“Reed did say you studied music at college. I thought he’d got it wrong,” Oli says, trying to sound unbothered by Lark’s swift bristling.

“Yeah. I got money to go to a place in San Francisco. Eventually.” Lark thinks of Quinn telling him third time lucky. “Took a few tries.”

Oli shrugs and closes an empty DVD case he’d just discovered, looking half-dead from exasperation. He lies back on the carpet with a sigh. “You got there in the end anyway.” Rubbing at his eyes, Oli thinks he’s not sure where “there” is and regrets saying it. A scholarship to a California conservatory was probably not Lark’s end goal. He tries to focus on the positives. “What is it like? To get something you really want?”

Lark looks down at him with a shrug. “Um, well. You know. I’m sure you’ve gotten something you want.”

“Not something like that, that I’ve had to work towards for years. Not where I’ve tried and failed and tried again. I imagine it feels like a real achievement.”

Lark considers saying that the flip side of this is that Oli has never had to know he wasn’t first choice for the life he is living. He’s not had to doubt if he was good enough. What Lark remembers best is not his own happiness but his friends’ surprise and the congratulations card his parents sent with a twenty-dollar bill. His mother had signed it for both of them, and there was no message besides WELL DONE pre-printed inside.

“It’s like anything else. Even if it felt like an impossible thing to do, it’s not so surprising once it’s happened,” Lark says.

Oli frowns, raises his eyebrows to perform his disbelief, but doesn’t try to contradict Lark. Tired, he folds easily.

Lark is still rehoming DVDs. “If you hadn’t, I don’t know, gotten into grad school, you wouldn’t have tried again?” he asks, flicking his hair away to look down at Oli.

“I love what I do. But I’ve grown to love it. At the time, it was just…”

“The path of least resistance?” Lark offers when Oli trails off.

“Maybe. It was definitely the path of least disruption. The most obvious option.”

Lark understands that. He thinks, sometimes, that conservatory had been the same for him. Not that getting funding had been easy for him at the time, but it had certainly been the most obvious choice. He was good at the piano. He needed a career. Ergo music school.

“I’m not sure we can know what we really want,” he tells Oli. “Not until we get it.”

I accepted the offer the same week it came, but I made no other plans. My life became a simple mirage, northwest rain a veil between me and the life I’d get to start soon.

I kept this dream-come-true to myself and didn’t tell anyone for nearly a month. Quinn became my first confidante, alone together in the practice room at his college, procrastinating a return to the wet winter outside. Quinn brought soy lattes when his class finished, and we sat sharing the bench, noodling on the piano. Quinn would play some melody line he’d learned during his own teenage music lessons. If I knew the piece, I’d pick up the left hand for him. When I couldn’t pull up the repertoire required, I made something up. It was easier to speak with my hands busy, my eyes ahead.

You got the scholarship? Quinn asked. Because you don’t sound like you did.

Well, I did, I said, looking to pull up some joy. Even though I thought I’d gotten used to the news, there was a lot of shock to sift through to find excitement.

So you’re going?

I nodded, and Quinn threw his arms around me. I stopped playing and gently returned the rare hug.

It was easier, once Quinn knew, to tell other people. I mentioned it to the matronly cashier at the Salvation Army. I told Jules, who congratulated me when they weren’t lamenting my impending departure or peppering me with questions about the future of my music career.

I called home and told my mother, too—endured her surprise.

Honey, you tried again? I thought you were done with all that. She said: Well, it’s not Julliard, is it? And ignored it when I said I had gotten into Julliard but couldn’t afford it without loans.

I’m going, I repeated and heard her sigh.

All right. Of course you are. You always were stubborn. Even when you were a kid. She said this with a kind of fondness. It was as close as she would come to saying she was proud of me. I didn’t begrudge it then.

I know, I told her.

I’ll tell your father, she added.

Lark knew this was for the best. If his dad was told at the right time, he wouldn’t be bothered. At the wrong time, though, Lark expected he’d have gotten an earful: about poor planning and worse career prospects; about how frivolous and sensitive he seemed. It was his father’s position that Lark was refusing to grow up and become a man, to take responsibility. Lark tended to nod through these accusations, which didn’t help anything. The talks they had about it when Lark still lived at home—quiet man-to-man sit-downs or one-sided, half-shouted lectures—all tended to leave Lark fuzzy about the things he should take responsibility for. He paid his bills and lived on his own and only then began to understand that responsibility was only a gesture towards a certain kind of life. It was the shape of something his parents understood, but that remained indistinct to him.

Lark had trained to imagine only a few things, a very small slice of potential time. Finally, a sliver of it was real: this hard-earned acceptance. Still, the rest was dark. There was a blurred suggestion of work and recognition preceding the things he could really see in the theatre of his mind: a piano, an audience, the quiet inside him when there was nothing but his hands and the music.