Ethan escalated his efforts the week Ms. Alvarez's sessions with Elijah began. He started with Elijah's practice schedule. The music room had a sign-up sheet for after-school use, a paper sheet on a clipboard hung outside the room's door with 1-hour slots marked by student name. It was an honor system. Nobody supervised it.
On Tuesday, Elijah arrived at the music room at 4:00 for a slot he'd signed up for the previous Friday. His name was gone. Someone had written over it, not crossed it out, but written a different student's name directly on top of it in ink darker than Elijah's pencil. That student was not present. The room was empty.
He borrowed the room anyway, playing quietly for 30 minutes before the actual occupant, a girl who'd signed up for 5:00, arrived and he left. The next morning, though, he overheard someone telling another student that Elijah was thinking about dropping out of the competition, that it was too much pressure, that he'd said so to someone. He had said nothing of the kind to anyone. The rumor was specific enough to have required deliberate construction. He identified Ethan as the source by Friday through the pattern of where the information had originated.
He didn't confront him. He noted it. He kept going. The sessions with Ms. Alvarez were different from anything Elijah had experienced since his grandfather. She didn't begin with pieces.
She began with fundamentals, not because she doubted his technique, but because she wanted to understand exactly where his foundation was and what it had been built on. Rather, she gave him scales and asked him to play them not mechanically, but with intention, to make the scale feel like something, not run through it. She asked him to play passages with his eyes closed and then describe what he'd heard. She gave him a short composition he'd never seen and asked him to play it twice, once exactly as written and once as he would play it if the notation didn't exist. He played it the second way and she sat very still for a moment.
"Who taught you that phrasing?" she asked. "My grandfather," he said, the first time he'd said it out loud to anyone at this school. She waited, not pushing, just making space. He told her a version of it, not everything, but the shape. Raymond Carter, who had played jazz professionally from his late 20s until his early 50s, he who had made records that were reviewed seriously and then largely forgotten, who had ended up teaching, first formally, then privately, then just to his grandson in a small apartment with an old Casio keyboard and a patience that never seemed to reach its limit.
"Is he still playing?" Ms. Alvarez asked. "He passed two years ago," Elijah said. She nodded. "I'm sorry." No performance around it, just the words. "He taught me the classical pieces because he said you had to know the architecture before you could take it apart." Elijah said.
"He started me on Czerny when I was six and moved me to Chopin by eight. But what he really wanted me to hear was the jazz. The way a phrase could breathe if you let it, the way the emotion could sit in the pause before a note as much as in the note itself." Ms. Alvarez was writing nothing down. She was just listening. "He said the best musicians were the ones who could tell the truth through the music." Elijah said.
"He didn't mean literally, he meant honestly. That the audience could hear when you were hiding." She was quiet for a moment. "What happened to his career?" Elijah looked at the keys. "He had a recording that was supposed to be released through a label in the early 80s, a full album. It was ready." He paused.
"The label's A&R director told him the sound was too sophisticated for what they thought black jazz artists should be doing. They wanted something more commercial, simpler. He refused to change it. They dropped him. A white musician recorded a version of one of his compositions 2 years later and was nominated for an award for it." He said it without heat.
Just the facts, arranged plainly. "Grandpa Ray never recorded professionally again. The music room was very quiet. "He kept the compositions, though," Elijah said, "in a notebook. He was working on one when he died.
Never finished it." He paused. "I've been trying to figure out how to finish it." Ms. Alvarez set down the pencil she'd been holding. "Then, that's what you play at the competition," she said. Danielle found Elijah at the keyboard late that Thursday night, later than he should have been awake on a school night, bent over a notebook covered in the same cramped musical notation she remembered seeing in his grandfather's hands. She stood in the doorway for a while without speaking.
Then she said, "You should sleep." "I know," he said. He didn't stop writing. She came and sat on the edge of his bed, the way she used to when he was small. "How's it going with Ms. Alvarez?" "Good," he said. "She's She listens different than most teachers.
She listens to what you're doing, not to what she expected you to do." Danielle nodded. She looked at the notation. "That's his," she said softly, not a question. "Yeah." She was quiet a moment. "He was working on it for a long time.