Aaliyah laughed, which cracked the sogginess, and played measure nine until the third beat stayed where it belonged. Miss Anita nodded once. "There. That was you. Not a hat."
"My mother said that. About hats."
"Then she was right twice in one lifetime, which is a good average." Miss Anita retied a loose end of her braid with a rubber band from the pencil cup. "There is a recital in the spring in the fellowship hall. You may play one page if the page is ready. You may also not play. Both are honorable. I will not put you up there to make adults cry. Adults can cry on their own time."
Aaliyah played the page in the spring. The fellowship hall smelled like lemon cake and metal chairs. Ruth sat in the second row in a blue dress, hands folded so tightly the knuckles paled, then loosened when the line held. Andre did not come. He sent a text that arrived after, with a heart and the words proud of you, which Aaliyah read twice and did not answer in the room. She answered later, thank you, because Ruth said silence could be a message and she should decide which message she meant. She meant thank you. She also meant the limit was still a limit. Both, again.
Other students came through Miss Anita's weeks: a boy who wanted to play video-game music and was allowed to, after his scales; a girl who quit when soccer got serious; a grandmother starting from nothing who clapped for herself softly when she found middle C without looking, a kindness Aaliyah stored as proof that beginnings were not embarrassments. They treated Aaliyah as the kid who was there a lot. Nice line. You left your folder. Don't hog the bench if Mrs. Grant is waiting. It was ordinary. Ordinary was a gift with no ribbon. In that room she was not only a girl whose mother had died. She was a worker with a page.
Once, a man waiting for his son looked at Aaliyah's keyboard case in the hallway and said, to no one in particular, "Cute that they let the little ones pretend." Miss Anita, passing with a stack of theory sheets, said, "Pretending is what people do when they haven't listened. She isn't pretending. You're early. Sit down or come back at four." The man sat. Aaliyah stored the sentence beside her mother's sentence about buildings and personalities. She was collecting, without calling it a collection, a set of tools for rooms that might not want her.
By the autumn she was ten, the gray song's first page was no longer a struggle. It was a place. The second page was a struggle, which Miss Anita said was the correct distribution of struggle. The kitchen phrase had grown, under careful rules, into sixteen bars that Aaliyah was allowed to call hers only if she could play them the same way twice. "Invention is not an excuse for mush," Miss Anita said. "If it's yours, you should be able to find it again. Otherwise it was just weather."