She sat down, stared at her phone again, snickered at it.
“You won’t have to hear about it anymore.” He stumbled around her, down the hall to his room. His face burned.
Moments later his mom went into her bedroom, talking on her phone loud enough for him to hear. “Then he said he was going to go to some college for violin. Yeah. Then he got smart. I slapped the shit outta him, that’s what I did.”
She went into her room, closed the door. He could hear her muttering, then a cackle, long and drawn out.
He pulled out his own phone, dialed.
After the third ring came a voice—shaky, frail: “Hello?” The sound of a throat clearing, and then, stronger, “Hello? Ray? That you?”
“Hey, Grandma,” he said.
“Ray? What’s wrong? You okay?”
“I’m fine—nothing’s wrong.” He cleared his own throat, blinked hard. His left eye still stung, as if sleet were stinging the side of his face. He sat up straighter. “I’m sorry to call so late, but I had to tell you the good news.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you called me. What is it, baby?”
Chapter 10
Janice
14 Months Ago
He’d missed two calls from her already.
“Ray?” Dr. Stevens said. “We need to talk.”
“What’s going on?”
Her voice sounded thin, strained. “Where are you?”
“In my room. What’s going on?”
He stood up, the phone suddenly slick with his sweat. The textbook he was supposed to be reading slid to the floor. Outside the March sky lowered cold and gray, with darker clouds shadowing the trees on the horizon, but the sun shone in a distant patch of blue. He leaned his forehead against the window, concentrating on the cold circle above his eyebrows. She rarely called him, and she never sounded like this.
“Rayquan. I’m going to ask you a question, and I need you to be honest with me.”
He swallowed. How would the accusation run? Someone’s instrument stolen （when it was left in a storage room）， a too-high music history test score （so he must have cheated）， a practice room vandalized （had to be the Black guy）。 He was so close to graduating. “Did I do something?”
“Can you meet me outside the music building?”
“Sure, but it’ll take me fifteen minutes to get there.”
“I’ll be waiting for you outside.”
“I’ll meet you in your office.”
“No. Just meet me outside.” She hung up without saying goodbye.
His pulse pounded in his temples, and the sweat was cold in his armpits and between his shoulder blades. He threw on his coat and pulled his Yellow Jackets ski cap down across his brow. He was almost out the door before he remembered his ID card on the desk. The cool plastic felt somehow alien—too cold, shaped wrong—as he stuffed it into his pocket. He headed out into the weak afternoon sunshine.
As promised, she was waiting for him, pacing back and forth on the steps of the music building, hands in her pockets. Above her loomed ancient brick, limestone lintels arching into a medallion with 1907 in its center. These walls had always been a refuge for him—he knew every office, every practice room, every hallway. The floors vibrated from far-off arpeggios and the faint buzz of distant pianos. For four years he had breathed in the aroma of cleaning solvent, the mustiness of old books, and the distant perfume from the vocal majors. That smell had become home to him.
When she saw him, she stopped moving. He waved, but she didn’t wave back.
She was always—always—smiling. It was one of the traits he found most endearing—it was as if there were some private joke that only the two of them shared, and they were a team, the two of them against whatever came their way—from a nasty assistant in the dean’s office to a sluggish bartender who didn’t seem eager to serve them. He’d never known an adult to treat him like this.
Now her smile had vanished, and her hands were deep in her dark blue puffy jacket.
“Will you please tell me what’s going on?” he asked her. He’d been waiting for this moment for the past four years, ever since she’d approached him with that out-of-the-blue scholarship. The entire time he’d been here, he’d felt like a fraud, and that they were waiting to kick him out. Was Popeyes hiring?
When he left Charlotte to go to college, he’d taken a series of buses to get to campus, carrying a ten-dollar suitcase, his red duffel bag, and the still-new cheap violin case. He’d paid his mother her long-awaited rent, and most of the bills, but still had saved $2,200 from playing gigs at night and working afternoons at the grocery store.