"And then you sit down at a piano you've never touched in front of the entire school, and everybody forgets I exist." Elijah let that sit. "You've been playing your whole life, too," he said. "Not like that." "You don't know how you play," Elijah said. "Because you've been playing for the result, for the newsletter. You don't know what you sound like when nobody's watching." Ethan looked at him.
"That's the only version that matters," Elijah said. He stood up. "Play for you today. See what happens." He walked back toward the warm-up room. He didn't look back.
Behind him, Ethan sat with the violin case across his knees and the particular expression of someone who has just been handed something they needed but hadn't expected to receive. The competition ran in order of school assignment. Hargrove was seventh. Elijah sat in the wings and listened to six other students perform. Some technically clean, some emotionally present, one who was both.
The judges sat at a long table below the stage, three of them making notes without showing their faces much. He thought about Whitmore's call. He had no evidence of it. Ms. Alvarez had told him she suspected it had happened based on the tightness of the initial judges' brief when schools were announced. He couldn't prove it.
It didn't matter. Whatever impressions Whitmore had planted, they were already planted. The only thing he could do about them was play. His name was called. He walked onto the stage.
The lights were warmer from up here than from the seats, and they narrowed the visible world. The audience was there, present but indistinct, the way an ocean is present beyond a shoreline without being fully seeable. The piano sat at center stage, a Steinway grand, lid fully open, black finish catching the light. He sat down. He adjusted the bench slightly.
Habit. He set his hands on his lap for a moment, not on the keys, just breathing, letting the room exist around him without trying to manage it. Then he set his hands on the keys and began. He opened with the classical movement, the structured, composed first half of the piece, the foundation his grandfather had built in those 43 measures. It was precise.