"Right. Almost." Pierce's eyes flicked to Jack's sweater, then away. "You play well. For real. Just... don't expect the place to love you for being a story. Stories get old."
After Pierce left, Jack sat with his hands in his lap for a full minute before beginning his scales. The anger he felt was not clean. Part of it was Pierce. Part of it was the fear that Pierce was right—that he had been admitted as a narrative, a proof of institutional virtue, and that the music might become secondary to the myth of the freckled boy at the forbidden piano.
That evening he told Eleanor.
Eleanor was knitting a scarf in a color she called "storm blue." The needles clicked like a soft metronome. "People will try to turn you into a sentence," she said. "Your job is to remain a whole book. Also, eat your soup before it gets a skin."
Jack ate his soup. He practiced afterward on the pawnshop keyboard until his wrists ached, then iced them the way Mr. Delgado had taught him, with a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a dish towel.
Mr. Delgado still saw him on Sundays at St. Mark's. Westbridge did not replace the old teacher so much as surround him. Mr. Delgado listened to Jack's new assignments and sniffed.
"Blake is good," he conceded. "She will make you precise. Do not let precision murder your listening."
"I won't."