Chapter 23: Swapped Pages
The class performance was not a recital. Professor Brandt called it a workshop, which meant the audience was only the other piano students, and the stakes were supposed to be low. Althea Moss did not believe in low stakes anymore. She prepared for the workshop the way she prepared for everything: early, carefully, with her folder checked twice.
She was to play a short classical piece, approved and restrained, the kind that showed control. She arrived twenty minutes early, set her folder on the piano's music desk, and went to fill a paper cup with water from the corridor fountain. When she came back, students had gathered near the windows, and her folder was still on the desk, closed, exactly where she had left it. She did not open it again until Brandt called her name.
"Althea Moss," Brandt said, smiling. "Whenever you're ready."
She walked to the piano, sat down, opened the folder, and felt her breath stop. The pages in front of her were not her piece. They were someone else's: a dense, unfamiliar work covered in fingerings in another student's handwriting. She stared at it for a second too long, then looked up at the room, at Brandt's encouraging nod, and understood that something had gone wrong in the most ordinary way possible. Someone had swapped the folders by accident in the crowded room. There was no malice in it that she could see, only confusion.
Her first thought was to explain, to stand up and say that her music was missing. Her second thought was that an explanation would sound like an excuse, and she had spent enough of her time at Alden explaining herself. She thought of the midnight hall, and of the way she had played "The River Remembers" with no pages in front of her, because the piece lived in her hands as much as on paper. She thought of Wendell's voice: technique is a vessel, not a cage. And she realised, with sudden clarity, that she knew this approved piece by heart.
She closed the unfamiliar folder gently and set it aside. Then she turned to Brandt. "My pages have been swapped with someone else's," she said, clearly, so the whole room could hear her. "I know the piece. I'd like to play it from memory, if that's all right."
Brandt blinked, then nodded. "Of course," he said. "Play."
She turned back to the piano, closed her eyes for half a breath, and began. The opening notes came steadily, and then the rest followed, not perfectly, but honestly. Without the page to watch, she listened more closely to what her hands were doing. She heard the shape of the piece the way she had heard it in the practice room when she stopped worrying about the score and started worrying about the music. A passage she usually rushed, she took at its proper pace. A quiet section she usually hurried through, she let settle. Her hands remembered, and her ears guided them, and for the first time in a classroom at Alden, she was not performing a page. She was playing a piece she knew.
Halfway through, she became aware of the room again: the stillness, the attention. Nolan Everett was leaning forward in his seat. Celeste Moreau, near the front, was watching her hands with an expression between surprise and respect. Brandt had stopped taking notes. When Althea reached the final phrase, she played it the way she had learned to play it in the recital: restrained, as written, and with a little light left in it.
The last note faded. There was a beat of silence, and then applause, warmer than workshop applause usually was. Althea stood, bowed, and felt her knees tremble only after she had sat down again.
Afterwards, the mystery solved itself without drama. A first-year student named Daniel, red-faced and apologetic, came up to her holding her folder. He had picked it up by mistake when the group near the windows shifted, thinking it was his own, and had only realised when he opened it backstage. "I'm so sorry," he said, over and over. "I didn't even look inside until just now."
"It's all right," Althea said, and meant it. "These things happen."
Brandt overheard and smiled. "You handled that well," he told her quietly. "Most students would have panicked or made a scene. You told the truth and then you played. That's a musician's answer."
Celeste stopped her in the corridor later, which was unusual enough that Althea braced herself. "You played that from memory," Celeste said. It was not quite a question.
"Yes," Althea said.
Celeste was quiet for a moment. "I couldn't do that," she admitted, with no condescension in her voice at all. "I need the page. I always have." Then she walked away before Althea could answer, leaving Althea standing in the corridor thinking that respect, when it came, often arrived in the plainest words, and from the last person she would have expected.