Chapter 2

Harper almost smiled. Almost.St. Cecilia's Home for Boys and Girls had stood on that corner of Brooklyn since 1962: bricks the color of dried blood, ivy frozen on the upper windows. Inside, the hallway smelled of old hymnals, cabbage soup, and the wax Sister Margaret applied to the floors every Saturday, whether the floors needed it or not.There were thirty-eight children at St. Cecilia's that fall. Harper was the oldest girl. In nine months, on her sixteenth birthday, she would age out, transferred to a group facility in Albany, three hundred miles upstate, where there was no music program of any kind. She had not told anyone she knew this, but she knew.Two weeks earlier, she had asked Sister Margaret about it at the kitchen sink."Sister, is there a piano in Albany?"Sister Margaret had been washing a coffee cup. She had not looked up. "Harper, don't ask me that.""I just want to know.""And I just told you. Don't ask me that, child.""Sister, please.""Harper Langston, hand me that dish towel and stop talking."That was when Harper understood there was no piano in Albany.Now, ask yourself something: if you were fifteen years old and the only thing you had ever been good at was about to be taken from you forever in nine months, what would you risk to keep it?Harper had been good at exactly one thing in her life since she was five years old: she could play piano. Not the way other children played; she could play the way her mother had played.Her mother had been Amani Langston, a piano teacher in Harlem, a woman with long fingers and a quiet voice. Harper still remembered the apartment on 125th Street: the radiator that hissed, the upright that took up most of the living room, the way her mother used to sit beside her on the bench and not say anything for whole minutes."Try the chord again, baby.""I did, Mama. It sounded wrong."

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