“I can be ready in thirty seconds,” I yell, scrambling to sit in the front row and open my violin case at the same time.
“Relax, he went to grab a coffee at the deli. He’ll be at least a few more minutes.”
“Are you ready?”
“Maybe not according to your standards, but at least I got here on time.”
“You’re pissed, aren’t you?”
“I’m not pissed, thank you very much. I just don’t get why I needed a lecture from you last night about the seriousness of this, like I’m not pulling my weight or something — and now you’re the one who doesn’t freaking show up.”
“Let’s just call a temporary truce, and we’ll talk about it after, okay?”
“I’m shocked that the great Ben Tristan would even want to be in the same room with me after I succumbed to such human vulnerability last night. Excuse me for needing to sleep in order to function.”
I don’t have an answer for that, so I tune my violin and we sit in silence until Robertson comes in.
Coffee in hand, he takes a seat in the front row of chairs that circle the piano. I stand up, like for some reason, that will make my apology more sincere.
“Mr. Robertson, thank you so much for taking the time this morning. I apologize for the delay. The trains were hell this morning.”
“Were you on the N?”
“The 6.”
“Oh, God, I don’t envy you. Seems like that thing is packed every hour of the day — like sardines in a rolling tin can.”
Claire and I both laugh a little too hard. Mr. Robertson ignores us, removes the lid of his cup and blows on the coffee.
“Do you want to play what you have so far?”
Claire takes a deep breath and we both nod.
I raise my bow and begin, soaring through the land mine, followed by Claire’s opening chord. We stumble through the first movement — it’s even worse than it sounded last night, and I can’t pinpoint why. Claire is dragging again, but I manage to speed her up. She’s following my lead — but why does the playing sound so scattered? I focus so hard it hurts, clenching my teeth to stay in sync with her as we crisscross phrases, running into each other’s lines and overflowing into the room, all jumbled and beautiful — but wrong.
This is so strange. No matter how hard I listen I can’t figure out what’s wrong with it.
And then it’s over.
I pull the violin from under my chin and Claire takes her hands off the keys and we sit, immersed in this great, astounding silence. The nothingness after so much something.
For a minute Robertson doesn’t say a word.
Then he looks at his hands.
Finally he speaks.
“Well, this could use some work,” he says.
“It was better last night,” Claire blurts out.
“Barely,” I snap back.
“You need to listen to each other,” he continues. “Claire, there were so many moments when you almost had it. The opening was beautiful. Dare I say, astounding. But I can feel you counting. Just get out of your head and run with it. I want lighter, more effortless, airy.”
She puts her head in her hands and her face gets all red — she’s so relieved I wonder if she’s going to start crying.
“And Ben. Where do I begin?”
Shit. Never in history has the question “Where do I begin?” ended with anything good. I bite my tongue so I won’t interrupt him. I wipe my face with the inside of my elbow. My forehead is soaked with sweat.
“You really impressed me at Carnegie Hall. I was at Lincoln Plaza the other night, seeing the new Woody Allen movie, and all at once it hit me. I thought, ‘Ben may be the best second-year violinist we have right now. He has the potential to be one of the greats.’ ”
“Thank you,” I say. Here it comes.
“Today I wasn’t impressed. You were rushing. You came in early at least twice. I didn’t feel you were even in the same room as Claire. What a mess, Ben. Go over it with Yaz as much as you can before the audition. He knows this piece better than anyone. Both of you. Work with your private teachers, work together, work separately. There’s plenty of time to get this in good shape before you play it for the rest of the judges at the end of the month. Right now we’re looking at thirty-three pairs competing for six slots, so the selection process won’t be easy.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thank you. We’ll work on it.”
“Thank you both.”
Robertson rushes out with his coffee cup and backpack to make it to the Rose Building before his next orchestra class. And then he’s gone and the room is silent and still again.
Claire’s lips are turned down in a pout, but her eyes are white lightning.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I can see her head puffing up with arrogance and confidence. But she hasn’t earned any of it. She was all over the place in the first movement, and she would have been even more lost without me to guide her. How does Robertson expect me to sound when I’m trying to help her stumble through?
“Sorry for what?” I ask, flashing my smoothest grin.
“I’m sorry Robertson was so hard on you.”
“It’s fine,” I say, because there’s nothing else to say.
“He’s just trying to challenge you,” she says. “He knows your potential and he doesn’t want you to get away with doing anything less. So the tempo was weird. We’ll get it right. We just need to —”
“Or maybe I just suck,” I say, setting my violin in the case and shutting it as fast as I can. I don’t wait to hear her response. I’m already walking down the hallway and through the big glass doors.
Robertson must have made a mistake. He must have heard me trying to speed Claire up, which made him think I was rushing or I didn’t know the phrase. He didn’t understand what I was trying to do.
I stalk past the fountain. The first two bars were perfect. Perfect. One of the most difficult introductions of any violin piece in the history of classical music, and all he could hear were the tempo issues. Unbelievable.
I’ll just have to do better. Play with more passion, more energy, more emotion. I can’t let anyone hold me back anymore. Not Claire, not Carter, not Robertson. Nobody.
* *
I start on Fiftieth Street, armed with a roll of packing tape and flyers.
Wait, am I really doing this? Is she going to think this is clever — or just crazy? No. I know she’ll love it.
I snake back and forth across the street until I’ve hit every streetlight and No Parking sign. Then I start down Fifty-First. Then Fifty-Second. Then Fifty-Third. It’s starting to get dark, but I don’t care. I don’t think you’re really supposed to stick flyers up in the city, anyway, so maybe it’s better that no one can get a good look at my face.
My superhero X-ray vision zooms in across the street on a girl with a puff of dark, curly hair. The light is about to change, so I bolt in front of a white van and race up next to her. It’s not A Train. It’s a crying, drunk woman yell-slurring at some guy who must be her boyfriend but probably won’t be for long.
I keep going, taping a flyer to every sign I pass. Fifty-Fourth. Fifty-Fifth. Fifty-Sixth. Fifty-Seventh. The streetlight on the corner by Carnegie Hall.
An old man with a nose three sizes too big for his face stops me and asks what I’m doing. I hand him a flyer and tell him to keep an eye out for A Train. He scrunches up his gigantic nose and keeps walking. I immediately regret wasting a flyer on him.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Milo.
I answer it.
“Where the hell are you?”
“Uh, out, why?”
“Mom’s really upset.”
He’s right — I can hear her muffled crying through the phone. “I told her I was going out.”
“It’s after midnight.”
“Wait, it’s that late? Damn it, I don’t know what happened. Tell her I’m so sorry. I really messed up.”
“Just come home, okay?”
“Yeah, be home as fast as I can. Fifteen minutes.”
I look at my watch. No way it’s after midnight. The last time I looked down it was 7:58 p.m.
I need to stop doing this.
I need to buy a buy a bigger watch.
{9}
Dominique
Sunday night, nine o’clock. I’m eating spaghetti out of the pot. Mom’s working late at Spin Cycle, trying to catch up — one of the dryers is still broken and we’re waiting for a part to be shipped, so everything’s running at half speed. I have a chemistry test tomorrow so she made me stop helping and go home. I hate leaving her there, and I hate being home alone at night just as much.
The apartment gets creepy at night. The neighbors yell and people run up and down the stairs. And even though our place is small, it starts to feel way too empty for just me.
Then I hear a knock at the door. It’s so loud the window rattles.
My first reaction is to hide. When I was little, Mom would make me duck behind the couch whenever someone knocked on the door, just in case it was a person who wasn’t supposed to be there. She dated a few guys after my dad left, until one guy came around in the middle of the night after she broke up with him.
She never had another boyfriend after that — at least, not that I know of. When I was younger, I always thought it was just that she was too focused on work, but now I realize she’s probably been trying to keep me safe.
The knocker pounds again, but this time he calls, “Maria, Maria!” And then he starts singing that song from West Side Story. No way it’s a crazy gun-wielding murderer. It couldn’t be anyone but Cass. I look through the peephole, and even though he’s wearing a huge black sweatshirt with the hood on, I definitely see Cass’s brown eyes.
I open the door. “Don’t you know how to text?”
He races in and pushes me to the couch so hard the spaghetti pot hits the linoleum.
“What’s wrong with you?” I bend over to get the fork from under the couch, but he grabs me and pulls me back up.
“Dom! Stop! Read this.”
He shoves his phone in my face.
I stare at it. I can hardly speak.
“Where did you see this?” I sputter at last.
“It’s on Grave’s Instagram.”
“Who?”
“Grave. The new counter guy at Lombardo’s Pizza.”
“His name is Grave?”
“Yeah.”
“Grave?”
“Okay, yes, that’s not the point. Dom, it’s viral. It got twenty thousand Likes. Is this you?”
“Whoa.”
We run into the bedroom, grab my laptop and spend the next hour crafting a response.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Hey
September 30, 10:32 p.m.
I saw the flyer on Instagram. How do I know it’s really you?
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Hey
September 30, 11:03 p.m.
I’ve gotten 1,479 e-mails to this account since I put the flyers up, so the real question is, how do I know it’s really you?
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Hey
September 30, 11:28 p.m.
Hmm. Good point.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Hey
September 31, 12:14 a.m.
Here’s what I’m telling everyone who e-mails: I’ll be standing where we first met at eight o’clock tomorrow night. If it’s really you (and it’s really me), we’ll both be there.
He’s been looking for me. He thinks my voice sounds like liquid gold. I say the words, just to see if he’s right.
“He’s been looking for me.”
Like a burst of light in the dark sky. A firework, exploding in the distance.
* *
Monday is the night everything changes forever.
Cass spots me the cash for yet another train ticket. Damn, I owe him. I feel terrible taking his money, especially because I know he doesn’t have any, but he insists, and my heart is so trembly and my hands are so shaky I don’t know what else to do. So I let him pay, and then we’re on the train to Manhattan together, me fidgeting all over the place and Cass gripping my hand. He’s doing double duty as my moral support and my bodyguard.
“Should I tell him I’m eighteen or nineteen?” I ask. “Do you think twenty is pushing it?”
“Why don’t you just tell him the truth?”
“So I tell him I’m actually in high school and I live in Trenton with my mom in a crappy third-floor walk-up, and if I really play my cards right, someday I’ll inherit a laundromat?”
Cass pauses. “You’re right. Lying is your only option.”
“Besides, it’s not like I’m going to get married to this guy or something.”
“You never know.”
“Shut up.”
“So you go to NYU.”
“Yeah, and I live in Goddard Hall and I’m studying to get my bachelor of fine arts in dance. I have to take regular classes, too, like comparative literature and biology and a bunch of lectures and seminars. My roommate’s name is Samantha and she’s premed, and our dorm overlooks the park. It can be a little loud, especially at night, but I love living right in the middle of everything.”
“So you’ve given some thought to this.”
“I’ve given this some thought. And three hours of Google research.”
Ben Tristan. Ben Tristan the violinist is looking for me.
I notice my reflection in the train window. My hair is frizzing everywhere, and I have a zit on my nose, and my forehead is all shiny, and my eyes are bugging out and bloodshot, and my neck has these weird, horizontal lines on them, and my shirt is too big and there’s a little hole near the hem, and my butt is a freaking boulder, and there’s no possible way I can meet Ben Tristan right now. No way.
“Let’s go back,” I say to Cass. “I changed my mind.”
“What are you talking about? We’re halfway there.”
“Forget it — I don’t want to go. I can’t do this.”
Cass grabs my hand and doesn’t say anything. I can feel my cold fingers shaking against his still, warm ones.
The train zooms through the suburbs, whether I like it or not.
In an hour I’ll be standing next to him.
{10}
Ben
Mom asks me to clean my room on Monday, and instead of just cramming a bunch of junk in my drawers like I usually do, I actually fold the sweaters and take the plastic off my dry-cleaned dress shirts and bring my empty water glass to the kitchen to put in the dishwasher. I finish in record time and spend the next hour practicing. Well, trying to. It’s weird, because I never get stage fright, but every time I remember I’m about to meet A Train at eight, my fingers start trembling.
I give up after forty-five minutes of being totally unproductive. I can’t remember the last time I was this nervous. Maybe my first kiss with Juliette, a girl from orchestra camp I kind of dated for a few months. Our braces kept clicking together, so it was hard to feel any of that stuff you’re supposed to feel. I haven’t really had a girlfriend since her. That was three years ago now. I’m definitely overdue.
This is useless. I can’t do anything but pace around the room and worry, so I put my legs to better use — I walk the seven avenue blocks and thirty-two street blocks from our apartment to Lincoln Ce
nter.
The sun falls behind the skyline, making the sky bleed orange. Like the skyscrapers are on fire, sizzling and hazy. A boy on a skateboard glides past me, followed by a little old lady with purple hair and an even purpler fur coat.
I can’t wait to walk up and see A Train smiling by the fountain, waiting for me. Calm rushes over me, and I remember how I felt when it was just the two of us, leaning against the concrete, talking about music. Not about metronomes and measures, but what’s actually in our souls. Trading a little part of hers for a little part of mine.
By the time I get to Eighty-Third and Amsterdam the sun has faded completely, and the cabs flip on their headlights. Nighttime in New York City is completely different from nighttime in the rest of the world because there are barely any stars. We still live in the same apartment we did when I was a baby, so it’s not like I’m an expert on what other skies look like. But when characters in movies stare up at the sky at night (or when I did that time my family took a vacation to Vermont for a week), they see a whole spattering of stars all over the place. In New York, I can see the thousands of twinkling lights from apartments with everyone home and safe and finishing up dinner. And office buildings that for some reason keep their lights on 24/7 with no one but security guards inside. It’s not exactly the same as stars, but I like it even better.
I belong here. I’m part of the city’s constellation. I’m the shining buckle of Orion’s belt. Or at least one of his toes. I’m not picky.
* *
I’m at the fountain by 7:36. She’s not here yet. Kreutzer plays in my earbuds. I keep skipping back to the first few seconds of the first movement so I can imprint the notes in my brain. Deep inside my nerves, so I don’t even have to think or feel — so they just appear, like sparks, out of my fingertips. But so far it’s still not happening.
My phone buzzes and I jump. At first I think it must be her, even though I still don’t have her number.
It’s a text from Yaz.
Kreutzer is a tough one. Do you want to come by for an extra lesson this week?
Robertson must have told him about the check-in with Claire. He must have told him that it was my fault. Yaz thinks I need extra help now. Fantastic. I try to push the thought out of my mind for now. When A Train gets here, none of this will matter. But the longer I wait the more it keeps creeping back in.
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