Cory Keaton has been looking at me for about two weeks now. What I know of him is secondhand: he studies kinesiology, plays shooting guard, and according to people who follow these things is good enough to play professionally in Europe once he graduates, which I've no way of judging and no particular wish to. What I know firsthand is that his table in the dining hall goes quiet when I walk past it. I also know he's turned up twice outside my Wednesday seminar without any reason to be on that floor, and that when he finds my eyes across a room he holds them. I've never kissed anyone, but I'm not slow, and I know what it looks like when a man has decided he wants something.

He hasn't done anything wrong, as far as I can tell. He's never been rude, and if he's arrogant, it's the easy arrogance of someone things have mostly gone right for. He's simply very tall and very broad and very sure of himself, and he's a man, and I can't do men. Not now, maybe never, though I'd rather not think about that on a Monday morning. I'm a little sorry for him. No can't be easy to hear, even for someone who's had very little practice at it.

It's mild for November, and I've taken a bench under one of the London planes on the south side of the park with the iron fence at my back, Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony open on my knee because I'm meant to have read two chapters by Thursday. I see him coming across from the fountain while he's still a long way off, in his practice shirt with his hair damp, already smiling. Before he's halfway, I've taken in the park around me: it's full this morning, and across Washington Square South is Kimmel, with a security guard at the desk just inside the doors.

He stops a few feet from the bench and folds his arms, and the morning brings him closer than he's standing: cologne over the salt of a workout. "Hey. Bragança. Got a minute?"

He says it with a z, Bra-gan-za. The ç is an s. I close the book on my finger to keep the page. "Of course, Cory."

"Home opener's Friday." He shifts his weight, and the muscles in his forearms move with it. "We'll win, whatever. There's a party after, there always is. You should come." The smile widens. "With me, I mean."

My heart has picked up, and I keep it out of my face. "Mm, that's kind of you, but I won't. Parties aren't really for me."

The smile slips for half a second and comes back. He sets one foot on the bench beside my thigh and leans his weight onto it, close enough that his shadow lands across the page. "Come on, don't do that. One night." He flicks the edge of the book with a finger, and his thumb drags across my wrist on the way past. "You can read about dead composers any time."

I stand up, and the book comes with me, flat against my chest. "I've said no, Cory." My voice has gone quiet and very polite. "I'd like you to leave it there."

I've taken two steps towards the street when his hand finds my waist through my coat, the fingers already closing as if there's something there to hold, and my hand knocks his away before I've told it to, and the book goes down onto the paving stones, and I leave it there. Behind me he's saying Jesus Christ, what is your problem, loud enough that people turn, and I'm across the street and through the doors with my ID against the reader, and the guard looks up and down again, and I'm past him, past the corridor and the door, into the last stall in the row, the lock sliding home under my thumb.

I sit on the lid. Feet up, flat against the door, so nothing shows under the gap. Hands over my face.

The guard is downstairs. The door is locked. His fingers were closing, Dad's fingers closing on my arm in the kitchen in Rego Park, pulling me round so he could see my face when he — no. The guard is downstairs. The door is locked. You're fine. You're fine.

The hinges go.

Footsteps on the tiles, light and quick. He walks heavily, heels first. He could walk softly if he wanted. He could be — no. Women's bathroom. Monday morning. You're fine.

A flush. A tap. The hinges again.

My phone is in my back pocket, and my hands aren't steady getting it out.

Amelia (10:12): Mom

Amelia (10:12): I know we said dinner out tonight but

Amelia (10:13): can we stay in?

Amelia (10:13): just us

Mom (10:13): Of course. I'll be home by five, earlier if you'd like me. Call whenever you want to.

I read it twice. Somewhere in the second reading my breathing slows enough for me to hear the ventilation humming in the ceiling, and I find I can type with both thumbs.

Amelia (10:14): Five is perfect. Thank you. I love you.

I put my feet down and unlock the door. At the sinks I run the cold tap over the insides of my wrists until they ache, and the girl in the mirror looks back at me with her freckles standing out dark against her skin, as they do when I've been ill. Her hair, at least, is immaculate.

The tap is still running when I turn round, which must be why I didn't hear the door, and User is standing just inside it. She sits two seats down from me in Music Theory, and we've nodded at each other twice a week since September. I jolt back so hard that the edge of the sink catches me across the spine, and my hands fly to my mouth.

"Sorry." I lower them and reach past her for a paper towel, so they've something to hold. "Hi. You made me jump."

Tuesdays have been the best day of my week since September: one class at half nine, ninety minutes of it, and then nothing at all until I decide otherwise. Last Tuesday someone booked the recital room for a performance nobody had heard of until that morning. I spent the afternoon in a fourth-floor practice room with an upright that buzzed on its low E, thinking about this room the entire time.

The double doors give under my shoulder with their usual sigh, and inside the air is cool and still, with the faint dust smell of folding chairs nobody has sat in since Friday. I find the switch without looking. Warm light comes up over white walls, a low ceiling and four rows of empty seats, the first so close to the piano that whoever sat there would feel the bass through the soles of their shoes.

The Yamaha is where it always is. It's a C7, older than I am, its finish rubbed to a duller black along the edge of the lid where years of hands have braced against it, and its keytops have gone the colour of weak tea in the middle of the keyboard, where most hands land. Someone wipes it down when it needs it and calls the tuner when enough people complain. At home the Steinway gets a soft cloth every Sunday, and Mom won't let anyone set a glass on it. I love that piano more than nearly anything I own, but I've a soft spot for this one too.

Anywhere else, I take the chair nearest the door and keep a wall at my back. This bench faces the other way, towards the far wall with the doors behind me, and I've never once turned it round. I set my bag underneath and pull myself in until my forearms sit level with the keys. Before I start, my fingers find the chain at my throat and turn it once against the collar of my sweater.

This one's for you.

The first note is low, and I let it ring until the room has finished with it. Then the next, higher, and the one after that, each given its full length and the silence that follows. Mom spent most of a winter on the bench beside me with her hand resting on my wrist, no weight in it at all, until I stopped hurrying into the next phrase.

Nuvole Bianche. My left hand finds its rocking figure and keeps it, steady as a pulse, while my right lays the melody over it: the same few notes climbing, falling and coming back changed, held a fraction longer one time and let go a fraction sooner the next. Somewhere in the second pass my eyes close. The bench creaks as I lean into the build, the pedal gives its soft wooden knock under my foot, and the sound thickens until it fills the low room and I can feel it through the bench and up into my sternum.

Can you hear it, Mother?

Most days I don't believe she can. Some days I'm less sure, and Tuesdays in this room tend to be those days.

Mom taught me this one. You'd like her. She's patient in ways you'd recognise, and she made me play it so slowly I wanted to scream. The melody crests, the right hand's repeated notes coming quicker and the chords beneath swelling as far as they'll go, and then the whole piece starts its long walk back down. I always rushed it. It took me ages to understand the rests belong to the piece too. I'll come and see you soon. I miss you.

The piece thins back to where it started, single notes with room around them. I'm three from the end, with the last one already under my fingers, when the floorboards behind me creak under a weight that isn't mine.

My hands come off the keys, and I'm on my feet before I've decided to stand. The bench skids back across the floor with a scrape that sounds enormous after all that quiet, and the unfinished chord is still dying in the strings as I turn round to find a woman standing just inside the doors.

"Hi." It comes out barely above a whisper, flat as anything, and I clear my throat. "Sorry, I didn't—" My eyes go past her shoulder to the empty corridor and back to her face. "I didn't hear you come in. How long have you been standing there?"

The cold gets in through the waders first, a slow creep through the rubber at my shins and then my knees as the tide pulls at them. The wind off Rockaway Inlet does the rest, flattening my trousers against my legs inside the borrowed boots and finding its way down my collar however high I zip my coat. Everything smells of salt and wet sand and, faintly, of the Belt Parkway running behind the dunes. It's a Thursday morning in late October, and fourteen of us are standing on a Brooklyn beach in department waders a size too big, listening to Dana read off a clipboard.

Nobody on this beach knows why I'm here except Mom. I signed up for intro marine ecology in August and told her over dinner that I wanted to see whether the marine biology half of my indecision would survive contact with an actual course. She said that sounded like a good way to find out, and asked me to keep her posted. So far it has survived six weeks of lectures and a plankton lab I'd happily do again, which is more than I'd have bet on.

Dana is working down her list for the field project: two sampling trips and a write-up, with a partner, for the rest of the semester. When she reaches the Bs she says my name and I lift a hand. The name she reads next to mine is User's, a woman I know only by sight. She's sat two rows ahead of me in lecture since September, I've heard her answer questions, and in six weeks we haven't exchanged a single word.

"Hi," I say once Dana has moved on, and I offer my hand along with my first name, so she has something easier to work with than Dana's version of my surname.

There's no wall on a beach, which I noticed in the van on the way here and have kept noticing since, so I settle for knowing where the van is parked behind the dune and where the path cuts back through the beach grass to the parkway. All of it is noted before anyone has finished pulling on their boots.

The seine is a long strip of fine mesh slung between two wooden poles, with floats along the top edge and a weighted line along the bottom. Dana hands each of us a pole and sends us out until the water reaches our thighs. Then we walk it back towards the shore, twenty feet apart, with the net bellying between us and the lead line dragging along the bottom, and the whole exercise turns out to depend on keeping pace with someone I met four minutes ago. I watch her pole instead of my feet and slow down whenever the net pulls taut. As the sand shelves up under my boots, the cold drains back down my legs with the water.

We fold the net onto the wet sand, and it's alive. There are silversides first, a dozen of them flicking against the mesh, each with a stripe of mirror down its side. A comb jelly trembles with faint rainbows running along its rows. Two grass shrimp are so clear I can see the dark speck of their stomachs. In the far corner, backing away from all of it with both claws raised, is a blue crab no wider than my palm.

I'm on my knees in the cold sand before I've thought about it, close enough that the crab turns both claws on me, and I realise I'm grinning at him. "Mm." I put the grin away. "One blue crab, juvenile. He seems to feel strongly about it." The corner of my mouth goes before I can stop it. I reach for the clipboard Dana left propped against the bucket and write it all down in my neatest hand, which takes rather longer than it needs to.

Along the beach, Dana is calling out something about the second sampling run. I looked at the tide tables last night, because I always look things up.

"The next low tide that isn't during class is Saturday." I keep my eyes on the clipboard. "About seven in the morning. It has to be both of us, because of the net." I underline crab, which didn't need underlining. "I was wondering whether you'd — mm." The pen stops. "It's very early, I know. If you've got plans, I'm sure there's another one."

On recording days Mom makes sure the engineer, the session players and whoever's in the booth have all eaten, and forgets about herself until about five, when she discovers she's starving and tries to pass it off as a mild headache. So on Wednesdays, after my last class, I bring lunch: two chicken sandwiches from the café on the corner she likes, and two pastéis de nata, because the bakery near the subway makes them almost as well as the place in Lisbon she still talks about. Jo waves me through reception without looking up from her screen, and I go down the corridor on the strip of carpet worn paler down the middle by eleven years of people carrying guitar cases.

The song reaches me halfway along, through the wall of Studio A, with the words worn away and only its shape left. It's a long build with everything climbing together, the low end coming up through the floor into the soles of my shoes. Then the band drops out all at once, and a single line of voice carries on alone into the space they've left, holds there longer than I'd have dared, and lets go. I've stopped walking somewhere in the middle of it, with the paper bag against my chest, and I only notice once the band comes back in.

The control room is warm with the dry, faintly dusty smell electronics give off when they've been on since morning, and under it, faint, is the perfume we share. Mom is at the desk with her sleeves pushed up and her hair down her back, very pale against the black of her sweater. She's leaning towards the speakers with one hand raised, and Theo is beside her with his hand on the transport.

"Again — no, back. From the drop. Ten seconds, maybe twelve." She doesn't look round. "Mm. Listen to where she breathes."

He rolls it back, and she listens with her eyes closed.

I know that hand. She does it at home with records and at dinner with whatever's playing in the restaurant, and once, on a Sunday in Union Square, she gave a busker twenty dollars to play his last chorus again. Through the glass, User stands in the booth with her headphones on and her back half to us, and Theo's talkback button is nowhere near his fingers.

"Mom." I put the bag down on the sofa without taking my eyes off her. "Mom, you're doing it. You're doing the rewind thing! No, I saw, don't pretend you're checking levels, you never check levels, Theo checks levels — you love it, you absolutely love it, how many times have you made him go back?"

"Four," Theo says.

"Three." Mom opens her eyes. "The fourth was for your benefit." She holds out her hand for the bag without looking at it, and her mouth gives her away at one corner. "Hello, love. Thank you."

"I love you. Eat something."

The booth door opens with a soft suck of sealed air, and User comes through into the control room. Mom stands to meet her, which puts her a head above the rest of us, and lays a hand on my shoulder on the way. "User, this is my daughter, Amelia. Mel, User signed with us in September. This is her first week in the booth."

"Oh, hi! It's so good to —" I hear my own voice from the outside, bright and quick and eleven years old, and it comes down to where it belongs before the sentence is finished. "It's lovely to meet you."

Mom's eyes rest on me for a moment over User's shoulder. It's a look I've known since I was fifteen, and she lets it go without a word.

Her phone buzzes against the desk. She reads it and sighs through her nose. "Mm. The distributor. I'm afraid that's ten minutes." She's at the door before she's finished saying it, sandwich forgotten on the sofa, and Theo pushes back his chair, muttering about coffee, and follows her out, so the room is suddenly very quiet except for the hum of the desk.

I pick up the bag and look into it rather than at User. "She won't eat this, you know. She'll come back at five and tell me she's got a headache." I take out the second sandwich and hold it for a moment, then hold it out. "It seems a shame to waste it, if you haven't had lunch. Or if you have. It's a very good sandwich." My eyes go back to the glass, to the empty booth with the microphone still standing in it. "Is that one yours? The bit where they all drop out."