Aaliyah's chin did not lift for drama. It settled. She took the backpack off one shoulder and then the other and set it on the floor beside the bench, close enough that her foot could find it, because her grandmother had taught her that unattended bags become other people's problems and other people's problems become security guards. She looked at the play structure, at the bright tunnel and the child climbing the wrong way, and she answered the man without the anger the moment could have justified. Anger would have been a kind of performance too.
"I am."
From behind the coffee counter, a teenage employee paused with a rag in one hand and a stack of lids in the other. Jordan Ellis was seventeen, brown-skinned, with a Hearth & Bean visor pushed up off a forehead that still broke out along the hairline, and a black apron tied twice because the first knot never held. He had been wiping the same six inches of counter while the line moved, the way you wipe when your body is at work and your attention has slipped its leash. He had seen kids bang the piano. He had seen a man in a suit play three smug bars of something famous and bow to nobody. He had never seen a girl this small put her bag down as if the bench were a place she had arrived to on purpose. The question came out before he decided whether asking it was his job.
"Is she really about to play?"
A woman in the coffee line turned her head. Malik forgot the pretzel. Lauren looked at the keys, then at the child's sneakers, then at the yellow cardigan's pilled cuff, and assembled a future in which the next minute would restore the afternoon to its proper size. She took a sip of coffee that had gone from hot to useful. Her mouth made the shape of amusement, which is not the same shape as welcome.
"This should be interesting."
Aaliyah sat.