"June."
"I'm not your confessor, Edward. I'm the music coordinator. I like the job. I'd like to keep liking the principal enough to do it." She paused at the door. "He said just listen. You did, eventually. Do it again on Thursday, in your office, when you want to narrate. Listen to the fact that you were late."
She left. The office smelled like paper and the lemon oil the night staff used on the desk. Harper sat until the light on the trees went from gold to ordinary. He did not write a note. He wrote, on a plain sheet he later put in a file labeled with the boy's name, the sentences he had said, in order, without improvement. Under them he wrote: He played the prelude anyway. I do not get to claim the anyway.
Thursday's panel was a room with bad coffee and good ears. Reynolds and two faculty and the artist-teacher who would inherit the scholarship students sat with the scores and the memories of the open house. The flash-loving colleague, whose name was Peter Adelman, tapped his pencil and then set it down.
"I wanted more noise," he said. "He gave me proportion. I'm annoyed, which usually means I'm convinced. The dance had charm and structure. The Bach, from what I heard through the doors and from the video, is the real news. He can play."
"He can play," said the artist-teacher, a woman who had no patience for myth. "More than that, he can revise in real time. The lobby piano is brighter in the treble than he expected. You could hear him adjust. That's teachable only because the foundation is already there."
They talked about the other pianists. One had played Liszt and played it like a dare, thrilling and smudged. One had played cleanly and not yet personally. Elijah's file, when they returned to it, included the income form, which they were not supposed to use as a color on the music and which Reynolds watched them not use. The recommendation from Keene. The statement. The video timestamps. In the end the scholarship offers went to a violinist, a cellist, a soprano, and one pianist. The pianist was Elijah Brooks. The Liszt daredevil would be offered a studio seat without the full scholarship, a distinction that would require a careful letter. Elijah's letter would be simpler. He had been the pianist they could not justify leaving out.