The guard saw him coming down the last of the drive and slid the gatehouse window open before he reached it, which was the guard's whole art now, to have the window open at the right time. The binder lay open on the counter under the lamp, at the concert tab, and the guard's pencil was in his hand, and the evening's departures stood checked in a column of small, satisfied marks. The guard ran his finger down the student roster at the front of the book — not to find the name; he had stopped needing to find it months ago — but to make the entry in its place, in the order the book required, because the form was the form and the year's whole lesson had been that the form, filled completely, was a kind of hospitality.
Diallo, the guard said. He said it the way he said the names of the regulars, with the greeting built into the saying, and he marked the departure beside the morning's arrival so that the boy's day at the school stood in the book entire, in and out, expected at both ends. Good night for it, Xavier. How'd the Elgar go.
At the tempo of the music, Xavier said.
The guard, who did not know the Elgar from the telephone book, received this as musicians' news and nodded in the manner of a man entering a result in a column he trusted. He said: your name'll be in the fall book on the first day, same page. Secretary does the roster in August; I checked her draft. He slid the window to — not shut; gatehouses do not shut until the book is closed, and the book would not close until the last name of the concert tab was out, and the last name was now out, and still the guard kept the light on a while longer, out of the habit of the year, which had taught the gate that a light left on over a finished log was not waste. It was a record, lit.
Xavier went out of the main gate onto the public sidewalk, into the spring evening and the street of tall fences and taller trees where the bus had first set him down. The gate stayed open behind him until the guard's closing hour; the wall ran along beside him; the neighborhood had its Friday sounds, a dog somewhere, a car's door, the far music of other people's evenings behind their fences. He texted his mother from the corner, standing under the streetlight the way a man had once waited under it for a daughter's bus, in another family's ordinary evening: on the bus stop now. home by eleven. And then, because the family's discipline was completeness, he added: played it at the tempo of the music. Her answer came while he was still looking at the phone, in the brevity she used for everything she meant entirely: I heard it. So did the third row.
The bus came up the street the way it had come on the first afternoon, out of the city's ordinary circulation, and he boarded it with the cello case and the garment bag and paid his fare and took the seat he always took, the one over the wheel where there was room for the case between his feet — upright, held down against the movement of the road with one flat hand, the way he had held a folder against a breeze a year and a month before, in the longest forty minutes of his life and the first page of everything that had come after: the curb and the record, the recusal and the review, the minutes and the margin, the clock and the question, the letters that arrived late and in full. The bus pulled away from the stop and gathered the street behind it, and the academy fell back into its trees — the wall, the lawns, the dark music building, the gatehouse window with its light on over an open log that had his name in it, entered and returned, expected at both ends, in the secretary's hand and the guard's — and the boy crossed the lot of the city in the spring evening with his cello on his back and his name in the book behind him, going home by the road he had chosen, in the ordinary dark, at the tempo of the music.