She picked up the baton then, because if she had stood there one second longer she would not have been able to conduct at all, and she turned to her orchestra and raised her arms β and the whole of her life, the corridor part of it, rose up before her eyes the way it always did in the moment before the music, except that tonight she let it come.
---
The corridor had smelled of floor wax and other children's lunches.
It was February of 1986, and Gabrielle was ten, and small for it, and she had worked out with great care the exact geography of being unnoticed. In the last twenty minutes before the buses came, the east corridor belonged to nobody β the janitor not yet arrived with his mop, the teachers in their rooms with their grade books β and the school violins, four of them in a cupboard with a lock that did not entirely lock, were unwatched.
She had not stolen it. She wanted that understood, then and forever, though she told no one. She simply took the least-broken of the four down from the cupboard, stood by the tall windows where the winter light came in the color of dishwater, and played.
The violin was too big for her. Its varnish had gone cloudy at the edges. And its bridge β the little pale wooden arch that holds the strings up off the body, no taller than a thumbnail β was cracked through at the foot, so that the whole thing leaned by a degree or two, and the strings sat low and buzzing, and every note she drew had a rattle inside it, like a word spoken through a loose tooth.
She played anyway. She played the only things she knew, which were the things she had heard: the hymn from her grandmother's church with its long rising line, a tune off the radio she had taken apart by ear, and scales β because she had watched through the music-room door how Mr. Delaney's real students began, and understood that scales were the toll you paid the instrument before it would tell you anything.
She was halfway up a scale, frowning at the buzz, when she understood that the footsteps she had taken for the janitor's had stopped.
Teachers walked past. That was the arrangement of the world as she knew it β not cruelty, just arithmetic: so many children, only so much day. She had been walked past by experts. She had her shoulders arranged for it.
Arthur Delaney stopped.
He did not stop the way adults stop when they have caught you. He stopped the way a man stops at the sound of water in a wall where water should not be β his head turned first, she remembered that for the rest of her life, and his body followed it reluctantly, as if the body had errands and the head had overruled them.
"Play that again," he said.
She should have run. Every instinct she owned, and she owned a great many for a child of ten, said to put the violin down gently so as not to add damage to the charge sheet, and run. Instead β and she would spend years wondering at herself β she played it again. The scale, up and back, with the rattle in it like a second, smaller instrument playing along in mocking harmony.
He came down the corridor toward her slowly, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow the way he always taught, and he did not look at the cupboard, or at her hands to see if they were stealing hands. He looked at the violin. Then, arriving, he did the thing no adult had ever done in her presence. He crouched. He put himself down at her level, knee cracking softly on the waxed floor, so that she did not have to look up, and he said, conversationally, as if they were two musicians meeting at a stage door:
"Your bridge is cracked."
"I know," she said, with all the dignity she had. "It was like that."
"I believe you," he said. "May I?"
She held it out β not surrendering it, showing it, the way you show a bird with a bad wing to the one person on the street who has stopped. He took it in both hands the way she would later learn you always take an instrument, even a ruined one, even a child's, and he turned it under the window light and looked at the crack with his whole attention, and she watched his face do something she had never seen an adult face do about a thing of hers.
He was listening to it. With his eyes. In silence. As if it had more to say.
"It still wants to sing," he said at last. "It's just having to shout through a broken door." He handed it back. "What's your name?"
"Gabrielle Mensah."