"Let's find out."
Somewhere on the second-floor balcony, a teacher appeared, a younger man, new this year. He froze at the railing, uncertain whether to intervene.
"Take it out," Whitaker said. "Right here, right now. In front of every person standing in this atrium. Let me hear this prodigy for myself."
Caleb's jaw tightened by a millimeter. Nothing else moved.
"Try me. I dare you."
Whitaker let those four words sit in the air. He had chosen them. He had known, walking down those stairs, that he was going to say them.
"And if what I hear isn't what Mrs. Brooks has been promising me, then you walk into my office before the gala starts tonight and you put your scholarship badge on my desk. We'll call it a mutual agreement. No hard feelings."
The atrium had gone completely still.
Mrs. Brooks appeared in the east corridor, two steps into the space, and stopped. Her hand went to her chest. Her face had gone the color of paper.
"Harold," she said. "This is inappropriate. This is-"
"Evelyn, let the boy speak for himself."
He did not look at her when he said it. He was looking at Caleb.
Caleb was looking at the saxophone case in his hand. He was thinking about Delores in the kitchen at 4:30 in the morning. He was thinking about the pawn shop receipt in the shoebox under her bed. He was thinking about the envelope from Berklee that had been sitting unopened on the kitchen table for 12 days because he had been afraid to see inside until he had the letter from this man's desk.
He was thinking that if he played and anything went wrong - a cracked reed, a slipped note, a second of doubt - there would be a video of it on the internet by bedtime. Every story that had ever been written about the scholarship kid who couldn't cut it would write itself around his face.
And he was thinking that if he walked away, something inside him would die that he would spend the rest of his life trying to bring back.
Caleb set the saxophone case down on the marble floor. The click of the first latch rang across the atrium like a dropped coin. The second latch clicked a beat later. Somebody in the crowd flinched at the sound.
That was how quiet the room had gotten.