The lobby of the Meridian Performing Arts Center held Saturday the way a good hall holds sound — carefully, with stone and wood doing the quiet work. Cream floors stretched in long pale planes toward tall windows, and the late light came through warm, already mixed with the lamps lit in their sconces. Dark wood panels ran between framed photographs of orchestras: rows of black clothes, raised bows, a harp at the edge of one picture like a gold parenthesis nobody in the photograph was looking at. Parents stood in loose clusters with paper cups and low voices. Children sat on benches with cases across their laps, violin and cello and flute, latches clicking when a nervous hand checked a lock it had already checked.
Near the audition-hall double doors, a concert harp stood on its brass feet as if it had been growing there all morning. The column rose in a pale curve. The strings made a bright fence between the lobby and whatever waited on the other side of the wood. A bench sat tucked to the side, not yet offered, as if the instrument were resting and had not agreed to be asked for anything.
Nia stood close enough to see the red felt on the sharping discs and the faint wear on the soundboard where years of hands had lived. She was eleven, slim, deep brown skin warming under the lobby lamps, dark eyes steady and a little too shiny from the walk and from not blinking enough. Her braids rested at her shoulders, neat, the ends beginning to frizz where the wind off the plaza had found them. She wore a faded burgundy cardigan over a white blouse, a dark skirt to her knees, and cheap black flats polished that morning with a dish towel until the scuffs had given up being the first thing a person saw. A worn navy canvas music bag hung from her shoulder. One strap had been repaired with black thread that did not match.
She was not touching the harp. She was looking at it the way a person looks at a door she has been told she may open and still does not quite believe the telling.
A woman in an ivory blazer stopped beside her. Blonde hair to the shoulders, dark green blouse, black trousers, gold earrings that took a piece of the window and gave it back smaller. A leather handbag rested in the crook of her arm. She was about forty-three, and she smiled with the lower half of her face, the kind of smile that arrived already certain of its usefulness. Beside her stood a girl of twelve with a polished violin case, black and expensive, the handle wrapped in a silk scarf so the hardware would not scratch itself or anything else. The girl watched Nia with an expression that had not yet chosen a side.
The woman's voice was pleasant. It carried without seeming to try.
"Careful, sweetheart. That isn't something children just play with."
Nia's hand, which had been hovering near the curve of the soundboard without landing, dropped to her side. The canvas bag shifted against her hip.
"I was only looking."
"Students train for years before they touch instruments like this."