Three weeks ago, she would have welcomed him. Would have been in his office telling him all about everything. Now he is the last person at school she wants to see.
“I’m okay,” she manages. “Just had a moment.”
“Not surprising. I’m glad to see you. We’ve missed you at orchestra.”
“Sorry.”
She straightens up, drags her sleeve across her watering eyes. Takes a breath and then another.
“Nothing to be sorry about. We managed. Are you ready to come back?”
“I’m not coming back.” She glances up at his face, expecting disappointment, surprised to see understanding.
“I get it.”
“You do?”
“Sure. Music makes us vulnerable. You’re not ready for that in a group setting right now.”
He has the vulnerability part right, the rest all wrong.
“I’m not playing at all,” she confesses, and he nods, as if he understands this, too.
“You will. It will come back.”
His words catch her off guard. Not the lecture she was expecting. Not a grilling. It’s like he’s looked right into her soul and sees everything except the guilt.
She shakes her head, denying. “No. I won’t. Not now, not ever.”
“Oh, Allie. I can’t imagine how hard this is for you. But music . . .” His face is so full of sympathy and kindness, it’s going to make her cry in a minute, and that would suck. “It will make you feel, yes, but it also heals.”
The way he says it, she thinks maybe he does know something about what she’s going through. Like maybe he’s had his own grief and lived to tell about it. But her problem is more than grief.
“Grief is a strange place, Allie. Everything is upside down. Don’t make any permanent decisions now.”
The hallway is empty. He’s so understanding, the closest adult to her, really, outside of her mother. Maybe she’ll tell him. Maybe it would help if somebody knew.
“How did the audition go?” he asks, as if reading her mind. “You’ll need to stay in practice to be at your best when university starts in the fall. If it would help, we could set up some structured time to play together to help you ease back in.” He notices, three steps too late, that she’s stopped walking and comes back to her.
“What is it? Did the audition go badly? Nerves?”
She opens her mouth to tell him, all of it, but then the buzzer signals the end of class. She jumps half out of her skin. Doors slam open, and kids fill up the hall as if summoned by magic.
“Come by my office.” Mr. Collins raises his voice above the chaos. “We’ll talk. We can get you another audition. Or I’ll help you apply somewhere else, if you’d rather.”
“Later,” Allie lies, taking cover in the crowd.
Promise or no promise, she is not going to calculus or any other classes. She won’t go and talk to Mr. Collins, either, or set up an audition anywhere else. Nobody tries to stop her as she walks out the front doors and keeps going until she is down the street and well away. Dazed, disoriented, she tries to remember where she parked the car, before memory comes rushing in.
Her father. Making her come to school, taking her keys, and leaving her blowing in the wind again, just like when she was a kid, just like the morning of the audition.
That was supposed to be the best day ever, the one that set her free from her mother’s insistence on med school. The one where she embarked on a life of music.
The one that reconnected her with her father.
She’d schemed for years to get that audition at the University of Washington while keeping her intentions to herself. Mom’s plan was for Allie to be a doctor, and she’d gone along with the admission process to premed, keeping her dreams secret.
Mom would have listened if she’d had some valid alternative to medical school—teaching, accounting, science, whatever, but Mom had a block about music. She tolerated Allie’s playing in the orchestra, but no way was she going to countenance a waste of time and brainpower on a music degree.
Once Allie had her acceptance to UW, though, it was easy to request an audition into the music school and to keep it a secret from her mother. When and if she was accepted, then she’d have ammunition for that battle. Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Mr. Collins and Mr. Blair, the private teacher she’d worked with since sixth grade, had both helped her prepare for the audition. Why she’d ever been allowed to work with