“I can relate. My flight is in four days. And I know I haven’t practiced nearly enough. I’m still making elementary mistakes on my Schumann piece.”
“I’ll tell you what my teacher told me,” Xinyan says. “At this point, practicing more isn’t going to make a difference. It’s all the work you’ve done up to now, accumulated, that will drive how you perform next week. He actually told me that I should take a few days off before prelims just to let my mind reset, so the pieces don’t feel so rote.”
“That makes sense. Easier said than done, though. Like…even if he’s right, I don’t know if I could actually stop practicing from now until prelims. I think I’d drive myself crazy with the what-ifs.”
“I get it. I’m the same way. He might be right, but if I do that and then underperform…I’ll blame myself for not practicing hard enough. Maybe it’s better to fail and then be able to tell myself, well, I tried as hard as I could. I practiced as much as I could. So maybe everyone else was just better than me.”
Honestly…yeah, that’s about where I’m at, as well. As much as I like the idea of switching off my brain and letting muscle memory take over, I don’t trust my body anymore. I need to be sure my limbs won’t give up on me day-of. And if they do, I need to know how I’m going to accommodate that.
I’m not Xinyan, who can even consider it. And I’m definitely not her able-bodied instructor with his easy confidence.
I have to find my own way through this.
“C’mon, Marigold—let’s go down together,” Jamie says, hooking his arm through mine once he gets back up to the top after a particularly risky swan dive down the slope.
I give Xinyan a helpless sort of shrug and follow, scrunchingour bodies together tight on the same tray, Jamie’s strong arms closing around my middle and his breath hot on my neck as we push off.
This is what I want to remember. Not my body’s many tiny betrayals. Not fear.
Just this.
Three Days
Until Stockholm
18
Jamie
One perk of living with the daughter of a Phil principal musician: free tickets to any performance you like. Or better yet, rehearsal.
I’m a Chopin fanboy at heart, always have been—maybe it’s the music, or maybe it’s just reading too many old books and romanticizing the idea of a consumptive composer scribbling away in a dim room in nineteenth-century Poland. I mentioned it to Marigold offhand once, and she must have immediately turned around and told her father, because the next night, she tells me that her dad got us in to watch a rehearsal. You know.If we want.
The Phil is still on tour, but one of the guest soloists will be at the theater this weekend practicing. So, it’ll essentially be a piano master class. Up close and personal.
“Sounds fancy,” my mom says when I check in with her over our weekly FaceTime.
“Well, it’s just a practice. But I’ll get to have the best seats in the house.”
She smiles. Maybe it’s the lighting, but her face seems wan, skin stretched too tight over bone. My heart does that familiarsqueeze of guilt; she’d never allow it, but I know I ought to be there. With her. Helping her. If I were a better son, I would be.
“I’m so glad you’re getting these opportunities, Jamie,” she says. “I remember how badly you wanted to go to New York. It was all you talked about when you were a kid. Phil this, Phil that. And now here you are.”
“Here I am.”
I need to figure out some kinda way to detach my mind from all the baggage dragging it down. Objectively, I already won. I’m at Parker. I’m going to Stockholm. Teenage me would have been elated for half as much. Instead, I feel like one of those same privileged, ungrateful assholes I always resented—getting it all, but always wanting more. Always bored of it.
If Adam were here…
Well, if Adam were here, a lot of things would be different. But he’d definitely tell me to pull my head out of my ass.
After my mom and I hang up, I toss my phone aside on the bed and stare up at the crown molding on the ceiling. Winning Stockholm would matter, right? If I won Stockholm, it’d actually sink in that Ididit, I made it, and let off just enough of that pressure that I can stop overthinking shit and just enjoy it again. Maybe that’s my problem—maybe I still feel like I haven’t done enough to deserve being here.
Aaand that’s why I don’t need to pay for a therapist. I have a Psych 101 course credit and an anxiety disorder. I can psychoanalyze myself.
It’s deep winter, the wind scrubbing a flush onto Marigold’s cheeks when we leave for Lincoln Center. I reach over and hook our fingers together, and hers curl in tight against my palm, like she’d been waiting for it the whole time.
“Three days until Stockholm,” she says. “This time next week, we’ll be about to start preliminaries.”
