Marcus did not laugh. He listened as if the three notes were a conversation he had almost missed. "Again," he said quietly. "I'm hearing you."
On the second-level railing, two teenagers filmed. One of them would post thirty seconds and caption it with a sentence that made Aaliyah into a miracle, which she was not. She was a practiced child. The caption would travel farther than the practice, the way captions do. Jordan saw the phones and felt a flare of protectiveness that surprised him, as if the coffee stand had deputized him. He didn't yell. He wasn't a guard. He wiped his shoe where the rag had dripped, uselessly, and then he did a thing he was allowed to do. He poured a small hot chocolate into a cup, put a lid on it, and set it on the edge of the piano's side where drinks were not supposed to be, then thought better of the piano and held it out instead.
"On me," he said. "I mean, I'll pay for it on my break. You don't have to. You just — that was the best thing that piano has done since I started here, and I started in June, so my sample size is small, but still. I'm Jordan."
Aaliyah took the cup because refusing would have made a bigger scene than accepting, and because her mouth was dry. "Aaliyah. Thank you. I didn't play it for the hot chocolate."
"I know," Jordan said. "That's why I'm not making it weird. Or I'm making it a normal amount of weird. I have to get back before my manager decides I joined the audience." He hesitated. "Are you here with somebody? That's not my business except the mall tells us to ask if a kid looks — you don't look lost. You look like you meant it."
"My grandmother is getting pizza," Aaliyah said. "She can see me. Probably. She will in a second, and she is going to have a face."
"I'll vouch you weren't causing trouble," Jordan said. "If vouches from a person in a visor count."