That night Nia did not play for long. She tuned, carefully, and played the first line of the prelude, and then sat on the floor with her back against the bench and let the presence of the instrument be the whole event. The radiator knocked. The harp shivered, faintly, clearing its throat. Nia said good morning even though it was night, because some habits belong to the dead and the living at the same time, and saying them is not the same as drowning.
Saturdays at the Meridian were a new country with an old gate. The cream lobby looked different when you had a badge on a lanyard and a reason to be early. Dr. Shah's studio smelled like wood and a little like the oil used on mechanisms. She was exacting and not cruel. She put a pencil mark where Nia's early-C habit still haunted a measure and made her play the measure until the habit got bored. She assigned sight-reading that made Nia sweat. She also, once, after a particularly clean phrase, said, "There. That is you, not your fear of me. Remember the difference."
Orchestra came in the spring, not before, because Brenner refused to put her in the fire of parts until she could track a conductor without losing her pedals. When she did sit in, the harp part was mostly atmosphere and the occasional bloom, and Nia learned the humility of counting rests, which is its own art. Around her, children with better shoes and worse anxieties filled the chairs. Some were friendly in the easy way of kids who have never been told they are in the wrong place. Some were not unfriendly so much as busy. One boy asked if she was on scholarship in a tone that meant he had heard an adult discuss it. Nia said yes, and that her aunt worked at the hospital, and then asked him what his part was doing in measure forty, which ended the interview.
Claire was in the violin section, third stand, which offended Mrs. Whitmore and quietly relieved Claire. They nodded in hallways. Once, in a practice room that smelled like lunch bags, Claire offered Nia a spare pencil and a piece of information: "My mother told my father you were a stunt. He asked if you played in tune. She said that wasn't the point. He said it was the only point. They argued in the car. I am telling you because secrets in this building rot, and because I don't think you are a stunt."
"I'm not," Nia said. "I'm behind on sight-reading."
"That's a fact, not a shame," Claire said, echoing somebody, maybe the peppermint teacher, maybe a better version of her mother that existed only in sentences. "Dr. Shah scares me and I don't even play harp."
"She should scare you a little. It means she's listening."
They were not best friends. The distance between their lives was real, and pretending it was only a matter of personality would have been another kind of politeness. But Claire saved Nia a seat on the bus back to the plaza when the orchestra ran late, and Nia told Claire when her G string was sour before a run-through, and these were not small things. They were the opposite of a lobby smile.
Mrs. Whitmore remained Mrs. Whitmore. She did not seek Nia out and did not apologize. When their paths crossed near the tall windows, she offered a nod so small it could be denied later if necessary. Nia nodded back even smaller and kept walking. June, hearing of the nod, said, "You don't owe her your warmth. You also don't have to spend your Saturday carrying her. Put it down at the door." Nia tried. Some weeks she succeeded. Some weeks the ivory blazer entered her stomach before she saw it, and she had to play a scale in a stairwell until her hands remembered who they belonged to.