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Natalie is sixteen. She stands behind the curtain, waiting. This performance will be the one that decides whether she’ll receive the scholarship she needs. The one that will let her escape.
Her palms are sweaty. Why are they sweaty? Nothing is wrong.
Besides her mother coming home in tears from her sessions with her new doctor, besides her father forgetting where his keys were three times this week, besides her last practice session before this performance consisting of possibly the worst thing she’s ever played—nothing is wrong.
Natalie wipes her palms on her skirt, makes sure her shirt is tucked in. She peers through the curtains at the crowd. Her father always sits in the row third to the front (because she’d claimed several years ago that sitting in the very front was embarrassing, and he’d listened), in the center column near the left aisle, and he always arrives fifteen minutes early without fail.
There are exactly nine minutes and twenty-three seconds left before her performance starts. And Dad’s seat is empty.
She wipes off her palms again. Nothing is wrong.
“Hey,” a voice says from behind her.
Natalie turns. There’s Henry, grinning that stupid, dorky, cute grin of his. “I’m not supposed to be backstage,” he whispers, “But…”
He pulls a bouquet of flowers from behind his back. Natalie flushes, smiling despite herself.
“For luck,” Henry says.
She reaches for the flowers, but the twinge in her chest pulls her attention back to the gap in the curtains.
“Uh—have you seen my parents out there?” she asks him, examining every face she can see in the crowd. “My dad said they’d both be here.”
“Then I’m sure they will be.”
Six minutes. “Will they,” Natalie says, choosing to channel her usual pessimism, because maybe that will cover up how her voice shakes. This is the recital that will dictate whether she gets into her dream school, whether she’ll be able to pack her bags early and get away from everything, and her parents can’t even manage to be here?
For some reason, the universe decides to play with her. The auditorium is packed except for three seats on the third row back, middle column, closest to the left aisle. One for Henry, and two for…
It’s fine. Nothing is wrong. She’s played this set so many times that she could do it in her sleep. The practice run from earlier was a mishap—if she relies on muscle memory, she’ll be okay. And she’s performed without Mom here before. Maybe not Dad; that’s new. But she’ll manage. She’s always had to manage. This isn’t something she’s not used to.
Two minutes.
“Where the hell are they?” she asks. She doesn’t mean to say it aloud.
One minute.
Goddamnit, she thinks. You’ve got to be kidding me. They aren’t making it.
She’s not making it.
Natalie steps out onto the stage. She walks slowly, in case her parents are just running late. In case they’re about to crash through the doors, whisper too loudly, find their seats next to Henry…
They don’t. The only people Natalie cares about who will hear her play tonight are her boyfriend, and the table of Yale representatives in the back of the auditorium.
“Thank you for coming,” she says, voice echoing into the silence. Her knees aren’t shaking. Her hands aren’t, either. Nothing is wrong. “Natalie Goodman.”
She looks down at the piano, her fingers twitching. She doesn’t have her music with her. It’s likely she could have brought it, but she wasn’t sure how well it would come off to the Yale representatives if she didn’t have it memorized, and her own hubris had made her leave the sheet music behind. Natalie curses that now. She wouldn’t look at it, but it would help to ground herself in some way.
She puts her fingers on the keys, sliding naturally into the correct posture. She takes a breath of stale air.
She plays.
The thing about classical is that it leaves an extremely small margin for error. If the chord she plays includes a wrong note, so long as that note fits into another chord in the piece that happens immediately after, she can play it off as intentional. That’s the most she can stretch her luck.
But Natalie’s never been very lucky. The run she plays on her right hand doesn’t land on the correct note. At the same time, her left hand slips and crushes the chord. Natalie freezes.
She’s fifteen. She’s practiced this set for countless hours, but something about it still isn’t right.
The main piece is the one she’s struggling with the most. She picked it because it was something Mom had played, way back when that sort of thing mattered to her. Dad dredged up the box of sheet music for her, and she’d looked through it and found this one. It still had some of Mom’s old annotations.
Part of her wanted something that tied her to Mom, even after the rest of her desired nothing but distance. Most of her audience wouldn’t know that she was playing a piece that her mother had once played. It wouldn’t mean anything to them, even if they did know.
She hoped, though, that it would mean something to Mom. Which is why she’d asked for Mom to listen to the set before she played it for everyone else.
Sitting on the hard piano bench, her mother across from her as she works her way up to the piece she chose to bring some life into Mom’s eyes, her hope feels more and more feeble.
Especially because she can’t seem to get any of it right.
From the first chord, she makes a mistake. Her A-flat—meant to be a G-flat—turns the measure into something that makes both her and Mom wince. Natalie pauses. She can’t stop herself from glancing up to catch the rest of Mom’s reaction. She sees the little spark of pain fade from her eyes, the empty space filled by polite interest again.
Polite interest. She’s listening as if she’s any other member of the audience.
As Natalie steadies herself and continues, she keeps throwing looks up at Mom, just to see if she remembers this piece at all. She doesn’t think it even registers.
That realization leads to another mistake. Her right hand messes up its arpeggio, the one she’s been hammering into her brain for weeks, trying to turn it into muscle memory. On top of that, it lags, so not only is it wrong, it’s also too slow.
It’s at that point that she gives up. She failed. Mom doesn’t remember she played this piece.
Or maybe the two are connected—maybe her mother doesn’t recognize it because Natalie has failed to play it correctly.
Natalie takes her hands off the keys and folds them in her lap. It’s not the end of the song. It’s barely over halfway.
“You stopped,” Mom says immediately, questioning.
Honestly, Natalie is surprised she noticed. She just smiles tightly, gathering up the sheet music, lining it up carefully.
“I finished,” she lies.
Mom hums, confused. She tilts her head and stares at Natalie. She doesn’t argue.
Natalie stares at the keys. At her hands, because they’ve betrayed her. She swallows, moves back into her starting position. She tries again.
But her hands aren’t steady, and when her eyes drift up to the crowd, pulled again to the two empty seats next to Henry, she falters.
This time she can’t even pinpoint where things go wrong. The entire first measure crashes. Natalie crashes with it. She can’t save this even if she wanted to. She slams her hands down on the keys, because she might as well—it can’t get any worse.
She’s crying, shouting in frustration, and that’s embarrassing and definitely not helping her chances of salvaging this enough to walk off the stage with dignity (because she’s never getting into Yale now), but she can’t get herself to stop.
The auditorium is silent. Her breath hitches.
“Sorry,” she croaks. The word echoes, even though she doesn’t say it that loudly. She flinches. “Sorry, it’s just—”
Someone from the back coughs. They shift in their seat. One of the Yale representatives. Likely dismissing her, wondering how much longer they’ll be tied up here before they can leave for a more important engagement. Natalie’s already proven she isn’t worth their time. But it makes her blood boil anyway, and Henry’s words from weeks ago come back to her.
“You know what the problem with classical is?” she hisses, turning back to the crowd. Glaring at the table in the back. “It’s so rigid. And—structured. You have to play the notes on the page. There’s no room for improvisation.”
In the third row from the front, center row, near the left aisle, she hears someone mutter, “Oh, no.”