Stockholm, when I land, is frigid.
The weather app on my phone says it’s forty-six degrees, but it feels far colder; the moist air off Lake Mälaren gusts through the city with marrow-chilling ferocity, an icy humidity that makes me fantasize about fireplaces and blanket forts. My mom had demanded that I text her the second that I land, so even though it’s five in the morning back in Iowa, I take an awkward selfie in front of the hotel and shoot it off with a salute emoji. There: proof of life.
Stockholm has an understated beauty. Even outside the old city, the buildings are smooth sepia-toned, as if they were clipped out of an old photograph. Families lounge in the parks and frosted green spaces—I see way more fathers with strollers than I do mothers, which I guess says something about how backward America’s parental leave policies are compared to the rest of the world.
Even with the block discount the hotel is offering the competition attendees, affording my room was a stretch. Not least because I had to rent an electric keyboard to keep in my room; the venue does have practice rooms, but I know from past competitions that those get booked up fast.
The room is tiny, tinier still with the electric keyboard crammedin there, but when I open the casement windows, I have a perfect view of the winding streets of Södermalm and the ferries that cruise the river beyond, silver ribbons in their wake.
I should be soaking it in, darting out into the chilly Nordic sun to drink bitter espresso and buy a souvenir Dala horse or two. Instead, I head down to the lobby, pretending it’s to get one of the free coffees and not to crane my neck at every new guest who walks through the front doors, wondering if Marigold is here yet. We’d bought our flights and hotel rooms separately—long before we got together—and I find that now that I’m here, I feel lonely. I’ve gotten used to her presence constantly lingering on my periphery, always just a room away. I text her, but she doesn’t reply. Maybe she’s busy practicing.
Or maybe she got into a horrible car accident and is languishing in a hospital somewhere with broken fingers or something. Maybe she died.
I force myself to stop spiraling. Obviously, Marigold did not get in an accident. She is not dead.
She just…isn’t responding, for some reason.
Celia’s flight lands in the afternoon, and she shows up at my room pretty much immediately with a practice room reservation in hand. My hands are cramping from already having spent hours hunched over my shitty hotel room keyboard, but pain means nothing when you’re down to the wire. We relocate to the Opera House, and she runs me through my pieces ten, fifteen times each, until my eyes cross from exhaustion and I’m hitting the notes off muscle memory alone, rote memorization dragging my fingers across the keyboard but my mind full of nothing but white noise.
Celia doesn’t leave until close to midnight. I haven’t slept in over twenty-four hours, but the endless hours of practice have me on edge and jittery. I pace the tiny hotel room with my headphones crammed over my ears, listening to the recordings we made of myprelim round pieces and trying to get my heart rate back down to a reasonable level.
Which is pretty much impossible, of course. Now that I’m here, the competition bears down on me like an impending storm, black on the horizon and impossible to ignore. I take my pacing out into the halls and stare at every ghost-eyed under-thirty haunting the lobby, our mutual panic crackling overhead like lightning. And Marigold still hasn’t texted me back. I try not to overthink why thatis.
Someone taps me on the shoulder, and I almost jump out of my skin.
It’s Xinyan.
“Can’t sleep?” she asks when I push my headphones down around my neck. “Me neither.”
“Pretty sure nobody here will be getting any rest for the next week. I mean, every second you aren’t practicing is a second wasted, right?” Or at least that’s what the voice in my head says—a voice that sounds suspiciously like Celia Chen.
“I was hoping at least one of us would be the sane one,” Xinyan says with a sigh, “but I guess I should have known better than to think it’d be you.”
My brows go up. “When have you ever known me to be a reasonable person?”
She laughs. “Good point. Have you gotten out of the hotel much yet, at least?”
“Not yet. Maybe tomorrow. But also maybe not, because like you said, that time-wasted guilt is pretty fucking real.”
She takes a sip of coffee. And of course she’s drinking coffee at midnight. I might as well do the same thing, if I won’t be sleeping.
“Yeah,” she says with another long exhale. “And on that note, I should probably get back to my room. I’m sure I could play that prelude another ninety-eight times before bed.”
She waggles her fingers at me and drifts off toward the elevators. I watch her go with a feeling of listless resignation, because I know I’m going to end up doing the exact same thing. And—now that I’ve run into Xinyan—I’ll spend the rest of the night worrying about just how badly her presence here is gonna fuck me in the competition.
Everybody’s good here,I remind myself. Xinyan isn’t an exception. She’s just the one competitor, besides Marigold, that I know well enough to know precisely how big a threat she poses.
I pull out my phone and check my messages. Still nothing from Marigold.
Are you okay?I text. The message is marked as “delivered,” but there’s no response.
Something itches at the inside of my chest, a horrible sense of dread that swells against my breastbone.
She’s fine. I’m sure she’s fine. She’s focusing, just like I ought to be if I want to stand any chance of defeating the world’s best young pianists on an international stage.
I manage to drag out my lobby voyage another five minutes by helping myself to one of the free cocoa balls they’ve got displayed under a glass dome and watching a YouTube video of one of the other contestants from his qualifying competition—we are, according to the portal, playing one of the same pieces in the prelim round.
But in the end, I head back upstairs, back to my cramping hands and the keyboard that looms patiently in the corner of my hotel room, waiting for my calm to break. Because after all, Xinyan’s right.
