"I understand," Harper said.
She was not sure he did. She was sure she had said it.
The hall took them in. Elijah sat in a chair at the side, where finalists waited, and listened to a flute play a French piece full of light and nerves. The girl was good. Her breath ran out in one phrase and she found it again. He clapped for her with real hands. When Reynolds said his name, he walked out with the card in his pocket and the score he did not need on the rack anyway, because Mrs. Keene had told him a rack was a place a memory could hide and he did not want a hiding place.
The stage piano was another Steinway, brighter than the one under the stairs. The seats were a field of faces, some of them the faces from the lobby, come inside to see if the sound had been an accident of marble. Denise sat on the aisle, tenth row, her purse on her knees. Harper stood at the back, which was appropriate and which he knew was also a kind of hiding. Two faculty members sat at a table with pencils. One of them was the colleague who liked flash. He had his pencil ready to be unimpressed, because he had heard the lobby and did not enjoy having his mind changed in public.
Elijah played Florence Price's dance as if joy were a technical demand. It was. The rhythms asked for a spine. The accents asked for wit rather than noise. He gave them both. In the middle section he found a tenderness the lobby had not required, and he let it be tender without slowing it into a speech. When he finished, the hall clapped longer than the lobby had, because halls know what to do with an ending. He bowed this time, once, the small bow Mrs. Keene had taught him: head, not a fold at the waist, a recognition, not a collapse. He looked for his mother and found her. She did not wave. She put her hand over her heart in a movement so brief anyone not looking for it would miss it. He saw it.
Backstage, in the corridor that smelled of cork grease and old velvet, Reynolds touched his shoulder once.
"That's a finalist," she said. "Not because of what anybody assumed. Because of what you did with the time."