[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.He gave me a stack of music books and offered to teach me.“Let’s just keep it to ourselves,” he said.I think it was the idea of having our own secret that appealed to me.I suspect he knew it would.We decided to meet for lessons after school at a park in another neighborhood.Mark warned me that he would be able to teach me only the rudimentaries of flute playing, but the very first time I put my lip against the embouchure, I had the strangest feeling, as though I had done it before.And perhaps I had, in some other lifetime.How else did I learn so fast?I loved our afternoons in the park and the walk back home together, when I gabbled on about school and my friends (ex-friends, really, since I no longer hung around after school let out).Mark raised his eyebrows at the cough syrup but told me that cutting was not cool because kids who started doing it often developed serious mental problems.Soon there wasn’t any more that Mark could teach me.He downloaded sonatas off the Internet onto his iPod for me.(Mine was still confiscated.) Bach and Handel and some Mozart.And he gave me a book about the lives of the great composers.I read and reread that book late into the night instead of doing homework.My favorite story was Beethoven’s—not so much for his music (I prefer Bach) but for his tragic life.I thought often about his troubles: his beloved mother dying early, his alcoholic father, his dead brother’s son, whose guardian he was, giving him all sorts of trouble.No one in his family appreciated him the way they should have.Mostly, I admired his ability to keep going after he realized—early in his career—that he was going deaf.I would have thrown myself into the Danube, but he just went on composing.I went to the park straight after school each day with Mark’s iPod and my flute.I’d find a bench hidden behind some overgrown shrubs and listen and practice on my own until it turned dark.Sometimes kids stopped to watch me, but I knew what to say to make them move on fast.My grades didn’t get much better.My parents yelled at me for coming home so late.And I still wore black.But inside, something had changed.I no longer wanted to waste my energy on being bad.One afternoon, when I thought I was ready, I invited Mark to the park and played all the sonatas I’d learned for him, plus a few short melodies I’d composed.I expected applause when I finished, but he just sat there looking at me.Then he said, “Lily, you have a gift.You can’t waste it.I need to tell Mom and Dad so they can get you lessons.” At first, I refused, but Mark can be persuasive.Soon I was in our living room, playing the flute for my astonished parents and Gramma.I messed up a few times because I was so nervous.In spite of that I must have sounded pretty good, because afterward they all hugged me and my mother cried and said I should have told them.The next day they arranged for me to have lessons with Mrs.Huang, who everyone in Chinatown agreed was the best teacher around.My parents got me an expensive new flute, too (although they rented it from Brook Mays, just in case).Just like that, I became the subject of much admiration at home and amazement at parties.(“Wah! Did you hear about that Lily? Learned to play Beethoven overnight, all by herself! Others practice until their fingers are bones, but that one, she’s a born genius!” Gramma would rush in to avert the evil eye then: “No, no, she makes lots of mistakes still, not half as good as your Caroline.”) I watched Mark carefully to see if he minded my ascension, but he appeared relieved.He was busy with college preparations.He had been accepted to MIT and spent much of his time on the Internet, checking out professors’ credentials and student ratings, deciding who he wanted to do work with.Dually blessed in their gifted progeny, my parents went around smiling all the time—humble smiles, of course.Mrs.Huang was an ambitious teacher, and she pushed me.I didn’t mind.I was hungry.I listened meekly when she scolded me about having learned things the wrong way.I even stopped composing my own music—though I missed it—because she said that I must first get a full classical education.When she entered me in a local contest, I was nervous about playing in front of strangers.But I won.She entered me in a more important contest.I won again, and this second time I was less nervous.I began to realize that I was better than the other players.I enjoyed the attention of the audience and my parents’ excited hugs afterward.I asked Mrs.Huang for more competitions and practiced feverishly for them.I put away my dark clothes and Goth makeup and became positively suburban, additionally delighting my parents.Mark was away at college.It was his first semester, but neither my parents nor I paid much attention to how he was managing so far from home.We were too busy winning (a bigger high than entire bottles of cough syrup).And Mark was Mark, after all.We knew he would perform superbly.When I e-mailed him details of my success, he wrote back congratulating me.At the end of the note, he added, Don’t do too much too soon.I thought it was a strange thing to write.I felt exactly the opposite.Music had come to me so late.I had to struggle to catch up with all those boys and girls who had been practicing since pre-kindergarten.How could it ever be too much?But one Saturday morning, just a day before a major state-level competition, I woke up with a heaviness in my fingers.Actually, I felt heavy all over.I didn’t want to go into the room my parents had set aside for my practice (Mark’s old room).I didn’t want to play Bach’s Sonata No.5 in E Minor, which was supposed to have been my opening piece, though it was one of my favorites.I wanted to call a girlfriend and go to the mall and giggle over girlish things—but I didn’t have a friend to call.My obsession had pushed my friends away.When I realized that, I wanted to cry.Instead, I called my brother.Mark’s voice on his cell phone sounded sleepy, although on the East Coast it was long past noon.I was surprised because he’d always been an early riser.I asked him what he’d been up to—we hadn’t spoken in a while—and why was he still sleeping.He said he’d been out late the previous night.“Were you partying?” I asked.It was a joke; Mark never partied.His idea of a good time was meeting his geeky friends at the local Borders for a latte and discussing lesser-known scientific theories.“I guess you could call it that,” he said.Intrigued and amused, I asked if he partied often.“Hey, listen,” he said abruptly.“Can I call you back? I have a terrible headache.” Before I could respond, he hung up.I waited around a couple hours, but he didn’t call.My conversation—actually, nonconversation—with Mark made me feel heavier.By this time, it was afternoon and I definitely should have been practicing for the contest.Instead, I sneaked out of the house, took the 38 down to the ocean, and went for a walk, hoping the salty, stinging air would clear my head and help me figure out what was going on.Music had been my life for the past year.I heard it in my head while I went through the boring necessities of daily existence [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.He gave me a stack of music books and offered to teach me.“Let’s just keep it to ourselves,” he said.I think it was the idea of having our own secret that appealed to me.I suspect he knew it would.We decided to meet for lessons after school at a park in another neighborhood.Mark warned me that he would be able to teach me only the rudimentaries of flute playing, but the very first time I put my lip against the embouchure, I had the strangest feeling, as though I had done it before.And perhaps I had, in some other lifetime.How else did I learn so fast?I loved our afternoons in the park and the walk back home together, when I gabbled on about school and my friends (ex-friends, really, since I no longer hung around after school let out).Mark raised his eyebrows at the cough syrup but told me that cutting was not cool because kids who started doing it often developed serious mental problems.Soon there wasn’t any more that Mark could teach me.He downloaded sonatas off the Internet onto his iPod for me.(Mine was still confiscated.) Bach and Handel and some Mozart.And he gave me a book about the lives of the great composers.I read and reread that book late into the night instead of doing homework.My favorite story was Beethoven’s—not so much for his music (I prefer Bach) but for his tragic life.I thought often about his troubles: his beloved mother dying early, his alcoholic father, his dead brother’s son, whose guardian he was, giving him all sorts of trouble.No one in his family appreciated him the way they should have.Mostly, I admired his ability to keep going after he realized—early in his career—that he was going deaf.I would have thrown myself into the Danube, but he just went on composing.I went to the park straight after school each day with Mark’s iPod and my flute.I’d find a bench hidden behind some overgrown shrubs and listen and practice on my own until it turned dark.Sometimes kids stopped to watch me, but I knew what to say to make them move on fast.My grades didn’t get much better.My parents yelled at me for coming home so late.And I still wore black.But inside, something had changed.I no longer wanted to waste my energy on being bad.One afternoon, when I thought I was ready, I invited Mark to the park and played all the sonatas I’d learned for him, plus a few short melodies I’d composed.I expected applause when I finished, but he just sat there looking at me.Then he said, “Lily, you have a gift.You can’t waste it.I need to tell Mom and Dad so they can get you lessons.” At first, I refused, but Mark can be persuasive.Soon I was in our living room, playing the flute for my astonished parents and Gramma.I messed up a few times because I was so nervous.In spite of that I must have sounded pretty good, because afterward they all hugged me and my mother cried and said I should have told them.The next day they arranged for me to have lessons with Mrs.Huang, who everyone in Chinatown agreed was the best teacher around.My parents got me an expensive new flute, too (although they rented it from Brook Mays, just in case).Just like that, I became the subject of much admiration at home and amazement at parties.(“Wah! Did you hear about that Lily? Learned to play Beethoven overnight, all by herself! Others practice until their fingers are bones, but that one, she’s a born genius!” Gramma would rush in to avert the evil eye then: “No, no, she makes lots of mistakes still, not half as good as your Caroline.”) I watched Mark carefully to see if he minded my ascension, but he appeared relieved.He was busy with college preparations.He had been accepted to MIT and spent much of his time on the Internet, checking out professors’ credentials and student ratings, deciding who he wanted to do work with.Dually blessed in their gifted progeny, my parents went around smiling all the time—humble smiles, of course.Mrs.Huang was an ambitious teacher, and she pushed me.I didn’t mind.I was hungry.I listened meekly when she scolded me about having learned things the wrong way.I even stopped composing my own music—though I missed it—because she said that I must first get a full classical education.When she entered me in a local contest, I was nervous about playing in front of strangers.But I won.She entered me in a more important contest.I won again, and this second time I was less nervous.I began to realize that I was better than the other players.I enjoyed the attention of the audience and my parents’ excited hugs afterward.I asked Mrs.Huang for more competitions and practiced feverishly for them.I put away my dark clothes and Goth makeup and became positively suburban, additionally delighting my parents.Mark was away at college.It was his first semester, but neither my parents nor I paid much attention to how he was managing so far from home.We were too busy winning (a bigger high than entire bottles of cough syrup).And Mark was Mark, after all.We knew he would perform superbly.When I e-mailed him details of my success, he wrote back congratulating me.At the end of the note, he added, Don’t do too much too soon.I thought it was a strange thing to write.I felt exactly the opposite.Music had come to me so late.I had to struggle to catch up with all those boys and girls who had been practicing since pre-kindergarten.How could it ever be too much?But one Saturday morning, just a day before a major state-level competition, I woke up with a heaviness in my fingers.Actually, I felt heavy all over.I didn’t want to go into the room my parents had set aside for my practice (Mark’s old room).I didn’t want to play Bach’s Sonata No.5 in E Minor, which was supposed to have been my opening piece, though it was one of my favorites.I wanted to call a girlfriend and go to the mall and giggle over girlish things—but I didn’t have a friend to call.My obsession had pushed my friends away.When I realized that, I wanted to cry.Instead, I called my brother.Mark’s voice on his cell phone sounded sleepy, although on the East Coast it was long past noon.I was surprised because he’d always been an early riser.I asked him what he’d been up to—we hadn’t spoken in a while—and why was he still sleeping.He said he’d been out late the previous night.“Were you partying?” I asked.It was a joke; Mark never partied.His idea of a good time was meeting his geeky friends at the local Borders for a latte and discussing lesser-known scientific theories.“I guess you could call it that,” he said.Intrigued and amused, I asked if he partied often.“Hey, listen,” he said abruptly.“Can I call you back? I have a terrible headache.” Before I could respond, he hung up.I waited around a couple hours, but he didn’t call.My conversation—actually, nonconversation—with Mark made me feel heavier.By this time, it was afternoon and I definitely should have been practicing for the contest.Instead, I sneaked out of the house, took the 38 down to the ocean, and went for a walk, hoping the salty, stinging air would clear my head and help me figure out what was going on.Music had been my life for the past year.I heard it in my head while I went through the boring necessities of daily existence [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]