In Summertime Saga

The hallway was emptying after fifth period and I was headed for the library to pretend to study when the sound hit me.

I'd been thinking about Bissette's tutoring and whether Wednesday was too soon to bring up the Dexter book problem, and then I wasn't thinking about that anymore because a bass line was coming from somewhere down the first-floor corridor past the science rooms. Piano, not a recording. The notes had the uneven weight of someone's hands on real keys, the slight timing variations that a speaker can't reproduce, and whoever was playing wasn't doing it for practice.

I stopped walking. A kid bumped my backpack and said "dude" and kept going. The hallway thinned out around me and the bass line kept going, jazzy, the kind of thing you'd hear leaking out of a club at one in the morning when the good set starts and the tourists have left.

I followed it.

The music room was at the end of the hall past Okita's lab. The door was open. I stood in the doorway and looked in.

Ms. Dewitt was at the piano.

She was alone. The room was dim, blinds half-closed, afternoon sun making stripes across the floor and across the drum kit in the corner where a cymbal caught the light. Rows of music stands folded against the wall. Posters of musicians I half-recognized. A whiteboard with treble clefs drawn on it in green marker. And Dewitt at the upright piano against the far wall, her back slightly turned, her hands on the keys.

She was in a green wrap dress today. Dark green, crossing at the chest and tied at the waist, the fabric shifting when she moved. Heels kicked off under the bench, bare feet on the pedals. Gold earrings. Her hair was in the cornrows ending in the high ponytail I'd seen yesterday from the stairwell, but from ten feet away instead of two floors she was a different person. Taller than I'd thought. Broader in the shoulders. Her hands were large for a woman's and they moved across the keys with the kind of speed that only comes from years of doing this when nobody's watching.

The piece was slow. Minor key. Her left hand walked a bass line while her right filled in chords that hung in the air like smoke, each one lasting exactly long enough to dissolve before the next one arrived. She leaned into the keys on the low notes and her body moved with the music, small shifts, her shoulders rolling, her foot on the sustain pedal pressing and releasing. She wasn't performing. She was just playing. The room smelled like wood polish and old paper and the faint sweetness of whatever lotion she wore and the piano itself, dust and felt and metal.

I stayed in the doorway. Didn't sit down. Didn't move.

The piece ended on a chord that faded into the room and the room was quiet and her hands rested on the keys and she sat still for two seconds. Then she turned her head and saw me and her hands came off the piano.

"Can I help you?"

Her voice was lower than I'd expected. Warm underneath the professional edge. She looked at me from the piano bench without turning her body, patient, assessing.

"What was that?" I said.

"Thelonious Monk. ''Round Midnight.'"

"That's a real song?"

Her eyebrows moved. A fraction. "It's one of the most recorded jazz compositions in history."

"It sounded like it was written by someone who couldn't sleep."

She turned on the bench. Faced me. Her hands were in her lap and her posture was straight and she was studying me. The same kind of focused attention Bissette gave a good essay, except Dewitt wasn't looking at what I knew. She was looking at whether I meant it.

"Do you play?" she asked.

"No."

"Then why are you standing in my doorway?"

"Because that was the best thing I've heard in this building."

Her mouth moved. The corners lifted and then she caught it and the smile didn't finish. The green dress caught the stripe of sun from the blinds and the gold earring on her right side flashed.

"Flattery earns you nothing in this class, Mr...?"

"Arthur."

"Mr. Arthur." She said the name like she was tasting it. "If you're not here to play, you're here to listen or you're lost. Which is it?"

"Listen."

She looked at me for another second. Then she gestured at a chair in the front row of the room, a folding chair near the piano, the kind that's only there because someone forgot to put it away.

I sat. The chair was cold and the metal creaked. Eight feet from the piano. The keys were yellowed at the edges where thousands of student fingers had pressed them and her hands rested near the middle register and the small calluses on her fingertips were visible from this close. The room was quiet around us. The hallway noise was muffled by the distance and the half-closed door.

She turned back to the piano. Didn't say anything. Cracked her knuckles once, quick, the sound loud in the quiet room. Put her hands on the keys and started playing.

This one was faster. Her left hand doing the walking bass again but quicker, bouncier, and her right hand dancing over chords that changed every two beats. Her fingers were long and the nails were short and they moved on the keys with a precision that reminded me of Somrak's hands on the heavy bag. Muscle memory at full speed. She wasn't counting. She wasn't reading music. She was just inside it.

The wrap dress shifted when she leaned into the higher register. Her right shoulder rolled forward and the fabric pulled across her back and her foot worked the pedal and the music filled the room from the floor up. The drum kit vibrated in sympathetic resonance. The cymbal hummed. A pencil on a music stand rattled. My chair vibrated under me, the metal frame picking up the bass frequencies and transmitting them through the seat into my legs. I leaned back and let it come.

Her body moved with the tempo changes. Faster sections and her shoulders tightened, her elbows came in, her hands closer together on the keys. Slower sections and she spread, her arms widening, her weight settling, the dress pulling at the tie around her waist. Her neck was long and the tendons stood out when she reached for the low register and her earrings swayed and her eyes were half-closed and she was somewhere I couldn't follow.

The chord progression was doing something I liked. It started on one key center, wandered through three others, and came back to the first one every eight bars but each time the return sounded different because the chords around it had changed. The structure was a loop but the content of the loop kept shifting. Going somewhere while coming back to the same place.

She finished. Her hands lifted from the keys and hung in the air for a beat and then dropped to her lap. The room hummed.

"What was that one?" I asked.

"Mine."

She was looking at the keys. A small shift in her posture.

"The chord progression," I said. "It circles back but the context keeps changing. What's the harmonic trick?"

She turned on the bench and her expression was different.

"Most students ask what song it is," she said. "You asked about the chords."

"I listen to structure. Melody's the surface. Structure's what holds it up."

She was quiet for a few seconds. Her hand was on the piano bench between us, her fingers tapping a rhythm on the wood that she probably didn't know she was tapping.

"The trick is tritone substitution. You replace the dominant chord with a chord a tritone away and it creates the same tension but resolves to a different place. So the listener's ear expects home but arrives somewhere adjacent. Close enough to feel right. Far enough to feel new." She played a quick example. Two chords. The expected resolution, then the substitution. The second one did land different. Sideways but correct.

"Like lying but telling the truth at the same time," I said.

She smiled. A real one. Her eyes crinkled at the corners and her teeth were white and slightly uneven and I wanted to make her do that again.

"That's not how I'd describe it in a theory class," she said. "But that's exactly how it works."

The bell was going to ring soon. The pre-bell noise was building in the hallway, the volume increase that meant students were moving.

"Come back Wednesday," she said. "I'm starting a composition project. Open to any student who's interested." She paused. "You don't have to play. You just have to listen like you just listened."

"Wednesday."

"After school. Four o'clock." She turned back to the piano. Her fingers found a chord. "Don't be late, Mr. Arthur. Musicians have opinions about time."

"I'll be there."

I stood up. The chair scraped on the linoleum. She was already playing again, her fingers moving over the keys like she'd forgotten I was still in the room. The wrap dress hung loose at her shoulders and her back was straight and the gold earrings caught the light from the blinds. The doorway was mine again and the hallway was getting loud behind me.

In the game, Dewitt's route opened through the talent show quest chain. You talked to her because the game sent you to talk to her. You collected items. You hit dialogue options. The music was background art, a ten-second loop that played when you were in her room. I'd muted it after the third visit because it repeated every ten seconds and you can't jerk off to a ten-second piano loop.

This wasn't a loop. This was a woman playing Monk alone in an empty classroom because the sound was what she needed, and she'd played me something she'd written herself, and Wednesday was two days away. I hadn't played a musical instrument in either life. I'd never wanted to. But sitting in that metal chair with the bass coming up through the floor and her hands moving on those keys, I'd wanted to be inside the music she was making.

The bell rang. The hallway filled. I went to class.

Her bass line was still in my hands. A low hum in my palms from the chair, from the floor, from the piano that filled the room from the ground up. It lasted all the way to sixth period and into the walk home and I was still hearing it when Debbie asked me how school was and I said "good" and went to my room and sat on the bed and thought about tritone substitutions and green wrap dresses and hands that moved like they knew something the rest of the body hadn't caught up to.