Wednesday afternoon, as I’m leaving orchestra rehearsal, I get a text from Water Bottle Guy on my messaging app. His name is Garrett Vines. I’m on social media now. Are you happy?

Welcome to the twenty-first century, I text back.

Pleased to be here.

Pleased to have you here.

You’re my only friend. You should feel special.

I do, actually. (It’s true. I do.)

Are you playing in the street anytime soon?

Good timing. On my way downtown now.

Except I hadn’t been.

It is a small thing, an almost indiscernible shift in agenda. I was going to practice anyway; I’ll just be practicing in public instead of private. It’s not quite the same—I won’t be able to work on the Popper etudes since they’re still so rough, and I won’t be able to drill challenging spots over and over like I would if I were by myself in a practice room. But public performing is a type of practice in a way, with how it forces me to keep going, to play through even when I stumble. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

When I roll up with my cello he’s already there, lounging on a bench, looking modelesque with one jean-clad leg neatly crossed over the other. He’s sipping coffee from a foam cup. I can see the shape of his pectoral muscles under his shirt, and I have the obscene desire to bite them right through the fabric. I shake away the thought and find a bench a couple of shops down from him, arrange my case so people can throw in tips, and begin to play. I don’t make eye contact with him though I know he’s watching me.

It’s cooler now, with night approaching, and the breeze whipping through the treetops sounds like waves breaking on a shore. It smells like fall, or Florida’s version of it—crisp, but humid and salty. The streetlamps have come on, and the crowd is thicker now than it was the other day, with people out for the dinner rush. I am only tangentially aware of these things, though; I’m focused on my simple songs, improvising on them like I used to, inverting the melodies, contriving unusual harmonies, screwing with the tonality. Garrett’s pale eyes are on me, studying me—this I am more than tangentially aware of. It’s making my palms sweat.

I’m familiar with the sensation of being watched, after all these years, of course I am. But this is different. I remember how awful it was when I first started busking two years ago, how I’d search for melodies like a blind man stumbling through the woods, my entire body on fire with embarrassment, my hands trembling as my fingers fought to find the notes. I purchased a couple of easy song books and played them over and over until I knew the music so well I didn’t need the books anymore, and then I taught myself to improvise on the melodies. The improvisation is what made the money pile up—people had no idea the songs were so easy, that I was just fooling them.

But somehow I don’t think I’m fooling Garrett. I feel like he can read into every twist of the melody, like he can decipher my personality by observing how I rearrange a harmony. He makes me feel naked.

I play for just over an hour. It’s fully dark now, and I estimate I’ve made around forty dollars. Mostly ones and change, but a couple people threw in fives. Garrett hasn’t moved from his spot on the bench, though now he has the other leg crossed on top. He’s still looking my way, but I can’t tell if he’s looking at me or just gazing off into space.

I stand and hesitate, chewing my lip, my hand poised against the side of my cello case. My instrument’s all packed up; I’m just unsure which direction to roll it.

Garrett stands, tosses his coffee cup into a nearby trashcan, and stretches. I take a step toward him—I ought to at least say hello.

He waves in an impersonal way, a tiny flick of the fingers that’s almost like a salute, then turns and walks off, casually, like, Meh, whatever, yawn.

I flinch. I remember that passing desire to bite him through his shirt, and I want to kick myself. But shouldn’t I be thrilled? Isn’t it a compliment for someone to want to hear me play, just hear me play, without any expectations?

But still, not even one word? He could have at least come over and chitchatted for a bit. We might’ve hung out, had dinner, gone to his place and had a nice fuck. I would have, too. I have a crazy desire to stick a finger in that deep dimple of his even though I know nothing about him other than that he is frustratingly enigmatic and bears an uncanny resemblance to Superman.

I’m an idiot for caring so much. My heart hurts in an irrational, contradictory way, a fiery, sharp, stabbing feeling alongside an expanding, gaping, numbness—wildly disproportionate for a slight that wasn’t really a slight. I hate the dollars I earned while he watched me play. I want to burn them. As I stalk to my car I pass a homeless guy pushing a rickety shopping cart full of aluminum cans. Seething, I yank the fresh wad of cash out of my pocket and press it into his filthy palm. He takes it, surprise etched into his craggy, bearded face, and I walk away as fast as I can. The fire in me cools a little.

I drive back to school, lock myself in a practice room, and work on my Popper etudes until well past midnight, until the middle finger of my left hand swells into a blister.

Like I should have done in the first fucking place.

---

“First years play first.” Professor Yarvik is standing on a low riser at the front of a long, narrow room. Fourteen cello students are crammed into chairs facing her, most of them with an instrument between their knees or lying on its side on the floor next to their chair. Yarvik looks pointedly between me and the three other first years, waiting for one of us to volunteer. Please don’t make me go first.

Beside me, a pale, heavyset girl with a tangle of strawberry blond curls raises her hand. “I’ll go.” I glance over at her and she casts me a dim smile. Her face is blooming like a pink carnation under her freckles.

Professor Yarvik steps off the riser and takes a seat just behind me. “Thank you, Bethany.”

Bethany lifts her cello off the floor and makes her way to the front of the room, nearly tripping over a protruding end pin that someone forgot to retract into the bottom of their instrument. My heart seizes as I watch her stumble, then recover, her pale neck flushed and splotchy like she’s had a tangle with poison ivy. “I’m just going to play a scale,” she says in a whispery voice, and her green eyes flick to Professor Yarvik behind me; I gather they’ve planned this ahead of time. In my early days of street performing, I would get so nervous I would sometimes drop my bow. But this girl is practically breaking out in hives.

Bethany’s performance is a tragic thing to witness. Her sound is fine, and her intonation is mostly fine, but distress radiates from her so palpably that I feel like I could grab hold of it and twist it into a knot. As she descends from the top of the scale, she misjudges a shift and the sound she produces is the auditory equivalent of a tightrope walker slipping off his line. She bites her bottom lip, trying to regain control, and my palms sweat for her.

Finally, she lands on the bottom note of the scale. I expect her to sigh with relief—I do—but her body is so bound by anxiety that I’m not sure she’s breathing at all. I catch her eye for a quick second and smile at her. Her gaze drops to the floor.

“It’s okay, Bethany,” Professor Yarvik says. “We all suffer from performance anxiety at some time or another. We’ll have you play every week, and before you know it, you’ll be used to having an audience, and your true sound will emerge.”

Bethany trudges back to her seat with her eyes on the floor, her ample chest heaving like a breathing mountain. It’s awful to screw up in front of an audience, but it’s doubly awful for that same audience to witness the humiliation that follows.

“Malory?” Yarvik turns to me. “What will you play for us?”

I had intended to play the Elgar, but after hearing Bethany suffer through a scale, it seems…mean. And anyway, my hands are shaking in empathy. “I think I’ll play the Allemande to the first cello suite, if that’s okay.”

I play as simply as I can, and the class offers a smattering of applause. They don’t seem too impressed.

Yarvik is resting her chin in her hand and studying me with narrowed eyes. She offers a few generic pointers about my performance, mostly that I ought to exaggerate my dynamic contrasts and take time on some of the phrase endings.

Well, what was I going to do? Play something flashy and make Bethany feel like shit?

Six other students play, most of their performances falling somewhere between mine and Bethany’s. One guy, a senior, is really impressive. I can almost see why Yarvik spoke to me the way she did during my private lesson, though I know I only played well for her because I practiced so hard. Probably none of these people are a game piece in a gamble to win a twenty-five thousand-dollar cello.

We pack up our instruments, Bethany latching her case as quickly as she can, rushing to get out first. I hurry down the hallway after her and catch her at the elevator. “Hey.” I touch her arm.

She jumps a little, then tucks a strand of red hair behind her ear and mumbles, “Hey.”

I hate the idea of her going home alone feeling like she bombed. “I get to the practice rooms every morning at eight,” I say. “It’d be cool to have someone to practice with, if you can stand getting up that early.”

“You mean practice together?” She makes eye contact, but only for a moment.

“Yeah, across the hall from each other. Break every half hour for coffee or to complain about aching backs?”

She laughs a little, her round, freckled cheeks turning rosy again. “I could use some accountability.”

“We all could.” I smile.

She fidgets with the strap of her cello case, which she wears like a turtle shell too. I wonder if her cello was expensive, if her parents were able to afford it, if they paid cash or financed it. It had as nice a tone as mine, or close to it.

“You played really well,” she says. “I’m jealous.”

“Oh.” The elevator opens and we step in. “Thanks for saying that.”

“I’d love to be as comfortable as you obviously are with performing. I turn really red every time I play.” She kicks at the floor like a shy kid kicking rocks at recess. “Plus the shaking. I’m sure you noticed.”

“Not at all.”

“Bullshit.”

I look up at her and laugh. “Okay, maybe a tiny bit.”

Later I wrangle my cello into my instrument locker, my head spinning the way it was in my lesson with Yarvik. Am I actually…good? I think back to my cello teacher from back home, how she used to push me, how impossible it was to earn her praise. When I won the competition I entered my sophomore year, she congratulated me, but it felt…conciliatory somehow, almost as if it were an apology on behalf of the other competitors for not having played to their full capabilities. We dove right back into my studies, with no ceremony at all. But she encouraged me to apply for the cello loan; she must’ve believed I had a chance at the Aspen Fellowship. Right?

And now I’ve got Yarvik mulling me over with her squinty, thoughtful gaze, and this guy Garrett wanting to hear me perform and not wanting anything else from me which is so weird for a guy, and then hearing my fellow students play in cello studio…

My stomach has gone all soupy, and I can’t figure out why. It shouldn’t nauseate me to discover I don’t suck; it should make me happy. I head back to my dorm and lie on my side on the bed, hugging Gerta the hippo to my chest, and text Liza: Did you know I’m good at cello?

She replies: Um, fucking DUH, and that makes me laugh, but at the same time I feel a little sick. What other things don’t I know about myself? And then, as if Liza has a special sister telepathy and can sense my discomfort: I knew you didn’t know, though. Dad’s fault.

I shiver. She’s probably right. My father came to that competition my sophomore year, standing in the back row with his chest puffed as they handed out the ribbons—every bit the proud and doting father. But that night while I was trying to fall asleep he came into my room and sat on the floor in the dark, breathing in and out through his nostrils like a penned bull, heavy and impatient and aggressive.

The hostility in his breathing, the way he sat so close and so still, those minutes and minutes and minutes without saying anything, it scared me so bad I froze in place under my covers, hardly able to breathe myself. Finally, after what seemed like hours, he said, “You won because most of them were younger than you and they all made stupid mistakes. There were only two people older than you. They both forgot the notes.”

Tears slid from the edges of my eyes and down my temples, pooling in my ears.

“You won by default,” he said, his voice grown calm and logical. “You can see that, can’t you?”

I nodded, too embarrassed to answer him aloud, lest he hear my disappointment—my tear-riddled, shaky voice. He was right. There hadn’t been any real competition. I’d known, as each performer bumbled, that it would be easy to win. “You’re like your mother, Malory. Very weak, not the kind of person who will leave a special mark on the world.”

Later, I would bitterly regret not defending her.

“It’s okay,” he said, getting up off the floor. “It’s better to be realistic about these things.” He tousled my hair and left the room, whispering, “Good night, sweetie,” before closing the door.

There are tears in my ears again—I didn’t even realize I’d begun crying. I’m still clutching Gerta the hippo to my chest. I wipe my face on her rough yarn and settle myself in for sleep.