looking absolutely confounded.
My heart stops. Did Mr. Christie actually just say that? “Perform it? I can perform it? For the whole school?”
I tell myself not to show emotion in front of him, but my brain is pretty much popping all over with excitement.
“That’s ideally the goal. A performance for the entire student body and the teachers. But how would you do it if there’s no piano part?”
My eyes widen and I’m the only kid in class who knows the answer. “Liszt,” I say, and in that moment I want to kiss the Hungarian composer. “Franz Liszt transcribed it for the piano. It was a daunting task, and it took him years. He almost stopped. But he soldiered on and he did it. And that’s why he’s my musical hero. That’s the heart of my spring project.”
For a moment I feel chills, good chills, thinking of Liszt, thinking of his dedication, his brilliance, his quest to turn all of Beethoven’s symphonies into solo pieces for the piano Liszt loved as much as I do.
“I am totally behind this. But we will also have to get it approved, of course, by Miss Damata,” he says, then quickly corrects his faux pas. “I meant Ms. Damata.”
But she’s already Miss Damata to me now. “Miss Damata? Who’s that?” I ask.
“She’s the new music teacher.”
“I didn’t know we had a new music teacher,” I say. Elective classes like music start the second week of the term.
“Mr. Graser had a job offer in California over the holiday break,” Mr. Christie says, referring to Themis’s previous music teacher. “He accepted it, but never fear. Everything happens for a reason, for we were able to quickly secure Victoria Damata. She has taught at Juilliard.”
“Juilliard?” I ask, practically salivating. She knows people. She knows the right people. She can help me get in. I will do whatever she wants. Juilliard has less than an eight percent acceptance rate, and if a former teacher from Juilliard just landed at my school I will do everything on this
earth to get in her good graces, and she will write me the most amazing letter, and she will phone up all her contacts, and she will put in all sorts of good words for me, and in less than two years I will be in New York training under the greatest teachers the world has ever known.
“Yes, Juilliard. I do know how very much you want to go there.”
I nod, unable to speak. I will curtsey when I meet Miss Damata. I will sweep her office, empty the trash, fetch her sheet music any time of day or night.
“Allow me to introduce you. Come with me.”
Mr. Christie gestures to the door of his classroom and I walk out with him, then across the quad, where for the first time ever I’m grateful for his presence. Today, he’s my Carter buffer. He opens the door to the music hall in some sort of ridiculously gallant gesture and there’s Ms. Damata at the piano. Her blond hair is piled on top of her head; she wears a high-necked beige blouse, a pencil-thin green skirt. I flinch for a second, thinking she knows what I did to the piano that night last week.
But then she smiles, warm and kind, and I know she could never be mad at me for that. She would understand.
I adore her instantly.
Chapter Twelve
A WINK AND A NOD
Miss Damata is a rock star.
She’s performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and New York Philharmonic. She won the Rachmaninoff Piano Competition. She plays in the Mostly Mozart Festivals in the summer. Oh, and she has a bachelor’s degree in music from Juilliard too.
I know this because I haven’t stopped asking her questions. She is gracious and warm; she answers everything I ask. I ply her with more questions. “Who is your favorite composer?” I ask.
“Schumann,” she answers. “Anything by Schumann.”
“I love Schumann too,” I say. “Wait. Do you mean Clara or Robert?” I ask. Robert Schumann was the more famous of the married pair of pianists, but his wife, Clara, wrote beautiful piano pieces, concertos, even a piano trio.
“Clara,” Miss Damata says.
“Me too!” I say, and my stomach growls. I place a hand on my belly, hoping she didn’t hear. I haven’t gone to the cafeteria since the run-in there last week with Carter and Kevin. I’ve been subsisting on pretzels and Clif Bars and whatever T.S. or Maia brings back for me. “Most people don’t know about her work,” I add. “But, then again, you’re not most people. You’re a star. You’re a Juilliard grad! A Juilliard teacher.”
She simply smiles and says “thank you,” then continues. “Her work was very romantic. But she stopped composing after she turned thirty-six,” Miss Damata says. Her voice is like powder, falling snow. “She even said, ‘I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose—there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?’ ”
“I’ve always thought it was terrible she felt that way. It was completely an injustice that she stopped composing,” I add, dropping in my new favorite word as we bond more over Clara. “It’s like we’re the poorer for it.”
“Especially because she was so genuinely talented. She wasn’t just talented for a woman. She was talented period. She could hold a candle and then some to the men, and our field is dominated by men. The teachers, the students, the composers, the stars.”
A twinge of guilt rushes through me because I have never given Clara a spot in my assembly of greats. I have never asked for her guidance when I needed musical help. I have turned only to men, and those men let me down after that night. I bet Clara wouldn’t have let me down. I bet Clara would have had something to say. I glance down at the piano, at the key I abused. It looks fine—it’s been playing fine for the last week—but I should say something.
“Miss Damata,” I begin, “do you think the E sounds off, like maybe someone…” I trail off, leaving my unspoken question hanging there.
She plays a few bars from Liszt’s Consolation no. 3; the notes are like a morning bird singing. “It sounds just the same as always to me.”
I close my eyes and listen to her play, and the piece soothes me. I picture it smoothing out the keys, restoring them under her gentle touch to the way they were before.
“Do you know Schumann’s March in E-flat Major?” Miss Damata asks.
I open my eyes. “Yes.”
“Would you like to play it with me?” she says.
We play Clara Schumann’s piano duet together and I feel the first ounce of unblemished joy I’ve felt since that night. When we’re done Miss Damata tells me she’s delighted to be teaching me this year. “You’re everything Mr. Graser said you would be. We’re going to have a great year,” she says.
If I were a blusher, I would blush. Instead I ask, “Why would you come to Themis when you were at Juilliard, when you’ve performed on world stages? That’s so much bigger than us.”
“Juilliard is a wonderful place, Alex,” she says. A strand of hair falls down out of her bun. She reaches for the blond pieces, tucks them behind her ear, and continues. “But I guess I’m not that different from Clara Schumann. I didn’t think Manhattan was a good place to raise a family. I wanted a quieter life.”
Maybe she has kids, but even so I swear I will never understand adults, even the cool ones like Miss Damata.
After we finish I take the long way to physics class, my boots crunching against the frozen ground as I go. Even though I’ll have to see Carter in class, I refuse to run into him on the way to class. I can’t give him a chance to try to talk to me, to try to touch me. So I have meticulously plotted out circuitous routes to all my classes. Maia did some detective work for me—I have a hunch Amy, Ilana, and Martin helped her out too over the last week—and we were able to reverse engineer Carter’s entire schedule. She placed it on my desk the other night with a flourish.
“Ta-da,” she said. “This is for when we can’t be there to walk with you.”
We mapped out how not to see him, down to the very second so I could still make it to classes on time. Now I take the long way everywhere, even though it’s winter, even though it’s freezing or snowing or sleeting or basically spitting up something wet and cold nearly every day in Providence.
Today, the ice is a minefield behind the music hall. I dodge one patch, but my left boot catches the next one the wrong way and before I know it, my feet are sliding out from under me and my ass collides with the cold, hard ground.
“Crap,” I mutter as I push myself up, grabbing my backpack. I stand and my right cheek already hurts and I can tell I will have a gigantic bruise by the end of the day. I make it to physics, wishing I were the kind of student who could just ditch a class, but I’m not a ditcher. I’ve never missed a class. And I’m not going to miss one now, even with an ass bruise the size of Alaska, even though Carter will walk into class any second.
I slide into my seat and Martin gives me a quick look. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little awkward around him now, but he’s also the only reason I can survive physics.
“I still have to show you those levitation pics,” he says, and I don’t feel awkward anymore.
“I was worried you were holding out on me,” I tease.
“Never,” he says.
But before I can say something else, I freeze. Carter saunters in, unzips his jacket, stops for a second, gives me a look, then winks. I can see the tip of his tongue almost sticking out the side of his month, in what he must think is some vaguely seductive, sexy invitation. I feel my stomach coil like a spring, hard and tight. He turns back and keeps walking, sliding into his seat at the front.
Then Mr. Waldman enters the room, briskly, not even looking at us. When he reaches the podium, he peers out at the class, his bald head bobbing quickly, his eyes moving up and down each aisle, taking attendance. He writes something down on a piece of paper. Two seconds later a runner walks in and rushes up the aisle to Mr. Waldman, who holds the attendance slip in his outstretched hand. The student
grabs it and heads out, but before he leaves I see him glance at Martin. Martin gives the student a nod, firm, precise. The runner gives him a quick one in return, then darts out.
I look to Martin, my curiosity piqued. Does he know all the runners back from when he was a runner? But he’s reaching for a pencil, looking the other way. When class ends, Martin puts a hand gently on my back and guides me out of class. He’s protecting me, getting me out of Carter’s line of sight. We walk across the quad and pass the bulletin board in front of McGregor Hall, where flyers flap in the wind. Martin tips his chin toward the board, where there’s a red notice with the bird staring at us.
The big bold letters are the words of Atticus Finch to his daughter, Scout.
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
It’s about playing fair.
That’s why the Mockingbirds consider all views—all votes—in the revised time for our first concert.
Then there’s a time and a date—one week from now. But the Mockingbirds won’t be performing then. Instead, they’ll be counting votes, adding up how many Themis students think date rape is a crime worthy of being deemed a violation of the only code of conduct that matters here.
Martin leans in to whisper. “Students have a full week to get their votes in. We think it’s more than enough time. You’ll find the ballot under your door tomorrow morning after first period.”
Chapter Thirteen
THE START OF SOMETHING
The next day, I’m dying for English class to end. I look at the clock, willing it to tick closer to ten so I can sprint out of here and grab the piece of paper that’s sure to be under my door.
Five more minutes.
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