"Jack," called a voice from inside. "Please come in."
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Chamber B was smaller than Jack expected and larger than fear preferred. Three judges sat behind a long table: Ms. Blake took the center seat; to her left sat Dr. Haruto Mori, a slight man with wire glasses and a reputation for destroying egos with soft questions; to her right sat Mrs. Vivian Cole, whose pearl earrings caught the light each time she turned a page. Behind them, on a raised platform, waited a concert grand that made the lobby piano look like a relative who had stayed home.
Jack set his backpack down by the door. He walked to the bench. He adjusted it by a centimeter. He placed his hands in his lap.
"You may begin whenever you are ready," Mrs. Cole said. "Your repertoire list indicates Chopin first, then your own choice of Bach, then the contemporary selection from the academy packet."
Jack nodded. He did not announce the pieces. Mr. Delgado had told him that announcing was for people who needed the room's permission. Jack simply began.
The Nocturne unfolded again—not the community-center version with the stuck key, but the same conversation somehow translated into a richer dialect. In Chamber B the piano answered him fully. The soft pedal did what soft pedals are meant to do. The melody did not float so much as walk carefully across water that might break if hurried. Ms. Blake watched his shoulders. Dr. Mori closed his eyes for eight measures and opened them again looking faintly irritated, which, for Dr. Mori, was a form of praise. Mrs. Cole's pencil remained still on her scoring sheet.
Jack finished the Chopin and did not look up for approval. He moved into the Bach—not an Invention this time, but a Prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier that he had chosen because it felt, to him, like climbing a staircase in a house you loved and finding that every landing offered a different view of the same garden. His articulation was clean without being brittle. Where other children his age often treated Bach like a math problem to be solved at speed, Jack treated it like architecture to be inhabited.