Wild Awake

quiet foreign exchange students listening to iPods and the occasional mom in two-hundred-dollar exercise pants sitting next to a baby in a high-tech stroller. That’s because Kerrisdale is the yuppiest neighborhood in the city. The streets are lined with fussy nail salons, chain clothing stores dressed up to look classy, and shops with names like Giggles and Birdy: An Upscale Baby Boutique that make you want to punch someone in the face.
    Dr. Scaliteri’s house is Historic and manicured to within an inch of its venerable old life. She lives on a wide, tree-lined street with brand-new sidewalks and lots of that tall, wavy beach grass in people’s front yards that’s actually an invasive species. The house is all gleaming hardwood and stained glass, and the piano’s an eleven-foot concert grand that looks more like a Hummer than a musical instrument. It even has that new-car smell.
    While I’m playing the Bach, Dr. Scaliteri perches on a silver exercise ball, bouncing up and down and writing notes on a spiral-bound pad. She’s wearing a low-cut black leotard, a dark red skirt, and silver ballet shoes. A golden pendant in the shape of a treble clef hangs between her crinkled old-lady cleavage. Dr. Scaliteri is in her sixties, but she still looks like the “piano teacher” in a low-budget porno: heavy mascara and piles of hair. All that bouncing on the exercise ball while she’s giving piano lessons has done wonders for her thighs. Now and then while I’m playing, she hums or whispers something under her breath, which drives me crazy, but on the few occasions I’ve stopped playing and said, “What?” she literally made me wish I’d never been born.
    I switched to Dr. Scaliteri from my old piano teacher, Mrs. Benjamin, right around the time my parents bought me the grand piano. She has a reputation as the toughest piano teacher in the city, and she takes only a few high schoolers. Most of her students are performance majors at the university, a tribe of pale, serious, vaguely subterranean-looking twenty-year-olds who look like they’ve been locked inside their practice rooms for weeks. There’s tall Anna Weissberg, who plays for the symphony; Nelson Chow, who has just been accepted to Juilliard; the Fukiyama twins, Jeff and Mark, whose commitment to technical virtuosity is matched only by their commitment to wearing perfectly laundered Ralph Lauren polo shirts in cautious shades of tan and blue. Dr. Scaliteri’s college students generally don’t acknowledge my existence, but who knows? That could change after the Showcase.
    I play the first and second movements of the Italian Concerto, a thirty-page baroque extravaganza that Bach apparently wrote to amuse himself while waiting in line to buy a Wiener schnitzel. It’s a hard piece, but I know I’ve got it nailed. My fingers dance over the keys, breezing through one mathematically perfect trill after another. As I play, the despair I was feeling on the bus melts away. This is something I’m good at. This is something I can do.
    But when I start to play the third movement, Dr. Scaliteri waves her hand to stop me. I halt, baffled, and wait for her instructions.
    Dr. Scaliteri just stares at me and bounces.
    An entire minutes passes, then another one. I watch the last digit on Dr. Scaliteri’s desk clock switch from a three to a four. At seventy-five dollars an hour, these are expensive minutes. We’re talking over two dollars’ worth of staring. Staring plus bouncing. I gaze around the room to distract myself, looking at the stained-glass window of a fruit bowl, stained-glass grapes and oranges made jewel-like by the sun. Who has a stained-glass window of a fruit bowl in their house? That window is the reason this room’s always so hot. It doesn’t open, so you just sit there sweating and breathing in hot, stale, exercise-ball-smelling air while you’re trying to play.
    Dr. Scaliteri reaches over to her desk, picks up her calendar, and flips through the weeks. Frowning, she traces a French-manicured fingernail along the pale blue boxes representing the days until she finds what she’s looking for.
    “The Showcase is July thirtieth.”
    I nod. I could have told her that and saved her eighty-five cents’ worth of time, but I know that making me sit here adding up pennies while she paws through her calendar is kind of the point.
    “That gives us less than six weeks.”
    I nod again. She peers at me over the rims of her cat’s-eye