February 1st, 1998

The waiting room air felt stingy and dry. In fact, the whole basement of this building sucked. The beige walls and the beige carpeting completely matched the beige chairs and beige table in the room. Two other students sat in the room with me, their parents blank-faced and bored looking. The amount of life and enthusiasm in the room could be measured with a micrometre.

The other students and I were all wearing our matching black t-shirts with the little hummingbirds on them, the signature of the school of music we all attended. Nowhere in the rules of the school did it require us to wear them to lessons, we clearly all felt compelled to wear them anyways. The other students seemed less willing to do so, even though as I said, it was not mandatory in any way shape or form.

Today was the first actual day of real music lessons. For the past three months, I had been learning musical theory once a week in a classroom here at the music school basement, learning how to read notes and clefs and keys and all that sort of stuff. I had sorta been hoping that I would get to play a real instrument way back in November, but alas I suppose theory was just as important as actual playing skill.

"Marty?"

My attention was grabbed by the instructor who had popped his head out from the hallway in the back of the room. He wore massively thick circular glasses and a tucked flowery Hawaiian shirt. I recognized him as the oboe teacher who's room was next to the classroom where we all learned theory. You know, as obnoxious as the oboe sounds normally, in the hands of this nerdy looking guy it sounded like this magical instrument of sound and beauty. Like a flute, but with soul.

One of the students, clearly Marty, stood up and followed the teacher into the back room, carrying a little black vinyl case in his hands. The aforementioned oboe. Ugh, the sound of that instrument was going to suck for the first little while until poor Marty got used to the weird two-piece mouthpiece. Eh, I could deal with it until then.

The sound of a door clicking open grabbed me next, emanating from back down the hallway again. Out of it came a tall and lanky man in a brown blazer and white khakis. His blazer had a little silver hummingbird pin on the lapel. He seemed to be that middle ground between tired and excited that only the most caffeinated teachers seemed to get at this hour of the day on weekends. He looked down at his clipboard, which was way over stuffed with papers and music books.

"Weiss?" he asked to the room. Granted, he looked straight at me as he did it since I was the only girl student in the room. So unless the other boy's name was, I dunno Tiffany or something, I was the logical choice. "Ah, good to see you're nice and early."

I stood up off my chair. "Hi, I'm Weiss! It's nice too meet you!"

I did my best to be personal with the man. My sister always told me this was the best way to make friends. She chuckled at me from the chair behind me.

"Well hello, there. I'm Mr. Callows, and I'll be your teacher. If you like to follow me, I'll show you to your personal studio." He spoke with a lilted voice, almost musical in nature by itself. He turned and proceeded back to his room with some long and weird strides. "Do follow me when you like and we can get sta-arted!" he called.

I turned back to my sister, sitting in the chair next to mine. She had her arms crossed and had been observing me with a bemused smile on her face. Her hair was tied up into a bun today, affixed to her head with two sharpened blue Staedtler pencils. Man, I don't think I'll ever properly understand her weird sense of style, but there it was, on full display. I guess if she needed to suddenly make a note of something she had two ways of taking record.

"Are you gonna wait here?" I asked, in a questioning tone. "Can you hold my coat for me?"

"Of course, sweetheart, that's what I'm here for." she said, taking my coat from my hands and gently folding it into a square. "I've got an hour to kill, I might go upstairs to the Starbucks or something."

I felt my shoulders drop a little bit. "You're… gonna leave?"

She sighed. "Of course not, I was just gonna get a coffee or something. You're so melodramatic, Weiss-Cake. Besides, I've got this to keep me entertained."

She pulled my Gameboy out of her inside pocket. My eyes went wide. How dare.

"Hey, that's mine!" I said, betrayed by my own flesh and blood sibling. "How did you get that out of my room?"

"There's no lock on you door, silly. Besides, I brought along your copy of Super Mario, I'm not gonna overwrite your Pokemon file. I'm not a monster." I felt more at ease knowing that my guys were safe. I was afraid I'd have to resort to sibling murder right then and there for deleting my save file. "Now go play some music. I'll buy you some hot chocolate when you're done, okay?"

"Okay!" That got the fire back in me. I very instantly forgot about being robbed of my precious game device after such a beautiful promise. I turned and bounced past the other student still in the waiting room and followed down the hall where my teacher had gone.

I popped into the room where he was sitting on a stool in the corner. In the middle of the room sat a glossy black upright grand piano, sitting pretty and polished. I had suddenly lost my outgoing attitude as the reflection of my face stared back at me in the veneer finish. I felt uncomfortable as I stared at the huge instrument.

"Please, have a seat." Mr. Callows said, noting my hesitance. "She won't bite."

I carefully moved forward, my school-provided notebook tightly gripped in my hand. I pulled out the wide stool and sat down on it, marveling at the wide keyboard. I barely knew what to do as the little Steinway & Sons logo stared back up at me, embossed in the gold script above the keyboard. As a distraction, I looked away and to the walls surrounding the instrument. They were covered in those black foam spike things, floor to ceiling, and they had a bunch of little trinkets and things shoved into them. I instantly recognized a plush Pokeball and an Eevie doll on the left wall. It put me at ease.

"Right, shall we get started?" he asked, reaching behind him and grabbing an electric keyboard off the floor. "Oh, of course, my mistake. Here's your new workbook for the course."

I took the book he handed to me, and opened it to the first page. On it were a few bars of music with a simple C major scale on it, ascending from middle C up to the first octave and back down again in quarter notes, with the note letters written below the staff.

"Right, stick 'er up on the ledge and we can begin." I did as I was told. "Also, now that we're in the classroom, you don't have to refer to me as 'Mr. Callows', I don't like that Hummingbird requires me to address myself as such and wear this stupid name tag. In here you can call me Tyrian, it's fine, whatever."

"Okay..." I said, turning to look at him. Now that I had a moment to do so, he actually seemed sort of familiar. "Wait, do you work at my school?"

He chuckled, sliding a pair of thin-rimmed glasses onto his nose and opening a teacher's version of the class workbook.

"Do you go to Barr-Haven Public?"

I nodded.

"Then yeah, I do. I teach fifth and sixth grade music and sixth grade phys ed. You're in what, grade four?" he said with a smile, playing a short melody on the white plastic keyboard.

"I'm in Mrs. Ambrose's class." I said, looking back down at the stark eighty-eight keys.

"Oh yeah, Peach's class. Oh, you must be the Kraut, then. She tells me you don't pay attention in her class."

Okay, he wasn't wrong. I had been recently spending more time chatting with Jaune and Emmy instead of actually listening to the lessons. I was still getting As, of course, just not actually bothering to pay any sort of attention to what she said. This was why my progress reports went home with needs improvement on them. The report cards were fine, though, Mrs. Ambrose just thought I needed discipline. Bitch.

"Yeah, I guess not."

"Heh, well..." he said, finishing his little melody with a flourish. "I know how boring her classes are first hand, so I don't think you'll have a problem here with me."

I later learned that Mrs. Ambrose was a hippie, still living out the 'Good Times' from the sixties and still believed that the Nazis, correction the Germans as a whole were the bad guys, and the nickname she had given me was not in good spirits. But today I was still oblivious. I think my ten-year-old mind wouldn't have been able to deal with such a revelation.

"Okay, lets get to tickling those ivories!" he said, in a chipper voice. "Well, actually they're a glass-like material, not ivory. That would be illegal and immoral."

I pretended to laugh, unsure of what he meant by that. I looked down at the long line of white keys in front of me and tentatively placed my hands over them.

"Right, lesson the first. I know you've taken the theory class, so I'm sure you're familiar with keys and chords. Now, can you tell me, without looking, where middle C is on the staff?"

I pointed to my notebook. "The one right below, with a line through it."

"Excellent, excellent. Now, do you know where the note of C appears on the keyboard?"

I looked down. It was an easy find.

"Here, next to the pair of black keys."

"It's like you know what you're doing. Now, if I asked you to play me middle C on there, where would it be?"

About halfway along the keys, naturally. I gave the eighty-eight little white keys a once over, gauging approximately the centre, and played the C key that was almost there. The note rung out softly.

"Perfect. Now, I'll assume you knew it was middle C because it was in the middle of the piano," he said, playing the note on his own keyboard. "But as pianists, we deal with notes as part of wholes, called octaves."

I nodded. This was part of my lessons before.

"How many octaves on a standard eighty-eight?"

"Seven and a bit." I played the lowest-most C followed by the highest most. As I did, something clicked in my head. Like the notes had just become permanently ingrained.

"That's right. We note them using subscripts on the page. The first one to the left is C-subscript-one, and the highest is C-subscript-eight." I doodled down what he said onto the open page of my workbook. "Of course, we don't say 'subscript' each time, we can just say C-one to C-eight. Now, middle C is which one on the piano, again?"

I looked back down, and played the key again.

"Right, and what C would that be?"

I gave a quick count of the ones that came before it.

"C-four." I said, matter-of-factly.

"Very good. C-four is our mainstay on the keyboard, everything we do and everything you play stems from there. Since you're young and you have short arms, you'll only have to deal with C-two through C-six for now, much the same way I learned." He said, playing a quiet four-octave arpeggio. "Now that we know the range we'll be working in, let's work on hand position."

He scooted his chair over so I could better see his hands and his keyboard.

"Step one; don't slouch. The folly of any good musician is an arched back, so sit up, back straight." he said, demonstrating for me. I followed easily along, sitting up and trying to look like one of those concert pianists I remembered from old movies. "Very good. Now, the hands are important. You want to be relaxed, but purposeful. Now, shake out your hands."

I gave him an inquisitive look.

"Excuse me?"

"Shake 'em out. Make 'em nice and spindly!" he said, giving me a demonstration of some fairly vigorous hand-shaking. I supposed I could roll with this. I gave my hands a wringing as well. "Very good, now, is all the stress out of your hands?"

"I think so." I said, wiggling my fingers in front of me to show the level of relaxed I was.

"Now, put your fingertips on the keys like so," his hands lay over his keyboard very elegantly, actually. "Keep your wrists in line with your hands, or else you'll get carpal tunnel. And make sure your fingers have a slight curve in them. The keys don't go down particularly far, so you don't have to get all spidery on them."

That was actually a good analogy, I thought. I tried to do my best impression of just what he had taught. "Like this."

"Okay, good. Now hands off and slouch."

I did.

"Now, piano position."

My hands came up, my back straightened, I relaxed my arms.

"Again."

We did this a few times, both of us slouching and unslouching to try and get me into correct posture. After about fifteen minutes of this hand and back exercise, we were ready to begin learning on the first page of the workbook. So I thought.

"Right, perfect. When you get home, I want you to practice just that. Getting into playing position. Wrist injuries are the number one leading cause of pianist death." he said, grabbing his teacher's book.

"Wow, seriously?" I said, pulling my hands away and hiding my wrists. I certainly didn't want to damage myself and my precious, piano-playing wrists. He chuckled at me in a friendly, knowledgeable way.

"No, 'course not. Now I should ask, are you left or right handed?"

I held up my left hand.

"Alright, that's good to know. Now, let me break you out of your comfort zone. Everything we're gonna do for the first bit is with your right hand. Playing position!"

I brought my hands up to the keys.

"Okay, see the staff on the first page?" I looked to where he pointed. "That's a simple two-octave C-major scale, very easy, and very dull, I know. Start with your index finger on middle C."

"Like this?" I placed my hand loosely on the keys as instructed, index finger on the forth C from the left.

"Right, now, play each finger on each key, and..."

I didn't let him finish, walking my hand all the way up the scale, crossing over with my thumb every fifth note, before walking right back down again to middle C and ending with my index finger again. He paused, completely perplexed.

"...that was correct. How..." he scratched his head, pulling his spectacles off his face. "Do that again."

I once again walked my hand up the scale and back down again, ending on the index finger. "Am I doing something wrong?"

He shook his head. "No, no not at all...it's just… I didn't teach you that yet. How do you know the crossover so easy?"

"How else would I do it?" I said, doing the scale again. My right hand felt weird moving by itself, without my left hand following. He laughed silently, putting his glasses back on his face.

"Most of my first-timers either lift their hands and play every four notes, or they go the rest of the way with just their pinkie fingers." he crossed his arms over his chest. "Here, try that again, but with your left hand, and start on C-two."

I brought my other hand up and gave it a whirl, starting on my pinkie finger.

"Huh." was all he said for a moment. "D'you..."

I sat, frozen and waiting for him to figure out what he wanted to say.

"D'you remember what two tones are above a base for a major chord?" he asked, looking at my hands.

Of course I remembered. "The major third and major fifth."

"How many semitones above are each?"

"Four and seven."

He pointed at my hands. "Play me a C major chord."

Simple. I played the chord as instructed. He paused, confused.

"Play me an A minor."

I moved my hand, and played the chord. The piano rung out very softly and very smoothly. He seemed to be overwhelmed by me playing two chords. He grabbed another notebook from under his chair, uncapping a marker and scribbling something down. I waited patiently as he furiously made some kind of drawing.

"Play me this." he turned the page around and showed me what he had drawn. Five horizontal lines, with the bass clef written to the left, and three whole notes. One just below the staff. One on the first space, and one on the second space. The lowest note had a sharp written next to it.

I brought my left hand up to the keys and let the note ring out. Tyrian almost dropped his notebook.

"How did…." he stopped, before leaning back and setting his electric keyboard across his knees. "Close your eyes."

I, as should be expected, did as I was told.

"Name this note." he said, and a note rang out from his synthesizer.

"E flat two?" I guessed.

He looked at me.

"Huh." he scratched his head. "I think you have perfect pitch."

"What's that?" I asked, tilting my head. He smiled at me.

"Scooch over, I think you'll like this." he said, setting his keyboard down on the ground. I slid over as he moved onto the edge of the wide square bench. He placed a song book on the rack, over top of my student book. "You play the melody part. I trust I don't need to explain the key to you?"

"No, Mr. Callows, sir."

He laughed at me for using his surname, placing his hand on the keys. "Alright, I'll play us in. Just keep following the top staff, okay?"

I nodded.

"'Kay, here we go. Two, three, four..."

/…/

"So, how was class?"

I leaned back in the big sofa-like front seat and put my feet up on the dash. "Was alright."

"Did you learn anything cool?"

I shrugged. "Nah, he didn't really teach me anything. We just sat around and played some music."

Winter frowned in my direction. "You played music?" she asked, turning half at me. "On your first day of class?"

"Yeah…" I said, flipping aimlessly through the new student notebook I had been given. "...It's a music class. What else would we have done?"

"Uh, fundamentals of piano?" She scratched her head with a gloved hand, making the sound of creaking leather. "Like how to sit and move and breath and all that? What happened to all of that kinda stuff?"

"Oh, he did teach that. He told me I was doing it right, and I'm supposed to practice it." I flipped to the back of the book, where I had slid a few sheets of music. "We played this after."

As we came to a stop at a red light, she took it from my hands. As she looked over the page of music, she went silent, and her face contorted in confusion.

"Weiss, this is Mozart."

I blinked. "What?"

She scoffed, and tossed the papers back at me. "I refuse to believe you played actual Mozart on your first day of class. There's no way."

The header line of the page just said 'Piano Duet F Major', written quickly in pen. Nowhere on the page did it have any composer name or anything. "This is really Mozart?"

"Yeah, that's K497. That's from seventeen eighty-six." She explained, flexing her musical knowledge from when we used to live in Germany. "Which part did you play, then?"

"Uh, the upper staff." I said, shuffling it back into the confines of my workbook. "I can show you when we get home, if you want."

My sister, my own flesh and blood, laughed. She didn't believe me! I would show her, and I would show her good.

"Uh huh, sure." she said, a chuckle coming to her lungs as she pulled into our subdivision. "Right after I show you how to split an atom with a Popsicle stick."

She kept not believing me as we pulled into the driveway again, the big wagon almost knocking me out of the seat and onto the floor as Winter mounted the curb. As we came to a stop, I collected my things from the floor and stepped out, my boot almost sliding away on the icy pavement.

"Watch yourself." came the overwhelmingly helpful voice from behind me. Yeah, thanks. Stupid non-believing stupid….

We went inside the house. At present, no one was home. Our parents were out doing I don't know what and had taken our little brother with them. Good thing, really. He had spent the last few days fussing over not being allowed to play Carmageddon on our dad's computer in the side room. That's what he gets for being eight and an ass. But anyways, we were by ourselves tonight.

"Okay, show me, and I'll make you dinner." Winter said, hanging her jacket up on the coathook next to the door. I wrinkled my face at her in response, kicking my snow boots at the tray. My coat followed it to the floor, and my sister gave me another scoff as she picked it up and hung it up with her own.

I dashed into the house, my notebook clutched tightly in my hands. I was gonna show her and I was gonna do it now. Into the family room I went, my sister following me lazily over. At the back of the wide room sat an antique player piano that my father had bought at an art auction and never used. As quickly as I could, I pulled the bench out and sat down behind the keys and slammed the cover open. The sheets of music went everywhere as I opened my book.

"Okay! Listen up!" I called, setting them on the rack and scooting forward. Winter sauntered over and leaned up against the side of the piano. I sat up, with my back straight, shoulders relaxed, and fingers resting gently on the keys. "Prepare to be amazed!"

I started playing, reading along the top line of music. Well, the top two, actually. The melody and harmony lines of the upper staff as he had highlighted them. My hands moved slower than his had, but to be fair this was only the fifth time I had gone through this song, so I was no expert or anything. As I got to the end of the first page I paused, flipping it over to the back side. I missed a note as I started up again, but I caught myself and continued on.

"What th- how're you..." Winter said, jolting away. "That's not..."

She leaned down and checked my feet, clearly assuming that I was using the player piano's self-playing mechanism to fool her. Joke's on her, of course. My short legs don't even reach the pedals.

"Told you." I said, flipping the page again to the third one. My hands kept slipping a little, and I had to focus on keeping my stupid wrists level. "I'm not great or anything. It was only one lesson."

"Move over." she said, pushing my butt sideways and into the lower side of the keys. She pulled the little cabinet next to the piano open and grabbed one of the many music books that were inside, grabbing one from the back and setting it up on the rack in front of us. "Here, this is like, the one song I know front to back. You play the melody, I'll accompany."

"What, you're not shocked anymore?" I asked, scanning the page quickly. Seemed simple enough. It was even in C major!

"Oh no, I'm in shock." She said, getting comfortable. "But I wanna know if you're really this good. Go ahead, you start."

I did the first arpeggio kinda slowly, and the flourish that followed as well. This many sharps and flats was a lot, after all. Winter started in with the lower melody as I started with what would be the singing part. We played slowly, not fully following any set tempo.

"This is amazing…." she said, laughing. "I am actually astounded. You really are amazing me right now and I don't know how to process this, so I'm just gonna keep playing."

The beginning riff of the verse came, and I did my best to do the runs up and down, with the quick chord changes in between. It was a hard song for someone as beginner as me. Billy Joel seemed to enjoy the arpeggios in his musical writings.

"I am ceaselessly amazed by you, kiddo," she said, putting her free arm around me. "I don't understand you, but I'm glad you are you."

"What're you talking about?" I asked, getting more into the song. "The notes are on the page. How hard is it to take them from the page and play them on the keys?"

"Incredibly! This is considered the hardest instrument to play!"

"But all the notes are literally right in front of you!" I started using both hands again to play the secondary part as well, pushing Winter's hand away from the keys. "It's like doing a test with the answer book in front of you!"

This made my sister laugh. After this, Winter started calling me maestro and insisting I play music for and with her whenever I could. Apparently being able to play a song listed in the songbook as 'intermediate' difficulty was a huge feat of accomplishment.

Piano came easy to me, I don't really know why, it just sorta clicked with me. Every song I picked up, I could play pretty much first try every time, sometimes with minor difficulty. But most of the time if I could get a paper copy of the song, I could play it.

I never really got into the whole improvisation thing, but I could still do reasonably good impressions of jazz pianists basically by ear. Like one time, Winter came home from work, this was much later in life actually, and she though I had put an Oscar Peterson album on and was playing it too loud. Then she gets into the back room where the piano was, only to find little ol' me, playing away. She was shocked then, too.

But I think I've always been a musician, inside and out. I mean, I don't think I ever wanted to do it professionally, but I always had a knack for it. It's my thing. Besides, Jaune was always impressed by my ability behind the keys. And we would often play together, him on the strings and me on the piano. It became a part of us we couldn't shake.

Music is my life. I am music and it is me.

You know?

I mean, don't even get me started about singing.

That's a whole different ball game.