AT REHEARSAL on Monday, Jason heard me warming up with the Zwilich Mr. Irving had given me, and when I put my bow down, he said, “So is that one of your audition pieces for next year?”

“Oh—no, I just liked the piece. I’m not auditioning anymore.”

“Oh, what?” He frowned. “Not at all?”

“I didn’t think it made sense.”

“Ah.” He leaned closer. It was noisy in the room, everyone playing all at once, and he had to duck his head and speak almost directly into my ear for me to hear him. “I’ve been thinking of it. Auditioning, I mean.”

“Really?” I was more than a little startled, for many reasons, not least of which that it was nearly too late. The due date for audition recordings was less than two weeks away. “Like, to a lot of places?”

“Nah, more like—going for broke. I was thinking I’d just do Juilliard. I doubt I’d get in, and it’s not like I’d go even if I did, but, I don’t know, I guess I just want to see how it goes.”

Immediately, before I could stop it, my mind flooded with images. I saw the two of us rehearsing together late at night in the practice rooms, all the noise of the city stilled around us; I saw us in the dorms I’d been looking up online, tucked away on the tenth or eleventh floor with the cityscape framed outside the windows, reams’ worth of new sheet music filling the bookshelves. I saw us standing onstage in recital halls.

“Do you think there’s time?” I said. “To get the recordings together?”

“Sure, I mean, there’s over a hundred hours in a week if you don’t sleep. And I was looking at the requirements and it wouldn’t mean learning more than one new piece.”

“Well—maybe I’ll do it with you,” I said. “If you wanted, that is.”

“Yeah?” He pulled back a little and studied me. “The thing is—it has to stay quiet. I wasn’t even going to tell Grace or Brandon or Sun.”

“Oh,” I said. “You don’t think they’d want to apply too?”

I knew as soon as I said it there was no chance. And Jason, of course, was too polite to say they’d never get in.

“It’s just if they happened to say something and their parents overheard, and then somehow word got back to my parents—”

It was true that my mother rarely talked to other parents, had never been a part of the unofficial Asian Parents’ Network that traded gossip and recommendations for restaurants or tutors or summer camps. Mrs. Nakamura wasn’t really either, though, and I doubted Sunny or Brandon would say anything, especially if he told them not to. But I didn’t want to question him or start some other conversation that might somehow change the course of this one, so I said, “Right, definitely.”

There was almost nothing I didn’t tell them, especially Sunny. And it was outside of what we’d promised one another. But if there was a minuscule chance—

I was good at hiding things. Maybe that was something Jason and I had always shared.