Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,36

place, literally frozen. I can’t swallow or blink or breathe. The food on the table looks lurid, surreal. Beside us, the hipsters’ chatter rises above the noise of plates clanking in the industrial dishwasher. Doug’s face has become impenetrable, as if we’ve come to a gate beyond which only he can proceed, a room only he can enter. Our waitress whisks by with the bill on a plastic tray and clears away our barely touched plates. Neither of us moves.

“What happened to him?” I say.

I imagine police sirens, blue lights flashing on Columbia Street. The kid being led away in handcuffs, his body twitching from adrenaline and withdrawal. An ambulance idling outside while the paramedics carry Sukey’s body down four flights of stairs on a stretcher. Someone at the police station calling, Dad reaching out to answer his cell phone as he’s driving home from work.

But this isn’t the picture Doug leaves me with, this tidy TV ending of ringing phones and flashing lights. He dips his head to put on his baseball cap and lays one hand on his crutches like he’s planning to get up. With his cap on, all I can make out of his eyes is a dark glitter, like water at the bottom of a sewer.

“After he did what he did to Sukey-girl, he went down to the second floor. The dealer was waiting for him with a few of his buddies. Kid went in there trying to give ’em a painting he grabbed out of Sukey-girl’s room—the only one she still had, the purple one she always kept up there on her wall.”

Pain lances through me. Hey, k-bird. Hang this in your room, and I’ll keep the other one hanging in my studio. I try to fill my brain with the pattern on the Formica table.

“What did they do?”

Doug looks around the diner as if he has only now become concerned about being overheard. He lowers his voice. “They bashed his head in with a pipe. Threw his body in the Dumpster.” He drains his coffee. “No more kid.”

chapter eighteen

“Kiri,” says Dr. Scaliteri, leaning forward on her exercise ball and gripping my wrist. “You must get serious about this piano. We worked on these problems on Monday and there’s no change. No change at all.”

I am sitting on the piano bench, wearing a short green wrap skirt, a black tank top, and a cowrie-shell necklace. This morning I showered and brushed my teeth and even put on makeup. Securing the perimeter goes for appearances, too.

On the bus ride here I almost cried, imagining Billy barging into Sukey’s room at the Imperial while we were safe in our house, a ten-minute drive away. Even though I’ve taken the same bus a hundred times, I looked out the window and didn’t recognize a thing—as if I’d been seeing the whole world wrong, as if I’d never really seen it at all. I panicked and thought I’d missed my stop, but ended up getting off a stop too soon and walking the last ten blocks, arriving at Dr. Scaliteri’s house sweaty and five minutes late.

I force myself to meet her eyes.

“I’m sorry. I’ve been—something came up.”

Dr. Scaliteri glowers. She turns to her desk, and it looks like we’re about to go through the old calendar routine again, but instead she picks up a piece of mail. She waves the envelope at me.

“Your name has come up for the master class with Tzlatina Tzoriskaya,” she says.

The sweat freezes on my skin.

The master class is this elite inner Showcase-within-the-Showcase, whereby qualified Young Pianists are given the opportunity to learn an extra piece selected by the judge for its extreme difficulty and announced just weeks before the big event. It’s supposed to test your ability to learn music quickly—that, and your ability to not have a nervous breakdown under circumstances almost clinically designed to produce one.

Dr. Scaliteri enunciates slowly.

“For this class, Tzlatina has selected the Prokofiev.”

“Which Prokofiev?”

“The Concerto Number Two.”

Only one of the hardest piano pieces ever written. My jaw drops.

“I can’t have that ready that in time for the Showcase. It’s a hundred pages long.”

“For the master class, it must not be ready. It must only be memorized. Tzlatina will give you instruction on how to polish. It is a very big opportunity for you.”

“I know, but—”

“Tzlatina is on the faculty of music at the Royal Conservatory. You will be auditioning there in the fall, yes? So you see that it is very important for you to make an