oscar didn’t ask where we were going. We rounded the corner onto a side street full of antiques shops and low-rise office buildings. Walking by the mid-point at a New York pace, you’d think the buildings were connected via a narrow alley, nothing of note. But if you really looked, you’d see mosaic tiles and, a few feet in, a wider space beyond.
I led Oscar into that space.
My courtyard. I had no legal claim on it, but it was mine all the same, sweet and simple, framed by low buildings with overflowing window boxes and one rusting fire escape. The far building housed three apartments by the looks of it, but I’d never seen another soul here, inside or out. That wasn’t what made it so special, though.
I watched Oscar’s face to see when it would hit him.
When we stepped in, the city buzz hummed around us. The next step, wind swooshed without so much as rustling our hair. Then one more, to the center of the courtyard, and—
“It’s silent.” Oscar touched his ear. Let it go.
“I can’t explain it.” I whispered, not wanting to spoil the effect. “I come here when the city gets to be too much. This place and the Ramble are where I go to feel alone.”
“Is it . . . public?”
“I doubt it.” I glanced up at the empty windows surrounding us. “But nobody’s ever kicked me out.” And I’ve never brought anyone else here. Just you.
“How did you find it?” He sat cross-legged on the center of the spiral of courtyard tiles.
“I was lost. Which is probably how most people find things.” I sat next to him, silence settling around us like a tent. “I was out with my mom and dad getting lunch. I’m . . . not sure what happened.” They were arguing. They forgot me. “They were hailing a taxi one minute and the next I was alone.”
Oscar let his wrist rest against mine. “When was this?”
“I don’t remember. I was eight, maybe?” Five. “Anyway, some delivery guy with a cart—he was probably nice, I was just freaked out—he tried to stop me so he could call my parents, and my stranger-danger alarm went off and I started running and ducked in here to hide. And the sound thing . . .”
I beamed slowly, peering up and all around.
“I had this The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe pop-up book and . . . I literally thought I’d slipped into another world. I was so happy. It made sense, why I felt the way I did in that other world. Out there.” I motioned to the street. “Anyway, it started getting dark, and I came out and all the noise hit me again and a cop found me and . . . I guess half the city had been looking. So that was something. And my mom made me hot chocolate and we sang together.”
Oscar smiled.
“It was winter,” I added. “Forgot to mention that.”
His knuckles had been idly dancing against mine. They stopped.
“How winter?”
“January winter.”
“You could have frozen.”
“It was cold. I remember that. But so was Narnia, right?”
Oscar turned and started rubbing my hands.
I laughed. “What are you—?”
“Warming you up.” He breathed onto our balled fingers. “You poor Dickensian urchin.”
“It’s July!” I swatted him away, feeling seven kinds of hot. “And if I were in Dickens, I’d be someone awful. Estella Havisham.”
“Wow, now that you mention it.” He tucked his hands back into his lap, scrutinizing me with a grin.
I slo-mo punched his shoulder. “Only I can make that joke.”
“Exactly what Estella would say. You’re not helping your case.”
“So.” I leaned in and away, a subject change. “Did you want to talk about something specific? I’m the one blathering on—”
“Yes.” Oscar’s shoulders shrunk in. “I mean, yes, I do, not yes, you’ve been blathering on. Now I’m blathering. This is how blathering, I think, is defined . . .”
I smiled, waiting as his face relaxed.
“Talking.” He drew a breath. “Okay. Here goes. I like you. As evidenced by the four hundred times I’ve told you I like you. Among other things.”
Say something funny. But my brain was too stuck on the other things.
“But here is where I’m at.” He spread his arms wide. “This is . . . mind-blowing. All of this, coming here, studying at Amberley, with your dad. It’s like some fairy tale. I can’t believe my luck. But . . .” He faltered, searching for words. “No, that’s it. I can’t believe my luck, so I’m concerned about, ah, messing with it. By pushing it.”
I recrossed my legs to face him. “How would you be pushing your luck?”
“I didn’t expect to meet you this summer.” Oscar’s eyes met mine. “I mean, I expected to meet Ruby Chertok, Martin Chertok’s daughter. I . . . didn’t expect to meet someone like you.”
Someone like me.
“Well. Likewise.”
“Exactly! And you have things to do that I’m distracting you from, right? You have a whole life here.”
Half a life. The start of one—a weird blend of exercise and D-list clubs and high-couture high-mindedness—but he wasn’t wrong.
“And, if I’m being honest, which is the purpose of this exercise . . .” Oscar sighed. “Okay, so back home, I’m this anomaly, right? I make my music, everybody kind of stares at me, ‘there goes Oscar again with his composition thing,’ and it’s this neat trick I do. No big deal. But here, it matters. And at the same time, I’m not that unusual, you know? I’m sitting in class with literal geniuses, most of whom worked a hell of a lot harder than I did to get here. But I’m still an anomaly.”
I wasn’t sure if it was my place to prompt him. He seemed to want me to. “Because you’re black.”
“Listen, I knew there wouldn’t be many black kids at Amberley. I didn’t realize there would be zero.” He made an O with his fingers.
“There are a few in the university programs. But I totally get it.”
I totally get it could have gone on our list of Things White People Say. I only understood how he felt on an intellectual level.
He still looked relieved. “Like I said—I am used to being the odd one out. This is just a special kind of odd.”
“You don’t seem odd to me.” I squinted. “You’re so . . . confident.”
“See, but that’s the thing, you get really good at that over a lifetime of ‘what’s up with that kid.’”
“At school?”
“Not so much school. Everybody’s good-weird at my school.” He scratched his face. “I mean . . . at home? My dad—super supportive, same as Mom—but he doesn’t really get composition. He’s always teasing me about classics versus classical, like it’s some debate we’re gonna settle. Classics being Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Billy Stewart, Etta James . . .”
I smiled. “That’s what he listens to?”
“We fight over the car stereo. Mom likes nineties R&B, Bri’s all Disney Channel pop, Etta hates music—”
“Hates music.”
“She’s lying, it’s her little rebellion.” His smile sank a little as his eyes drifted. “We’ve got this big family on my dad’s side, three aunts, two uncles, I don’t even know how many cousins. They all live, like, forty-five minutes away, so we do a lot of Sunday dinners, and . . .” He laughed. “Mom grew up in Carmel, California, and you know her health hang-ups. She always turns up with escarole cranberry salad. Quinoa burgers. One time my cousins called me Carlton.”
I grimaced.
“It’s all good—like I said, I’m used to it. But this? A world-class conservatory program? ‘Odd one out’ here means . . . it means a whole lot more attention. Higher stakes. Implications that stretch and stretch and . . . yeah. I don’t know. This is new.”
I wanted to link my arm through his, but I stayed put. His eyes shifted to meet mine and he smiled, slumping a little.
“So here’s where I’m concerned. Not concerned, like worried, just contemplating. What does it look like . . . out there”—he motioned past the courtyard—“for . . . let’s say the ‘new kid on the classical music scene’ to immediately hook up with a Chertok?”
I flinched at the sound of my last name.
“It looks deliberate, doesn’t it? And it isn’t. I promise, this is accidental.”
The way he looked at me when he said accidental made the air shimmer.
“They . . . ask about you, you know. The Amberley students. They’re curious.”
I pulled at a snag in my hair. “What do they ask?”
“What you’re like.” He nudged me. “When you’re debuting.”
I let out a mirthless laugh. “Right.”
“I don’t tell them anything.”
“It’s fine, tell them whatever. But I get what you’re saying. I’m, like, this added thing. So . . . people would talk.” I very nearly rallied with a rousing “Who cares what they think?” before stopping myself.
He cared. And whatever his reasons, they mattered.
“So. All that on the one hand. And on the other . . .” Oscar stared at his open palm, then up at me. “You’re what I think about.”
“When?”
“At all times.”
I drew a slow breath.
“I’m done, I promise. Sorry to unload. This is not something I do much of. I don’t have anybody I can talk to about this stuff without seeming . . . I don’t know. Ungrateful. That’s a big thing with my parents, practicing gratitude—”
“You can talk to me about anything. I’m here to listen. Whatever we are.” I drew a slow breath to keep from wincing.
Oscar stared at me for a second, then he smiled like he’d made a decision. Instead of telling me what it was, he took my hand and uncurled my fingers, one after another, and pressed his palm to mine. I watched him as our fingers slipped together and folded shut. It was so quiet, I swore I could hear his pulse catching up to mine as we sat together, perfectly still.
This was limbo, but here in the courtyard, I didn’t mind it. We’d fall one way or the other, but for now we were both friends holding hands and . . . not. The nicest imaginable version of Schrödinger’s cat.
I lost all sense of time until his thumb crept up to nudge the watch on my wrist, Mom’s birthday gift to me from two years ago. I wore it every day and never looked at it. But Oscar’s eyes were sharpening, his face falling.
“It’s one? How is it one?”
“Is that . . . late?”
“Um.” He straightened, perching to stand. “How long do you think it’ll take to get home?”
I got up, looking out to the street. “We can grab a taxi. What do you need to be back for?”
“An interview.” He brushed off his shorts as he stood. “It’s not till one fifteen, but Ms. Visser said she wanted to prep me.” He laughed uneasily. “Whatever that means?”
“For the alumni magazine, or . . . ?”
“I actually have no idea.”
I stepped onto the sidewalk, feeling my posture cement as the wall of city noise rose around me like the roar of an oncoming army. I went funny like this every time I left my house, skin hardening into armor. I’d often wondered if every New Yorker felt this way. Oscar sure looked tense as we rode silently in the back of a taxi, but that was probably more to do with this mystery interview.
As we got to the stoop, Oscar’s phone started to ring. The Farzone theme song—TJ calling from his gamer chair.
We both smiled, then I reached idly for Oscar’s pocket. It wasn’t until I’d handed him the phone, watching him press the button to mute it, that I realized how familiar a gesture it was—the kind of thing a girlfriend would do. Not whatever I was.
I peered up at Oscar, testing this teeny-tiny boundary, hoping I hadn’t made him uncomfortable. There was surprise shining in his eyes—but warmth drowning it out. He stepped closer.
The front door swung open. I jumped back, surprised to see Nora welcoming us like we’d teleported to her house in Gramercy Park.
She looked thrown too. Her eyes darted between the two of us, widened, sparked, narrowed, all in the space it took me to squeak, “Nora! Hey!”
“Hello, my angel,” Nora said, stepping onto her tiptoes for an air kiss. “How was the Met?” The question felt teasing, like she knew exactly what that night had led to. She gave my elbow a playful tweak—the universal mom-gesture for we’ll talk later. Then she let go to reach past me with both arms. “Oscar, our renegade!”
That was her kind way of saying he’d shown up massively late. As she craned her neck into the room behind her, I looked back to see Oscar peering past me with an expression as cheery as hers. No one could possibly tell how frantic he’d been hailing a taxi a few minutes ago.
“He has arrived!” Nora sing-called, steering us both inside.
I latched the door behind us, adjusting blink by blink to the fact that my house was full of people. Dad sat in the dining area, in lively debate with a small middle-aged man I didn’t recognize. Bill Rustig perched stiffly on the edge of the velvet armchair that filled the nook facing the stairwell, looking like he really was rusting, and assistants filled all other available corners, leaning on walls, typing on cell phones.
Nora ushered Oscar all the way back to the dining room, hand glued to his back as if he were her son. I bit back a laugh, imagining teensy ginger Nora producing tall, brown, elegant Oscar.
Nora can’t have kids, I remembered. Mom told me that.
I looked at my feet, chastened. Only a few days ago, Nora had pressed her hand to my back, guiding me through a party. And it was nice, wasn’t it? Comforting.
“This is our wonder boy,” she said proudly.
I leaned on the wall, desperately curious, despite all efforts not to be.
“Oscar, this is Simon Wilkerson of the New York Times.”
My feet slid. Holy crap.
“The New . . .” Oscar pivoted ninety degrees, instinctively fleeing—but Nora patted his back like she was calming an anxious pony. He extended a hand, recovering his height instantly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”
“The pleasure is all mine,” said diminutive Simon Wilkerson of the New York Freaking Times, his accent hovering between British and American. “Shall we find someplace quiet to chat?”
Oscar looked over his shoulder at me, eyes glowing. I felt a twinge, wishing that we were still there, locked in that ambiguous moment, away from all this.
“There’s a great patisserie on Columbus,” Nora suggested, blinking around at everyone. “If you’ve got time for a bite—”
“L’Orangerie?” Oscar asked.
Nora clapped, beaming. “Look how much of a local he is already.”
They all rose and exited the house at a glacial pace, like a ceremonial procession in an opera—Mr. New York Times already asking Oscar how his love of music began, Nora linking arms with Dad while Bill surged ahead on a tiny invisible Segway. I thought for a second Nora might stop and make good on that pinch, but she didn’t even glance over her shoulder at me as she left with the others. Only Oscar did—faint regret shining in his eyes before he turned away again, continuing the conversation.
The door shut, the procession proceeded, the house sank into silence around me, and my brain . . . crescendoed.
Okay, what the hell were we? What had felt nice and unique and balanced in the courtyard was now jangling in its discord. How was I supposed to feel right now?
I cleared up the half-full coffee mugs they’d left on the dining table, determined to distract myself. Whether we were a thing or not, it wasn’t as if our individual lives were going to stop. And if anyone had a life, it was Oscar—a rammed schedule, a symphony to write—none of which could be put on hold for . . . whatever. I got it, understood it, wouldn’t let it affect me, even if I had shared something with him that felt way more vulnerable than any make-out session.
A courtyard. A couple of childhood memories. Oscar’s secret vulnerabilities and feelings for me and—calm down, I told myself, this is fine.
But it wasn’t until I closed the dishwasher and leaned against the counter, task completed, that another source of uneasiness hit me.
Oscar wasn’t just some guy I was ambiguously hanging out with. Somehow, along the line, I’d started blanking who he was—Dad’s protégé, Amberley’s most gifted recruit, a bottomless font of brilliant music. Now he was officially someone the New York Times wanted to interview, and I was still . . . a blur.
Oscar was right to put the brakes on. This summer was his moment. It was in no way mine.
A knock sounded in the entryway. I thought for a confused second it was Oscar back already, but when I opened the door to the street, Nora stood three inches away, shrugging broadly.
“Am I right?”
Oh God. I couldn’t stop my cheeks from flaming. “About . . . ?”
She shot me a playful glare as she walked past me into the house. “I could be wrong, but I’m usually right about these things. I have an eye for gossip.” She peered at the Steinway for a second as if searching for Mom on the bench, then turned. “So. You? Young Oscar Bell? Is this a thing?”
“I . . . duh . . . he . . . um . . .”
“I am good!” She walked over to wrap me in a dancing hug while I continued to express myself with startling eloquence. “Listen, you don’t have to tell me, but if it’s the start of something . . . ? I could not be more pleased.”
I felt a spark of surprise, but couldn’t pinpoint why. Maybe because of what Oscar had said—or because last week she’d been a tap away from setting me up with somebody named Charlie Weatherby.
“As much as you want to get away from Amberley, my dear, it’s in your veins. I knew we’d get you back.”
Amberley? What?
“It’s practically your birthright.” She brushed off one of my shoulders. “And I, for one, am glad you’re finally claiming it.”
As my stomach started a slow descent, her phone rang. She peeked at it.
“Ugh, I have to run, again, but . . . lunch soon? Monday? Meet me at my place at one and we can jet from there.” She blew a kiss and was lifting her phone and out the door before I could so much as squawk a reply.
It took me the whole walk up to my room to connect the pieces of that disjointed conversation. Oscar. Amberley. Claiming it.
I sat on my bed, stinging.
Oscar didn’t need to worry about public perception. The board chair herself applauded the idea. Dating a musical genius was my birthright, as far as she was concerned. Proximity to Greatness: The Ruby Chertok Story.
If anybody needed to worry about looking like an opportunist, it was me.
Tell the truth. If he were a nobody, no talent, no connection to music whatsoever—would I like him better?
The simple answer: Hell. Yes.
But then his music started playing in my head, that snippet from the other night, and I felt so overcome that it took lying down and staring at the ceiling to get my own gravity back.
Whatever we were, whatever this was, we’d left simple behind in the courtyard.