Lark resents it, too—what he sees as his own neediness. Something he’s been accused of and warned about: he is always circling back to people that hurt him. Left on his own, even his mind turns to the way others have failed him, remembering burning details that grow into painful totems.

The e-mail he got from his tutor was one of them. It went unanswered and perpetually flagged in his inbox, even years later.

Instead of moving forward, he thinks of these things and blames himself, of course. If he could forge his own way, if he could be enough on his own, he wouldn’t—couldn’t—be let down so keenly by others.

“Do you want to go back inside?” Oli asks.

Lark realizes he’s been shredding the lawn, pulling up blades of grass one at a time. There’s dirt scattered across his acid-wash jeans, grass stains on knees. “Yeah,” he says. “Probably should. What time is it?”

Oli shrugs, says, “I left my phone upstairs. Can you help me with the telescope?”

Lark looks through the viewfinder one last time while Oli packs away the electronics. Without the computerized guidance system, Lark can only find distant stars and dark swathes of space.

Oli asks him to hold the barrel of the telescope while he collapses the tripod. Together, they pack everything away back into the shed. “It’s heavy stuff,” Lark says, a vacant comment as he hefts the telescope into Oli’s waiting hands.

Oli makes a non-commital sound; Lark is taller than Oli, but Oli is stronger. “This is very much the lightweight model. You should see the scopes at the observatory. Not that I have to lift those ones.”

Lark imagines Oli’s observatory as a tower crammed full of lenses and mirrors. He wonders who maintains them, cleans all that glass. Who built them? What team of optical engineers and aerospace scientists came together to let Oli look up at the sky?

“When you look through one of those big telescopes,” Oli says, “You’re actually looking at the past. It takes so long for the light to reach us. You can see a nebula as it was six hundred years ago, or even a star just as it was a million years ago. We can only predict what’s happening now. All we know for sure is what has already happened.”

This makes sense to Lark. It can take a long time to see what has happened. It takes even longer to understand it.

I sent off my applications in early October, hoping to get a decent audition slot, something in the middle of the pool at the West Coast schools I could visit in person. I wouldn’t want the first auditions, I reasoned, when the judges were conservative, when they weren’t sure how to balance the scales yet; early on, they always expected better might come along. I had a large and unusual repertoire I’d carefully honed with a long-time teacher nearing three years ago, pieces that were once at my technical edge but now lived comfortably in my hands. Preparation and the surprising selections made comparison one of my best allies. But unless I somehow got an acceptance from the elusive and free Curtis Institute, I also needed to be seen before the scholarship money ran out.

I got two e-mails from the San Francisco conservatory that had offered me a place two years running: one with an audition slot and another from one of the piano tutors. He had been a judge at the New York auditions the school hosted the year before. I’d driven down overnight without a place to stay; I remembered the cottonwool feeling of a night spent awake except for a rest stop nap. Some combination of exhaustion and nerves had given me a total out-of-body experience during the audition, a moment where I could watch my hands moving over the keys like they were someone else’s.

I was very impressed with your audition last year and disappointed you couldn’t join the program, the e-mail said. If there’s anything you need to better navigate the admissions process, please let me know. Looking forward to seeing you again.

I started to write a response but ended up just saving it to my drafts with a single line: Thank you for your kind words.

I told Quinn and Jules about it as an offhand remark to placate Quinn, who was eager to hear how things were going while I ate dinner at their house. In my room, alone in the dark, my laptop balanced on my keyboard, I hadn’t felt much about it. Where I thought I should have felt gratitude, there was just a seed of anxiety.

Jules, though, was so happy for me. They put their hand on the small of my back, turned me towards them. That’s wonderful. Do you know how many people he probably sees? Lark?

I nodded, uncertain.

Across the kitchen, Quinn watched us; a smile twitched up along one side of his face. He didn’t come to join us, but I felt he wanted to. It made me think that he and Jules had spoken about me when I wasn’t in the room. They had made explicit to each other what kind of a friend I was. What kind of love I needed. What kind of help.

I stepped away from Jules, unsure how to feel. Thank you, I almost said. Or sorry.