"You will try to," Mr. Delgado said. "Everyone does when they enter a building with portraits. Portraits make people perform for the dead."
Jack laughed, surprising himself. "Principal Harrison isn't dead."
"No," Mr. Delgado said, "but he has been practicing a kind of living that forgets why the doors opened in the first place. Be careful around forgotten reasons. They are contagious."
---
Principal Harrison, for his part, began appearing at student recitals more often than his calendar strictly required.
He told the board it was good optics. He told Margaret it was overdue. He told himself, privately, that he was simply doing his job with renewed attention. The truth was more awkward: he was looking for Jack the way a person looks for evidence that an old wound might still be capable of healing into something useful.
In February, Harrison requested—through the proper channels, because he was a man of channels—a brief meeting with Ms. Blake about "scholarship student support structures." Ms. Blake arrived with notes. Harrison arrived with coffee he had made himself rather than asking his assistant, a small and unexplained deviation.
"Jack is adjusting," Ms. Blake said. "Academically fine. Musically more than fine. Socially... it's a steep room."