Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,83

great-grandma’s sick and they’re going up north to be with her next weekend so, um, sorry, but he can’t play our victory show at the Train Room on Saturday and is throwing everything we’ve been working on since September on the stink barge.

I tell Lukas to have fun at IndieFest with Kelsey Bartlett next weekend, whereupon he mumbles something about dropping off my gear and hangs up.

A little after noon, the phone rings again. It’s Dr. Scaliteri. I take the phone into the kitchen with me and press a pack of frozen peas to the bruised part of my chin, thinking, Dr. Scaliteri, if you knew how much I’ve suffered for my art—does Nelson Chow have to stand up to vicious thugs every time he practices piano? Does Nelson Chow have slivers of shattered metronome stuck to the bottoms of his feet?

It turns out Dr. Scaliteri did not call to congratulate me on my fortitude.

“Kiri, I am thinking we will cancel your lessons. It has been a very bad summer for you, and I cannot be teaching you if you are not doing serious practice.”

I lift the frozen peas off my chin.

“But I have been practicing. I’ve been practicing constantly.”

I’ve been practicing since six in the morning, in spite of brutal beatings and an awful comedown from those yellow pills that’s left me queasy and dry-mouthed.

“Yes, yes, I understand this, Kiri, but you know, if you are not serious about piano, it is not right you should be taking lessons from me. The rest of my students, they are very serious, and it’s not fair to them. Besides this, I have received a call from the Showcase, and they tell me you are wanting to change which pieces you play.”

“Yes—I’m going to play Sesquipaedia instead of the Prokofiev. Remember, I showed you the music last year?”

“This is completely unacceptable.”

“It’s a great piece. Risky, sure. But I think I’m up to the challenge.”

There’s silence on Dr. Scaliteri’s end. I pace to the window and look out. Our neighbor Mr. Hardy is pulling up a shrub from his front yard. He plunges his shovel into the dirt and pries it up. Each time he pries, a little more of the tangled, woody rootstock is wrenched up from the ground until the whole plant is lying on its side, naked and wretched and impossible to screw back in. Dr. Scaliteri sighs.

“I have told this Showcase you will not be able to perform. You do not have the discipline for piano.”

My body goes numb.

“You can’t do that. You can’t withdraw me.”

“Okay, Kiri. You remind your parents to mail me the check for your last lesson when they come home.”

“Wait—I need to—”

“Ciao.”

When I take the phone away from my ear, the air in the kitchen is hot and softly vibrating, as if someone just shot a gun. In the living room, the piano looks like it did on the day the movers delivered it to my house: a beautiful bomb shelter, a flotation device in an ocean whose depths I was afraid to see. Maybe it’s not discipline I’ve been lacking all this time. Maybe it’s something simpler—something that’s been staring me in the face this whole time.

I march to the front hall and open the door. The high noon sun is blinding, and the azaleas are snickering at me. “Hey, Mr. Hardy!” I shout. “Can I borrow that shovel?”

The first azalea bush takes fifteen whacks.

The second one takes ten.

I wrap my arms around the bushes, wrestle them out of the earth, and heave them, panting, onto the lawn. Mr. Hardy gapes at me from his driveway. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What are you doing to those pretty flowers?”

“They’re diseased,” I shout back. “You should probably kill yours, too.”

I go back into the house, sweating all over and electric with holy rage, and play through my repertoire one last time. I play passionately, brilliantly, as if Tzlatina Tzoriskaya herself was sitting on the living room couch. I drain my entire being into the keys. As I play, I hear things in the music I never heard before. My grief over Sukey. My fury at my parents. My vulnerability, my savage ugliness, my playfulness, my hope. It’s all there, laid out with terrifying clarity, where anyone could hear it—where I can hear it myself.

Holy crap, I think, Nelson Chow was right.

All this time, I’ve been afraid of the music, and I’m not afraid anymore.

When I’m finished playing, I lower the piano’s heavy lid and slide the curved