It’ll all be over.
Just a matter of time.
In the end, I do manage to get a couple hours of sleep, even if I spend the first half of the night trying not to toss and turn too much—because the only thing worse than not sleeping myself is dooming Jamie to the same fate. Even so, when my alarm goes off at six, I lurch awake to a nauseating sense of disorientation, as if my brain is awake but my body still hasn’t fully got the message.
“Fuck,” I mutter under my breath, and Jamie twists around to slide an arm around my waist.
“Shh,” he says. “It’s okay. You’re gonna crush it.”
I appreciate that he doesn’t bother with small talk this morning. Exchanging sweet nothings right now would give me a panic attack.
We get dressed in relative silence. Speaking silence, anyway—I play the recording of my set list on my phone the whole time, carrying it around with me from the bedroom to the bathroom and back again, cranking the volume all the way up while I’m in the shower until the sound of Prokofiev almost drowns out the rain of water against tile.
Jamie and I get breakfast together, cardamom buns and coffee at the same place we always go to, even if we sit opposite each other at the table with headphones crammed over our ears, listening to the same shit for the five hundredth time.
“You will do well,” Celia tells me when I show up at the practice room at eight-thirty. “Just don’t overthink it. Play the way you have played this entire time, and everything will be fine.”
Easy for her to say. I bet her memories of all her young pianists’ competitions are so buried under the intervening decades that theyfeel like documentary films. Hindsight confidence is always peak confidence.
Warm-up goes better than I expected, though, considering the level of sleep deprivation and stress I’m operating with. By the time one of the staff members shows up to let us know that they’re almost ready for us, I’m feeling lax and loose, and like, you know what, maybe Celia’s right, maybe I won’t completely fucking die today after all.
I change into my performance dress, which is black velvet and lace and way too expensive considering, if I bomb this, I’ll never be able to wear it again without feeling miserable.
I don’t remember the entire trip from the practice room up the stairs and through the warren of backstage. I just know that at some point, I’m stepping out under the white glare of the stage lights and the audience is clapping, the orchestra poised onstage with bows and instruments aloft, and this is it. This is really it. It’s happening.
I smile and dip into a shallow bow, acknowledging the applause. But I can’t keep staring out into the lights for long. I feel like I’m running off the fumes of adrenaline alone at this point.
When I settle in at the bench, though, as the claps taper off—when it’s just me and the piano, the one I picked out, the one my hands have learned too well over the past few weeks—all of that falls away. I take a breath.
And the music takes over.
All in all, my set takes thirty-five minutes. Both way too short and way too long, somehow. And yet when I emerge to take my final bow, I can still hear the last notes ringing in my ears, louder than the applause. I’m grinning as I stare out into the lights, and even though I can’t see past the faces in the first two rows, I know Jamie’s out there somewhere watching, too. So I smile for him.
I don’t get to see him again until after the first session’s complete. But then he shows up backstage with a bouquet of flowers that he must have bought off the street while I was warming up, because they sure weren’t in our room this morning.
“You were fantastic,” he says. “Seriously. A lady next to me was crying during the Rachmaninoff. It was like the entire audience was spellbound—I wish you could have seen it.”
He seems so purely, unadulteratedly happy for me. It’s infectious.
I set the flowers aside on the nearest flat surface and throw both arms around him, rising up on tiptoes to press a kiss to his mouth. “Thank you. God. I can’t believe it’s actually over. I still haven’t processed.”
“Over for you,” he says wryly.
“Sorry. Was that insensitive?”
He laughs. “No, I’m just giving you shit. I’m trying not to think about this afternoon. Just gonna ostrich my way through the next several hours, and maybe when I emerge, it’ll be to find out I won the whole thing. Or,” he adds diplomatically, “that you did, of course.”
“False modesty is not a cute look on you.”
“Sorry. Yeah, still hope to beat you, no offense.”
“None taken.”
I can’t remember the last time I saw him look so happy talking about music. That horrible eternal engine that had been running inside him for the past two months seems as if it’s finally shut off, leaving behind a Jamie that smiles easily, shoulders relaxed and not constantly scrunched up around his ears. I can’t help imagining what his final performance will sound like, if he plays it feeling like this. Maybe for once, he’ll forget about the audience and justplay.Maybe he’ll let himself feel it.
“How are you feeling?” I ask him. And then realize it’s a little unclear what exactly I mean by that, so I revise: “About your pieces. Do you feel like you’re ready?”
“Ready?” he echoes, and makes a face. “Is anybody ever ready to get judged by a jury of the best musicians the world has to offer? I’m just hoping to make it through alive.”
