The letter from Briarwood Academy had come on a Tuesday in March, in an envelope thick enough to suggest its own importance. Briarwood was a private school across town, the kind of school whose name appeared on the bumpers of cars in neighborhoods the Diallos drove through on the way to somewhere else, with a music program that had its own building and an endowment for scholarships that the brochure described in the language of mission. Xavier had applied in January, at the urging of his Saturday teacher, who had written in her recommendation that the boy played like someone who had already decided to be a musician and was only waiting for the paperwork to catch up. The application had asked for recordings, grades, an essay. Xavier's essay had been about the repaired crack in the loaner cello and what it meant to play an instrument that had been broken and fixed, and his mother had read it once and said, that's true, which was the highest praise the family issued.
The letter invited him to an interview and an audition on a Thursday in April, at four o'clock, with Anton Weber, the academy's music director. It specified what to bring: the instrument, two prepared pieces, a folder with the appointment letter itself. It specified where to go: the main gate, where the gatehouse would have his name. Xavier read the letter four times the day it came and then put it in the folder his mother bought for the purpose, a plain dark folder with a clasp, and the folder lived on the kitchen counter for three weeks like a member of the household whose schedule everyone respected.
On the morning of the interview, Moussa laid out the rules again, not the police rules, the other ones, the musician's ones: eat something, warm up slowly, do not apologize for the instrument, and if you miss a note, keep going, because the note is gone and the piece is still there. Renee, who was off duty that day until an evening commitment at the public library two blocks from the academy — a neighborhood forum on youth programs, at which she was scheduled to listen more than speak — ironed nothing and fussed over nothing, but she stood in the doorway of his room while he dressed and said, you look like yourself, which the family understood to be the correct thing to look like. The interview clothes were his good clothes, the ones reserved for concerts: a dark jacket, a white shirt, trousers that had been hemmed by his mother in the fall and were already, by April, making a case for another hemming. Because he meant to change at the school if the bus ride rumpled him, and because his mother had suggested the jacket travel protected, he carried the clothes over one arm in a garment bag borrowed from his father's closet, and the folder in his other hand, and the cello in its case on his back, and he set out for the bus stop at two o'clock with all of it, looking, as the family said later, when they told the story among themselves, like a one-man moving company for a very small, very serious orchestra.
The bus let him off at a stop he had never used, on a street of tall fences and taller trees, where the academy's grounds began behind a brick wall that had been built to look as though it had always been there. The main gate stood open. A gatehouse of brick and glass sat inside it, and beyond the gatehouse a drive curved up through lawns toward buildings that caught the April light in their windows. It was twenty minutes past three. His interview was at four. Xavier had planned the extra time the way he planned everything, generously, because a public-school boy traveling to a private academy on two buses did not leave his arrival to chance.