All Chapters of Six Months Of You: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

30 Chapters

Chapter Twenty-One: What Comes After

The acceptance letter came on a Tuesday. I was in the practice room when my phone buzzed. Professor Valdez had been right about the piece. I had known it the moment the last note left the room and the panel had gone quiet in a particular way, the way people went quiet when something reached them. Westbrook Conservatory Pre-Professional Program. Full scholarship. Spring enrollment. I read it three times. Then I put the phone face down on the chair and I picked up my bow and I played Bach from the beginning, all the way through, because that was what you did when something good happened. You played the thing your grandfather taught you. You played the thing that always sounded like a door opening. When I finished I called Landon. "I got in," I told him. A pause. One second. Then: "I know." I looked at the phone. "What do you mean, you know." "I mean I know you got in. I've known since the audition that you were going to get in." "You couldn't have known that." "I heard the pi

Chapter Twenty-Two: Sunday

Margaret's room was warmer this time. She had flowers on the windowsill, small orange ones in a glass of water, and the chair she had been sitting in last time had been moved closer to the window. She was in a softer cardigan. Her book was face up on the table, which meant she had been reading recently and set it down deliberately, not fallen asleep over it. Small things. I noticed them the way I noticed the details in a composition, the choices that told you what was actually going on underneath. She was having a better day. "You came," she said. "I said I would," I told her. I had brought my cello. Landon had asked if I wanted him there for this and I had said no, let it be just us, and he had dropped me off at the entrance and gone to wait in the lobby without arguing. That was one of the things I had learned about him over the months. He knew which rooms to step back from. I sat in the chair across from Margaret and we talked for a while before I played. She asked about th

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Coaching Program

The first Saturday he coached, I went to watch. I didn't tell him I was going. I found out when the sessions were from the youth league website, and I showed up at the field behind the community center at eight forty five AM with coffee in both hands and sat down on the bleachers in the cold. He was already out there. Ten kids, maybe eight to ten years old, in mismatched jerseys and too-large shin guards, running a drill that involved considerably more chaos than coordination. Landon stood at the center of it with his hands in his pockets, watching. Then one of the kids, a small one in a green jersey, completely lost track of the ball and ran face-first into the kid next to him. Both of them went down. The small one sat up with wide eyes, clearly deciding whether to cry. Landon walked over, crouched down to their level, and said something I couldn't hear from the bleachers. The small kid laughed. I watched him stand up and restart the drill and I thought about the boy who had w

Chapter Twenty-Four: Priya's Question

Chapter Twenty-Four: Priya's Question Priya asked me a direct question on a Wednesday night. We were in my room, late, the kind of late that arrived after a full day of everything and deposited you on your bed with nowhere left to be. She had a half finished essay on her laptop. I had my notebook open to a page I had been staring at for twenty minutes without writing. "Are you happy," she said. I looked up. "Right now specifically or in general." "In general. Since the contract ended. Since room 214. Since all of it." I thought about it. Not the automatic answer, not the reflexive fine. The real answer. "Yes," I said. She looked at me. "Just yes." "Just yes." She closed her laptop halfway. "That's the first time you've answered that question without adding a qualification." I turned that over. She was right. I qualified everything. I was fine but tired. I was good but busy. I was okay, considering. I had been adding caveats to my own happiness since before I could remember,

Chapter Twenty-Five: Sheet Music

Chapter Twenty-Five: Sheet Music He had brought Ravel. Specifically the Pavane pour une infante defunte, arranged for piano and strings, which was not a simple piece and was also, I understood the moment I saw it, a deliberate choice. The Pavane was about grief and memory and the particular weight of something beautiful that had ended. It was not a happy piece. It was an honest one. I looked at the sheet music. I looked at him. "Why this," I said. "I heard it when I was twelve," he said. "My mother played it the week my father first threatened to stop her piano lessons. She played it every night for a week." He looked at the pages. "I've been thinking about it lately." I thought about what Margaret had said. About Sunday mornings. About the piano lessons that ended in ninth grade. About the things his father had taken, one by one, over years. "Have you played it since," I asked. "I tried once. Sophomore year. There was a piano in the common room and I thought no one was around

Chapter Twenty-Six: Formal Findings

Chapter Twenty-Six: Formal Findings The formal findings were published on a Friday. Richard Cross was charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud and money laundering facilitation. Marcus Hale had accepted a cooperation agreement and was cooperating fully with the investigation. Cross Capital had been ordered to cease operations pending the outcome. Civil suits had been filed by fourteen of the clients whose accounts had been misused across six years. I read the summary in the library and then I put my phone away and sat very still for a moment. I thought about the morning in Grace Okafor's lobby. The clock moving toward nine. Landon closing his eyes for three seconds when Grace came out and told us the report had been received. I thought about his father's voice on the phone. Controlled. Certain. A man delivering a decision. It doesn't matter. Because it's already done. He had been right that it was done. Just not the way he had meant it. My phone rang. It was Elena.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: December

Chapter Twenty-Seven: December December arrived with cold that meant it. The kind of cold that found the gaps in your jacket, that made the walk from the dormitory to the music building something you moved through quickly and with purpose. I had been at Westbrook for three years and I still wasn't used to this particular cold. My grandfather's cello did not like it either. I had to tune before every single session. I was tuning when Landon arrived on Thursday. He had started knocking consistently now. Not as a formality. As an announcement. I had come to recognize the exact pattern of it, two knocks, a pause, a third, and the way it sounded different from anyone else who used the practice rooms on the third floor. "It's cold," he said, coming inside. "That's December." "Your cello sounds unhappy." "It is unhappy." I made a small adjustment. "It prefers September." He sat in the chair by the window. He had the Ravel folder again, plus something else, a second folder I hadn't s

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Before Spring

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Before Spring The spring enrollment packet arrived the second week of December. Course selection. Practice room allocation. Ensemble placement auditions in January. A list of faculty I would be working with, including a name I recognized from a recording my grandfather had played for me when I was nine, a cellist whose approach to Bach he had described as the most honest thing he had ever heard. I sat at my desk and read the packet three times. Then I called my mother. "It's real," I told her. "It was always real," she said. "You made it real." "Mom." "I'm allowed to say that." I thought about what Priya had said. You're allowed to have it. My mother's version was different but it meant the same thing. "I'm going to be twenty minutes away," I said. "I can still come home Sundays." "I know. But Lena." A pause. "You don't have to come home Sundays. You're allowed to have Sundays that are yours." I thought about Leo. About the cooking and the video game

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Last Thursday

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Last Thursday Room 214 was double booked in the second week of December. I found out on Wednesday when the room schedule showed a string quartet rehearsal from four to seven, which was our window. I texted Landon. He found out at the same time. We stood in the corridor outside the room on Thursday afternoon and looked at the closed door and the sound of four people rehearsing Haydn coming through it. "Where else," he said. "Professor Valdez's studio. Third floor. She said students could use it over the holiday break." I looked at him. "She also said it has a better piano." He looked at the closed door. "The piano in here isn't bad." "The piano in here is thirty years old and the middle C sticks slightly." "I've adapted to the middle C." "You shouldn't have to adapt to a sticking key," I said. "Come on." Professor Valdez's studio was at the end of the third floor corridor, larger than I had realized from the outside. There was a good piano, a full upri

Chapter Thirty: What We Keep

Chapter Thirty: What We Keep I went home for Christmas and Leo beat me at the racing game eleven times in a row. He was genuinely very good at it. I said so and he accepted the compliment with the particular graciousness of a twelve year old who had been waiting for the acknowledgment. I let him win the strategy game twice, then he won it himself on the third attempt and I didn't have to let him do anything. My mother made dinner on Christmas Eve and we sat at the table for a long time after the food was gone, just the three of us, not talking about anything in particular, the radio on in the kitchen. I looked at my mother's face in the candlelight and I thought about how she had looked in the hospital waiting room that morning in October, still in yesterday's scrubs, running on nothing but will. She looked different now. Not younger. Just less held. Less stored. "You're thinking very hard," Leo told me across the table. "I think hard. It's a habit." "About what." "About how g

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