He sat with four applicants across the three Thursdays. A violinist of fourteen who had memorized the school's viewbook and quizzed him on the dining hall, as if the audition were the formality and lunch the stakes. A bassoonist who cried quietly for two minutes after playing, from the release of it, and then apologized, and was told by Xavier, with the authority of the initiated, that the practice-room sink had warm water and that crying after was in the program, unofficially. A pianist who asked whether the scholarship students were treated differently, in a voice that had been rehearsed by a parent, and to whom Xavier said the truest thing he owned on the subject: the list has your name before you get here; that's the main thing that was ever different, and it isn't anymore. And on the last Thursday, a cellist, fifteen, from a public school on the west side, who arrived forty minutes early with her instrument and a folder and a garment bag over her arm, and was checked against the list at the gatehouse and admitted within the time it took the guard to find her name — which he did without running his finger down twice, because the scholarship tab was in front — and who came up the drive past the bench at a pace that slowed, as she passed it, for no reason she could have named, and played her audition in the room with the high windows, and afterward, in the room where the chairs were, asked Xavier whether he had been nervous last year.
He told her: yes. He told her the wait had been long. He did not tell her the rest, because the rest was hers to be spared and his to keep in the folder, and because Weber, passing with a stack of folders, caught his eye and received, in answer to the question conductors ask with their eyebrows, a nod that meant the room was all right. The girl was admitted to the second round. Her name went into the binder's spring pages in the secretary's hand, expected, in the column where names now lived before their owners arrived, which is the ordinary miracle the whole year had been spent constructing: a list that knows you are coming.
Moussa's spring brought the year's machinery into his own office by the door it was designed for. In March, one of his middle schoolers — a seventh grader of twelve, small for his age, with a record in Moussa's clothbound notebook of three visits about a reading difficulty and one about a grandfather's death — was detained with two older boys outside a shopping center two bus stops from the school, on a store detective's report of theft that the detective had assembled from a camera angle and a conclusion. The boys were held in the center's security office and then on the curb outside it, in the new vocabulary of the city's spring, for a total of fifty minutes. What Moussa knew, when the boy's grandmother arrived at his office the next morning with the story still shaking in her hands, was the part of the fifty minutes that the city's new paragraph governed: a supervisor had been called at the detention's start, because the desk that took the call had a clock now, and the supervisor had arrived in thirteen minutes, and had asked for the camera before he asked the boys anything, and the camera had shown the seventh grader holding a bag for an older boy who had done the taking — holding it the way a twelve-year-old holds anything an older boy hands him, without knowledge, in the doorway, in the open. The older boys were referred. The seventh grader was released to his grandmother at the curb, at minute fifty, with the supervisor's card in her hand and a contact call logged for the following day, which came.