King of the Armadillos: a Novel by Wendy Chin-Tanner

Author:Wendy Chin-Tanner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

ELEVEN

The air was damp with a nip of cold when Victor met his friends in the field behind the dorms at 11:20 one night in late fall. They were safe for a while since Jay the night watchman always took his break at 11:15. Donny had heard Victor come in on the night he got caught by Sister Helen a couple of weeks ago, and when he told the others, Judy had seized on the idea that they should all sneak out for a nighttime concert at the chapel.

“Forget it,” Donny told Judy when Victor hesitated. “Maybe he isn’t any good.”

“He is,” she insisted. “I could hardly believe it when I heard him.”

“Come on,” Manny said, elbowing Victor in the ribs. “It’s just us.”

The truth was, Victor didn’t feel ready to play for anyone besides Mrs. Thorne or Judy, and with his penance freshly paid, he wasn’t really up for sneaking out either. But how could he say no? Now here he was, creeping around in the dark, telling himself that he wasn’t breaking any promises to Sister Helen. After all, they weren’t going to the infirmary, and he’d never said anything about the chapel.

That afternoon, he’d been distracted at his lesson. Instead of listening to Mrs. Thorne explain solfège since they’d added singing to his studies, his head had been filled with Judy’s voice and the look of awe on her face when she’d listened to him play. It was like the sun coming out on a cold, cloudy day, and he wanted more than anything to feel that warmth again.

Afterward, he’d had a hard time practicing his scales with the new method Mrs. Thorne had suggested. Keeping his hands and wrists still, he was supposed to move one finger after the next individually, marching them up and down like the legs of toy soldiers. He’d gotten through only fifteen minutes of this when his hands began to cramp and he had to rub them until the muscles flexed and finally relaxed. Whenever that happened, he worried he was having another relapse, but with his Diasone dose at the maximum now, the flare-up of symptoms he’d had before the eye surgery—the fevers, dizziness, nausea, and fatigue—had calmed down. He’d shaken out his hands and gone right back to his scales, playing doggedly through the pain. Then he’d gone over the piece he’d picked for tonight, “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

The looseness of that kind of jazzy music was less exhausting for him than the precision demanded by the classical pieces Mrs. Thorne assigned. While his speed was improving at a steady pace as his nerves continued to heal, unless the song was slow, he still often played a fraction of a second behind the beat. As frustrating as this was when he was working on his Mozart or Bach, it was less of an issue with jazz or blues, which were somehow able to absorb the delay without ruining the music. In fact, the slight withholding of

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