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.

59. Hundred Years Melody -Part 2-

After Story: Hundred Years Melody

-Part 2-

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I was the one to run with Ruby to her plane, because she'd forgotten one of her bags in my bedroom and we had to go back for it when we were almost halfway to the airport. Already when we got there, they were announcing that the plane was ready for takeoff.

"You're wonderful, Wiena," Ruby said while we were running. "Promise you'll come see me in New York?" She's a very fast runner, even with luggage.

I was carrying two of her bags and trying to keep up with her. People were scooting aside to let us by. "I'll try," I said. "Hey, Miss Ruby?"

"Yes, my sweet one?"

"I'm gonna play a competition in September. That Mozart you've kept hearing me practicing." I was huffing.

Her head swung toward me, her earrings flashing. "Wiena! Really!"

"It's the Sarutobi Competition. I'm a finalist," I said. I had to stop and change the bags to opposite sides and then run to catch up with her.

"I've heard of that one—Wiena, I'm so excited—why didn't you—"

"I just couldn't find the right time—"

"Here's the gate— Hey, wait, here I am—don't leave—" She flung her ticket envelope at the uniformed woman standing at the doorway. "Wiena!" She burst down on me and put her arms and bags around me.

"It's on the first Sunday of September," I said. The woman at the doorway was taking the two bags from me.

"I wish you love," Ruby whispered into my hair, and she was gone to Boston to sing two concerts.

I watched her running down the ramp, with bags flying out from her sides. Even in her fluster and haste, she was beautiful.

I moved back into my bedroom. It still smelled like her, perfumy.

The concert review had said she was a genius.

The weather was getting so much hotter that I'd gotten used to beginning to practice before 7:00 A.M. That way, I could work for three hours before it got really hot, and I'd save the rest of the practicing for later.

Ayane was due back from America in a few days, and Anya was due back from dance camp in a week.

I took breaks from the Mozart project to play the Vitali now and then, and some Dancla études. And the awful, nasty, torturing Kreutzer. Sometimes even Kreutzer felt like a break. I couldn't do Mozart forever.

When I was a really little kid, Uncle Asto used to have me walk and play at the same time. You take four steps to the measure if the piece is in four, or three steps if it's in three. Or eight steps if it's in very slow four, six steps if it's in very slow three. It helps little kids learn to count and be regular. I suppose it looks hilarious: this little kid, marching around a room playing a violin. Because when you make a mistake, your feet get mixed up and you can end up standing off-balance with one foot hanging in the air while you find the right note. I used to back up to the place on the rug where I'd been a few measures before I got lost, and start again from there. I think it was a way of getting my little brain organized.

It's kind of like the way little kids always know the first few measures of a piece really well, because they're always starting over again from the beginning.

I went back to pacing sometimes with Mozart. It was about nine thirty one morning when Mama came in and said Uncle Asto was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. She smiled at me pacing.

"I feel like a little kid," I said, and put my violin in the open violin case.

She laughed. "It works, doesn't it?"

I looked at her and nodded my head.

"Then pace your heart out, darling," she said.

I went to the kitchen phone.

"Good morning, Wiena-chan. How would you like to play the Mozart in public next week?" Uncle Asto asked.

"What do you mean, in public?" I said.

"I mean there's a little town up the Samegawa, and the little town has a little orchestra, and their soloist has broken two fingers of her right hand windsurfing on the river, and they need somebody to come and play it. Outdoors. In their park."

"This concerto…?" I asked.

"This very one. The orchestra's spent two months learning the accompaniment. I owe the conductor a favor, and you'd have fun doing it. Are you interested?"

I didn't say anything. Next week. In public. Mozart and Uncle Asto and an actual orchestra and a whole bunch of people in a park. And me.

"I hear your wheels turning, Wiena-chan. The concert's on Thursday night in Inaba Ridge. One rehearsal, Tuesday at seven, indoors. I'll drive you there."

"One rehearsal?"

"That's all. If she'd broken her fingers two weeks earlier, there would've been more. What do you think?"

I looked around the kitchen. Mama wasn't in sight. Nine weeks until the competition. "Is it a kids' orchestra?"

"No. A community orchestra. Pharmacists, Sunday school teachers, farmers, some kids. You know, amateur. A woman conductor. She's very good," he said. He wasn't actually pleading.

Why not? Why in the world not to do it?

"Can you think of a good reason not to do it, Wiena-chan?"

I laughed. He was looking right into my head over the phone. "No. I think I will."

"Good girl, Wiena-chan. We'll talk about it tomorrow morning. You'll tell your parents?"

"Of course."

Of course I knew from records how the orchestral accompaniment sounded. Of course I knew I could close my eyes if looking out at the audience began to scare me. Of course I knew this would be a concert for practice. Of course I knew I wouldn't have to throw up the way Ruby does.

What I had never in my life done was perform three movements and three cadenzas completely from memory with a conductor and a whole bunch of players following me. I was supposed to lead them and entertain the audience and bring Mozart into a park somewhere. With one rehearsal.

Oh. Oh. Oh.

Mama and Papa were "surprised and very much delighted." That was what Mama said. And "profoundly proud too," said Papa. Boruto said, "Maybe the other one broke her fingers on purpose so she wouldn't have to play with that bunch; maybe there's something you don't know yet."

By the next morning, at my lesson, Uncle Asto had his one-rehearsal rules and advice to give me.

One: First time through, if you feel something wrong in the tempo or in the dynamics, play to the end of the movement and then stop and tell the conductor the problem. The conductor's name is Yuugou Uzuki, and she'll listen to you. If the same thing is still wrong when you're playing it the second time, stop exactly where it begins to be wrong. Don't wait. You may get to play the concerto through three times, or you may not. It depends on how much time the conductor has allotted for your part of the rehearsal.

Two: With amateur orchestras, one big problem is usually that they rush the sixteenth-notes. They see a lot of black on the page and they get urgent about it. They tend to try to pull the conductor along with them; they don't know they're doing it, they just do it. You may have to make a choice on the instant: follow Mozart or follow the orchestra behind you.

Three: There'll be some out-of-tune playing in the orchestra. You can't do anything about that, and, as a guest, it's not your place to say anything about it. The conductor has ears, and she deals with it as well as she can. You know a good conductor can make you play better than you can play sometimes—right? Well, she can't do that all the time.

Four: All these people are genuine amateurs. They play because of that thing inside them, that impulse telling them to—as it's inside you. Where they're different from you is that they spend most of their lives not being musicians. Many of them studied as children and then put their instruments aside—and then they try to begin playing again after—after maybe twenty years. They're very humble, usually. They don't have to be told they're not perfect; they know it all too well.

Five: They'll be thrilled to play with you.

I listened. I didn't know why in Number Five they'd be so thrilled, and I just looked at Uncle Asto.

"Because you're twelve years old. Especially the older ones in the orchestra; they'll feel very sentimental, Wiena-chan."

I doubled my practice time, I took the printed music out of the music room and put it in the kitchen so I couldn't even peek at it, I played the recordings of David Oistrakh and Anne-Sophie Mutter, alternating, while I waited to go to sleep. Among us, we had three different sets of cadenzas. In Mozart's time, composers didn't write actual cadenzas. The violinist was supposed to improvise. Other people came along later and wrote cadenzas to fit in the concertos. Oistrakh's were by David, Mutter's were by Joachim, and mine were by Herrmann. Suba-chan lay curled up between my feet.

Uncle Asto and I went to the rehearsal. We had to go about seventy miles up the Samegawa River. The hills on both sides of the river looked like velvet heaps of land in the early evening sun, and we kept seeing sailboats and windsurfers. Inaba Ridge is built on the riverbank, so the streets are sloping. Monks used to live there. When we got off the freeway and into the town, it smelled like hay. We saw two hay mowers in fields. "Farmers and musicians work at night," Uncle Asto said. The town is smack in the middle between two mountains, Mount Hokage in Konoha and Mount Fuji in Shizuoka.

When we walked in the door of the rehearsal room, a school music room in a sort of shed, the orchestra was already playing. Uncle Asto had said out of tune. But he hadn't said how much. We sat down in chairs.

I counted thirty-three people in the orchestra. One lady had a waitress costume on, with "Kitty" written on the pocket of her shirt. Three people were wearing cowboy boots. Scattered among the adults were nine kids, about high school age. I saw people squinting at the notes on the page and looking down at their instruments as if the instruments were trying to outsmart them. Out of thirty-three people, probably half of them were tapping their feet, in lots of different rhythms. They finished the piece by holding the last note very loud and long.

Uncle Asto whispered to me to stand where I could see Yuugou's baton out of the corner of my left eye. That was all he said.

Then he introduced me to her, and she introduced me to the orchestra. She said, "This young lady is Wiena Namikaze, from Konoha, who's come to play the Mozart with us." People kind of moved around in their chairs, and the brass players emptied their spit valves. The concertmaster said, "Welcome to Inaba Ridge." He had very rosy cheeks and glasses. I said thanks and looked at Yuugou. She was middle-aged, and quite tall, with long purple hair.

Yuugou wanted me to give her my tempos for all three movements first. I gave them to her as well as I could, by going Da da-da da in the air. She said my tempos were fine. "Well, then, let's do it," she said to everybody. The orchestra began the introduction.

In forty-one measures I heard a lot of wrong notes. Uncle Asto was sitting on the other side of the room with my music in his lap. His face didn't have any expression on it at all. "Think microrhythms" is one of the best pieces of tempo advice he's ever given me. He said it when I was a little kid, and it makes everything easier. If a piece is in four, you divide every beat into four so you're automatically thinking in sixteen counts. You can subdivide again into thirty-two if you need to. If you keep that rhythm in your mind, your fast notes won't be ragged.

The instant I started my part, I was a different player, not the player I'd been that morning. It was a very, very strange feeling, playing a solo with an orchestra behind my back. It was a sudden huge responsibility. Yuugou's baton was supposed to follow me. I discovered that this concerto was bigger than I'd had any idea of. Closing the gap between Mozart and me was all of a sudden terrifying.

I got back to playing my familiar way in the first-movement cadenza because it was just me—no accompaniment.

At the end of the first movement, I turned around to see what Yuugou wanted to do. She was looking down at her conductor's score and frowning. I glanced out at the orchestra and my eyes landed on one of the thin-haired old ladies. She was crying and wiping her nose with a handkerchief. I looked back at Yuugou. "Let's go on," she said.

The second movement can be so sweet and slow that you can get carried away. It has that place where I was leaning on the eighth-notes for a long time, but I didn't play them that way with the orchestra because they wouldn't have known what I was doing. Yuugou was taking a tempo that was faster than I was used to, but I went along with it. The cadenza is a pretty song, as Uncle Asto would say, and I love playing it, and I sort of forgot there were all those people listening.

At the end of that movement, I turned around again. Yuugou was smiling, and I quickly looked across the top of the orchestra. I realized all of a sudden that I was almost embarrassed. I'd played the cadenza as if it were just me in the room, just a private song. Something had come up out of me. Like Ruby said. And there they all were: all those people sitting there holding instruments. It was a moment of astonishment. I was just turning back around, because I didn't want to see the faces, when I noticed the old lady wiping her nose again.

I looked quickly at Uncle Asto. He was smiling at me, then he closed his face. I looked up at Yuugou. On to the third movement.

In the last movement, Yuugou had to stop us and begin again four times because the orchestra got separated.

I hadn't even taken my violin down when there was a very loud clapping. For a moment, it was as if I were at the end of a telescope, looking at the orchestra from far away, and then they got close again, in normal vision. An optical illusion. They were clapping the way orchestras always clap for a soloist. I smiled at them, and a little laugh came out of my mouth. I don't know why. Then I scrunched my bow back in my hand and clapped for them. Because we'd gotten through the concerto together.

I told Yuugou about the different tempo I'd been using in the second movement. She nodded her head, and we did the whole movement again. Then we did the whole concerto again. Then the orchestra took its break and Uncle Asto and Yuugou wanted to talk to me.

Uncle Asto stood with his head leaned to the side watching Yuugou as she talked. "Your stability is particularly important in the last movement, I'll be counting on you there," she said to me. I nodded my head. "And the dynamics will be different in the park—you may find you'll want to rev up your pianissimos somewhat." I nodded. "We'll see you Thursday," she said. "You'll be just fine, Wiena-chan."

"Thank you," I said. There was so much going on in my head, and that was all I said.

Just as I walked out the door, I heard somebody saying, "But Kaori-chan took the cadenza faster, too." "And besides that…" somebody else said, and then I was out of the rehearsal room.

Uncle Asto and I got in his car and drove home. The sun hadn't set yet, and we followed it down the river, going south. The hills are in layers of blue as you look downstream, going from very dark to very light. It's a beautiful place. Uncle Asto was wearing sunglasses for driving.

He asked me how I'd liked the hour we'd just spent. I told him about how I felt surprised to have all that responsibility. He nodded his head. And I told him about the optical illusion and he said, "Hmmm. Indeed." I told him I was nervous about the concert, and he said, "Of course. Of course you are. It goes with the territory."

And he said, "In Europe you find many little orchestras like this one, in little towns. Not so many in Japan…" I looked at him. He said, "The sounds aren't ever perfect. But the spirit is often quite wonderful. For some of those players, the orchestra is the only thing they have."

I couldn't get the faster cadenza and the "and besides that" out of my mind. There were long silences as Uncle Asto drove back from Inaba Ridge to Konoha. It was like trying not to think about elephants, of course. Which cadenza did the lady mean Kaori took faster? "And besides that," what? It was as if somebody was looking over my shoulder and having opinions about me but wasn't telling me what they were.

"What's the problem, Wiena-chan?" Uncle Asto asked.

"I don't know."

"You'd better say it."

I wanted to and at the same time I wanted to say anything else but it.

"Beware the boomerang," he said.

"I know," I said. I squirmed a little in the seat and folded my arms in front of me. I knew I was folding them to keep things inside me, like protection. He meant the boomerang you throw in Australia and it comes back and hits you in the head if you're not paying attention. He meant that if you throw your problems away somewhere so you won't have to think about them, they'll come back and hit you in the head.

"Is Kaori very, very good?" I looked away from him the minute I'd said it. I looked at the Samegawa River. You can't even tell if it's moving.

"Kaori who?" he said.

"Kaori, with the broken fingers."

He drove along without talking for a while. Two huge crows were sitting on the guardrail above the river, staring at us as we drove past. "Ah, Miyazono Kaori," he said. "Yeah, she's good."

She was probably going to play the competition. When her fingers healed. She'd be one of the tall ones who'd never had a trouble in their lives. No: she'd had lots of troubles and won every single one of them with her magic fingers.

Broken magic fingers now.

Wiena, I said to myself, you are being evil and cruel. If you're glad even for one second about her broken fingers, you're a nasty fiend. I looked at my face in the side-view mirror of Uncle Asto's car. I was looking at a nasty fiend. Clean up your act, Wiena, I said to myself.

"How old is she?" I asked.

"Oh, I think Kaori must be seventeen by now."

Remember, I said to myself, when you first heard about the finals you didn't even want to try. Then you thought it would be better to lose. You only decided to play because you saw that picture of Pyrrha Nikos. Then you got all excited about it. Did you think there wasn't going to be anybody else playing the competition? Did you think you were going to march in there and play and have all the judges clap their hands and forget about hearing anybody else? Act your age and don't be an imbecile.

"Does she go to music school?"

"Yes. Yes, she goes to music school."

That night I dreamed about the competition. It was in an auditorium. I was waiting to play and I had a raincoat on, all buttoned up. My turn was coming and I couldn't get the buttons unbuttoned, and then I saw that everybody else was wearing bibs, the kind ski racers wear. I looked around and the bibs all said "Kaori" on them. I couldn't tell how many there were, but they were all tuning their violins and they were all very tall and beautiful. They looked like sisters. They had the same faces, all with stage makeup on. I kept trying to unbutton the raincoat so I could see what my racing bib said. I hadn't even taken my violin out of the case yet. One of the Kaoris said, "It's too slow." She had thick, swirly glassess. I couldn't find Uncle Asto. He was supposed to meet me backstage. An usher was saying, "Put the elephants in here," and pointing to a big closet with mops and buckets and brooms in it.

I woke up and saw the little green stereo light still on. The needle was going round and round at the end of Anne-Sophie Mutter's third movement. I turned the stereo off and took Suba-chan under the covers with me to wait for morning to come. I had an extra lesson scheduled.

At 6:00 A.M., I was in the music room, playing all three cadenzas faster. I sounded horrible.

I was a grouch at breakfast, so I took my oatmeal and stuff to my room and listened to Miles Davis, and Suba-chan drank the leftover milk from my bowl. Miles Davis is a jazz trumpeter. It's an old record called Kind of Blue, and my parents let me have it in my room. There's a house rule that says you don't have the right to make everybody else miserable just because you are. The rule is Don't Try to Make Your Misery Contagious. Of course it's a hard rule not to break.

Miles Davis makes the music sound as if he's just doing it, not even working at it. I yelled, "You stink, Miles," and stuck my tongue out at the record on my way to the bathroom. The door was open.

Boruto was cleaning his new shoes, getting water all over everything. If we had water rationing, Boruto would be put in jail the first day. I sat down on the toilet cover.

"Hear that sound?" Boruto said.

"Which sound?" I said.

"That crowd on the lawn."

"What crowd?"

"It's the Jazz Society of Japan, coming to draw and quarter you."

I kicked him in the left shin.

He held the brush up like a microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 'Lifestyles of the Weird and Crazy.'…" Then he went on brushing.

"Boruto, you are a creep!"

He didn't say anything. He looked down sideways at me, then looked back at the mirror. He went on brushing and splashing. "How'd you like the hinterland?" he asked.

"What's that?"

"The remote countryside. Up the river."

"It was okay." I walked out of the bathroom, wrote "hinterland" on the clipboard, turned Miles Davis off, ignored my unmade bed, and went to my lesson.

Uncle Asto had "only a few things to say. First, you handled the job very well, Wiena-chan. Yuugou was struck by your confidence and your technique. Second, you have some adjustments to make. In the pianissimo sections—the seven-note sequences before letter I in the first movement, and the da-da-da-da-duh sections in the second movement—and some other places—you just can't play as pianissimo as you've been playing. The audience won't hear you. The orchestra doesn't have enough control over its own dynamics to let your sound come through. And of course the end, the end of the concerto. And third—what was third?" He looked at me.

"I don't know,"I said.

He sat staring into space. "Ah. I know. The second movement cadenza. The first time you played it last night. I don't know what you did, but it was unusually beautiful. It had a magic I didn't teach you. Do you know what you did?"

I'd forgotten there was anybody else there. I told him.

He leaned way back on the piano bench and then leaned forward again. "Wiena-chan. What a thing. You did that. Indeed."

"Yep."

"How awfully difficult. And you did it. You're remarkable." He stared at me for several seconds, and then he said, "Now, let's play."

I felt better after my lesson. There was a note on the kitchen table in Mama's writing that said to call Ayane. I put my violin and stuff down and called her.

"I just got back last night. I'm still on San Francisco time; it's weird. What's going on?"

"Strange stuff. How was San Francisco? Can you come over?"

"Crowded. I ate so much I'm fat. What kind of strange stuff? Bad strange or good strange?"

"Both, I think," I said. "Ask your mom if you can come over. Not for the night. I'll explain. Can you come?"

Ayane had been to America and I'd been to Inaba Ridge.

She showed up wearing a pink ribbon in her hair. She looked beautiful.

We went to the lawn behind our house. My mother said we had to clip roses. You have to clip them at an angle, and the pianist I turned for had said they have to be cut just above a stem with seven leaves so they'll bloom again. We took turns with the rose clippers and gloves, and Ayane told me about eating Sourdough bread and Cioppino, and about sailing her uncle's boat, and the lights on San Francisco bay at night, and about going to Chinatown, and about her little cousin who was impossible.

"You know, I feel more American than I did before we went," she said. "I talked it all the time, I wrote notes to my uncles telling them where I was going, all in english—I ended up even walking American."

She was excited about the Sarutobi Competition, and I told her about Inaba Ridge. "It must be scary to think about," she said. "I mean, at night. In bed. With Suba-chan."

"Yep. It is. Tomorrow night is just for practice, but it's—I think it's like the feeling you probably get if you're in the Olympics or something. I mean, Inaba Ridge isn't the Olympics. But it's in public. And. And you only get one chance."

I told her about the faster cadenza, but I didn't know which one, and I told her about the dream with all the Kaoris. We were cutting a huge bouquet, and we had a pile of dead roses to put in the compost heap.

She said, "That's why I'm going to be a Chef. You can cook the food before and do plans and think about them before you actually serve them in front of everybody. It's not just a one-chance thing. You can make mistakes and fix them so you don't make disgusting food." She looked straight down into a rosebush. It's hard to tell when Ayane is thinking about her father. She doesn't let it show very often. Pretty soon she said, "Is there anything about this competition that's fun?"

"Sure," I said. "The adrenaline, when I'm playing well."

I looked at her, standing up to her armpits in the garden, and remembered the flower fight we had once, Ayane, Anya and I, right in this same place, when we were very little. It was a hot summer day like this one. We were having a little-kid picnic and suddenly somebody started throwing flowers, and pretty soon we were covered with them. Flowers stuck to our socks, inside our shirts, they floated in the red Kool-Aid.

"Remember the flower fight?" I said.

We burst out laughing.

And I remembered that after the flower fight my father came out in the garden and gave us each a swing-around, holding us at arm's length and twirling us off the ground. I told Ayane she could share my father because hers was dead.

"What little kids we were," she said.

My mother made Ayane take a big bouquet of roses to her mother. Before she went home, she helped me decide what to wear to play the concerto in the hinterland and showed me how to sing Kimigayo in English.

I went to the music room to practice.

(◕ω◕✿)

To play in Inaba Ridge, I wore a flowered dress and white flats. And I had my hair in one braid hanging down. Uncle Asto reminded me that the sun might be in my eyes or it might be down behind the trees in the park by the time I began the third movement. I'd have to deal with it the best way I could.

He and I went early for the short run-through that Yuugou wanted; my parents were coming later and bringing Ayane. Uncle Asto had his camera stuff in the car. "I think it'll help us to have a video Don't you? We'll compare this one with the February one," he said as we started out.

"I don't know…."

"Yes, you do know. Your softball coach made videos, didn't he?"

"Yes. She did…"

"Well, watching to the performance is going to give us some new ideas, and it'll give us a chance to check on our old ideas. Right...?"

"Okay…"

He reminded me that people would probably applaud between movements. "And that's all right, Wiena-chan" he said. "There's nothing wrong with people liking music enough to clap for it. They don't have to know all the concert-hall customs. It'll be very informal, very homey."

But not informal or homey for me.

"You'll be fine, Wiena-chan. Just do it the way you love to do it."

"I'll try." Easy to say, hard to do. Play it the way I love to do it—in front of a whole bunch of people. I kept saying to myself, as we rode along, This concert is for practice, This concert is for building courage.

"Nobody's immune to the fear, Wiena-chan. Even your mother, the genius prodigy Weiss Schnee. She used to stand in the wings—paralyzed with fear—and someone had to push her onstage. Then she'd sit down at the piano."

The park was spread out on a little hill with swings and slides at the top and a stage at the bottom. The stage was a concrete platform, with a backdrop made of concrete too. Kids were swinging and sliding at the top of the hill, and people were already sitting on blankets on the grass when we were doing the run-through. We played just a few measures of each movement. The orchestra players were in black and white, and Yuugou was wearing a long black dress. It looked almost like the Yasogami High School Orchestra at Midoriya Park.

The orchestra was bigger than it had been at rehearsal. Two more cellos, a double bass, a percussion player, and there seemed to be more violins. Yuugou explained that she could never get the whole orchestra in one place at one time except in concert. She shrugged her shoulders. "This week it was the county fair. Some of them had to work in booths. A nurse and two doctors were on call. And the Port Commission had an extra meeting this week. That's the percussion section."

The concert wouldn't have an intermission, she said. "If we stop playing, people will go home, so we just keep on. You're third on the program."

Uncle Asto sat on the grass and set his camera stuff out on the blanket he'd brought. My parents showed up. A whole carload: Boruto, Ayane, Aunt Naruko.

One, I still wasn't used to having an entire orchestra behind me. Two, some of the people hadn't been at the rehearsal. Three, the orchestra players weren't full-time musicians. Four, the cello section was staring into the setting sun and they couldn't see Yuugou's baton clearly and they came in wrong three times. Five, outdoors does very strange things to music. It's physics. The way air moves. Strings get out of tune almost instantly, and people on one side of the stage can't hear people on the other side.

I was very sure I wasn't playing with the simultaneous remembering and forgetting, the divine inspiration of the NBA.

So, the concerto sounded like one Mozart might have written, but not exactly like the one I'd been practicing. The people gathered in the park on their blankets eating picnics really seemed to like it, though. They clapped every time they got a chance. Between movements, at the end of the first cadenza, everywhere. Some people whistled at the end.

I'd gotten through it. I remembered to bow.

And the next thing I knew, a little girl came up on the stage and put a big bouquet in front of my face. It was full of daisies and delphiniums. I scrunched my bow into my left hand and took the bouquet and remembered to bow again. And I turned around to shake Yuugou's hand and she put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me on the cheek. She whispered, "Marvelous." Or maybe it was "Harvest." Or "Horriblest." Or "Barfelous." I remembered to shake the concertmaster's hand. He grinned at me. The orchestra was clapping, and people on the grass were clapping, and I walked off the stage and went down onto the ground.

I sat down next to Ayane on one of the three blankets they had spread out. I put my violin in the case and laid the bouquet in my lap. Uncle Asto smiled and nodded his head at me. My mother and father both leaned over to me and patted me on my shoulders or arms or whatever they could reach. Boruto pushed a plate of brownies at me and I took three.

Ayane whispered, "You must really be good, Wiena-chan. Just at the end of the second movement, I heard some girl go, 'Oh, Mozart…' It was like he was her boyfriend and he was kissing her or something." We ate brownies and got ready for the orchestra's last piece.

And out of the crowd came the dancing man. Ruby's dancing man. We were hundred kilometers from Konoha, and there he was. He started dancing. His same dance. His same clothes. And the shoes.

Mama was explaining to Ayane about him. I heard her whispering that somebody said he'd been dancing at concerts for three summers, and something about our friend Ruby who'd slept in my room. Ayane looked at me. "He just comes and dances?" she whispered. I nodded my head. "I bet he's lonely," she said.

"He must be," I whispered back.

A baby started crying just behind us. "Would it be okay if I dance with him?" Ayane was asking my mother. Mama spread out her hands, saying, "Okay." Ayane looked at me, shrugged her shoulders, and got up, walked forward on the grass and began dancing. Just the way Ruby had done, but keeping a little bit farther away from him.

He did the same thing he'd done with Ruby. Smiled and danced. The sun was going behind the hills and shining on Ayane's long black hair and the dancing man's pocked face. When the piece was over, she shook his hand. Then when she saw him bowing, she bowed to him. They said something to each other. She came back and sat down and the concert was over.

"His name is Trouble," she said.

I looked at her.

"That's what he said," she said. "I didn't make it up." People were standing up, getting ready to leave the park.

Boruto leaned over while I was zipping up the violin-case cover and said, "It was good, Win."

I looked at him. He meant it. I stood up and picked up the bouquet. Several people were coming over to say they liked it and I kept saying Thank-you, and some people told me their names, and a couple of people knew Uncle Asto and Aunt Naruko and they were all talking together and introducing me, and Papa and Mama were talking to Uncle Asto and Aunt Naruko's friends and I couldn't see over the people to find out where the dancing man was. He just disappeared. He just wasn't there.

I was looking around some people's shoulders hunting for him when I saw a blond girl standing in front of me, with thick swirly glasses. I didn't see her appear; she was just there. She said, "I really liked hearing you play the concerto." I looked at her face. It had cute freckles on it. She has blonde wavy hair that reaches down her waist. She put her right hand up to brush her hair out of the way. Her arm was long, and slender, and two of the fingers on her right hand were splinted together.

"Thanks," I said. I had to change pictures in my mind very fast. Out went the tall, beautiful Kaoris with the ski-racing bibs. In came this Kaori, with one button of her plaid shirt popped out of its buttonhole, just above her skirts. "It's too bad about your fingers. You should've been playing it—" I took a deep breath and said her name. "—Kaori-san."

She looked at her hand and laughed. "Your name's Wiena?"

"Yep."

"Well, Wiena-chan, never go windsurfing when you have to play a concerto, that's my advice."

"It's really too bad," I said. "I mean it's unlucky."

"Yeah," she said. She looked at me. "You're really good. I loved the second movement. Makes me feel like going home and practicing."

I didn't know what to say. She was seventeen years old and in high school.

"You know what I love about Mozart?" she said.

"What?" I said.

"He can make you forget everything else. All your problems. You know?" She sort of laughed.

"I don't know. I mean—I don't know.…"

"You played it really well. Nice meeting you, Wiena-chan." She walked off. I stood there in my flowered dress holding my violin case in one hand and the bright bouquet of flowers in the other, and watched her slender hips waddle away, bumping into people. She was holding her right hand up out of the way.

"Nice meeting you," I called to her, but I don't think she heard me.

I felt selfish. I wanted to erase the last three minutes from my life. I looked down at the flowers and their big yellow ribbon. Kaori should have had the bouquet. I felt guilty holding it in my hand. I felt guilty about my dream. I felt guilty that people had clapped when I played. I even felt guilty for not being fat.

Ayane came scooting through the crowd. "I looked all over for him. He's vanished," she said. "That girl—the blond one with the swirly glasses. The one you were talking to? She's the one that said, 'Oh, Mozart!'"

"That's Kaori-san."

Ayane made a silent O with her mouth. She said, "Broken Fingers Kaori."

"Right."

"I wonder where the dancing man went," she said. "He dematerialized. How can somebody do that?"

"Wiena-chan," somebody said, a man's voice. I turned around. It was the concertmaster of the orchestra. "We liked playing the concerto with you," he said. "You kind of inspired us." He had two little kids with him, a boy and a girl. They stared at me, and the little girl put her hand on the big yellow ribbon on the bouquet and stroked it.

"Oh, I liked it, too. It was scary. But fun." He was wearing one of those hats people wear when they drive tractors. It said, "If you ate today, thank a farmer." "Thank you," I said. I meant his hat. "I mean, I ate today. Are you a farmer?"

"Yeah," he laughed "Part-time apple farmer, part-time fiddler. I bet you'll be a full-time fiddler someday. You really made us practice." He laughed and took the little girl's hand off the ribbon.

"Really?" I watched the little girl's hand make a fist and go behind her back.

"You sure did. Most of us went home Tuesday night and did some woodshedding."

Woodshedding is hard practicing. "I did, too," I said. The little girl hooked her hand in his pants pocket and started swinging back and forth in an arc.

"Well, thanks for coming. We were kind of up a creek.…"

"I know," I said. "Unlucky for Kaori-san, lucky for me."

"Yeah. She'll be okay, though. She's tough. She'll play again, better than ever." The little boy tugged on the man's violin case. "Well, these kids oughta be home in bed. So long, Wiena-chan."

"So long," I replied.

The crowd was separating. People were getting little kids off the slides and pulling them along down the slope and into cars. Our bunch broke into two groups, part of us to ride back with my parents and Ayane to ride with Uncle Asto and Aunt Naruko because she lives near them and Papa's car was crowded. "I just don't know where he went," Ayane said to me.

"I don't even know where he came from," I said.

"Namikaze-san?" somebody said. I looked. It was the old lady who'd cried at rehearsal. She was very short, and her violin case looked too heavy for her. In the white blouse and long black skirt she looked sort of like a rabbit. "It was wonderful, Namikaze-san," she said in a quaky voice. She reached her hand up to her collar. It was shaking. An elderly shaking hand.

"So were you," I said. "The orchestra was fun to play with."

"I like it," she said. "It's my home away from home. We're amateurs."

"So am I."

For a little moment it was just the little old white-haired lady and me both bursting out laughing. Maybe she knew what we were laughing at, but I didn't. Her laughing was old and crackly and mine was probably childish. There was just a set of sounds coming out of both of us, and we stood there looking straight at each other and laughed and laughed. What was strange about it was that I didn't feel weird laughing with a total stranger probably six times my age. In fact, it felt wonderful. Then we both stopped laughing, almost at the same time.

"Go well, my dear," she said, and she put her hand on my arm. I looked at her hand. It was veiny and spotty and it had gullies along the back between the bones. I looked at my arm and her hand together, at the place where her hand stopped and my arm began, and I felt the borderline, the little gaps of air under her fingers. I thought of all the notes she'd played with that hand and all the notes I'd played with that arm. I was still looking at my arm and her hand together when she lifted her hand away and turned around and walked off across the grass.

Night was coming. People were hustling instruments and picnics into cars and turning on headlights.

Uncle Asto hadn't said anything to me. Now he said, "See you tomorrow, Wiena-chan," and got into his car with Aunt Naruko and Ayane. I put my bouquet in the back of the car where Papa's bass rides, and kept my violin between my legs. Papa was driving, and if we made a sudden stop my violin would get broken. Boruto was beside him, and my mother and I were in the back.

"Well, one down," Papa said.

"And goal to go," Boruto said.

We drove past two churches and a service station on our way out of Inaba Ridge and onto the freeway.

"How did you really like it?" my mother asked me.

"Very strange," I said. I wished Ayane was riding with us.

"How strange?" she asked.

"Strange from beginning to end."

"All that sound?"

"Right," I said. "It just kept jumping out at me. Like pushing me from behind."

She nodded her head and said, "Right."

"Everybody has a first time," Papa said.

"I guess so," I said.

"And those rushed sixteenth-notes. You stayed steady, that was great," Mama said.

"My brain didn't."

Papa said, "I couldn't tell that from listening."

I don't remember the rest of the trip home. Papa and Boruto were arguing over whether the horizon is 3.8 or 3.6 kilometers away if you're standing on flatland and your eyes are five feet above the ground, and I fell asleep. I woke up with my head on my mother's lap and Papa was driving into the garage.

But when I got into bed I couldn't sleep. I played with Suba-chan for a while, swinging the end of the sash from my nightgown back and forth like a pendulum for her to catch. She moves her head like a metronome when you do that, and you can change the tempo whenever you want. Cats don't get tired of doing the same thing over and over again. They have a good attention span.

I tried going to sleep. It was a hot night. Konoha has a few of those in the summer, not too many. I kicked all the covers off. Suba-chan went to the foot of the bed and started to study the wall. Usually she sleeps curled against me. I turned over. And over. And over.

It's always hard to sleep after a concert, or even after a big rehearsal. Your adrenaline is going too fast. You have all these tunes going around in your ears. I don't know why I slept in the car.

Did I play well? Or were those people just saying those things? The four wrong notes—didn't anybody notice them? Well, what would people say—"You played really well, except for that part in the first movement, which was awful"? If I'd known Kaori was in the audience, would I have played differently?

I looked at the bouquet, in a pitcher on my desk. If only she hadn't turned out to look that way. I wouldn't have felt so bad. I turned over and tried not to look at the flowers. And she could stand there and say Mozart makes you forget your problems. I put my head under my pillow. It was too hot under there. I kept listening to my own breath. I sat up.

The clock said 12:22 A.M. I didn't want to read. I didn't want to go over my list of words, starting with "tenacity," all over again. Suba-chan and I were tired of playing. What do people do? Ayane knits. She's knitted six sweaters in her life. And Anya gets up and does exercises beside her bed.

I put on some shorts and sneaked down into the garage and got my bike and went out bike riding.

I hadn't ridden my bike for a long time. I couldn't ride to my lessons because I might drop the violin case; Ayane and I hadn't had time that one afternoon; and I'd been busy practicing; and I don't know what the other reasons were. I rode down our street to the corner and took a left turn. The streetlights were on, but I used my bike light anyway. I rode around three blocks twice. The air felt so good, just nice air. Nice air, I kept saying to myself, in rhythm with the pedals. I stopped and unbraided my hair.

I felt my hair blowing straight back. I felt bugs hitting my legs and bouncing off; the handlebars were shiny under the streetlights and then gray and then shiny again. I rode past an all-night coffee shop and saw three men laughing inside. One of them was holding a cigarette high in the air and they were all shaking with laughter.

I went into the dark again and rode in a straight line for a while. A bat or something swooped down in front of me. Maybe it was a swallow. We had a nest of swallows once when I was a little kid, and I saw the babies getting fed when they were brand new. I think four or five years had passed. Where would those baby birds be now?

I rode into Midoriya Park. The bushes were shadowy, clustered in bunches, and the air was cooler. Some punk kids were sitting on a bench, smoking cigarettes. I had a tune in my head: I tried to remember what it was; it was from somebody I'd turned pages for. It kept on playing in my head and it was so beautiful and sad; it's a tune about love. I mean it's about love for everything: stars, hills, bushes, trees, and it was about being in love, too. It kept going around in my head, as if it were on a vidoe, just that one part of something I'd turned pages for. It's a melody that makes your stomach and brain and everything get all melty. I slowed down and pedaled in time to it.

Pyrrha Nikos was much too old for me, and I kept hearing the tune anyway.

When I rode out of the park the tune was still in my head. I rode straight home, not around any extra blocks. I put my bike away in almost silence, not to wake anybody up. I walked around to the back door and stood between two rosebushes smelling them and hearing that melody for a couple of minutes. Then I got inside without making anything click noisily, went up the stairs very carefully, skipping the sixth step because it creaks, and I went to bed.

Exercise is good for you. It helps you sleep better. It makes peace.

(◕ω◕✿)

Uncle Asto was wearing a sweatshirt that said, like a National Enquirer headline, "Dvořák alive! Terrorizes couple in London!" The first thing he wanted to do was listen to the concert video. We both sat in chairs in his studio and closed our eyes.

"Intonation problem … dragging on that shift … sixteenth-notes are beautiful.… Too soft right here, I can't even hear you … nice descending trills.… You landed on that second G like a dive bomber.… Where's the fortissimo? I thought you were supposed to be fortissimo there.… Mozart thought so, too.… Take longer on that low A.… Your timing here needs to be more assertive—remember, it's your cadenza … again, trills quite strong and good here.… Second movement wants somewhat more, I don't know, it wants some, some, some kind of quiet elegance … not that there isn't any, but.… Here—right here—hear that pleading tone? That's wonderful, Wiena-chan … and here, where he answers the questions he's just asked in the previous section.… This cadenza isn't quite liquid enough.… Again, fine, fine trills here … you lost the grazioso a bit there, didn't you? Nice bright tone here, good for you.… Uzuki-san's band sounds like a flock of geese.… Good fluid grace notes, they're like birdcalls ascending, aren't they?"

At the end, I opened my eyes and he said, "In short, Wiena-chan, your violin invites you to do more with this concerto. Mozart does, too. Listen to your instrument more, hear what it's capable of doing. More, much more." He looked at me, then away, out the window. "Indeed."

He looked back at me. "I'm proud of your work last night, my dear. But. But. In the first movement, you can run like an athlete. In the second, you're capable of melting snow. In the third, everyone should feel like dancing." He smiled. "But it's not happening yet. Are we ready to go to work?"

"Yes," I said, and opened my violin case. There's a music teacher saying: Did you come here to be praised or appraised? I thought of the voice my softball coach used when she said, "Pretty good isn't good enough. Let's go to work." While I was rubbing rosin on my bow, I glanced at the poster that said A teacher is someone who makes you believe you can do it. We went to work. I hadn't had much sleep, and there was a lot to remember, everything he'd said about the video. It wasn't very much fun at times that morning, but I didn't say so. And I didn't ask how many minutes and seconds the performance had been. It didn't seem so important anymore.

As we played that morning, in the first movement my sixteenth-notes were too muddy; in the second movement, I wasn't melting any snow; and in the third, I didn't feel anyone dancing.

"If you can do in performance what you did with the second-movement cadenza the first time in rehearsal with Uzuki-san's group—ah, Wiena-chan.…" he said. "Isn't it strange—how difficult it is to do the perfectly natural thing?"

I nodded my head. "Something got into me and made me forget people were listening," I said.

"Almost but not quite, Wiena-chan. Let you forget, not made you. Shall I tell you a funny story about your mother? A genius at relaxation. She once woke up in a concert in Boston and realized she'd played an entire movement asleep. And she'd played it beautifully. The Beethoven concerto. Your grandfather was conducting. This is a true story, Wiena-chan."

I laughed. I'd heard the story before, but it was still funny.

"This sleeping performance is not our objective for the competition, however.…"

As I left my lesson, he put his hand under my chin and said, "No reason for you to be a 'fraidy cat, Wiena-chan. Mozart didn't want you to be one."

And he also said, "Have you been doing anything for just plain fun this summer? Anything irresponsible?"

I thought about banging on the metal sculpture in the Flower Garden with Ruby and all those people. And messing around with Suba-chan. And going bike riding last night. "A little," I said.

"Well, why don't you do more than a little?" he said. "Give yourself a day off—do something different? Tomorrow."

"You mean not practice?"

"Indeed. I mean not practice. Do something away from your violin."

"Okay," I said. I didn't really know what to do.

When I got home, Suba-chan had a mouse on the lawn and I stuck my tongue out at her for doing it. I used to get mad when she killed things. But I've gotten myself under control and don't do that anymore. I made myself think of it differently: Suba-chan was doing what nature taught her to do. She wasn't a maniac being made happy by murder. Nature didn't plan on a whole species running to the sound of electric can openers; cats were designed to get their own food, and they kill things because that's their law.

But that mouse had had such a short life.

I went upstairs to my room to take a nap.

I was supposed to run like an athlete and make snow melt and make everybody want to dance. Mama could play the piano while he was asleep, and I was supposed to be as divinely inspired as the Boston Celtics, and I was supposed to take a day off and not practice, and Mozart didn't want me to be a 'fraidy cat, and I was supposed to take longer on that low A and have more quiet elegance, and I was supposed to be ME: Wiena Namikaze—I'M playing this concerto, and there was a mouse being chewed up on the lawn that just thought it was going out for a walk. I think I was bewildered.

Anya called and woke me up. She was back from her dance camp in Moscow. We should celebrate.

The concert that night in the park was another orchestra that both my father and mother play in in the summertime, called the Festival Orchestra. It's not against their union rules to play in it. People, including Papa, had been kidding Mama about how she might never play again after this concert so she'd better enjoy it. In fact, if the Konoha Symphony players didn't get their contract for the next season, they'd be "locked out" and the Youth Orchestra might have to play the concert in Tatsuhime Shrine that my mother's orchestra was supposed to play on the first September weekend.

The calendar dates suddenly hit me. The Sarutobi Competition would be on Sunday morning. Mama Symphony was scheduled to play in the park on that Sunday night. If my mother's orchestra got locked out, I'd be playing the competition in the afternoon and playing a concert that night. I braided my hair and said to myself that it wasn't fair to have everything crowded together that way and then have to start school the next morning. And I'd have a completely new stand partner; I wouldn't be anybody's Little Buddy anymore.

I met Anya and Ayane where we usually meet, by the violin side of backstage in the park. My parents weren't as strict this summer about where we could sit, because we were ten. Last summer we'd had to put our blanket exactly beside at least one other symphony family if we didn't have our own grown-up along. This time they said we could sit anywhere if there were only three rows of blankets between us and the stage.

Anya said, "Parents lie in bed at night and think these things up, the same way teachers do. You really have to work to think up that three-rows-of-blankets rule." It was great seeing her again. She thought the Sarutobi Competition was nifty. "Nifty. Sure. How many people in the whole world are finalists for something like that?" She put on her idol pose and said in cute way, "Totally awesome~~!" Anya is gorgeous, the most beautiful girl I know. She has short silver hair and gray eyes. Her biggest hobby is stargazing and she hopes to one day discover an asteroid.

We walked up one side of the park and down the other, smelling the food. You can get a whole meal if you want to spend a lot of money. Chinese food, and shish kebab, all kinds of pastries, pasta salads, grilled sausages, bagels, ice cream. We had to walk around the long lines of people waiting to get into the bathrooms, and every once in a while we saw somebody we knew and said hi, and stuff stuck to our sandals, and we just walked along in the summer evening.

Anya had her own food in a bag; she wouldn't eat any from the booths. She said, "You know what's in those things? You know what they dip the chicken in? That cooking oil has forty-one percent saturated fat. You know what a fat-filled cell looks like? The nucleus and the cytoplasm are all squinched up; there's no room for anything but fat. If you get a whole bunch of fat cells you can have a stroke and brain failure." But she still wanted to go along and smell. Anya dedicated her life to become an Idol, because of that she's an extremely healthy person. She doesn't get colds or anything and she hasn't been absent from school in three years. She gets these embarrassing Attendance Awards and has to get up in front of the school and receive them at the end of the year.

We were reading the signs on the food booths, all the various kinds of cappuccino you could buy, and all the things you could get with a plate of yakisoba fried noodles, when we saw QUITE BROILED SALMON. Ayane and I decided we wanted that. "How do you 'quite broil salmon'?" I said. It smelled fabulous.

Anya said, "It's probably a British expression. You ever hear it in America" she asked Ayane.

"No. Never," Ayane said. We stood and stared at the sign. Quite broiled salmon. Anya walked up close to it and burst out laughing. "It's partly covered up." She pointed. Hooked under a board was the beginning of the sign, "Mes." MESQUITE BROILED SALMON. We roared with laughter. Mesquite is a smoke flavor from a mesquite tree.

While Ayane and I were eating Quite Broiled Salmon and yakisoba and chicken and Greek gyros and Anya was eating her healthy food and taking bites of the salmon because it passed her Healthy Test, we played I'm Neek. Somebody taught it to us in school in second grade, and we still spell it that childish way. It's called I'm Unique: everybody has to tell unique things about themselves. It was supposed to make us more thoughtful when we were little.

"I'm Neek because I'm the only one in this park right now who's forgotten how to write the Kanji character for old age," Ayane said.

"Not counting the ones that never knew in the first place," Anya said. "I'm Neek by winning a pirouette contest last week."

"How do you do that?" Ayane asked.

"I didn't fall down till the fourth one. See my knee?" Anya pulled her big lavender skirt up to show us. It was a big floor burn. "They were on pointe, too."

Anya was dancing when she was three years old. Or not much more than three. She was a Kuuko Yasaka number 1 fan, that's what she said in her school report last year. Kuuko Yasaka is a really famous Japanese Idol and Anya watched her video every single day. She said Kuuko bring smiles to everbody faces who watched her sing, and that inspired Anya to become an Idol.

Our teachers call us the Three Weird Sisters sometimes in school, the ones in Shakespeare that say, "Double, double, toil and trouble."

"I'm Neek because I played a solo in a park last night and the girl who should've been playing it wasn't scary the way she was in the dream I had about her and I feel guilty about that," I said.

Ayane said I was the star of the show, and then Anya told us about her roommates at dance camp, one from Kazan who shaved her head and one from St, Petersburg who had taken a vow of silence for the entire summer and would only whistle. Then we started to tell Anya about the dancing man. Ayane said his name was Trouble, and she said, "I bet he'll show up here. Watch. Wiena-chan has seen him how many times?"

"I don't know," I said. "Lots."

"I've only seen him once," she said. "But I'm Neek 'cause I danced with him. You should've been doing it, not me," she said to Anya.

"I'm Neek because Shinji liked me for eight whole classes last year before he went on to somebody else. He's such a jerk he only likes somebody for three or four classes usually," Anya said.

Ayane and I'd had to listen to how wonderful Shinji was after all eight classes too. "I'm Neek 'cause I knew he was a jerk before you did," I said.

"No, you're not," Ayane said. "We both did at the same time, so you're not Neek that way. Remember when he told her he'd never look at another girl? That was when, and we both knew. He was already a jerk then."

Anya sat quietly with her legs in a complete lotus position and said, "It sounds like you're both trying to make me feel stupid at the same time." I felt terrible. The three of us are friends because we don't usually do that. We all know which buttons not to push with each other. With Ayane, we don't push the button about her mother going to the cemetery every single day and making Ayane or one of her sisters or brothers go with her to see her dead husband's grave. With Anya, we don't push the button about her unhealthy obsession with Kuuko Yasaka. And with me, they don't push the button about never having a single boy friend since Tatsumi-kun in kindergarten or the one about being a maniac for practicing. And we never ever argue about who's pretty or who's ugly on which day.

Ayane said, "We're not trying to make you feel stupid, Anya-chan. Nobody can tell if a guy's a jerk close up. Not at first when he's all friendly and whispery. It's only if you're away from him. Then you can tell. You have to get perspective." She looked extremely serious. I thought of Ruby and the man who suddenly remembered another Ph.D. he wanted to get.

Anya looked at her and thought about it and then she laughed. "Thank you, dear Ayane-chan," she said, and we all put our arms around each other and swore our friendship "in thunder, lightning, or in rain" again, from Shakespeare about the Weird Sisters.

The music started and the dancing man appeared, as usual, out of the air.

He was wearing his same brown clothes, or ones just like them. But he had a different shoe on; it didn't flap open. It didn't match his other shoe. He did his same dance from before. We watched him, and Ayane and I partly watched Anya watching him. She was fascinated. He turned, and half turned, and moved in his sort of circles, and he looked that same stiff way but his dancing still had a nice feeling in it, and he had his same kind of part smile on his face, and his same dance went on and on until the piece was over. Then he bowed to the orchestra.

During the applause, Anya said, "He's got no stage fright at all. Absolutely zero. That's a fox-trot he's doing. Kind of a waltz–fox-trot."

"I want to know who he is," I said.

Sure enough, Anya wanted to dance with him. "I'm gonna do it," she said. She hopped around people's blankets just as the music was getting ready to start, and took a position right near him but not too near.

At first, it was just two people moving in a sort of parallel way, the way it had been with Ruby and with Ayane. But pretty soon Anya started moving around him and he started following her, and her lavender skirt was sliding back and forth in the air, and she made their dancing area bigger by slowly stepping farther to both sides. Eventually, they were using the whole front of the grass, coming very close to some Stem People and just missing stepping on people's blankets but never once doing it.

The sun was going down and the bright, almost orangy light from the stage was on them, and for a little while it was like Grandpa Jacques's music box in Tokyo again, and the whole world could be happy if those little minutes could go on and on, music and dancing on the grass everywhere in the world and everyone would stop fighting each other and people could just listen and watch.

It even made the concert a better one. I secretly think they gave the audience a better show.

After the concert, people were getting up to leave, and calling to little kids, "Stay right here. Don't you go one step away," while Ayane and Anya and I grabbed our blanket and picnic stuff and followed him.

He was already slipping around to the back of the stage but Anya caught him. She put her hand on one of his arms.

"Is your name really Trouble, Ojiisan?" she said.

He turned around and looked at all of us. Up close, with the lights from the stage, the little holes in his face were very big. Looking at his face felt a little bit like looking close up at Suba-chan's whiskers and mouth. Different and fascinating.

"Yeah," he said. He really had almost no teeth that I could see, just two in the front, one up and one down. "They know me on the block."

I heard all three of us breathe in at the same time. He started to duck around the side of the stage. There was a smell of dirty laundry. Of fried food and dirty laundry together. People were coming down the steps from the stage, carrying flutes and oboes and violins and horns.

"Wait a minute," Anya said to him. He looked back at her without turning all the way around. Part of him was in the dark where the side of the stage cut off the light. "I never had a dancing partner just disappear before," she said. He kept looking at her. His face began to open up and then it closed again. We must have looked to him like a committee.

Ayane said, "You're a very good dancer, Ojiisan." He turned around to face us.

He looked in a strange way like the man in Chagall's The Green Violinist in the music room at home. It was hard to tell what he was thinking, in the same way it's hard to tell in the painting. You know the face is saying something, but it's hiding it from you.

"Thank you, young lady," he said. "Me, I like to dance."

"Me, too," Anya said.

"I gotta get my gear," he said. Then he darted behind the stage. Anya followed him, and Ayane and I looked at each other and then followed her.

He went around to the very back of the stage, where the grass was worn away and the ground was hard dirt. He knelt down kind of stiffly and reached underneath some broken boards in the base of the stage and pulled out a big plastic garbage bag partly full of clinking cans. He shook the bag to get the dust off, making the cans clank together inside, and stood looking around for a few seconds, as if he were alone.

"You dance at lots of concerts, don't you?" Ayane said.

I said, "You even went to Inaba Ridge."

"I danced with you there," Ayane said.

"I saw you at Shopping District. And Midoriya," I said.

"You must've been dancing for years," Anya said. He was down on his knees in the dirt, reaching under the stage again. He pulled out a plastic bag with a notebook in it. He stood up. "My name's Anastasia, but people called me Anya," she said.

"Pleased, Anya-san," he said. He glanced very fast at Ayane and me and then off into the shadowy park. He held the notebook in its bag tight under one arm.

Horns were honking in the traffic jam that always happens after a park concert, and people were lugging blankets and picnic coolers and little kids across the grass.

Ayane was standing between Anya and me. I was kind of behind her, and she poked me by sliding her arm around to the side and back so that her elbow went right into my stomach. I didn't know what she meant.

"You're the fiddler one," he said, looking straight at me and then looking away.

"Yes," I said.

"That there's a pretty song you played," he said. He was looking sideways, not quite at anything. "Upriver."

"Do you live there? In Inaba Ridge?" Ayane asked him.

He looked at her. "Me, no. Catch a train," he said. He ignored us and took the notebook out of the plastic bag and took a stubby pencil out of his pants pocket. We stood absolutely still and watched him clutch the plastic bag under one arm, open the notebook, turn the pages, move his lips as if he were reading, and then write on a clean page. Anya was closest to him, and she stood on her tiptoes to peer very sneakily over his writing arm. It took him a long time. Then he closed the notebook, put it back in the plastic bag, picked up the bag of cans, and saw us still standing there. All three of us backed up abruptly.

"Good night, young ladies," he said, and moved away across the grass, clutching the notebook and clanking his bag of cans. He just clanked away into the crowd.

Anya turned to us and said in a soft voice, "He wrote the date in his notebook."

"That's all?" Ayane said.

Anya nodded her head slowly, over and over again. "And he misspelled 'July.'"

We were all completely silent for a moment. Then Ayane said, "He's a gaijin and he keeps a diary and he can't spell 'July.'"

We just looked at each other.

"He has to pick up cans for money," Ayane said. That was what she'd poked me about. Of course. At a nickel a can, you could easily make several yens at a concert.

"That's the most fascinating person I've met all summer," Anya said. "He supports his dancing habit by can refunds, and he…"

"… is a good dancer," Ayane continued.

"And something more than that," I added. "His face. While he dances."

"Yeah." They both agreed.

Then we were all quiet. A couple of people, friends of my parents, walked past us with instruments and said hi and we said hi back, and then we went to where my mother and father were standing looking impatient. "You took too long to get here," Papa said. "This isn't the safest place in the world for three kids to go waltzing around after dark." We went to where my mother's car was parked and crowded in and my parents took us all home.

(◕ω◕✿)

The next morning I took my day off. I left my parents a note, and I rode the bus downtown and got off at the park. The sun was bright, not hot yet. I walked around feeling how it felt not to be practicing on a summer morning. I watched some kids skateboarding on the sidewalk. I watched two police bikes slowly riding past the park. I watched pigeons and squirrels. Maybe I was really looking for the dancing man because there he was, with his bag of cans, going through the garbage containers.

I stood and watched him for a few minutes. Then he looked at me. He straightened up, letting the bag rest on the grass. "You play fiddle real good, little lady," he said.

"Thank you," I said. "I try hard. My name's Wiena."

"Me, I got the brain damage. I lost my song Waltz Tree, Miss Wiena," he said. He changed his grip on the bag and some of the cans rattled.

"You what?" I said. The sun was reflecting off the cans.

"Lead poison, ruint Rome. Can't remember. My song it was Waltz Tree back then. Nobody done play it a long time. Waltz in Three."

I put my hand up like a sun visor. "You had a song. It was called Waltz in Three, right?"

"That's it. Waltz Three. In form school."

"What's form school?"

"Where they put the bad boys. Form school. I come to find the Waltz Tree."

"What did you do that was so bad?"

"Didn't set no fire. Farmer set the fire. My father, he said I set it. The Pression. I was Trouble."

"Somebody set a fire and your father said you set it?"

"The Pression. My father, he had a Kodak he give me; I hid it with my valuables in them branches on the pasture edge. I didn't set no fire there. Nineteen and thirty-three, the Pression." He picked up the bag of cans and walked away. I followed along behind him.

"You had a camera, a Kodak, you hid it in a tree."

"Nope. In them branches piled. They was on the ground. Nineteen and thirty-three. Farmer set the fire; he had brush to burn. My father's Kodak, it burned, never a sight to see of it. Whole pasture burned. Put me in form school. It was filberts and that." He was still walking. I was following him.

"Who put you in form school?"

"Them farmers. My father's Kodak. I was Trouble. Said I set paint, the docs. Lead poison. Same with the Roman Empire, it fell. They was poisoned."

"The farmer thought you set the fire, but you didn't? Why didn't the farmer just say he set the fire?"

He stopped and rested his big bag beside the next garbage container. He looked at me. "He don't say nothing. They said it was my lead poison; I was Trouble. Them Romans they had it in their jugs, brain damage with their wine. Don't drink no wine, Miss Wiena."

"I won't, Trouble Ojii-san."

He rummaged through the trash for a few minutes, pulling out cans and putting them in the bag. I picked up three cans from the ground a few feet from the trash container. One Pepsi and two Coco Cola. I held them out in my hands, he pointed to the bag, and I dropped them in. "They found it when they dig them up. Them bony remains. They had their lead stored up. It was a burden in the bones. Them Egyptians had it. Them Jews, too."

"Lead poison?"

"That's what, Miss Wiena. It makes you imbecile. Them docs said I set paint. Thought I'd kick my bucket. I'm still here. I got a life span." He went on rummaging through the trash and putting cans in the bag.

I went on scavenging with him. We moved along to another garbage container. "And your song, Waltz in Three. Did you sing it in form school?"

"Nope. It gots no words. It's a song. Them violins. Waltz Tree. You know that song? It's a record on the player." He straightened up and looked straight at me, and stayed that way, staring.

"No. I don't know a Waltz Tree song. Can you hum it?"

"Me, no. I lost it." He looked up to the right, at the trees. "I worked sanitation, they blame me a dog gets poison. I didn't do no poison; they fired me." He set the bag down on the ground and bent over the trash container.

"Why?" I picked up some cans and put them in the bag.

"I fed them dogs. So they don't bite you. But I didn't carry no poison for no dog. They fired me, I was Trouble." He stood up straight and looked at me. "You can't play Waltz Tree?"

I looked at him. If you lose a song you can stay awake all night wanting it to come back. It's a desolate thing all inside you, a terrible empty thing. It hypnotizes you. And he'd been looking for his song for more years than I'd been alive. "I wish I could, Trouble Ojii-san," I said.

"Me, I don't want to never die without I find it. Waltz in Three."

"I'll try to help you find your lost song."

He looked at me, then away. "Nobody done that," he said. Then he carried the bag of cans off to the other side of the park. I picked up about eight cans on the way and put them in the bag when he set it down near a dumpster.

"Me, I could use the Kodak. Wished I had it."

I looked at him. He looked away. "Put it right up there on the table. Right up there." He was looking off into space.

"What table?" I asked. My parents would have a fit if they heard me prying into his private life.

"The Gospel gots a table."

"The Gospel?"

"Mission yonder." He pointed with his thumb sideways into the air. "They don't gots no violins. No Waltz Tree." He opened the lid of the dumpster and began hunting around in it. I watched him for a while.

Two police on bikes come riding toward us. They were a man and a woman. They stopped near us. "Morning, Trouble-san," the man said. "Found yourself a friend?"

Trouble Ojii-san lifted his head. "This here violin," he said, pointing me out. The police and I said hi to each other. I looked at ther bikes and listened to the clanking of Mr. Trouble's cans and said to myself that this might be the only time in my life I'd ever be called a violin.

"He telling you his Roman Empire story?" the man asked me.

"Yes," I said and the man smiled.

"You don't want to be late for lunch, Trouble-san.," said the woman cop. "Curry rice today. Smells good."

Trouble Ojii-san kept his head in the dumpster.

"You have a half hour till lunch, Trouble-san," said the man.

"I be there, I be there," came from the dumpster.

The cops both said good-bye and cyled on through the park.

My parents would have had a complete fit but I asked anyway, "Where's lunch, Trouble Ojii-san?"

"Gospel. Curry Thursday. Satonaka and them." He clanked some cans into his bag. "You find a Waltz Tree?" He straightened up and looked straight at me and didn't look away.

"No. Not yet." His mouth stirred itself up in a wrinkled motion. "But I'll try. I haven't had time yet. I haven't even gotten started." I sounded like someone making an excuse to a teacher. He bent his head back down into the garbage.

"I have to go now," I said. He was rummaging in the dumpster. He didn't turn his head or say anything, and I left.

Gospel. Satonaka and them. I could have jumped up and down right in Midoriya Park. He wasn't homeless. He lived somewhere. Somebody fed him. Satonaka and them.

I rode the bus home, back across the Samegawa River, and started looking through waltz books. No Waltz Tree. No Waltz Three. No Waltz in Three.

Papa came home from teaching his class and saw me on the floor in the music room with piles of music around me. I told him. About the police being there and everything. Papa said he didn't know how I was going to find a song that had at least three titles, but he said I should call the reference librarian at the university where he teaches. My father looked down at me with my sprawl of music all over the floor and said, "Poor old guy. Poor old guy."

The reference librarian told me she'd look it up. "But every waltz is in three, Wiena-chan," she said. She had a tone that was like "But all cucumbers are green, Wiena-chan."

"I know. But maybe it's about a tree. Could you look under that, too?"

"Well. I'll try," she said. She said good-bye as if she were closing a book.

I wasn't supposed to practice all day. I called Anya and she called Ayane and we took a bus and went to the zoo next town. We spent the whole afternoon walking around and we saw the whole entire zoo, every kind of animal.

We stood for a long time watching pandas. Some of them were eating bamboos. Looking at the pandas always makes us feel like such little kids. We get so happy. Just watching pandas with their big body and their little tiny eyes.

"Why would the Trouble grandpa tell you his life history?" Ayane was wondering.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe he tells everybody. You know what I think? He was explaining himself. But I don't know why."

"It's obvious if you think about it," Anya said, and then she waited for us to pay attention. "You're a musician. You're a connection. He's a disconnected person. That's all."

"Why wouldn't he tell you, then? You're a dancer, so is he."

She looked at me. "Wiena, it's so simple. He hasn't lost his dance. He's lost his song."

We looked at the pandas walking around in the sun. "I am so glad you both came back from your faraway places," I said.

"Speaking of Panda and China," Ayane said, "did you know bamboo is a big important symbol there?"

Anya said, "Of what?"

"Bending without breaking. It's a symbol of that. Like Trouble Ojii-san," Ayane told us.

When I got home from the zoo, Suba-chan had thrown up in Boruto's new shoes and he was putting up signs all over the house with pictures of dead cats on them.

(◕ω◕✿)

The music librarian at my father's department called me and said her staff couldn't find a Waltz Tree or Waltz Three or Waltz in Three, and asked me how soon I needed it. I didn't know what to say. It had been lost for probably more than fifty years. He didn't want to die without finding it. I didn't even know if he was sick.

I'd started depending on my midnight bike rides. I saw old people walking their dogs, once a lady pushing a sleeping baby in a stroller, and I saw a man sitting on a bench in the park flossing his teeth, all alone. I saw people coming home and putting their cars in their garages, and a couple of people coming out of their houses with lunch boxes, going to work on late shifts. And the bushes and trees with their leafy shadows in the night, and once in a while a rabbit scampering in the park. One night I saw a man and lady arguing beside a tree. She said, "You always do that, every single time.…" and he said "You're the one that always" something. Once I saw a porcupine in front of me on the trail, going along in its slow waddle. And usually there were cats crouching or springing, their lemon-shaped green eyes eerie in the dark. They were little stories I was seeing; they helped me get unfolded inside. The night riding helped me go to sleep.

But somebody saw me one night and phoned my mother the next day. I heard it happen.

"Our Wiena? No—No. She was fast asleep in bed. You what?! She what? Wiena, come here right now! Wiena? She—No, no, I had no idea—It was what time? I can't believe—Ruto, come here right now! On her bicycle? Alone? Are you sure? Thank you, thanks. Thanks. Of course. I just didn't—Thanks, good-bye.

"Ruto, you won't believe—I can't believe—Wiena, where were you at seven minutes after midnight last night?!"

My father and I had both come almost running. We stood in the living room listening to my mother's voice all choppy and afraid. I took a deep breath.

"In Midoriya Park," I said. I tried to say it as quietly as I could, and I was hoping the neighbor was wrong, that I'd actually been home in bed.

My father took a few seconds to understand. My mother put her hand over her mouth and leaned against the end of the sofa. They both stared at me. My mother's hand fell down from her face. "On your bicycle," she said.

I felt my

head pull back into my neck. "Yes," I nodded.

"By herself, alone, in the middle of night" my mother said to my father.

He shook his head. My mother nodded hers. It was very quiet in the living room. My father looked at me and believed my mother. He leaned toward me with his whole body and said, "Why?" I felt terrible for both my parents, being so afraid of something.

I couldn't think of a single reason that would make any sense. I didn't dare tell them about the porcupine waddling across the trail. Watching stray cats when I could be in my room watching Suba-chan wasn't logical, either. I couldn't tell them I'd seen a man sitting on a park bench all by himself flossing his teeth.

My mother said, "What reason could you have? At seven minutes after midnight?"

"No reason's good enough," my father said.

And then I was angry that I was supposed to have a good enough reason. Adults don't always have good enough reasons for what they do. I didn't say anything. I thought of a rabbit I'd seen, with its long feet kicking out behind as it scurried under a bush. I couldn't mention the rabbit.

"All the pernicious things out there," my father said, accusing me.

"I can't believe you'd do such a…" My mother didn't finish what she was going to say.

"It's the most irresponsible thing," my father said.

I opened my mouth. "I'm supposed to be a child and stay in my bed at night and I'm supposed to be an adult and be responsible. How can I be everything at the same time?" I heard my angry voice blowing through the room, and I thought of terrible punishments they might give me. They could ground me completely, my phone and all. Or even take my bike away.

"This is Ruby's influence," my father said suddenly, like a verdict.

"Ruby, who doesn't even know how to ride a bike?" my mother said very fast.

"This living on the edge. This middle-of-the-night, this wandering around. I don't know—we've got a lunatic soprano in one room and a dish full of dead bugs in the other—I just don't know." My father was exasperated. "There's something not normal going on. Normal people go to bed at night."

"Ruto—that's not fair. It's not because of—"

My parents went on talking to each other. The front door opened and closed, and Boruto walked right past us and up the stairs.

I followed Boruto. I don't think my parents even saw me leave. He went into his room and tried to close the door but I pushed it open and went right in after him and closed it behind me. I stood in the middle of the room and just breathed.

"What started all that?" he said and sat on a chair at his desk. The last time we'd seen Papa and Mama this upset was a long time ago, and it was about Boruto getting into a fight in school.

"I went out and rode my bike in the middle of the night and they found out about it."

He looked at me. "Where'd you ride?" He has very intense eyes.

"Around. Midoriya. Around."

"The park?"

I nodded my head.

"You know if this is a big city like Tokyo you'd last four minutes—"

"This is Konoha. I was on my bike. I could go faster than anybody that wanted to—And then Papa said normal people go to bed at night, and he called Ruby a lunatic, and.… Don't you think it's normal to go bike riding?"

He swiveled on the chair, which makes an awful screeching sound. He leaned back, looking like a lawyer in a movie. "I'll tell you what isn't normal. Practicing the violin eight hours a day isn't normal. Playing nursemaid to a loony soprano isn't normal." He put his hands together. "Trying to track down a Waltzing Tree for a man who's lost his mind isn't normal."

Boruto can be a very cruel person. I asked him, almost in my normal voice, "Is going bike riding normal?"

He swiveled in the chair again, as if he liked hearing it make that screeching sound. "In fact, Win, you want to know what would be normal?"

I was still standing in the middle of the room. "Yes, Mr. Wonderful. Tell me."

He picked up a ballpoint pen. "You and your girlfriends could be mall babies, slinking from store to store and popping your gum—and buying useless things because if you didn't buy 'em you'd die. That'd be normal." He twirled the ballpoint pen on one finger, like a baton.

It was the first funny thing I'd heard in hours. I sat down on his bed. "Mall babies?" I asked.

"Capital M, capital B. Mall Babies from this really old movie black lagoon." He tossed the pen across the desk. "Quintets of 'em, octets, battalions. They've got to be seen in every mall in the free world by the time they die, and it's—" He was bending over laughing. "It's hard work."

We sat there and laughed and laughed and shook, and his chair squeaked little tiny squeaks, and I remembered the day he'd warned me about letting the competition make me a crazoid, and pretty soon we were both just sitting there looking at each other. I tried to imagine both of us in our little white "Symphony Kid" T-shirts, dancing in the grass all those years ago. Mama's and Papa's voices downstairs were getting louder and then softer and then louder, but I couldn't hear the words. I opened Boruto's door very quietly to hear what was going on.

"Why are you yelling at me?!" Mama said, almost yelling.

"Because I love you!" Papa said, almost yelling.

Then there was absolute silence. I was scared and relieved at the same time. Boruto and I weren't supposed to hear that, and I looked at him, and I had a feeling of being spies together. I tried to close the door silently and stood against it, holding the knob back so there wouldn't be a click. He whispered, "Did I tell you the world was crazy?" and picked up the ballpoint pen again. But he didn't swivel his chair; he didn't want to make a sound.

I had to keep holding the doorknob to keep it quiet. "Is all this my fault?" I whispered.

"Win," he whispered back, "use your brain. What if your little kid went out alone in the middle of the night—you know what I saw in Tokyo?"

"Yes, I know you saw somebody selling drugs."

"Right on the street—"

"I know it, Niisan. You told me and told me."

"They're getting old, just try to keep 'em happy," he whispered. "You know what you are? You're an endangered species. They're just trying to keep you alive."

"What do you mean, I'm an endangered species?" We both kept on whispering.

"What I said. They could have a Mall Baby instead of you. You care about something, and it gets them all excited." He looked at my hand on the doorknob and went on whispering. "They probably love you so much they're terrified they lost you." He squeaked the chair again. "Besides, they've completely forgotten it's their fault you're not normal."

"They let you do anything you—"

"I'm not a child," he said. He can even be cruel when he's whispering.

"What does 'pernicious' mean?" I asked him.

"Evil," he said. He turned on his Rock music.

I opened the door and went downstairs. Papa and Mama were hugging each other tight, standing right beside the table where Mama has her dead bugs and magnifying glass. I didn't even try to be quiet. Mama had her back to me. She was holding tight to Papa, and she was snuffling, "Hopeth, believeth, endureth all things," and then she said in her normal voice, without even turning around, "Wiena, you will not go out in the middle of the night again ever, ever in your life."

"With or without your bicycle," Papa said, looking around her head at me, still with his arms tight around her.

"Even when I'm fifty years old?" I said.

"Wiena, this is not something you can be flippant about," Papa said. He broke his hold on Mama.

My mother said, "It's time to tell you about Ruby." She sounded as if she were blaming me for something.

"What's Miss Ruby got to do with—"

"Just listen," she said. "Ruby had a child once, and the child got killed. It was a little girl, and she had a husband, too, and someone hit the child, in her stroller when Ruby was walking with her child in the park, it was a drunk driver—actually, it was drugs and alcohol both, and—her husband, blame Ruby for their child death." My mother looked down at the floor and shook her head fast, as if she were trying to shake out bad pictures. She looked back up at me. "And that's why she's the way she is—and—and that's why."

I saw Ruby in my mind, crumpled on the floor in front of Papa's bass, saying she always ruins everything, and hissing at me, "No drugs!" and then I saw her with her arm around the little girl in the Flower Garden, and I saw her mumbling in the car on the way to her concert, and I saw her singing the concert, with her eyes and her mouth wide open in those gorgeous, ringing notes, and I saw the word "genius" in the newspaper, and I saw everybody applauding while she bowed, and I saw her with her raincoat on so she could throw up before she sang.

"I didn't know anything about that," I said.

"Of course you didn't," my mother replied.

I looked at my mother. That was what she was afraid of: that I'd die on my bike in the park and she'd end up like Ruby, needing to be held and rocked and put to bed. I looked at my father. "Why do you make fun of her, then?"

He rubbed his nose with his thumb and looked down at Mama's collection of dead bugs. "No good reason," he replied.

My mother looked at him quietly. "It's your father's way of pretending it never happened, pretending Ruby never had such a tragedy," she said. Her words came out very slowly. "Because—if he admits it really happened, he'll have to admit it could happen to his child, too—" She stood there looking at him. I could hear her breathing. "A person can take only so much, Wiena."

I watched my father pick up one of Mama's dead striped beetles and hold it in his hand and look at it and then put it back in the dish with the others. He looked as though he was wondering if Mama was right about him.

"I want you to grow up strong, healthy and happy," he said to me in a very soft voice. "I want you to be someone who—"

"How about right now?" Boruto's voice came from behind me, in the doorway. "Maybe you could worry a little bit less about what she's gonna be and notice she's right here, right now. Everybody's alive in this house. As of this morning. Everything doesn't have to be a matter of life or death. How about taking some of the heat off?" I kept my eyes on my father. Then I heard Boruto walk away and out of the house. Everybody else just stood there in the living room, listening to the front door close.

"Mr. Wisdom has now been heard from," my mother said after a few seconds. "And I for one think he's wrong. Everything does have to be a matter of life or death. Everything is." She stared at the place where Boruto had just been standing. I looked at her hands.

A sudden thought hit me. My mother saved insects' lives and then saved their carcasses for the exact same reason she rocked Ruby in the music room, years after Ruby's daughter was dead. It was because something is alive one minute and dead the next. Like my great-great-grandmother Wiena. Boruto was right: my parents were terrified.

And I remembered the way my mother had acted when the twelve years old Boruto got off the car when he came back from Tokyo, as if it was some miracle that he was alive. She even cried with happiness.

And maybe when my mother made that silly wave at people, she was saying, "Hey, everybody here is alive, let's celebrate!" Like a little kid, waving and looking silly, but underneath she had that terrible reason to be happy.

I looked at my mother face. Maybe I was her great-grandmother Wiena in some strange way. I had her name. That wasn't so strange. And I thought of Ayane: she couldn't save her father from the eruption of the mountain. And Anya, who thinks she dances for all those dead people in the war.

"Mama," I said, "is everything a matter of life or death?"

She looked at me, and she looked around the living room, at the chairs and the sofa and the lamps. "I don't know, Wiena," she replied.

I went to the music room and practiced. I'd been at it for about an hour when Mama came in. "Listen, Wiena," she said, walking across the room. "Put down your violin a minute." I put it on a table. "And your bow." I did. She put her arms around me. I was listening to her heart beating against the right side of my head. "Whether everything has to be a matter of life and death." She cleared her throat. "The evidence is right here, right now. Suffering and joy. That's all there is. There isn't anything else. And they're so close together—" She was talking very softly. "They're so close, it strikes terror into the human soul." She backed up and looked at me. I tried to imagine her as a little girl, watching her grandmother dust the living room before the opera came on the radio.

"Oh, Mama," I said, hugging her tight.

(◕ω◕✿)

That night was the first rehearsal of the Youth Orchestra for the Tatsuhime Festival. I'd be on the inside chair, third stand, first violins, and somebody completely different would be on the outside; I'd be turning pages for a stranger. When I walked into the rehearsal hall, sitting in Kotomi's chair was a boy I'd never seen. I saw his long raven hair first, from across the room. I got to my chair and didn't know what to say to him. He didn't look at me. I tuned up, and he tuned up, and we sat there. I pretended I was looking at the music and the Xeroxed list. For a Tatsuhime Summer Festival Concert there isn't a whole symphony, the audience can't listen that long at a time. We play short things. We were going to play Respighi's Fountains of Rome, the William Tell Overture, and short pieces by Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and Samuel Barber. We'd played them all before in the two years I'd been in the orchestra.

I sat in my chair and remembered how funny Kotomi had been about the William Tell, which she'd called "the Billy Tell." There's a section in it where the strings sound like buzzing insects, and she said we were the flies buzzing around the apple on Billy's son's head.

I looked at my new stand partner. He was obviously in junior high school. I've never gotten to sit beside anybody my own age in an orchestra. Somebody had to start the conversation so I said, "Hi."

He said hi back. Under the raven hair he had a sort of roundish face, with a very pale lavender eyes, and very long fingers. He looked at the music and said, "Do you always play this easy stuff?"

"No," I said, "Just for a park concert." This music wasn't necessarily easy stuff. And in March we'd played a Shostakovich symphony; it was very hard. It was the one where Kotomi and I'd played the wrong note together. She'd said the Wrong Note Police were going to come and get us. I didn't mention it to my new stand partner.

He was very good-looking. We still had a few minutes before rehearsal began, and he said to me, "Put the Fountains up, will you?" I shuffled the music and put it in front. He found a place he wanted, and played it a couple of times. He played very, very well. He rested his violin on his left leg and looked at me sideways. "What's your name?" he asked.

"Wiena."

"Wiena what?"

"Wiena Namikaze."

He looked back at the music and worked on tuning his D string. "My parents know your parents. I mean my father. I'm Hyuuga. Ryuuji Hyuuga." That was all he said.

Little Ryuuji Hyuuga with the Lego blocks and the sixteenth-size violin and the phenomenal concentration.

"I've heard of you."

"Yeah, I was at America."

I didn't say that wasn't where I'd heard of him. Rehearsal began.

I love playing in the Youth Orchestra. It's more fun than the softball team, although they're both hard work. In softball there's a lot of waiting around for the fun parts. In the orchestra the fun parts come more often. It also has more different kinds of people, more different ages. The little kids usually have tense mouths, and they move their eyes in quick sideways looks to see if anybody's watching them. On almost everybody in the whole band you can see a combination of the urge to play and the fear of playing badly. In the older kids, the fear isn't so obvious, of course. Mirai-san, the concertmaster, has this little speech she makes sometimes. She says, "Make your fear work for you, not against you. Let it push those fingers into place; think of it as just one part of what you do. Let it be part of the force of your music. May the force be with you." It cracks people up, the first time they hear it.

But in both music and softball you work to be as good as you can, you get breathless with effort, you surprise yourself sometimes, and you know everybody in the whole bunch is feeling sort of the same way.

Kotomi and I'd been like teammates. We'd had a rhythm of sitting together: I knew just when to turn the page, and once she'd shown me a whole new way to braid my hair.

I was definitely not Ryuuji Hyuuga's Little Buddy.

At intermission, I was standing with some of the wind players, listening to a girl tell about getting her driver's license and getting the braces off her teeth on the same day, and in the middle of it I heard somebody playing part of the first movement of Mozart's Fourth Violin Concerto very fast. I had a momentary shiver. My reflexes turned me around to see where it was coming from, even though I didn't want to find out. It was coming from a corner of the rehearsal hall, and it was as if a thread was pulling my ears to it. I saw Mirai-san whirling around to look, too. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her puff her cheeks out and blow hard out of her mouth. Ryuuji Hyuuga was in the corner with his back turned to everybody, and I watched his bowing, not wanting to watch at all. His arm moved smoothly and hard; the notes were perfect. I caught Mirai-san's face watching him closely.

Mirai-san and Ryuuji would both be playing the Sarutobi finals.

I closed my face and turned back around, and everybody was laughing at the driver's license and orthodontist story. I didn't let my face show anything. I tucked my shirt into my jeans and scratched my chin. We all went back to our places. I looked between the heads of the second-stand players at Mirai-san's back. Mirai-san is the granddaughter of Hiruzen Sarutobi, she's also in college, a nice girl with very fast fingers. I knew her mainly from when she turned around to tell the section a different bowing; that's part of her job. She was listening to the conductor tell her something.

Ryuuji Hyuuga came back to his chair. I didn't look at him. I got out the next music, the Sibelius, and put it in front of everything else.

"Now, ladies and gentlemen," the conductor said, "we remember, don't we, that in this piece the happiness of the dance is only one side of the music. The music ends in death. We play it knowing that. It has a double meaning, perfect for the kind of piece it is." He looked over the orchestra, stopping his eyes at some of the little kids. "We all understand 'double meaning,' don't we?" he said, and some of the big kids laughed. I noticed a little boy in the cello section looking scared; he only joined last year. "This music has a profound yearning and a profound lament—at the same time. Like life. Let's play." He raised his baton. "Be ominous," he said.

I heard Ryuuji Hyuuga mutter, "… waste of time." We began.

We stopped just after letter C. "I'll remind you," the conductor said to everybody. "Remember—when we played this before? The pause between the second and third beats in this section—that's where the question of great happiness or great sadness of the heart arises. The audience doesn't have to know what you know. But they deserve to hear that pause in all its silence. We suspend everything for that moment. That means we have to get off the second beat precisely and together. No split-second errors. In this case, the precision of the silence will equal poetry." He raised his baton again.

Ryuuji Hyuuga let out his breath in a whispered way that he maybe meant for me to hear. It was a whispered Aaawwwffffffff.

We began again.

At the end of rehearsal, Ryuuji Hyuuga said to me, without exactly looking at me, "You're the best page turner I've ever had." And he walked off to put his violin away while I was feeling three things. One, I was a professional—a paid page turner—so I ought to be good. Two, that was a nice compliment. Three, he said it as if that was my job in the orchestra, to be his page turner.

When Boruto picked me up from rehearsal, I said to him, "Don't ask." He hadn't even said anything yet.

"Hello, Miss Grumpy," he said. I put my violin case upright between my knees and we started home. "Look, Win, I'm not gonna ask what's wrong. But just maybe you're taking yourself too seriously. Maybe."

I watched our bike going past, traffic lights changing, Boruto pedaling faster, a dog running along the sidewalk. Isn't that what you're supposed to do? Take yourself seriously? How else do you get anything done?

"If I didn't take myself seriously, wouldn't I be just a joke?"

"Everybody's a joke."

When we got home, Mama was in the music room playing piano and Papa is watching. I had another memory: being a little tiny kid, walking in the door and hearing Mama playing piano for Papa. All of a sudden it was a feeling of safety, with the smell of hot chocolate and marshmallows in a little yellow mug I used to have.

The mug had gotten broken years ago.

Boruto and I went up the stairs together. At the top, I whispered to him, "That's not a joke, is it? Mama playing piano for Papa after they got so upset this morning?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "No. Not really. Borderline."

I couldn't go bike riding, of course. I sat in my room and played with Suba-chan. I went over my list of words, with "pernicious" and "flippant" and "ominous" added. I kept seeing violinists lined up at the competition. Ryuuji Hyuuga, Mirai-san the concertmaster, probably Kaori Miyazono, if her hand was healed. Me. That made four. Some others, and I didn't want to know who they were. I just saw violins and hands, all lined up.

I put on my pajamas and brushed my hair.

Ryuuji Hyuuga was very good-looking. And he played very, very well. And he'd given me that compliment. I didn't want to like him. But I did. Even his neck was good-looking. He had good-looking eyes, too. But I didn't see them much; he didn't look straight at me. They were reaaly pale, and he had long eyelashes.

"Put up the Fountains, will you?" Kotomi never ordered me around that way. And she was probably older than Ryuuji Hyuuga.

How could anybody has that really pale eyes?

Waltz and Three. Why couldn't the music librarian find it at the college? Waltz Tree. Probably because there were so many pieces listed under just plain Waltz. There must be thousands. And I didn't know the exact name of it. Maybe she'd call back the next day and say she'd found it.

I wondered what had happened to the husband Ruby used to have.

I remembered the clinking of her earring going into Papa's bass. And how she got so delirious. It must have been because she wasn't paying attention and suddenly things went wrong. Poor Ruby.

Abruptly I realized something: It was almost like Papa. His thing about Vigilance and Peace of Mind. Papa and Ruby were exactly alike in that way and they didn't even know it.

It was almost midnight. I pulled Suba-chan's ear and woke her up. "Hey, Suba-chan, it's midnight and I need someone to talk to." She stretched.

Why are you yelling at me? Because I love you! Maybe Boruto was right. The world is crazy, and they were terrified.

Mall Babies from the classic movie black lagoon. I wanted to call Anya and Ayane and tell them both. I put Miles Davis on the turntable and listened to "All Blues."

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