Love, Eroge, Music & Other Craziness

by Geek Girl Naruru

Namikaze Naruto is a normal fifteen-year-old high school student. He has a distant relationship with his sister Naruko, who always treats him rudely. One Day in Spring, he encounters a foreign girl playing a piano on one of his travels to a junkyard and helps her in many ways as he discover that her name is Weiss Schnee.

58. Hundred Years Melody -Part 1-

After Story: Hundred Years Melody

-Part 1-

- This is a one shot story I made for the fifth anniversary of this fic. The story follow Naruto & Weiss Daughter Wiena finding music inside her heart. I hope you like it.

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"Now that you're warmed up Wiena-chan, let's revisit Mozart-san," said my uncle and music teacher.

It was a beautiful June morning and in my mind I heard another voice: "Now that you're warmed up, let's demolish those Wannabes." My softball coach and my music teacher were overlapping each other.

With my softball coach, it was stairsteps and laps and stretches and endless batting practice. With Uncle Asto it was eight repetitions of very fast B-major scales and five minutes of octaves. Two weeks after being the shortstop on the team that had lost in the second round of the district play-offs, I was at my lesson, looking for the Mozart concerto. People say I have a quirky way of holding my violin and bow way out to the side in my left hand while I bend over and sort through music with my right hand, as if I'm signaling to somebody. Uncle Asto said we were going to "catch up with Mozart-san. Do the concerto start to finish, no stops, to see what's going on in the totality of the thing." He was sitting on the piano bench, waiting for me. The Fourth Concerto, in D. I hadn't paid very much attention to it since February, and now it was June.

In the summer I get to have morning lessons twice a week, and I love it. The sun comes in the windows of Uncle Asto's studio, which is at one end of his house, and it lights up the rug's big, colorful designs. Auntie Naruko leaves for work early, and there's always some great smell left over, French toast or omelets or something. I work best in the mornings. Things haven't had time to get so cluttered yet.

Uncle Asto was wearing his "Pergolesi—a man for the '90s" sweatshirt. It's a joke. Pergolesi lived in Italy in the 1700s and he wrote operas and he died of consumption when he was twenty-six, five days after he'd finished composing something. Uncle Asto is better in the mornings, too. He says the Symphony keeps him up past his bedtime. He plays in the first violins at my mother Symphony. So he's up past his bedtime most of the time during the season. It's the Heart's Desire Symphony. They don't play regular concerts in the summer.

I put the music on the stand and got ready. With Uncle Asto you don't whine or mutter. It doesn't help. "We want right notes, not excuses" is what all music teachers say, I guess. He doesn't have to say it very many times; you learn it fast. Uncle Asto and I'd been together for five years, and he was going to know the instant I got to the top of the second page that I hadn't been practicing the Mozart. At that spot there's a fast shift from first finger to fourth finger on the G string, and you have to get ready for it. You can't let a shift like that take you by surprise.

"Straight through. Right, Wiena-chan? Including cadenzas." A cadenza is the part where the violin plays alone; it's harder than the rest of the piece, and it gets the audience all excited when you do it in a concert. There are three cadenzas in this concerto, one in each movement.

"Right." Poor man.

The introduction is forty-one measures long. This time, instead of playing just the last two measures of it on the piano, Uncle Asto played the whole thing. The introduction to the first movement, the part the orchestra would play, is bouncy, and it mostly announces what the solo violin will play when it begins. That way you get to listen to it twice.

While he was doing it, I practiced the G-string shift without making any noise, sliding my hand up and down the fingerboard.

I love this concerto. Mozart only wrote five of them for the violin. The year before, Uncle Asto had let me choose which one to learn, the third one or this one, and I'd taken them both home and spun my bow the way you spin a tennis racquet. If it landed with the hair toward me, I'd learn the third, in G; and if it landed with the hair away from me, I'd learn this one. When Uncle Asto and my parents found out I'd treated my bow With Such Astonishing Disrespect, they got very alarmed about it.

I'd worked very hard on it for several months, and in February we'd made a video of it to send to a contest. I'd worried and fretted and trembled, but we'd gotten the tape made. After that, I'd sort of neglected it. In softball season I'd practically stopped being a violinist.

Uncle Asto, who was having fun playing the introduction, got to the BUM-pum-pa-pum part that comes right before the violin begins. I was ready. It starts on a high D and goes on up from there.

I got through the first movement all right, and I made some genuine messes of the beautiful double-stops near the end of the second-movement cadenza. Double-stops are two notes at once, on separate strings. And I was sure the last-movement cadenza was making it Abundantly Clear to Uncle Asto that I hadn't even seen it for a long time. But the end was fine. The Blip-te-de-bip-bip-bip came out very, very soft and nice.

Uncle Asto leaned back, smiling and saying a kind of "ah." Then he turned sideways on the bench. "Isn't this a beautiful song, Wiena-chan?"

"Yep." It is. Uncle Asto calls overtures and symphonies and concertos "songs" sometimes. I waited for him to say the rest.

He leaned forward and flipped the pages. "Hmmm. I'm concerned about the articulation in spots, and some of the dynamics aren't at all what they should be—and you know that, young lady—and… Hmmm." Then he turned sideways on the bench again, straddling it. "Are you willing to play this concerto a thousand times by September?"

I laughed. That would be more times than I'd brush my teeth by then. He watched me thinking. He started to smile, then he got up and walked across the studio, away from me. Then he turned around. "Your video was accepted," he said. "For the Saurotobi Competition. The finals are on the last Sunday of August."

I looked at him. And I saw myself four months before, worrying and worrying and worrying about whether or not the sixteenth-notes in the first movement were vigorous enough, how satiny smooth the Andante cantabile was.… I remembered being a mass of nervousness, actually frightened of a camera.

"Had you really forgotten about it?"

The picture in my memory faded and Uncle Asto's face came in, looking at me.

"You're serious, aren't you?"

"Indeed. You are one of the finalists. We have almost three months, if you decide to play. You may decide not to, of course."

I laughed. I held my violin and my bow out at arms' length, so I was kind of a V shape. "Really," I said. "Thanks, guys," I said to them. I dropped my arms, letting violin and bow dangle so they hung just above the floor. I thought of my great-grandmother in Paris, Grandma Marie, who'd bought me the first violin I ever had. It was a one-eighth size. I can still hear her voice in my head, like an old radio program you think you remember, all jolly-sounding, saying, "Just tuck it under your chin, just tuck it.…" The whole violin was only seventeen inches long.

Uncle Asto bent his head to the side, a little bit like a bird listening. "Uncle Asto, do you think…" I purposely let my voice fade.

He shook his head back and forth. "You make your own decisions, always, Wiena-chan." I laughed again, and so did he. Mine was kind of an accusing laugh; I was thinking of the thousands of hours of finger-sickening exercises he'd put me through in seven years. Those nasty exercises were his decisions, not mine. "In important things of this kind," he added.

Spend three months with Mozart. My whole summer vacation. Go through the nervousness all over again. The Saurotobi Competition for Young Musicians of Japan. Last year it was for piano, the first Beethoven concerto, and the boy who plays piano with the Youth Orchestra won it. He played the concerto with the Heart's Desire Symphony at a Sunday concert; that was his prize. I'll never forget his eyes when he came out on the stage to begin playing at the concert. They looked wild, as if he didn't know what a piano was. Papa and I were sitting down front, and we could see him very clearly. Mama said he'd been awfully jumpy in rehearsal but always came through in the clinch. He was seventeen. He played the performance wonderfully.

"How old are the others?"

"Wiena-chan, will that affect your relationship with the concerto?"

I looked down to both sides of me. My violin was centered exactly over one of the dark blue curly designs on the rug. I centered my bow over another one. The designs weren't exactly alike. I'd had the rug designs memorized for years. I looked back up at Uncle Asto. He was standing with his hands in his pockets. "I don't exactly know," I said.

He moved his feet slightly. "Let's say I'm quite sure you're the youngest. Let's say that." He kept looking at me. I put both violin and bow in my right hand. "How tall are you?" he asked.

I told him. 137 cm.

"Indeed," he said. "And you've had the full-size instrument since…?"

"Uh… I was just starting fitth grade. One and a half years ago. One year and nine months."

"I'm wondering if we can expect some growth these days. It would make the reaches a bit easier for your hand, you know. Your brother Boruto, he's rather taller than you, yes?"

"Boruto's 150 cm."

"Indeed. Well, we'll see what nature has in mind." He began pacing across the rug. Then he stopped. "What do you think, Wiena-chan? Would you like to play the competition? You mustn't play it unless you're willing. Completely willing."

I'd never done such a thing in my life. I'd played auditions. One for the Prep Orchestra, but I was so young then, that one hardly counts. I almost didn't even know what I was there for. And for the Youth Orchestra, the one I play in now. That was scary, because I knew exactly what I was there for.

"Umm… I've never—Uncle Asto, I've never played a…"

"I know, Wiena-chan." His voice was full of—I didn't know what to call it. It wasn't pity. I had to have my own list of new words by September for school homework, and whatever it was in his voice would be one of them. I'd find it. It was something like pity, but not the kind that makes you feel bad.

"Does Mama know about this? When did you find out? Find out I'd made the finals?"

"Yes, she does. We've talked about it. Not long ago."

"What does Mama think? Why didn't somebody tell me?"

He sort of laughed but not really. "She thinks it's your decision, Wiena-chan. Naturally. We wanted to wait till after school was out—and your softball—so you could more accurately gauge how you want to spend your summer."

"Does Papa know?"

"I'm sure Ruto does." Papa doesn't play in Mama Symphony; he plays in the opera orchestra. And he teaches at a local university and plays in a Jazz quartet. He's a bassist.

"What does Papa think?"

"That, I don't know. I have a hunch he agrees with your mother."

I loosened my bow. "What's it like? You don't have to play in front of a lot of people, do you? I mean, not the whole orchestra?" I looked down at the rug design on my left, where the blue and red come together. "Do you get more than one try?"

"This is the way it goes, Wiena-chan. There'll be three, maybe four judges. They're the jury. Every contestant will play the entire concerto. Once. Without accompaniment. The judges listen and decide. Somebody will win. And there'll be a second prize, an alternate. The others will get a whopper of an experience. Then it'll be over for all the competitors except one. That one will play the concerto in January. With the Symphony, at a Sunday concert. If the winner should get sick, the alternate winner will perform."

Suddenly the idea of winning was the worst thing I could imagine. I'd be out there exposed to everybody. I'd rather lose.

Or would I?

"How many people are gonna be in the competition?"

"I'm not exactly sure. Fewer than ten, I think. The finalists have come from a field of eighty-five."

Eighty-five. "Are they adults or something? In college, I mean."

"There is no minimum age, just as in the Youth Orchestra. The maximum age is twenty-one. I expect the mean age to be about seventeen."

"I was ten in March."

"I know, Wiena-chan. Do you want to think about it for a few days?"

"I don't know. Maybe I'd better think … I don't…"

"Well. Then we have unfinished business, you and I. Let's do the Vitali for fun now."

My music says Vitali was born in 1660 and never died. It says, "Tomaso Vitali, 1660– ." It just has that blank. He wrote a ciaccona in G minor that I love. That was what I'd been practicing. It has a lot of trickery of crossing strings in it, and you have to play faster than your mind can think when you play the trickery parts. Automatic pilot is one way to describe it. It's a kind of automated finger memory. You let your mind go away and not interfere with your fingers. It's kind of like the way you write your name or ride a bike. First you learn how, and then you just go ahead and do it without thinking about how you do it. I love the ciaccona he wrote.

But when we got to four measures after letter M, I botched some trickery notes. And I stopped. I don't usually do that; I usually go right on.

"This section is still your hardest, isn't it?"

"Yes. I don't know if I can play any competition, ever, Uncle Asto. I…"

"Oh, sweetie, don't start that. It doesn't do any good." He looked at me. "Remember, this competition is in memory of the great Hiruzen Saurotobi."

"Yes." Hiruzen Saurotobi was a legendary composer who born in Konoha and lived at the beach. Last year the Youth Orchestra played a concerto grosso he wrote, and it was so beautiful it made some people in the orchestra cry.

"And we're going to remember, you and I, that Saurotobi-san had tenacity and fearlessness and a great, great soul."

I looked at him in a question mark.

"Tenacity. Holding on when it would be more comfortable to let go."

I nodded.

While I was putting my violin away, I saw on Uncle Asto's desk a photograph of a string quartet I hadn't seen before. It had the most be beautiful woman holding a violin, with long red hair and an incredibly smiling face.

"Who's this?"

"Hm? That's the Beacon Quartet. You must hear them in person someday."

"I mean who's this?" I pointed to the redhead one.

"Oh. That's Pyrrha Nikos. Their second violinist. Excellent musician."

Instant crush. Lightning love. Wiena and Pyrrha . Pyrrha and Wiena. Duets.

"You'll think about the competition, won't you, Wiena-chan?" he said as I was going out the door.

"Of course. Thanks. For the lesson. And…"

"You're welcome. Always. And do the Kreutzer double-stops this week?"

The terrible, nasty, tormenting Kreutzer double-stops. Kreutzer lived in the same time as Beethoven. He wrote a whole book of violin exercises, called études, and his idea of double-stops was to get you going good and fast and then throw one at you that your fingers can't possibly reach and make you keep going. Good old number 34.

I was just crossing Uncle Asto' lawn when a catastrophe struck me: if I didn't at least try to play the competition, I'd be just one more boring violin student and Pyrrha Nikos would never even think of looking for me in Konoha, Japan. She wouldn't even ever find out I was alive.

I turned around and ran back and knocked on the studio door. Uncle Asto opened it, and I told him, "Yes! I want to play the competition."

He looked a bit surprised, but not totally. "Good girl, Wiena-chan. It's a deal. Kreutzer." He almost growled the last word, and smiled. I said good-bye again and he put his hand up in his flat-handed wave.

I walked home. I had to talk to somebody. My brother Boruto was in the dining room playing guitar. He was sitting in the chair he sits in for dinner. He's thirteen and he really good with his guitar. Last year he was invited to join a music camp in Tokyo. Ever since then, he's been sort of Mr. Superior.

I stood in the dining room looking at him. I had to talk to somebody. Papa was at work at the university where he teaches, and Mama was at an all-day committee meeting, trying to make a playing contract so the Symphony wouldn't go on strike.

"Niisan, I did something today," I said.

"Good, Win." He went on strumming his guitar.

"I mean, I made a decision today."

"Good."

He's exasperating. "Listen to me, Niisan. You have to listen."

"Okay, I'm listening. Talk." He looked bored.

"I'm gonna play a competition. Maybe I'm crazy."

He didn't pay attention; he thought I meant an audition.

"A competition, Niisan. You're not listening. There'll be about ten people. Do you know I sent in a Mozart video way last February? To a competition?" The whole thing began to look in on me. The competition wasn't a thing I was looking at, it was looking at me, as if it had lots of eyes.

"What do you mean?" Boruto asked.

So I told him. I stood there in the dining room, with my violin case on the floor and my arms hanging all floppy at my sides, and told him the whole thing. How I'd have to play the concerto perfectly and be suddenly brilliant. I'd be the youngest. The cadenzas are very hard. The idea sounded insane.

"I don't see the point," he said. "If you win, you just get up out of your chair and you walk up front, and you stand there and you play it. If you lose, you sit there in your place and play your part. Look: you've won one spelling championship thing and you've lost one. That didn't annihilate your whole head or anything; you didn't go around looking for razor blades. You're a lousy ten years old. Winning won't make you queen of the world. And losing isn't gonna terminate you. It's a concerto; it's not the future of the universe."

Sometimes I can be very frustrated and very quiet at the same time. I sat down in the chair I sit in for dinner, across the table from him, and I folded my hands. "I didn't say the Youth Orchestra, I said the Symphony." I said it very slowly.

He looked at me. "You mean Mom's symphony. Is that what you mean?"

"Yes."

I tried to remember what Pyrrha Nikos looked like, but I could only picture her eyes and her hair.

"That's different."

"Right."

He rolled his eyes around, thinking. "What's it gonna do to you? Is it gonna make you a crazoid?" Boruto thinks the world is a big insane asylum anyway. We're all inmates, just in different wards.

"I don't know."

"Well, look at you right now."

"Maybe that's because I just this morning found out."

"You don't want to end up like that Rubes person."

"Who?"

"You know. Mom's friend, the one that sings."

"Which one?"

"She sings concerts, and she's strange."

I couldn't remember anybody like that. "I wonder if I'll get strange."

"Do you want to change your mind? You know, not do it?"

I thought of the way Pyrrha Nikos held her violin in the picture: high up, kind of like a flag. Sometimes I feel my violin is out to get me—an enemy or something—and sometimes it feels like my best and only friend.

"I don't think so," I said.

He put his guitar down. "Do you think you can win?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Probably not. I don't know. Eighty-five people sent videos."

"Well, you ought to go ahead and do it. But remember what I said. It's just a concerto."

Easy for him to say.

"I think I'm going to," I said. I had to hear myself say it out loud again.

He looked at me and strummed his guitar three times. Then he put it down again and said, "Look, Win, I have to go to work in a little while. Nobody's home for dinner tonight. Dad has that park concert; Mom's gonna go hear him after her meeting."

"Niisan, I'm afraid."

"Try not to think about it." He put the guitar back in its case. "Yep. Try not to think about elephants." Somebody said that when Boruto was in a little kids' art class at the art museum a long time ago, and he said it all the time for a while. I looked at my violin case on the floor, and at my briefcase with the Mozart and Vitali and Prokofiev and Kreutzer and all the other music inside it.

"What does that word mean, the one with 'nigh' in it?" I asked him.

"I don't know. What word?"

"You said it. You said when I lost the spelling thing it didn't nigh-something my whole head."

"I don't know. Nigh-something. I don't remember."

"You said it."

"I don't know. I've got to go to work. Will you make me a sandwich?"

I went to the kitchen and made sandwiches for both of us. A breeze was coming up, blowing the hummingbird feeder around outside the kitchen window. Boruto picked up his sandwich and put it in a bag and left for his part time job. I sat and ate mine. Mozart was nineteen when he wrote that concerto, plus the four other ones in the same year. I wonder if he thought they were the future of the universe. I wonder if he thought they'd make any difference to anybody. I wish somebody had saved his brain.

I was just taking out the Mozart, to look at the third-movement cadenza, when my phone rang. It was Boruto. "It's 'annihilate.' Comes from Latin, nihil, n-i-h-i-l, means 'nothing.' It means 'destroy.' Bye."

It was time to start my list of new words homework. Summer goes very fast and you can end up with no list at all in September if you're not careful. I've seen it happen. I went upstairs and wrote it down on the clipboard beside the bed. Boruto hadn't spelled it for me, so I did my best. A-n-i-h-i-l-a-t-e. I put "tenacity" from Uncle Asto before it.

I cleaned up the sandwich mess and went to the music room and practiced. I worked on Kreutzer no. 34, which is a good way to insult yourself if you haven't worked on it lately. I played it for almost an hour. It can torture your fingers, and it's good for you.

It's also very useful in distracting you from your problems, because you can't even think about them while you're playing it. Kind of like skiing: you keep your mind totally on what you're doing and give your mental problems a rest. You keep your mind right where your body is. I don't understand it all totally, but that's what you do. You keep doing it till you get convinced.

And after the Kreutzer, I went straight to the first-to-fourth-finger shift in the first movement of the concerto. I did it over and over and over again. Just that one shift; I did it maybe fifty times, and then I played a couple of Dancla études, which are different from Kreutzer's, and sometimes more fun.

Papa came in late in the afternoon and said it was going to be windy for the concert, and he wanted me to turn pages. They don't always use page turners; only when there's a chance of wind. It was his university quartet, the Fireshadow Quartet, that was playing. And they weren't playing in a park; they were playing in a place called Central Shopping Distirct, which is in downtown Konoha. So sometimes there are lots of cars going past while the concert is having a really soft part, pianissimo. People make jokes about it.

I'd never turned pages for anybody in public before. You have to clamp the pages down with clothespins, and then unclamp a page at exactly the right moment and turn it at exactly the right instant so the person can go on playing, and then you reclamp everything and keep watching the music so you know when the next turn is coming up. There's another way to do it, too: with a sheet of Plexiglas laid on top of the music to hold it down when the wind blows. It can be as complicated as the clothespins.

"Papa, I have to tell you something," I said. He was putting his bass case on the floor against the dining-room wall.

"Right. You have to tell me if you'll turn pages."

"No, I have to tell you something important—"

"Listen, if you won't do it I'll have to get somebody else. The concert's at eight."

"Papa, this is important!" I heard myself sounding like a little kid.

He walked straight to me, looking confused. He put both arms around me, tight, and I put my head on his T-shirt.

"My video got in the Sarutobi finals."

His arms got kind of rigid, as if he were bracing himself for something.

"And I'm gonna do it," I said. Just like that.

He didn't say anything. He just held me, and he found my left hand and kissed every finger on it. It's a joke he used to do when I was little and couldn't stand how badly I played. He kissed each finger to make it all better.

"I'll turn your pages tonight," I said to his T-shirt.

He laughed. "Pages aren't important. You're important. You're really going to play that competition. Wiena Namikaze." He kind of sighed and just held me. Then he backed away and said, "Weiss knows you're going to play, does she?"

"Nope. I just found out at my lesson. Then I decided. I told Niisan."

"Good. We get to surprise her. I'll heat up the chicken; you find something to wear. Something dark, okay? We have to leave in an hour. I'll show you the worst page turn. You'll have to be really nimble with the clothespins."

I was up the stairs. I put on a navy blue skirt and a grayish sort of shirt with little skinny white stripes. I guessed I looked dark enough.

"Set the table, will you, Wiena-chan? Please?" Papa called from the kitchen.

I brushed my hair first. I've got blue eyes and silver gray hair, which is kind of an odd combination for Japanese people. Maybe it's from me being a mixed-blood. My friend Ayane has straight black hair to her waist, and she has really dark eyes and her skin is a perfect gold; it's because her dad was black American and her mother is Japanese. Her father is dead; he was a geologist when a mountain erupted and he died there. Imagine having your father die that way. She told me she wanted to be a Ramen chef like her mother. While I was brushing my hair, Ayane was in America with her mother. They go there every summer, and she has to practice her English so she doesn't end up all Japanese and no American.

And my other best friend Anya, who's also an European descent like me, was at dance camp in Moscow. Until that morning, I'd been the one with the dull summer ahead. I looked in the mirror at the bruise on the left side of my neck from the chin rest on the violin. It's a sort of rubbed place on my skin. Almost all violinists have them, just below the jawbone. That's how you can pick out a violinist in a crowd. I put my hair in a braid because of the wind and went downstairs to set the table.

When Papa brought our plates to the dining-room table, my piece of chicken had a toothpick standing in it with a little tag that said "Wiena the Brave." He showed me the worst page turn. It was in a quartet by Dvořák. He said I should probably turn three measures early.

In Shopping District, the audience sits up above the players. It's like a Greek theater. Papa said in the car on the way to the square, "Did I tell you I pay my page turners?"

"Nope," I said. For some reason, I felt all happy and not bothered by anything much. The competition was months away. It was summer, and it was windy but nice, with pretty evening light that happens in Konoha. Maybe it was doing the Kreutzer no. 34 that made me feel good. "How much?"

"It depends. For you, I'd say a hundred for every easy turn, and a thousand for the hard ones. You have to keep track of the wind. That's your job, not mine."

"Okay," I nodded. Konoha is built on both sides of a river that flows north into Shizuoka prefecture. We were going over one of the bridges. "Papa?" I said, "will you not tell anybody about the competition?"

He looked at me and then back at the bridge he was driving over. "No, I won't tell anybody. Why not?"

"I don't know. I just don't want people to know."

We left the bridge and were on the west side of the city. "That's fair, Wiena-chan. It's understandable."

We parked the car and went to the shopping district. Everybody else had adult page turners. They were their students or their husbands or something. Only one other page turner had a chin-rest bruise. Papa and everyone else in the quartet were wearing their usual black stuff, but with white jackets for the men. Those are for summer concerts. Jazz quartet ensembles are often composed of a horn, classically clarinet (or saxophone, trumpet, etc.), a chordal instrument (e.g., electric guitar, piano, Hammond organ, etc.), a bass instrument (e.g., double bass, tuba or bass guitar) and a drum kit. This configuration is sometimes modified by using a second horn replacing the chordal instrument, such as a trumpet and saxophone with string bass and drum kit, or by using two chordal instruments (e.g., piano and electric guitar). Papa quartet consisted of a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, and a violinist. Three men and a woman; she's the violinist.

I looked at the program. It was the Dvořák and Mozart and Gershwin and Glazounov, he was a Russian composer. I sat back and got ready to turn pages.

(◕ω◕✿)

I lived in a small city called Konoha. My family moved here when my father got a job as music teacher in the local university seven years ago. Konoha is supposed to be one of Japan's fewest populous cities, but it has lots of free outdoor concerts in the summer. Some people bring picnics to the concerts; others wander in and listen for a couple of minutes and then leave. Sometimes in the shopping district people roller-skate around while the concert is going on. At the jazz concerts lots of people dance, especially little kids.

Mama got there late. The quartet was already playing the first piece. I'd have to wait till after the concert to talk to her. I couldn't tell from looking at her face if she knew I'd found out about the Sarutobi Competition. She waved to me and made this big, silly hello-thing she does with her hands. It's what Konoha people did in the welcome dance a long time ago. She puts her hands up at the sides of her head and wiggles them and opens her mouth wide and grins. Even though it's perfectly silent it feels very loud. It's embarrassing. I looked up at her and made a very little smile, and I abruptly remembered the strange singer Boruto had meant. Her name is Ruby, and she's really beautiful.

While I was watching the first violinist and thinking about judges watching me, I saw somebody dancing in front of the audience, just a few feet to my left. He had his elbows held out to the sides, as if he had sore armpits. His head was going up and down, and he was taking steps in rhythm with his head, sort of in syncopation to the music. He went forward and back, forward and back, kind of in an oval. He was stiff, the way old men get stiff when their bones get creaky.

He was just dancing. A dancing man.

He had on old clothes. His pants were too big; he was kind of skinny, and his belt made them fold all around. They were brown and so was his shirt. It had short sleeves so you could see how bony and blistery his elbows were. One of his shoes was torn, down at the place where you start to lace them up. I could see it when his foot danced forward. Even though he looked as if he had arthritis or one of those creaky diseases, his dancing was kind of musical. It was formal dancing, the kind they do in old-fashioned movies.

His face was a little bit like another face I saw when I was little. When somebody's father came to pick up his kid from a rehearsal—it was the Konoha Prep Orchestra—he had little holes in his face. On his forehead and everyplace.

The dancing man had them. It must be a sorrowful thing to go through your whole life with holes in your face. People probably stare at you; they can't help it. He wasn't exactly smiling, but he looked happy.

He reminded me of something, or of somebody. I couldn't figure out what it was.

Some of the Stem People were staring at him. Those are the people who bring picnics to concerts and sake or champagne or something, and they bring real glasses from their cupboards, ones that have stems. They pay a lot of attention to their glasses not falling; they're very careful of the stems. And high up on the steps, almost in the last row, a man pointed at him and the lady beside him nodded her head and went on listening to the music. She was an Ear Lady. Those are the ones with dangly earrings that bounce in time to the music. The Symphony where Mama and Uncle Asto play used to have an Ear Lady, but she took them off.

I made another page turn. You have to take off both bottom clothespins, then reach across and under the music to do the pin on the right, stand up, take off the top two pins, turn the page with your left hand at just exactly the right instant—two or three measures before the end of the page or sometimes the player nods at you exactly when to do it—then attach the top two pins, sit down, attach the bottom left one first because that's the page he's on, and then reach under and across again and attach the bottom right one. While you're standing up you're holding two clothespins in each hand. And while you're doing all that you can't get between the player and the music; he has to see the notes.

After I sat down I turned to watch the man dancing again. He was facing the quartet, and he looked at me watching him and he smiled at me. It was the way my mother smiled at some sheep one time in a field when we were driving along in the farm. Papa saw her do it and said we weren't taking a sheep home for a pet. My mother said she didn't want to take one home: they were perfectly fine where they were; she just liked to know they were there and she was smiling at them.

That was the way the man smiled at me, I think. I was surprised. I smiled back at him. He kept dancing. He seemed to have hardly any teeth. It looked like one tooth in a whole lot of darkness.

The last movement ended and everybody clapped. The Stem People usually put their stem glasses down to clap; sometimes they hold them in one hand and clap the other against the glass. Some people lean over and talk to their friends while they clap. Some people don't clap at all. They just watch the quartet standing up and bowing; they just stare.

The man danced right to the end of the Glazounov. He left when everybody else did. The quartet packed up their stuff and people came around to talk to them, and Mama met us. I rode home with her.

"I get paid for turning tonight. I think I'll do it again," I said when we were in the car. My mother has beautiful, long white hair that she tied into a ponytail. It vibrates when she moves her head fast.

"You did really well, sweetheart. I watched you," she said.

"Thanks. Did you see the dancing man?"

"Of course. I've seen him at concerts before."

"Dancing?"

"I've never seen him not dancing." We were stopped at a traffic light, and lots of people were leaving the shopping district. I watched her thinking. "You know," she said, "it's a joy to see him dancing as spontaneously as the little children always do."

"What do you mean, 'always'?"

"Oh, I'm remembering you and Boruto, dancing your little hearts out one summer. You both had white T-shirts. I think they said 'Symphony Kid' on them. You were so tiny."

I tried to remember doing that; all I could see was bare feet in grass, moving up and down.

"That dancing man reminds me of somebody. Or something."

"Maybe you've seen him before."

"I don't think so. Maybe I dreamed him?"

"I don't know."

What we really had to talk about was the competition. Mama was purposely not talking about it. She knew I'd been to my lesson that morning, and since it was the first lesson after the end of school, it was probably all planned that Uncle Asto would pick that day to tell me. Evidently I was supposed to bring it up.

We were on the bridge crossing the river. Konoha has its bridges lit up at night. My mother's orchestra played in the park for the lighting ceremony of one of them.

"Uncle told me about the Sarutobi finals."

She didn't say anything. I listened to the hum of the steel grating. "And what do you think about it?" she finally asked.

"I think somebody could've told me about it before."

"Why?"

"So I'd be ready."

"Ready for what?"

"Why did everybody wait so long to tell me?"

"So you could concentrate on finishing the school year, get your projects and things finished. So you could give your energy to the softball play-offs. How much readier would you be if somebody'd told you before? How long before?"

"I don't know. But I wouldn't've ignored the concerto for so long."

She kind of sighed. A Mother Sigh. "Hurry up and study for your spelling test, hurry up and practice the Kreutzer, hurry up and make your bed.…" she said. She looked at me and then back at the road.

"What's that supposed to mean?".

"What kind of hurry-ups are those?"

"Mother Hurry-ups,"

"Exactly. And what're they really for?"

I knew what she was getting at. When we went to see my friend in a horse show when I was about six years old, we saw some parents leaning on the rail yelling at their kids: "Wrong lead, Nana-chan, wrong lead!" and "Heels down!" and other things. It's called getting Parents' Trophies.

"Does Mama want me to play the finals?" I asked.

"I won't touch that one, sweetie," she said, not looking at me.

Nobody said anything for another couple of minutes. "How scary will it get, Mama? You used to this when you were my age."

She looked hard at the road. "Well, sweetheart, if you want to know, it'll get very, very scary. That's all I can say."

"I'm going to do it anyway."

She nodded her head at the road ahead. "I thought you would."

(◕ω◕✿)

My cat, Subarashii (wonderful), was on my bed. Cats spend eighty percent of their lives sleeping. She's called Subarashii because that's what my mother said when she saw her in the shoe box I brought her home in. Some people in front of a fruit stand were giving away kittens, and they had shoe boxes for them. They were a huge fat lady and a little girl; they were both wearing shorts. They had the kittens in a big cardboard carton. Papa and I looked at the kittens, all cluttering each other and reaching with their big feet, and squeaking and blinking. There were two gray-striped ones and a calico and a completely black one. On the cardboard box there was a Magic Marker sign: Do You Need Somebody To Love? Kittens Free.

Papa and I just stood there looking down into the carton. The completely black one looked at me and meowed and its eyes looked surprised at the meow, as if it were sending an SOS. I reached down into the carton and put my hand on its back. The fat lady said, "That one's a male. And I think he likes you, little lady. See? He kept meowing at you."

I picked him up, and he felt very warm and good to hold. I looked at him up close. He was absolutely, completely black. And his eyes were very big and blue. I put him against my chest, and he tried to climb up me; I could feel his heart beating very fast.

I looked at Papa. He looked at the cat. He laughed. The fat lady, who had extremely fat fingers, put the kitten in one of the shoe boxes and we all came home together.

Suba-chan turned out to be a girl. We had her spayed because my mother wouldn't let her have kittens. And her eyes turned yellow; they look like moons.

When I got into bed with Suba-chan after the concert, there was an unread massage on my phone.

Do I have to rent a tux if you win?

You spelled annihilate wrong. I fixed it.

Two n's. He'd corrected it on the mail.

I opened my window about six inches. There's a nice sound that comes in. It's tree frogs, and little mutters of bushes settling down. Suba-chan settled herself between my feet.

It's always hard to go to sleep after a concert. It's your adrenaline. I kept seeing the dancing man with his torn shoe, moving slowly around and around, the brownness of all of him, and the music making him smile. Maybe such a man was a little bit crazy. But you couldn't be too crazy if you liked to dance to jazz quartet music.

That morning, all I'd had in my head was having a fun lesson and learning new words for my Summer homework and missing my friends who'd gone away to do things for the summer. A few hours later, along had come the competition and the strange dancing man, and I'd turned the pages in public for money, and I'd learned "tenacity" and "annihilate." In the war they annihilate people. You could let nervousness annihilate your chances of playing Mozart the way you wanted to. Hitler tried to annihilate the Jews.

On our dining-room wall we have a photograph from Poland of a little girl with snow white hair standing in a field of flowers, holding a purse in her hand. There's a white goose standing beside her, and she's holding a homemade straw broom; it was what she used to tend her flock of geese with. The purse is velvet with some embroidery on it. She was my great-great-grandmother, and she was Jewish, and her name was Wiena. My namesake.

Before my mother came to Japan, her family used to live in a small town in France. They lived so far out in the city, they had several people on the same telephone line. It was called a party line. My mother and her childhood friend Ruby, who lived two miles away, could pick up the phone and listen to the neighbors' conversations. In fact, on the day my mother knew she'd find out if the music school she and her friend Ruby enrolled had accepted them, she was sixty-five miles away at her piano lesson, and the postmistress called to say it was a thick envelope from a famous music school in Paris, not a thin one. But nobody was home, and Ruby picked up the phone when she heard the three rings for my mother's house, and she took the message. So Ruby found out before my mother did that they were going to go to Paris to go to music school. My mother and Ruby were each other's answering machines. They still phone each other on New Year's Day every single year and talk for a long time. Ruby now lives in America. My mother can cook both French food and Japanese food. She makes delicious French toast and fried fries, and she also makes Coq Au Vin the way Grandma Marie taught her.

We had to do family trees last year at school. Ayane's tree had to reach from Mississippi to Konoha, and she couldn't find the slavery parts. Maybe her father's ancestors weren't even slaves. It's a whole unknown part of her. You had to say something about yourself when you did your oral presentation of your family tree, and Ayane did hers with mirrors. She told everybody the day before that they had to have mirrors for her presentation. So she had us look in the mirrors we'd brought from home, and she had us imagine a place several generations back, to see ourselves in some place completely different. Her point was that maybe a great-grandparent who looked a little bit like us, maybe in the jaw structure or around the eyes, looked out on a river or lived near a mountain or maybe drove a horse and carriage. She explained that she knows about the Japanese side of her family—they came from Osaka—but her black side is a mystery before her father's grandparents.

Anya's family tree went all the way back to when Volgograd was named after Stalin, in Russia. Anya said Russia was where she got the beginnings of her dancing, and it was seven generations back that somebody of her family was a dancer. She said she dances for all the dead people in Stalingrad. Some kids thought that was stupid. It made Anya feel terrible.

Mine was four countries. Poland, France, Hungary, and Japan. I was supposed to include everything I could find, every name and every date in my family history. I'd always seen the snow white haired girl with the goose and the broom in the dining room, but there was something that made me not ask questions about her. For school I had to ask.

"It's when. That's part of it," my mother said. We were at the dinner table. Dinner was over, and I had my notebook and pencil out. "I can't tell you when she died. Somewhere in Poland, sometime after 1939. Isn't that enough?"

I remember the way Mama looked at the pencil in my hand and then away from me. She was making a miniature pile of crumbs on the tablecloth with her thumbnails.

"But was it one of the death camps?" I asked.

She looked at the pile of crumbs on the tablecloth, little brown fragments of bread on white cloth, then up at me and then back down at the pile. "Yes." She got up and left the table.

My father said, very softly, "T-R-E-B-L-I-N-K-A. And her husband's name was Johan." I wrote down the words.

That was what had made me never ask before. The way my mother turned away from the pencil in my hand.

When I did my oral presentation I said I was mixed of Jewish and Gentile, and that has advantages and disadvantages. One, if you're mixed, you're lucky because each kind has some really good things about it. Gentiles are good at building things, cathedrals and huge barns and things. Jews have courage, to wander all around the world getting abused and killed and still go on having the Torah. It must be a terrible courage. Two, if you're mixed, you're the thing that can't be. You can't be mixed Jewish. So you go through your life being something that can't be.

And now I was still the thing that can't be, and I was going to play a competition with people all older, and they probably knew everything Mozart ever wrote down. It would get very, very scary, Mama said.

Play the concerto one thousand times by September. My friend Anya would probably do more than one thousand pliés by September. She changed dance teachers last year, and all of a sudden she had a boyfriend in her dance class. Still, a plié isn't a whole concerto.

Would that be what might make me end up like Ruby, as Boruto had warned me? How could I end up like her? She's a very famous singer. She and my mother sometimes stay on the phone for hours; she times her phone calls for when Mama gets home from playing a concert, and by then it's after 2:00 A.M. in New York, where Ruby lives.

On our dining-room wall, on the opposite side from the photograph of Wiena and her goose and her broom and her purse, there are two embroidered linen pictures in frames. Grandma Marie in Paris made one when Boruto was born and one when I was born. They have our names in Hebrew, and pomegranates, figs, dates, wheat, barley, grapes, and olives all in colored thread. Those are the seven fruits in the Bible. Grandma Marie met my great-grandfather Charles when they were both standing in line to get standing-room tickets to the Palais Garnier in Paris. They went inside and stood together to see La Bohème. It was very sad, and he gave her his handkerchief when she cried. She forgot to return it to him and she ended up with it at home. She washed it and starched it and ironed it and carried it with her to the standing-room lines of four more operas before she saw him again. When she finally saw him and returned the handkerchief to him, he bought her a glass of tea after the opera and they ended up getting married and having my grandfather Jacques.

Grandpa Charles is dead now. They always listened to the Palais Garnier on Saturdays on the radio. Grandma Marie still dusts the living room every Friday afternoon for the Saturday opera. "You wouldn't want to be slovenly when people are falling in love and dying with their hearts broken; you can dust up a little," she used to say. My mother can do a perfect imitation of her saying it.

When I was in kindergarten I had a crush on boy, I think. Tatsumi-kun. He really good with sewing, and he taught me how to made a cute teddy bear. Tatsumi-kun built a castle of blocks one day and said I could live in it. Another kid came and knocked it down, and Tatsumi-kun got really angry and hit him. They had a fight right there on the floor until one of the teachers got hold of them and started chanting a peace song over and over again. They calmed down.

On Valentine's Day, Tatsumi-kun made me a big, red, gooey Valentine; the glue oozed out all around the edges. He and I held hands at story time. Then he moved away, while one of the teachers was reading The Trumpet of the Swan to us. He never even found out how it ended, I guess.

Tatsumi-kun was the first and last crush I'd ever had.

Suba-chan paced up the bed and curled up on my pillow, leaning her back against my head.

I listened to the crickets and tree frogs outside in their little breeze and started fingering the Allegro ma non troppo part of the last movement of the Mozart concerto on my chest. It's in six-eight, and it's a cheerful thing to play. It's the part that comes back at the very end of the concerto, but then it's played pianissimo.

(◕ω◕✿)

It was very important for nobody to tell the whole world I was going to play the Sarutobi Competition finals in September. I wasn't sure why; I just knew I didn't want it broadcast. And I didn't want to know who the other finalists were either. It was bad enough imagining these very tall people with computer memories and fingers like willow branches walking in and playing the Mozart as if they were brushing their teeth. I didn't want to know what they looked like.

I told everybody in my family that was the way I wanted it. They said okay. My mother was standing at the kitchen sink when I told her, early on the morning after the day I'd found out. She'd just found a fly struggling in the soapsuds and was scooping it up to take it outside and saying to it, "Oh, you poor creature…" I'd already practiced two hours that morning.

"I understand, dear. We wouldn't dream of telling people. Promise. You're supposed to call Shino-san this morning."

"Shino-san who?"

"Shino-san the horn player. He called late last night. Woke us up, in fact. His number's by the phone." I looked at her. "Papa's friend," she said.

"Why am I supposed to call him?"

"I don't know. Why don't you find out?"

He had a recording on his phone. "Do you know the one about Ravel and the pianist who played the 'Pavane' too slowly? He told her, 'I wrote a "Pavane for a Dead Princess," not a "Dead Pavane for a Princess."' He said it in French, of course. Leave your name and number at the beep and I'll call you back." It was a musicians' joke.

"This is Wiena Namikaze," I said. "I think you know my number. I don't know what you want to talk—"

"Hi, Wiena-chan. I don't pick up the phone for just anybody. Listen, Wiena-chan, I saw you turning pages for your dad last night. I want to reserve you for next Sunday in Midoriya Park. We've got a blowing date, my wind quintet. I don't know what you charge. Will you save the date—if you're not busy? I don't know what the weather'll be. Maybe we'll turn out to be a windy quintet."

"You mean you want me to turn pages for you?"

"That's exactly what I want you to do. Can you be there by one forty-five? How much do you charge?"

"I don't know."

"You'll never get rich that way, Wiena-chan. Let me know when you find out. You'll schlep your own clothespins, or shall I?"

"I can bring mine,"

"We're partners, then," he said. "You'll put the date in your little black book?"

"I don't have a little black book."

"You'll want to get one," and he hung up.

Mama was listening. I looked at her. She laughed.

"Mama, I think he's strange."

"You're a businesswoman suddenly."

"I said I think he's strange."

"Sweetheart, he's no stranger than the rest of the human race. He's a good musician. When's this page-turning event?"

"Sunday afternoon. Midoriya." That's near where we live. It's kind of our neighborhood park. It has lots sakura trees and rhododendron and camelia bushes all over the place. People walk their dogs there; it's a friendly place.

She rolled her eyes up toward the place where the wall and the ceiling come together. "That's right. Glad you reminded me. I promised him long ago I'd be there. We'll go together, all right?"

"I have to take clothespins," I said. She was putting some plates away. "Mama, why should I have a little black book?"

"That's the way men talk," she said. "Don't worry about it."

"Papa doesn't talk that way."

"Right. And I'm married to him, not to Shino-san. Did you eat breakfast?"

"Yep." I'd eaten an oatmeal recipe I'd made up. I suppose it's called Oatmeal Wiena. Here's how I make it:

1⁄3 cup rolled oats

2⁄3 + cup water

about 2 dozen raisins

a small handful of nuts

(almonds or walnuts)

1 apple

a sprinkling of cinnamon

a smaller sprinkling of nutmeg

½ + cup plain yogurt

a very small spoonful of honey

Cut the apple into very small bits, but don't peel it. Put the apple bits, raisins, and water in a saucepan on medium heat. Cover the pan, bring it to a boil, and then boil it for a minute or two. Poke some of the apple pieces with a sharp knife; when the knife goes through them easily, add the rolled oats. Follow the stirring and timing instructions on the rolled-oats box. When they're almost cooked, add the cinnamon, nutmeg, and nuts. Cover the pan and set it aside for the time the instructions say to. Then put the whole thing in a bowl, add the honey and the yogurt. Mix it all up and enjoy.

You can use a pear or a peach instead of the apple; the cooking time will be less. You can use a big spoonful of honey, or even brown sugar, if you want to. You can use any flavor of yogurt you want.

The music room is at the back of our house, like Uncle Asto's, but it's different. It has French doors to the outside, and lots of plants in pots because it faces south, and it's cluttered. It's got eight shelves of music, and a piano, and three music stands, and paintings of people playing music. And some photographs. There's room for people to play quartets or quintets here. There's even a sofa. And people are always leaving things when they take lessons from my parents. There's a Lost & Found Chair. That morning it had a green rain slicker on it, and a tan sweater, a cello sonata by Fauré with "Hoyt" scrawled on it, a pair of sunglasses, and a blue comb.

I was looking at the third movement of the concerto, the Rondeau. It's kind of like a body with all its different parts, and if you took the arms and legs and everything apart you could still match them up, because they really do all go together, kind of parallel parts. I was thinking that when you play the third Andante grazioso it feels as if you're at the heart of the movement.

"Playing Mozart isn't hard, but to play him well is what you can die trying to do." That's what people always say.

My mother came in with her spritzing watering can. "Wiena, how would you feel about sleeping in here for a few nights?"

"When?"

"Ruby's coming. She gets here next Tuesday." She climbed on a chair and spritzed some water on a Swedish ivy that hangs down from the ceiling. "She suddenly decided she couldn't stand to stay in a hotel."

My mother looked down at me with the spritzing can hanging in the air. "Well, she has more than her share of ambivalences about her life." I looked up at my mother in a question mark. "'Ambivalence' means you could go either one way or the other and you're not sure which. She thought she'd stay in a hotel, but she's just gotten rave reviews in both Boston and New York and they've unsettled her. Well, scared her, really. She doesn't want to be alone. So…" my mother stepped down off the chair, "she'll stay with us. All right?"

I looked at my mother and tried to imagine being scared by rave reviews.

I didn't remember Ruby clearly. She hadn't stayed with us when she came to Konoha to sing the year before; she just came for dinner and we went to her concert. She travels around singing all over the world.

"I don't know what kind of mood she'll be in. She may want to sleep in here herself. Sometimes she gets frightened of everyday things."

"Everyday things?"

"Yes, sometimes. She got frightened of staying in a hotel. Maybe she'll be frightened about being selfish if she takes your room, I don't know."

"Is she weird?"

Mama walked over to a plant called Boruto's Plant, I don't know its other name, and she walked around it, bending down to look under its leaves. "Ruby's had a troubled life, sweetheart. And she's our friend."

"Is she weird?" I asked again.

She straightened up and went to an auralia. She turned its pot clockwise a bit and spritzed. "I don't know, honey. What is weird? If she feels all right about sleeping in your room, do you feel all right about it?"

"I guess so." Actually, sleeping in the music room is kind of fun. All the paintings and photographs are right there, it's a kind of social feeling. Suba-chan and I sleep on the sofa.

My mother picked up a dead daddy longlegs from a table and held it in her hand, the way you'd hold an egg that fell from a birds' nest. She took it out of the room. She'd add it to the little collection of bugs that have died in the house. She keeps them on a table in the living room, in an antique dish, with a magnifying lens beside it. She thinks it's interesting to look at all their parts. She says they're Splendid Creatures, So Magnificently Made. When the bugs get dusty and fall apart, she takes the little pile outside, and then she starts a new collection.

(◕ω◕✿)

The first thing to do was get the concerto clearly and completely memorized, so it would be loud and clear in my mind. I'd lost some parts in the back of my mind since February. When we'd made the video, I hadn't imagined making the finals. For a video, the concerto didn't have to be memorized. For the finals, it had to be played from memory.

In fact, when Uncle Asto had given me both the third and fourth concertos and I'd played through them and then spun my bow to decide, I'd been completely ambivalent. If my bow had landed the other way, I wouldn't have ended up playing the Sarutobi Competition at all. The competition concerto was Number Four.

When the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma was little, he memorized two measures of a Bach cello suite each day. The suites are unaccompanied, no piano. In a year he knew three of them, how they were built, how the notes worked in patterns. Not everybody works that way. You have to find the way you work best. That's your method.

Different violinists play differently, of course. Anne-Sophie Mutter, who's German, plays the third movement of this concerto in seven minutes and twenty-one seconds. She was invited to play a solo with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic when she was fourteen. David Oistrakh took seven minutes and fifty-four seconds to play the same movement. He was Russian. And Itzhak Perlman plays it in seven minutes flat. And he wrote his own cadenzas. He's American. Those were the only three recordings of it we had in our house. I didn't know which one was what you'd call Best; I don't know how you even decide those things. What's Best? Faster isn't necessarily better. All I know is that I listened to all three of them quite a bit for several weeks.

I played the recordings in my room, on the old stereo that my grandfather Minato had given me for my eightth birthday. He won the stereo from the radio by sending in a question to the opera quiz that happens between the acts of the NHK radio broadcast on Saturdays. If the Met quiz uses your question on the radio, you get prizes. Grandpa Minato had sat at the dining-room table for a lot of nights thinking up questions and throwing them away; it took him a long time to come up with a good one. The one that got used was "How many operas can you name that take place on islands? And which of these islands are real and which are imaginary?" And for that he got that stereo. It almost didn't seem fair.

Summer was turning out to be a whole lot of practicing and not very much else. One day I got three emails: one from Ayane, one from Anya with Russian characters on it, saying that dance camp was harder than the, year before, and one from my stand partner in the Youth Orchestra who was suddenly moving to Tokyo. It felt as if everybody was going away.

My stand partner was seventeen years old, her name was Kotomi, and her parents got transferred and she had to go along. "They want me to go to Todai next year anyway," her mail said.

A stand partner is very important. In the string sections of an orchestra, two people share a music stand. Usually the outside person is the better player. Mirai-san, the concertmaster of the Youth Orchestra, says, "It's important how you occupy your space." The outside player can't just let the scroll of her violin hang out in the middle of the space and get in the way of the inside player's line of vision. The one on the inside, away from the audience, turns pages while the outside player keeps on playing. Of course you have to turn at just the right moment. You also have to listen to instructions together, and once Kotomi explained something I didn't understand.

Stand partners also have to agree on what things they want written in pencil on the pages, and who's going to write them. Kotomi and I'd agreed that we could use my music, with my writing, things like "Don't drag," and with difficult sections circled.

At the bottom of the mail she wrote, "Don't forget me, Little Buddy. Remember the time we played the wrong note together in the Shostakovich?"

I tried to imagine somebody else sitting in her chair. I missed her already. Just remembering the way she called me "Little Buddy" made me lonely.

When I turned pages for Shino-san at Midoriya Park, there was just a little breeze, so I didn't need the clothespins on every turn. And my mother let me borrow these very long clamps that she uses for outdoor concerts. She wasn't going to need them until Summer Festival, for the Heart's Desire Symphony concert in Tatsuhime Shrine. Mostly, I got to listen to the wind quintet. Papa and Mama and Uncle Asto and everybody were willing not to tell about the competition, so I didn't have to hear people wishing me luck, or looking at me and deciding whether I was going to win or lose it.

The quintet had a flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon. Shino-san announced all the pieces. During the second song, a horn honked loudly and burst into the music. At the end of the song, he said, "That was our sixth member. He always comes in late."

They were just beginning the second half of the concert, and the sun was streaming through the trees, making the bushes and everything gorgeous, and people were sitting around on their blankets with their food, when the dancing man got there.

He was wearing his same clothes. And he danced the same dance. If the music got faster or slower, he didn't change his dance. I watched him a lot. He was holding his arms out in sideways v's like crescendo markings, the same way he'd done in the square, and he moved his feet in a sort of oval; it was his dancing method. He still had his torn shoe.

At the end of the concert, the dancing man made a little bow to Shino-san's quintet. He did it while they were bowing to the audience and everybody was clapping.

I earned 10000 yen that day.

Papa stayed to talk to some friends, and my mother and I walked home together, through the park and up the hill and along the sidewalk where some little kids were jumping rope. Mama was swinging the canvas shoulder bag she carries, and I was holding my plastic bag of music clamps and jingling my money in my skirt pocket. It was a nice summer afternoon, and you could smell people's gardens.

"I love Konoha," Mama said. "If you have a little bit of ground, you can have any flowers. Anybody in the city can—if they have dirt."

Konoha is called the City of Flowers. It's because of the long growing season. Flowers bloom from early spring to late fall. We have eight flower bushes. In a park there's a huge Flower Garden on a hill where you can see thousands of flower and look down on the city. The squirrels there are so tame they come and grab food from your hand.

"I wonder if the dancing man has any," I said.

She reached in my pocket and took my hand out. We walked along holding hands. My money jingled. "Darling, I don't know."

We walked along. You could hear our sandals flapping. Then she said again, "I don't know." We walked along some more. "He's a victim. Probably…"

"… Of what? What do you think a victim of?" We were on our block, and you could hear sprinklers on people's lawns.

"I don't know. It could be a hundred different things."

(◕ω◕✿)

From Shino-san's concert I got two more page-turning jobs in the same week. Turning for pianists makes the most money by far; they have the most page turns.

"Only two more days till we get Ruby's Doldrums," Papa said a few mornings later when everybody was home for breakfast.

"Ruby's Delirium is more like it," Boruto said.

Mama replied, "I think you're both being stinkers. I don't want this to turn into Women versus Boys. Listen, she has to sing, and it'd be inhuman for us to do anything even slightly…"

Nobody said anything.

"And besides, if it gets cold or rainy or something, she could get sick, and it's our responsibility to…" She didn't finish that sentence either.

It's kind of a sad joke how singers get sick when they come to Konoha from other places. In summer it's not so bad, but mostly, Konoha weather is hard on them. Lots of rain. Once a baritone lost his voice for an opera and he had to stand on the stage acting out the singing while another man stood way down in the orchestra pit, right where Papa plays, doing the voice part. If you were there watching, it looked ridiculous.

"Weiss, word of honor. I won't do anything even slightly. Promise," Papa said, smiling.

Mama laughed. "You, Boruto?" she said. "Be a sweetheart."

"How do you be that?" he said.

"For one thing, you could try not imitating her when she practices," Papa said.

"She's gonna practice here?" I asked.

Mama looked at me. "Where else? Do you think it'd be better if she didn't practice here? What if somebody told you you couldn't—"

"Okay," I said. I was looking forward to having her come to stay. It would bring some variety into the house.

"Well, enjoy your nearly last French toast for a while," Papa said.

"Why?" I asked.

"No fried foods when Ruby's in the house," Mama said.

"Why not?" I replied.

"Her voice," Boruto answered. "She can't do her eeee-eeee-eeee if there's any residual fat in the air." He made loud, high sounds, like a giant mouse.

"Boruto, that's exactly what your father meant," Mama said. She looked at me, partly as if she wanted me to help, and partly as if she wanted to prevent something from coming loose.

(◕ω◕✿)

Uncle Asto was pleased with the way the concerto was going. He got out his violin a few times and we played parts of the concerto together. We listened to the copy he'd kept of the video we'd made in the winter. "Already in February you were in teamwork with the music. That was wonderful. For the preliminaries. Now we're ready to begin the hard part. It's no longer just the right notes in the right dynamics at the right time, Wiena-chan," he said. He turned sideways on the piano bench. "It's time to start making the concerto your own song."

I looked at him. I didn't even have all the notes exactly memorized.

"It's like this, Wiena-chan," he said. He held up both hands, about a foot apart. "Here's Mozart, over here. He has his concerto with him. And here you are, over here. See the distance between you? It's a fact. There are more than two hundred years. And there's all that ocean. And his mind and your mind. We're going to start moving them closer together. See?" He started moving his hands very, very slowly through the air. "We're going to bring them as close together as we can." He put his hands down on his knees. "That's what we're gonna do."

I looked at the places where his hands had been. Music poured out of Mozart. It wasn't automatic or anything, nobody's mind does it automatically. He had to find the notes in his mind and put them in order, but he just poured them out.

Uncle Asto put his hands up again. This time he brought them so close there wasn't even an inch between them. "We're going to get to the point where there's just an edge. The place where you and Mozart and his concerto meet. That's the edge we want. As little air space as we can manage. We're gonna try to close the distance." He looked at the little space between his hands. Then he put them down again and looked up at me. "How're you holding up?"

"I'm holding up fine," I said. Pyrrha Nikos was smiling in the photograph on the desk.

"Good. Because we've just begun. Do you like this concerto?"

I decided to come right out with the question that had bothered me. "Uncle Asto, why didn't you tell me sooner that I'd made the finals?" I was maybe even angry. "In fact, when you first gave me the concerto. At the very beginning. You knew there was this competition. I want to know why I was the last person to find out."

"So. You have been concerned, haven't you?"

I nodded my head. "When did you find out I was a finalist?"

He looked at me and waited for a little while. "Not so long before I told you. Not so very long, Wiena-chan."

Not so very long. It was getting through to me. "My parents knew and everything, then. A long time before I found out."

"Wiena-chan, you had school to finish up. The softball team … those play-offs you were in…"

For the whole last six weeks of school I'd been mostly a walking softball uniform. The school was counting on us, and in the mornings the intercom kept reciting the results of our games into all the rooms, and they made it seem like the most important thing in the world. And there were final exams. Ayane and Anya and I had very hard ones in our classes. "But even at the beginning. You didn't say, 'If you choose the Fourth Concerto you'll be entering the Sarutobi Competition—but if you choose the Third, you won't, because the Competition concerto is Number Four.'"

"Indeed. Yes." He folded his hands together, then spread them out flat on his lap. "I didn't tell you you might make the Sarutobi play-offs." He waited for me to laugh, and I did, just a little bit. "My dear Wiena, it's this way. First, I know too much about what happens when young musicians are forced into competition. Imagine how you'd have felt, trying to prepare this concerto for the finals if you were all the time wishing you were playing a different concerto. And second, once you selected this concerto, if I'd told you right then about the competition, you'd have learned it differently. Don't you think so?"

"I don't know."

"I want you first to love the music. Then compete."

"But it's the same concerto."

"No. If I'd given it to you and said, 'Listen, Wiena, you will play this concerto in competition in exactly so-and-so months,' it would not be the same concerto in your hands."

I looked at him and thumbed the strings of my violin with my right hand. It's a sort of nervous habit I have.

"And your softball is very important to you, too, is it not?"

I glimpsed myself a few weeks before, running to practice, running from practice, studying geography and English and math and everything else for finals, and my parents making me sit down and eat dinner with the whole family almost every single night "because we are a family, we're not just four random people running in and out of the same house," as my father said. And I glimpsed myself stretching to catch a fly in one game that made the winning out and hearing everybody yelling "Namikaze!" over and over again, and I remembered half the time having dust everywhere on me, in my ears and my hair, and the other half taking showers and hearing my whole body getting squeaky clean, and always being so tired. Tired. All the time.

"It was important. It was important then."

"Indeed. And Mozart was resting then. Now he's getting his turn. Things in their seasons, Wiena-chan." His eyebrows arched. "This is the music season."

I nodded my head a little bit.

"I want you and the concerto to be in partnership first. Only then can we bring you close to music. A general partnership of good feeling first. Then we close the distance. Is that clear?"

"I guess so."

"Well," he laughed, "good. Because I'm not convinced it's clear to me. These things are hard to explain, you know."

"I know." I laughed.

"Remember what somebody said: Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Let's play. Which movement?"

"Let's do the first," I said. I wanted to try this Closing the Distance from the beginning.

He stopped me at letter E. "Wiena-chan, I want you to try something this week. I want you to play this whole movement just as boldly as you can. I want you to say, 'ME: Wiena Namikaze. I'M playing this concerto.' I want you to jump right into it. Let's see what that accomplishes."

"Okay," I said. We started it again.

At the end of my lesson, Aunt Naruko brought in chocolate-chip cookies. She calls the treats Endorphin Therapy. "These are to give you the strength to get home, Wiena-chan," she said. The Endorphin Therapy was a joke, of course, but I was glad to have the extra strength, even if it would just be for the cadenzas.

(◕ω◕✿)

I changed the sheets on my bed for Ruby. I put on the ones with the music notation. You can read parts of The Magic Flute on them. Mama and Papa gave them to me for my nineth birthday, last year. I cleaned everything I could reach, the lampshades and everything, because Ruby is allergic. Ayane had brought me a Barbie doll all the way from America when we were seven years old, and I even cleaned that. And I took a box of things to the music room. My pajamas and my clipboard and things.

Ruby's airplane was late. She was coming from Aspen, Colorado. She was singing there at a festival. While we waited, Papa kept us occupied by making us guess things he already knew. How many daily newspapers are published in New York? Twenty-three. How many of them aren't in English? Thirteen. Both Mama and I guessed way wrong. What Tibetan product does the British army use in its helmets? Yak hair. We both guessed way wrong again. What species has nerve fiber a thousand times wider than humans'? The squid. My mother burst into laugther and said Papa could ask everybody in the entire airport and nobody would know that one.

I went to the bathroom. In the Narita airport, you have to step on a button on the floor to turn on any water at all. There was a middle-aged lady standing in front of a washbasin, feeling around. She had a white cane with a red tip hanging on her arm, and she was wearing sunglasses. She obviously wanted to turn the water on. There was nobody else in the bathroom so I said, "You have to step on a button, Obaasan."

She felt around with her right foot. Water spurted out of the faucet. "Oh—thanks, dear," she said. It's always kind of surprising when you hit the button for the first time.

"It's the same with the toilet," I said. "To get it to flush." I didn't know if I was doing the right thing or not.

She turned sideways toward me but I knew she couldn't see me. "What an interesting system," she said. Then she laughed. "It's a secret code."

"Yep," I said. I laughed, too.

I pretended to be washing my hands but I was just running the water and watching her. How would you know how to turn on the water if somebody didn't tell you, if you couldn't see it? It could take you hours to figure it out. You'd be feeling around in your brain for the right question to ask, and you'd be wondering why the water wouldn't go on. You'd hear it going on at the other basins. You wouldn't have the information you need.

It was a little bit—very much—like trying to get over the gap to the Mozart concerto. I could hear it played beautifully on the records, and I was feeling around in my brain for the information I had to have to play it the way I needed to play it.

Ruby was carrying about six bags, and she had a huge suitcase checked. She has a neck-length, black hair with red ombre, and she has that great big loopy earrings. An Ear Lady.

"Wiena, my sweet! I knew you when you were a baby. Let me look at you, darling." She and I were squinched in the backseat of Papa's car, with some of her bags, and the rest of her luggage was behind us, in the place where his guitar bass rides. She has huge silver eyes that stare.

"Ah, the gene pool," she said, and laughed. "You're so much like your Mama when she was younger. And there's that snow, white hair! Weiss, is there anyone in your family who doesn't have white hair?"

Mama laughed. "No. I don't think so."

"It's not really white," I said. "More like silver gray."

"Do you know what I mean when I say 'gene pool'?" she said.

"Yep. It's the way you get things from both parents. In your genes."

"And from their parents, and their grandparents. How's the violin going?"

"Fine."

"What're you playing now?"

I shuffled music around in my mind, avoiding Mozart. I wasn't ready to tell her about the competition.

"She's playing page turner this summer," Papa said. "Earning money. By the way, Wiena-chan, can you turn for a pianist on Saturday? Two o'clock?"

"Okay," I said.

"Ah, blessed are the Konoha breezes," Ruby said. "What've you turned?"

I told her all the pieces I could think of.

We put all Ruby's bags and things in my room. She said she just wanted to be alone for a few minutes "to try to find some coherence."

(◕ω◕✿)

With Ruby staying with us, arranging practice times could get complicated. Boruto hung a sign-up sheet on the music-room door. It was divided into half-hour blocks, and you could sign up for as many as you wanted, as long as you weren't selfish about it. The sign-up sheet had a picture on it that he drew. It was somebody with lots of arms, like that Hindu demigod Asura, and the person was playing two violins and a cello and singing at the same time.

I was just about asleep in the music room that first night and I was watching this painting we have. It's by Marc Chagall and it's called The Green Violinist. The man has a green face, and he's playing a violin. He's wearing a purple hat and coat, and things are flying through the painting. The violinist is up in the air above some buildings, and there's a small gray man flying in the sky and another man, even smaller, holding up his arms to catch the flying one. I've always liked that painting. You can think that the man playing the violin is sending flying music into the air and that's why everything flies, or you can think there's some other reason why they fly.

There's a streetlight near the corner of our house, and it shines through the windows of the music room at night, so you can see things kind of in a gray color. And there are sort of trapezoids of light on the carpet from the French doors.

Someone knocked on the door. "Am I bothering you, Wiena?" It was Ruby.

I told her she wasn't.

"I won't stay long." She was in a balloony white nightgown with lace, and bare feet, the nightgown made a cottony sound when she walked. She still had that long, dangly earrings on, and you could hear them tinkling when she walked. She had a big glass of milk in one hand.

"Want me to turn on the lamp?" I asked.

"No, I just want to sit here with you in the half-light."

She sat down in the chair the second violinist uses when there are quartets. She put the glass of milk on the floor and stretched both arms above her head and then out to the sides, the way you do in the breaststroke. Then she folded her hands in her lap. "I'm stupid with exhaustion. And I can't sleep. Does that ever happen to you?"

"I think so," I said. I was thinking of the final exams we had to take at the end of school. Ayane, Anya and I spent the whole night just sitting in front of the TV set, watching old movies. We were at Anya's house. We'd taken the history exam that day. All on Egypt and ancient China.

"It was Aspen that did it to me. The altitude. And rehearsal's at nine tomorrow morning. This is terrible."

I hunched up on my left elbow and bunched up the pillows. "Do you get nervous when you sing?" I asked her.

"Do I get nervous?" She didn't say anything for about a minute. "Wiena, I throw up before I go onstage."

"Miss Ruby, that's awful"

"I know. It is awful. The first thing I find when I'm singing anyplace new is the bathroom. That's more important than where the stage is or who's accompanying me or anything else. It's ghastly."

"But once you get started singing it's all right?"

"Yes. It gets all right. I could take a beta blocker, but I don't like drugs."

"What's a beta blocker?"

"It's a drug. It slows your heart, makes it less excitable. It helps keep you steady. Great for stage fright. Some musicians take them all the time. They walk in and play their hearts out. It's crazy."

"It doesn't sound crazy to me." I was thinking about the competition, of course. I didn't know there was a drug for stage fright.

"Oh, I know somebody who hallucinated when she took it. Very good flutist. She won a prize and she saw donkeys in the auditorium. I don't think it's a very good trade-off. Ehehehe."

She got up and walked over to the photograph of Einstein as an old man playing the violin. He has that white hair you always see in pictures of him. She hummed around the photographs of Fritz Kreisler, Pablo Casals, and the other musicians on the wall. She walked over to the French doors and looked out. "Your flowers are wonderful. Do you know that?"

"Yep," I said. I thought of the dancing man, without any flowers. We probably have more than our share.

Ruby walked back to the chair and sat down. She almost didn't make any noise when she moved.

"What are the big things in your life these days, Wiena?" she said. "Now that school's out and everything."

I moved a little bit and pushed the pillows around and sat up straighter. I didn't say anything. I hadn't told anybody in person, except my parents and Boruto, about the competition. I'd told Anya and Ayane by email.

She hit her forehead with her fist. "Oh—I completely forgot. This guy your Mama and I used to know is coming here. It's a guy we knew at school. In fact, he's already here. Teaching at some college. Or university. He's a biologist. He's got a son, a violinist. Older than you. I haven't seen the kid since he was tiny. I heard about him in Aspen, though; he's supposed to be very good. Somebody who knows somebody who knows him told me. I wrote it all down on an envelope. He'll probably turn up in your orchestra—what's it called?"

"The Konoha Youth Orchestra."

"He'll probably turn up here. Do you like playing in it?"

"Sure. I like it a lot."

"Are you the youngest?"

"No. There are a couple of really little kids."

"But you're one of the youngest?"

"I guess so. Yep. I am. You know what somebody did once?"

"What?" She took a big swig of milk.

"This guy, he's a cellist, he had the repeat section memorized, and he didn't turn the page back, so the girl playing on the outside just went ahead and didn't play the repeat. It was only in rehearsal, but still."

Ruby laughed, just a little bit. "That's a very dirty trick, Wiena."

"I know it. He got in trouble for it."

"What kind of trouble?"

"He didn't get to play the whole next concert. Not even rehearsals. He was kicked out for the whole time. Three months."

She was laughing again. "Good for him, he deserved it. I get the impression you really love the violin, Wiena. Am I right?"

"Yep. I do."

"Do you know why?"

"No. I don't think I know. It feels good."

"Can you imagine not playing it?"

"No!" It came out surprisingly loud.

Ruby nodded her head. "Then you're stuck with it, aren't you?"

"I guess so. I guess I am."

She looked at me for quite a while with her intense eyes. "Wiena, here's something about doing music—or painting a picture or anything. When you're doing it, you have to remember everything you've ever learned, and simultaneously forget all of it and do something totally new." She was silent for a while more. "Because if you do the first part and not the second, you're making music or art just like everybody else's. It's not your own."

I was asking myself silently if I could ever do that, remember and forget at the same time.

"When I lived in Boston, I used to watch the Celtics a lot. They do the same exact thing—when they're at their best. You watch one of those beautiful shots go exploding down through the basket and that's what's going on. That guy has in his memory every basket he's ever shot—and at the same instant he's making up a new one. The divine inspiration of the NBA."

"Miss Ruby, I never heard anybody say that before."

"Well, that's the way it is."

"Is that what you do?"

"Yes, that's part of it. When I'm at my best."

I imagined her bent over throwing up. "And you still throw up?"

"Sure. That's why, in fact. Or that's part of it. I'm afraid I won't be able to get that simultaneity." She clenched and unclenched both her hands on the lap of her white nightgown. "There are all kinds of static just waiting up there," she pointed to her head, "to sabotage things."

I reached for the clipboard. "How do you spell those?"

"What? 'Sabotage'?" She spelled it for me. "It means 'to ruin completely.' You have to learn new words for school, or for yourself?"

"Well, both, I guess. A list for school homework, but I'll need them anyway. And simultan—"

She spelled "simultaneity." I wrote them down.

"You could wear a raincoat," I said. "For throwing up."

She was stretching her arms again. "That's exactly what I do."

"Good. What's this violinist like, this boy?"

"Oh, Ryuuji? I don't know. When he was a little kid, he was darling. He had a sixteenth-size violin. Long black hair and huge lavender eyes. Long eyelashes. And Lego blocks. He built the most amazing things, he must've been three years old. Big towers. He had phenomenal concentration." I was watching Ruby take her long, dangly earrings out of her ears. They tinkled when she had them both out and was holding them in her hand. "He'll probably end up being your boyfriend, Wiena. Heehee."

"I don't think so. You said he's old."

"Oh, not so old. Probably about Boruto's age, I should think. That's not old. I can tell you lots about old." She got up and went over to a photograph of Hiruzen Sarutobi. It's kind of low on the wall, and you have to bend over to look at it. I kept not telling her about the Sarutobi Competition.

I heard a clinking of metal on wood. Two clinkings. She knelt down, her balloony nightgown spreading kind of like a white swan around her.

"Oh no, I dropped an earring." She was bending over Papa's guitar bass, which he'd left out of the case, lying on its side. "I can't find it. Turn on the light, will you?"

I got up and turned it on. It was too bright; my eyes hurt. She was feeling around. Then she took hold of the bass by the neck. You could hear something rattle inside.

She looked at me. She looked panicked. "Wiena. It fell through the f-hole," she said in a frightened voice. She put the bass back on its side. "Oh, Wiena. What have I done?" She was whispering.

"It's okay," I whispered back, as I walked over to where she was squatting on the floor. "We'll shake it out. Look. You pick up the neck, I'll pick up this end, we'll just turn it over—" I started to pick up the body.

"No! I couldn't pick up a thing. I'm shattered. Wiena, it's always like this. Every single place I go I do something hideous.…" She put both hands up over her face, one fisted up with the other earring in it. Her hands were shaking.

I squatted down beside her and put my hand on her shoulder. I whispered, "No, really, Papa won't be mad. It's all right. We'll just let it fall out the f-hole where it went in.… Or the other one…"

She was letting out very strange sounds, part sighing and part crying, I couldn't tell which was the main part. And she was shaking all over.

"Well, we can do it in the morning then. Really, it's gonna be all right. Papa won't be upset. Do you want me to do it by myself?"

Ruby shook her head hard. "No. Don't—don't do anything.…" She still had both hands over her face. Her hair was hanging down partly covering her face, too. I couldn't see her eyes; her teeth were clenched tight and even her feet were shaking. Seeing her so almost paralyzed was getting me shaky, too. I kept wishing for a first-aid kit, even though I knew it wouldn't have anything in it that would help.

"Maybe we'd better go to sleep, Miss Ruby. Maybe you're just tired. From Aspen … It's late.…"

She just stayed there squatted on the floor, shaking. I brought the rest of the glass of milk to her. I nudged the sleeve of her nightgown with it. She pushed the milk away without looking at it.

"Miss Ruby," I whispered, "do you want an aspirin?" I put my hand on her shoulder again.

"No! No drugs!" She was almost shouting but still in a whisper.

"Do you want to lie here on the sofa then? Just till you feel better?"

"Oh, Wiena, I can't believe I've done this terrible thing—"

I started to laugh. "It's not so terrible. Just an earring in a guitar bass—"

"Stop it! I've ruined everything—" She let her hands slide down her face and looked up at me, almost like a little tiny kid playing peekaboo. Her eyes looked terrified.

"You haven't either. Come on, stand up, come over and sit on the sofa. Tell me what you're gonna sing at the concert. Please?"

Ruby let her hands slide down to the floor and looked at me. Her face got smoother. She pushed herself up and stood looking around the music room. Suddenly she was talking in her normal voice. "Oh, Wiena, it's beautiful. It's an all-French program, and—just beautiful. Lovely songs…"

She opened her hand and looked at the earring in it. It had three gold circles and inside the smallest one were three tiny bells. She bounced it in her hand and walked over to the sofa and sat down on the down sleeping bag I was using for covers. Her nightgown looked as beautiful as a wedding dress. She stared at the earring in her hand and didn't say anything for a long time. Then she whispered, "Wiena, I am a disaster."

I didn't know what to say. I could say, No you're not, but she was being quite strange, and I didn't think I could convince her.

"What time is it?" she asked.

I looked at the clock. It was after midnight. I told her.

"Oooooohhhhh," she said in a long sigh.

"Let's get some sleep, Miss Ruby?"

She stared at me the way she'd been staring at the earring in her hand.

"Papa won't be mad. Promise."

"How can you say that when men are so unpredictable?"

"He's my father."

She walked over to the metronome and turned it on at a slow tempo. Then she walked around the room, staying far away from Papa's bass. The metronome was ticking, she was walking, almost like dancing, very slowly, but not exactly with the metronome's rhythm. "I love coming here. To Konoha. Your house. It's so peaceful," she said. Then she picked up the glass of milk, drank what was left in it, said good night to me and walked out, pulling the back of her long white nightgown to her when she closed the door. I turned off the metronome and the light and lay down under the down sleeping bag. I knew I should be writing a word or two on my clipboard. I didn't know what the words were, though.

(◕ω◕✿)

I woke up in the middle of the night and remembered Papa's bass. I turned on the light and wrote him a note on the clipboard paper: Talk to me before you do anything else in the morning. I went upstairs in the dark and slipped the note under my parents' bedroom door. The whole house was quiet; I could see the windows and chairs and things just standing there in their shapes, like something waiting to begin.

Mama came into the music room early in the morning to water the plants. Papa came along with her. I was just waking up and thinking about practicing. I'd signed up for the 7:00 A.M. practice slot, but I was worried about waking Ruby.

"What's this note about, honey?" Papa said. He stood at the end of the sofa in front of my feet. Mama was humming around the Swedish ivy with her watering spritzer.

I looked at him. "Ruby's all upset." I sat up.

Mama stopped spritzing and Papa gave her a look—just a look, no real expression on his face—as if he were listening to her, except that she wasn't talking.

"Well, last night she came to talk to me, she couldn't go to sleep, she was wearing this beatiful, long white nightgown—and she accidentally dropped one of her earrings and it fell through the f-hole in your bass."

Papa kind of smiled. "The things that have fallen through f-holes could fill a small museum," he said.

"And then she had a sort of fit. She—she said she'd ruined things, and she always does this.… I couldn't even talk to her." Looking back on it, I realized I'd actually been afraid.

Papa looked at me and then over at Mama. "Weiss, you decide."

Mama stood with the spritzing can in her hand. "Decide what?"

He kept looking at her. "Decide what's to be done about Ruby. What time was all this, Wiena-chan?"

"Kind of midnight."

Mama took a big breath and said, "What's going to be done is get her fed, get her to rehearsal, make sure she takes a nap, give her all the love and safety we can, get her to the concert, and hear her sing. That shouldn't be so difficult for reasonable human beings to accomplish."

"Mama, do you know she throws up before she sings?"

"Yes, darling, I know," Mama said. "Do you want breakfast?"

I watched my mother. She picked up a bug from a begonia leaf and closed her hand lightly over it, carried it to the French doors and opened one of them with the hand that was holding the watering can, and sent the bug out into the air. "What a lovely morning," she said to the yard. "Is it all right if I leave the door partly open? The air smells beautiful,"

If she left the door open, more bugs would come in, and if she saw them she'd pick them up and put them outdoors again. When they're bees, she talks to them, nudging them toward an open door with her voice until they leave. That's the way to get bees to go away, she says.

"Sure," I said.

"Do you think Ruby had a right to get strange with Wiena?" Papa said.

She turned around. "The world is so full of a number of things…" She didn't finish it. The rest of it says, We should be happy as kings. She kissed him on the neck and went out of the room.

Papa was trying to protect me. And Mama was pretending everything was normal. Both of them were being kind of unrealistic.

Papa went over to the bass. "Wiena-chan, lift the neck, will you? Let's get this thing out and minimize the trauma around here."

"Okay," I said. I climbed out from under the sleeping bag. My blue pajamas were really dull, compared to Ruby's nightgown. We shook the bass gently and in a few minutes the earring dropped out. Papa spelled "trauma" for me and I wrote it on the clipboard. He said it means something terrible happening and getting whatever it happens to all upset. When people get in car accidents they have traumas. Being born is a trauma, he said. It takes you out of what you're used to and puts you somewhere else, and you don't understand anything that's going on.

Papa put his bass in its case, "where it should've been, anyway," as he said. "Peace of Mind requires eternal vigilance." We laughed. Papa's really into Peace of Mind, and that thing about eternal vigilance is sort of his slogan.

It was past seven, and I hadn't even picked up my violin yet. I took it out, put rosin on the bow, and did some nasty Kreutzer for a few minutes.

Everybody except Boruto was at breakfast. He had to work early for his part-time job; they kept changing his shifts. The breakfast conversation was about the concert, and old friends, and Ruby was just fine. She spilled cream when she poured it on the peaches and cereal, and she just laughed. She was wearing shorts and a huge sweater. Her hair was up on her head, in a scarf. She said she couldn't get over the luxury of eating breakfast in an authentic dining room. "Breakfast in a dining room—can you imagine that in New York?" she said. "With trees and birds outside?" Mama and Papa laughed. I was thinking about her throwing up peaches and cereal that night before she sang.

"What about that friend of yours, the one coming to Konoha—with the son?" I asked her. "You were gonna tell Mama."

Her eyes got big. "Oh, Weiss! Remember Neji Hyuuga?"

Mama laughed. "Sure. With his pale eyes and long black hair. I wonder what he looks like now."

"You're about to find out. He's got an appointment to do research here, I don't know. His little tiny son is a genius prodigy like you and Asto, plays violin."

"Violin?" my mother said. Ruby nodded her head ."How'd you find out?"

"In Aspen. Some people were talking about this genius kid who'd been studying there, and his name was Hyuuga, and I just asked. It turns out to be little Ryuuji Hyuuga who used to build towers with Lego blocks."

Mama looked at the ceiling. "Little Ryuuji Hyuuga is … I think he's—something like thirteen now? Fourteen?"

"Probably. And I have a rehearsal."

"I'll drive you. It's only about ten minutes. We'll leave at eight-thirty, do you want the practice room?"

Nobody mentioned anything about the earring in the bass. Papa was gathering his briefcase and things, getting ready to teach his class across the Samegawa River from where we live, on the same side of the city with Shopping District. It's a music theory class, even in the summer.

Everybody left and I practiced. I was working on "ME: Wiena Namikaze. I'M playing this concerto." It wasn't completely a matter of playing it louder. In some places, it was a matter of playing it softer. Like this part, the fifth and sixth measures after letter B in the second movement.

Right there, between the third and fourth notes, I decided I could get so soft you could hear a bunny rabbit sleeping, as Uncle Asto said once, a long time ago, when I was a little kid and he was trying to teach me what pianissimo really was. And this ME: Wiena Namikaze–thing was a matter sometimes of landing on a note and staying there almost too long, so if you were listening, you'd almost wonder if I was ever going to leave that note.

(◕ω◕✿)

Mama and Ruby got back from the rehearsal and Ruby wanted to be on the move. Mama had to wait for the piano tuner to arrive. The piano tuner is a very hard-faced old lady, and she won't tune our piano any other time than exactly noon, and she'd made the appointment two months ago, and she won't change her schedule for anybody. She used to scare me when I was a little kid. I was afraid of the noise her teeth made, a clack-clacking sound.

"I want to go to that place, that flower garden, the one way high up on the hill. You'll go with me, Wiena?" Ruby said.

Mama thought the Flower Garden was a great idea; Ruby could drive Mama's car, and I'd guide her there. We'd be back in time for Ruby to take a nap before the concert. She wanted to have lunch at our house first so she could eat in a real dining room again, so we did. We made sushi tuna fish and tomato sandwiches. Ruby changed from her sweater to a big re shirt and she took the scarf off and let her hair hang down. I already had shorts on. The day was getting hot. We took some old bread to feed the Flower Garden squirrels.

"I never drive a car in New York," Ruby said as she backed Mama's car out of the garage. "In fact, I haven't driven in a year or so." She laughed. I made sure I gave her directions way ahead of time, so she could change lanes and things without getting upset.

We parked Mama's car by the soccer field, where some young people were playing soccer and we walked down the stone steps. Ruby kept saying how wonderful Konoha was. "People here just park their cars and play soccer on a summer afternoon. They just do it. It's so simple. Do you have any idea what you'd have to go through in New York just to play a game of sport? Wiena, it's absurd."

"No," I said.

"Subways. Sports club membership fees. Crowds. Reserved courts. It takes more effort than it's worth, sometimes. Everything in that whole city does."

"Then why do you live there?" I asked.

"Wiena, there are more concerts in New York every year than a single person could go to in a lifetime. An embarrassment of riches. Come visit me there, will you?" She reached down and held my hand. I looked sideways at her. "I'll take you to hear such music. Such music."

We were kind of bouncing along down the steps into the flowers, holding hands.

"Look at this—millions of flowers. Millions." She stood still and looked very slowly all the way to the left and then all the way to the right. "Millions," she said again. The sun was really bright and she was squinting. "Wiena, smell that smell!"

We walked around. The flowers are in more different colors than you can believe at first. After you've been there a lot of times you just go along with it, but if it's your first time there, it's hard to imagine so many different kinds of flowers.

"Rose, protea, peony, chrysanthemum, magnolia, orchid, sakura, anemone, lotus, iris, tulip, lily, dahlia, plumeria, camellia, daffodil…" she sighed, and I laughed. "You could spend your life here, couldn't you?" she said, and let my hand go.

"I guess so," I said. I took her over to the hill on one side of the Flowe Garden where they have concerts sometimes. There's a big concrete stage, and the audience sits on steps carved into the hill.

We went down to the stone wall at the bottom of the garden. It's where you look out over the town, and where the squirrels live. They grabbed the bread right out of our hands. I watched her feeding them. They looked intensely at her hand and she looked intensely back at them.

We went up the hill to the place where the sculpture is. It's made of silvery aluminum, and it has three tall columns, connected with thick arches at the top. There are two smaller columns; they're not connected to the rest of the sculpture. They come up to about my chin and they have water coming down them. Under the sculpture is shallow water in a squared-off pool, and over it there are walkways, little bridges, in a kind of cross. People drop coins in the water, and you can jump across parts of the pool if you get a good start.

Ruby knocked with her knuckles on one of the big thick columns and it made a nice drummy sound, echoing in the hollowness. Then she went to another one and did the same thing. The tone was different. She hit the third one, and I hit one of the small columns and then ran across to the other one and hit it. We had five different tones. It was like metal kettle drums with splashing added. Then we walked on the bridges around the columns, hitting each side, and the tones were all different. We had twenty different tones, and that didn't even include what you'd have if you played them as high as you could reach and then way down to the level of your feet.

It was Ruby who started the song.

She began slowly, BONG bong Bong bong with her knuckles on the three big columns, walking between them. Then she reached up high and down low, faster, and I hit one of the two small columns when she left a silent spot. The rhythm was slow, we were just bonging around. Pretty soon, I started moving back and forth across the little bridge between the two small columns; I had eight different sides to bong on. Ruby accelerated the tempo, and I had to start running. Then she changed the rhythm to groups of threes, and moved into my small-column territory. I moved into hers, the big columns. We were getting a little bit faster, and a little girl in a yellow dress started bonging with us. She couldn't reach very high, so her tones were different. Now there were six hands bonging and six legs traveling across the bridges.

Then two little boys came to play tunes. They stayed on one of the watery columns for a few beats before they started to move around. One had brown shorts and one had jeans. They were a little taller than the girl in the yellow dress, so their tones were between hers and ours.

Ruby began to hit harder, and pretty soon everyone else did, too. A teenage boy and girl in sunglasses joined in, running around the outside of the sculpture. Some other people appeared. It was getting really loud, with slow beats and fast beats and lots of different rhythms, and drops of water flying. BONG. BONG. BONG. And Bong-bong, Bong-bong, Bong-bong. And Bonnnnnggggg, Bonnnnnggggg, Bonnnnnggggg. And Bongbongbong, Bongbongbong, Bongbongbong. And ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping. And pingBONG pingBONG. Somebody, I don't know who, found a way to go Bommmmmphphph. And I kept hearing a little plink plink plink. I think it was the lady with the long fingernails and the big sun hat. I don't know where she came from. Maybe she came with the man in the soccer jersey.

A strange symphony was going on, all made of drumbeats and water.

We all had to go carefully when we wanted to move to a different column, because the little boys kept moving all the time and everybody else had to be careful not to run into them.

We couldn't see each other when we were playing; the columns were in the way, or we had our backs to the others if we were on the inside of the sculpture. We just played. Once when I turned around, I saw that an old man had joined in, bonging on one of the columns and checking a big gold pocket watch each time, staying out of the way of the water drops.

I never figured out how everybody stopped almost at the same time. Maybe we all just got tired. All I remember is stopping and looking around and finding out that there was no more music going on except that the old man bonged twice more and checked his watch. There was just a very soft hum in the air for a few seconds, and then it faded away.

Everybody started to walk away, but a lady with a camera put her arm out right in front of the teenage girl's face and said, "No, wait. Just one. Just wait for one?"

The girl and her friend laughed and shook water out of their hair. The man in the soccer jersey grinned and made the "okay" sign with his thumb and index finger. Ruby started gathering everybody else together, bringing the little girl in the yellow dress along by the hand. A lady, the little girl's mother, I guess, motioned to her to stay with Ruby, and she pulled a camera out of her shoulder bag. The two little boys had taken off their shoes to wade in the water under the sculpture and some grown-ups made them get out and stand with the rest of us to have their picture taken. The lady with the big sun hat ran after the old man, who was walking away, and brought him back. He had a big white mustache, and he was wearing a vest and a black hat. He stood still and stared at the camera.

Four more picture takers lined up. We just stood there crowded together and waited. Somebody said, "What's the name of our group?"

The teenage boy did a pose and said, "The Heavy Metal Gang."

The girl with him slapped his head. "Idiot! That's so very not cute name."

"Hey, how about Good Vibrations?" somebody said.

The lady with the big sun hat said, in a kansai accent, "A Curious Group of the People?" Cameras were clicking.

"Musical Anarchy?" Ruby asked. She bent down and asked the little girl in the yellow dress what she thought. "That's a good idea," she said to the little girl. "Say it louder. Get quiet, everyone. Listen!"

There were eleven of us to get quiet. "Flower Music," the little girl said.

She had a little chirpy voice and several people nodded their heads, and the teenage boy said, "Yeah, that's our name." More cameras clicked, and then everybody drifted off in different directions.

A crumpled old lady in a wheelchair, being pushed by somebody, said in a creaky little voice as she went past me, "Wonderful. Wonderful…" She had on a green sun visor and her head was shaking. She and her pusher wheeled on to look at more flowers.

Ruby leaned into my ear and said in a soft voice, "She's right. That's why we're here. On this planet. To make music. It's probably the oldest art form. You know, people hopping around in caves, singing their stories, singing their prayers, banging on things, making rhythm … It's all the same thing. Sending messages."

We stood there, staring down the slope of flowers for a while, not saying anything. The smell of millions of flowers was so great, a crowded smell, of almost too many flowers, if there is such a thing. I squatted down and watched a big ant pushing a grain of dirt along through the grass. It went around a giant blade of grass, made a turn, kept pushing the grain of dirt, came to another giant blade of grass, made another turn, and kept pushing. I watched it move about an inch before Ruby squatted down beside me. Her black hair hung down to the top of the grass.

"Look at that. All that work," she said.

"It's gone about an inch," I said.

"So have we all," she said. A drop of water slid off her elbow onto the grass.

I didn't say anything. We watched the ant move about another two inches. Then Ruby said, "I have to take a nap. You ready, Wiena?"

"Sure. Let's go." We went up the steps to Mama's car.

"Life, my darling Wiena, is a terrible, terrible thing sometimes," she said. I didn't say anything.

As we were on the bridge going across the Samegawa River, Ruby said, "Wiena, did you notice the way the music was happening, back there in the Flower Garden? That percussion symphony?"

"What do you mean, Miss Ruby?"

"In a way, no one was making any music. Really, it was just a matter of letting the music out. Out of the sculpture."

"You mean it's in there all the time?"

"Sure. Same with your violin. Same with my body. Whatever your instrument is."

I'd never heard anybody actually say it. I looked at her, driving along across a bridge, just like anybody else.

"Miss Ruby?"

"What, Wiena?"

Even knowing that Ruby wasn't a normal, stable, regular person, I told her a private thing from my childhood. "That's what I thought when I was a little tiny kid. I thought Mama had music inside her piano, when she moved her fingers and it just came out, the beautiful sounds. When I first picked up a violin, I was so shocked that there was no music coming out of it, I hid under my parents bed and cried and cried. There were just these screeches."

Ruby looked across the car at me. Nobody said anything the rest of the way home.

(◕ω◕✿)

I practiced with the mute on while Ruby took her nap. A violin mute is a little black thing you hook on the bridge to make the sound softer.

Uncle Asto, of course, didn't know anything about the music living inside a thing and waiting to be let out; I wasn't sure I wanted him or anybody else to know what Ruby and I'd said about it. And I didn't know what he'd think about simultaneously remembering and forgetting everything you know. But just three days before, he'd said more about closing the distance between Mozart and me. "The concerto is already there. It's not static—look at all the different ways people can play it. But it's there. It exists. On these paper pages." He put his hand flat on the first page of the third movement. "This concerto is what it is. You're the one doing the moving. Moving toward the center of it." He patted his stomach. "That's what you're doing. Everybody has a different relationship with it. Everybody moves into the center of it differently. You can't have Perlman's relationship with it, or Mutter's, or mine. You have your own. You have this concerto in your own way." He looked hard at me. "It's a very fragile thing, Wiena-chan," he said, his eyes not blinking, staring straight into my face, "almost dangerous, getting to know something that intimately." Then he laughed. "Talking about it is ridiculous, isn't it?"

Mozart composed so much music, and he did it so fast, and when he died the pieces weren't in any order. Somebody named Köchel came along after Mozart had died and made a list of all his compositions. Every Mozart piece has a Köchel number. The Fourth Concerto is K. 218, and the highest Köchel number is 626.

I was spending my summer with a Köchel number.

Ruby didn't want dinner. She did warm-up exercises in the music room for about fifteen minutes before we went to the city hall for her concert. She did sound kind of like the way Boruto did when he was imitating her. I put on a blue-and-white striped skirt and blouse and put my hair in a braid down my back.

Rube wore a long and swishy crimson red dress with balloony sleeves, and the material was kind of gold-flecked. She was wearing skinny gold sandals with little heels. And long dangly gold earrings with little ruby stones in them. She had her raincoat on.

Mama drove her to the concert early and I went along. Papa was coming later. While we were in the car, Ruby stared straight ahead, saying something over and over again. I didn't hear exactly what it was. I was sitting in the backseat on the other side of the car, behind Mama, so I could look at Ruby. It sounded like "Horrible wonderful horrible wonderful horrible horrible horrible wonderful horrible…" Mama reached over while she was driving and held Ruby's hand; I saw her do it in the space between the seats. Then she let it go when she had to shift gears to go into the parking lot.

We walked around the Stem People having their picnics on the lawn outside the city hall. They eat first and then go to the concert. Ruby whispered, "I love being in plaid-shirt country again. Weiss, this is a wonderful place."

I looked around. There were several men in plaid shirts. Mama was laughing and doing that big embarrassing wave at some people she knew, the one where she puts her hands up to her ears and grins. Some people were staring at Ruby.

"Remember where the bathroom is, it's around the corner on the right," I whispered and pointed for Ruby on our way in.

She gave me a sideways hug. "Thanks. Wish me love," she said.

"Love," I said back to her.

Mama said "Love," too, and Ruby walked to the place they use as backstage.

"Didn't she mean 'Wish me luck'?" I asked Mama.

"We used to say 'Wish me love' when we were in school." She took hold of my hand for just a second and then let it go.

We walked around, picked up programs, and put sweaters across three cushions to save them, including one for Papa when he got there. You almost always take a sweater or jacket when you go to a summer concert in Konoha, because the nights usually get cold.

We walked outside again, and somebody came dashing over to us. It was a golden-haired lady Mama and Papa know. "Wiena-chan," she said, "would you consider turning pages for me next Thursday? I've seen you with your dad, and with Shino-san? I need a page turner badly?"

I couldn't even remember what instrument she played. I just remembered her face and her hair, and I remembered she talked in questions.

Mama looked at me. I looked at her and then back at the lady. "Sure. I can do it," I said. "Where?"

"The Community Music Center? Can you be there by six-thirty? I'll show you the fast turns?" She looked at Mama and said, "It's the Mendelssohn C minor?" and rolled her eyes.

I looked at my mother again. "We'll have her there," she said.

"Thanks, Wiena-chan. You've bailed me out?" the lady said, and walked away.

"My daughter the rich woman," Mama whispered, and then did that big ear-hello thing to some more people.

I wasn't rich, and I was trying to picture Ruby throwing up on that beautiful re dress while people ate their food and drank their drinks on the lawn getting ready to hear her sing. Papa got there and we went inside to our cushions. I sat between him and Mama. He sat down on his with a thud. He opened his program and said, "Let's see what's on the menu," and started reading it.

Mama explained that the golden-haired lady was a pianist with a trio. The other two instruments are violin and cello. I wanted her to explain about Ruby in the car, but I didn't actually ask.

Papa was muttering, "Oh. The Queen of the Night's going to sing all in French." Mama reached behind me and put her hand on his elbow and said, "Ruto, please." He was making fun of Ruby for what she'd done in the music room the night before. The Queen of the Night is a character in Mozart's Magic Flute, the opera on my bed sheets. It's a soprano part that goes very high and gets very dramatic.

Ruby sang songs by Saint-Saëns and Chausson and Debussy, and a string quartet and pianist played with her. I don't know much about soprano singing, and I didn't know any of the songs before, and I didn't know enough French to understand many of her words, but several times I had goose bumps on my legs, all the way up to the top.

While we were clapping, Papa said to me, "You see, Wiena-chan, that's what's really inside her—Ruby. Not all this strangeness. That wonderful voice is what's really in her."

Mama looked across me at him and shook her head slowly and smiled kind of sadly and said, "Men." We all kept clapping. She leaned over to me and said, "You had to know her before. Before she got afraid of things." We went on clapping.

After the concert, lots of people came around to stare at Ruby and some of them shook her hand and a few people kissed her. People kept handing her their programs and pens for her to sign autographs. Then she put on her raincoat. It looked just fine and it didn't smell bad, so she must have made it to the bathroom in time.

At home, Boruto had bought a whole bunch of fruit. It was on the kitchen table. A honeydew melon, peaches, cherries, plums, and things. He handed a note to Ruby that said she'd sung for her supper; it had fruit-shaped notes dancing up and down the treble clef. She threw her arms around him and he looked as if he wanted to disappear. He pulled backward and asked her how the concert had gone, and she said, "All right, I think. I think. Oh, I don't know…"

He looked at her and said, "Then how can I congratulate you—or what?"

"It was a wonderful concert," my mother said. She put her arm around Ruby. "She was fabulous."

"Then congratulations," Boruto said.

"Thank you," said Ruby.

Papa went to bed and Mama, Ruby and I took some fruit and plates and a whole pile of paper napkins into the music room. Ruby flopped on the sofa and spread her arms and legs out like an x. Mama laughed. "Well, Ruby, what's cooking?" she said. Then she sat down on the piano bench.

"Rule number one, Wiena my girl," Ruby said. "Talk after the concert. Never before." She breathed out hard and took off her shoes. She was in bare feet.

I sat on the floor in front of the platter of fruit and looked at her. "Do you want the long, grimy version or the short, grimy version?" she asked.

"Whichever one you want to tell," Mama said.

"Let's begin with the basics," Ruby said. "Wiena, you know what happens when you fall in love, don't you?"

I looked at her. I thought the world ought to turn into one big red heart, but I wasn't going to say so. "What happens?" I said.

"Well, you go to dirty little restaurants and you love the awful food, and you ride on carousels and you hold hands when his horse goes up and yours goes down. And you feed sea gulls together and you go ooh-ooh-ooh over dewy spiderwebs on bushes. It empties your brain. Those are the basics."

I picked up a peach and about four napkins.

"So," she said to Mama, "this one was the same exact thing, of course; different exercises. Penobscot Bay—that's in Maine, Wiena. Lobster and seaweed, and sand in the toasted marshmallows. And ooh-ooh over the beautiful mussel shells. The whole google-eyed thing."

"What happened?" Mama asked.

"Well. He suddenly remembered another Ph.D. he wanted to get and took off for somewhere. Geneva or somewhere. I don't know." Ruby slid down from the sofa onto the floor across from me. She picked up a bunch of grapes. Her crimson red dress was getting all crinkled. She stared with her silver big eyes at the grapes in her hand.

My mother folded her hands like somebody in an old-fashioned painting and said, "Well, so much for romantic love."

"Chapter dozen," Ruby said. She ate some grapes. Nobody said anything. Then she said, "Well? Weiss?"

My mother got up and picked up a piece of honeydew and a napkin and went back to the piano bench. "What do you mean, 'Well? Weiss?'" she said.

"You know exactly what. You. And Naruto. The floor doesn't keep sliding out from under you without warning. What is it?"

"You mean what holds us together?" Mama said.

"Of course. I mean, I know: you two fell in love that day in that junkyard Naruto called The Department Store of Hearts' Desires, and you have Boruto and Wiena, and here you are. But what is it?" Mama was chewing melon. She was just a mother sitting on a piano bench chewing her food. "What would happen if Naruto didn't meet you there, when you played your mother's old piano in that place?"

Mama looked at her. "I don't know, Ruby. Maybe I would be different person now… or maybe I would never played piano again if I didn't meet Ruto…"

Nobody said anything. Ruby looked up from the floor at Mama. They looked at each other for a long time, a look of trying to figure something out. Ruby had her big long skirt hunched up above her knees and she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She got a peach from the platter and spread napkins all over her lap. "You've got it all, Weiss. House, symphony, kids, flowers. A husband who's not a jerk."

"Well, it's hard work sometimes," Mama said. "I mean, what's a jerk? Everybody's a jerk sometimes." I wondered if she was thinking about Papa calling Ruby the Queen of the Night. But he was right, in a way: this was the second late night in a row that Ruby was sitting in the music room where I was supposed to be asleep.

Suddenly Ruby screamed: "YYEEAAAGGGHHEEE!" Like that. Everybody jumped. She had her hands over her head the same way she'd had them the night before. Mama flew down off the piano bench and I felt my arms fly up and out, and we were both making surprised noises and Ruby's hair was hanging down the front of her face and she was moaning the way she'd done the night before.

Somehow, Mama got inside Ruby's hair and put her arms around her and held her. She just held her and rocked her. She was on her knees, holding Ruby and rocking her back and forth, and I stared at them. I couldn't see any faces, just hair and shoulders and arms. And Ruby was making that moaning-sighing sound.

"It's done, it's over," Mama kept saying. She was almost humming it. I stared at them. They were like a dance, just there on the floor, rocking, with their faces in each other's hair. You could have set a metronome by them, rocking back and forth. I didn't know if I should leave the room, or sit there, or what. I ate some grapes.

They stayed like that for a long time. Ruby gradually stopped making the strange sound, and Mama still kept holding her and rocking her and sort of humming. I looked at the braided rug fringe. In a few minutes they stopped hugging and pulled back and looked at each other for a long time. Mama said, "Want to go to bed now?" in a very soft voice. Ruby nodded her head. She picked up her shoes and Mama leaned over and kissed me good night on my forehead and they went out and closed the door. I took the fruit stuff back to the kitchen and put it in the refrigerator and went to bed on the sofa.

I watched the leafy shadows on the wall while I tried to fall asleep. I couldn't get rid of the sight of my mother and Ruby hugging on the floor and rocking back and forth. Forward and back. Forward and back. A steady rhythm. Not even scary. In fact, the opposite. My mother humming and the sound of both of them breathing.

Of course I wanted to know what it was about. But at the same time I didn't. It was like a secret ritual, where they both knew exactly what to do.

(◕ω◕✿)

At breakfast, everybody had closed faces about the night before. They were reading the review of the concert in newspaper Papa was repeating, "Ms. Rose's melt-in-the-mouth vowels" and Ruby and Mama were laughing. I read the review. It said, "Ruby Rose exerted formidable control and enchanting lyricism.… She wrapped herself around the Saint-Saëns with a bold intimacy that made one humbly grateful to have ears.… She is a genius."

I wasn't sure about the "bold intimacy" part, but it had something to do with the music coming up from inside, and it also had something to do with Uncle Asto and Mozart and closing the gap. I said it over several times in my mind. It was connected with what Uncle Asto said about danger, but I didn't know how.

Ruby smiled at me. "We haven't told them about the Flower Music, Wiena. How many people were there in our band?"

We told them about the people coming to play on the sculpture with us, and Ruby imitated the accent of the lady with the big hat. I told them about the old lady in the green visor being wheeled away and saying, "Wonderful … Wonderful…" in her little craggly voice.

Then Papa got a phone call to fill in for a missing conductor the next night at Midoriya Park, a concert by Yasogami high school, and Mama and Ruby went off to pick raspberries in the farm, and I practiced. Ruby would sing her next concert, the same program as before but at a different place with a different bathroom, and she'd stay another day and we'd take a picnic and go to the concert and hear Papa play music.

I went to Ruby's second concert, too. She was perfectly fine; she didn't get strange at all. Just before she went upstairs to bed that night, she said, "Do you know what Martin Luther said he'd do if he thought the end of the world was coming soon? He said he'd plant apple trees."

I looked at her, standing on the bottom step with her hand on the banister, holding both tiny sandals by their straps. Her big silver eyes were all shiny from the adrenaline of the concert.

Boruto was standing at the top of the stairs looking down at us. "Ruby, if the end of the world was coming, how would there be time for any apples to grow?" he said. He said it in a voice that showed he wasn't expecting an answer.

Ruby looked up at him. "Just to have them there, you see? Not for them to be of any use—there wouldn't be time. Just to have apple trees. Just growing up out of the earth…" She leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and we said good night. Her dress floated up the stairs behind her.

I listened up the stairs. Boruto said, "That was in the fourteenth century. What did he know?"

"Well, sixteenth, actually," Ruby said. "But it's a pretty idea.…"

"Doesn't sound too bright to me," he said.

Ruby said exasperatedly, "Boruto, you are such a realist."

Immediately the family was laughing. Papa and Mama from their bedroom, me from the bottom of the stairs. I think we were all laughing at different things, though.

(◕ω◕✿)

At the Midoriya Park Concerts, thousands of people come and sit on the grass to hear the music. Shino-san was playing in the orchestra, and I saw him walk over to Papa's chair and say something that made Papa laugh. Papa has a nice reasonable laugh, where his face breaks open and then shuts itself up again.

The park has food booths all lined up along the sides. Somebody on the radio called the Midoriya Park Concerts "the best-smelling concerts in Kanto."

When the orchestra started to play the second half of the concert, the same dancing man from before started dancing. He had his same clothes on. He danced the same dance, forward and back and around, and he had the same concentrating look on his face. Some people just watched him, some people pointed at him, some people didn't pay any attention to him at all. Just like before.

Ruby stared at him and let out a loud whisper, "Aaaahhhh." Then she whispered, "Why on earth doesn't someone dance with that man?"

Nobody said anything. My mother and two of her friends and I just sat there.

"Well, why doesn't someone?" she said.

I shrugged my shoulders. "I don't know," I said. I looked across Ruby at Mama, who was just listening to the music.

Ruby stood up and started walking around people. She had raspberry stains on her big, swingy black-and-red-striped skirt, at the side. Everybody had blankets or sleeping bags spread out, and she had to be careful not to step right on them. I watched her stepping around people, almost doing a kind of dance in her skinny sandals. She had to go around about six blankets covered with people to get to the open space in front of the stage.

When she got to the bare grass, she stopped for just a beat of the music, and then went right over to the dancing man and started dancing with him. I think she caught him by surprise. He sort of stopped for a moment, then he bowed a little and smiled a little smile, like How do you do, and went on dancing. She danced, following his steps, keeping about three feet of space between them. When he turned, she turned. When he kicked his foot out to the side, she did the same thing. They danced.

The music was by Handel.

I'd seen an old-fashioned music box in Tokyo once when I went with my mother to visit my grandfather Jacques. His house smelled like dried-up flowers. When Grandpa Jacques wound the music-box key, the two little dolls on top, a man and a lady, went around in a circle, and you could imagine a whole ballroom full of people watching them turning and turning. They had smiles painted on their faces and the smiles just kept turning around as the music played. The lady doll was built with a long pink dress on, and the man was built wearing a black suit. While Mama and Grandpa Jacques talked, I sat on the floor and watched the dancers on the music box, which was on a little table. The dancers were just at the level where I could see their faces. Grandpa Jacques showed me how to wind the key when the music ran down; you had to be very careful because it was very old. Grandpa Jacques said I could touch the dancers if I'd "be careful like you would with eggs, the little bitty things could break."

Watching Ruby and the dancing man, I thought of the music box and being a little kid sitting on the floor watching the pink dress and the black suit and the painted smiles go round and round, and listening to the music run down, and then winding the key to make them dance again. I could almost get the dried-flower smell back again.

Ruby and the dancing man just danced, the whole last half of the concert. It was a pretty sight.

At the end, they made little bows to each other. Ruby curtsied, the dancing man moved off into the crowd, Papa leave the podium, and we got the car and went home.

"Konoha, Konoha, land of lots beautiful flowers," Ruby said in the car. "Nice concert, Naruto. Really, more people ought to be dancing to Handel and Brahms and Mozart. Don't you think so, Weiss?" My mother smiled and ran her hand through her hair. "Well, Wiena, don't you think so?"

I was thinking about the little music box. The music was inside, and you had to wind the key just right and it came out, and the dancing man and lady went round and round, smiling. How to get close enough to the Mozart concerto so that— How to move so close to it that there would be just that edge Uncle Asto talked about— How to get something strung just right in me so I'd be balancing right exactly on that edge— How to remember everything I know and forget it at the same time and invent a new thing. And that would be the way to let the music out of me. ME: Wiena Namikaze. I'M playing this concerto.

"Yes, I think so, Miss Ruby."

But that still didn't explain how.

Practice.

Listen for the feel of getting closer to it. Would I recognize it?

I went to sleep looking at the Green Violin man. His green face is distorted; his nose is twisted downhill to the left, his smiling mouth twists uphill to the right. Something is happening to make the music lift out of his instrument. I wondered if there was any word for it.

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