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face that greets Maia in the mirror. When she can get away with it she buys fashion magazines at the grocery store and leafs through the pages later in the safety of her own room, touching the pictures of long-limbed models in their fairytale-princess dresses, leaping for the camera like the white-tailed deer that bound through the woods near her house, as though she can step through the glossy pages and into another life.
    Her only door out is the piano. Four hours a day, six hours a day. Some days eight hours, ten, twelve. Her mother had wanted a good daughter, a doll of a daughter, placid and dainty and dressed in ruffles. She’d sent Maia to ballet lessons, dreaming of her daughter a graceful Clara pirouetting around the Nutcracker prince. Instead, tiny Maia fell over when she tried to plié and cried every time she was put into a leotard. But Maia took to piano in a way her mother hadn’t dared hope for. She’d chosen Oscar because he was the best teacher. Even when Maia was only four, it was obvious that she’d become his best pupil. His other students weren’t always kind to her about it. “Of course the Asian girl is perfect,” she’d heard one of the girls mutter to another at a recital. But Oscar had heard it, too, and responded with a devastating contempt that Maia hadn’t yet known he had in him.
    â€œDo you think it is because of where she was born that she is better than you?” he’d said coolly, in a voice that carried across the entire room. “It is not the color of her skin that makes her less lazy. You have not got half her gift, but even if you had, you are too stupid to use it.” The girl had gotten another piano teacher, but none of Oscar’s other students ever bothered her again.
    Maia drops her bag in her room. The walls are painted a pale pink she’d picked out years ago and long since outgrown, but she can’t imagine what color she’d want them to be now, even if her parents let her choose a new one. Ruffled white eyelet bedspread and matching pillowcases. A framed watercolor of a unicorn. The girl in the street wasn’t been wrong to call me princess, she thinks. Cass. She says the name aloud and then looks around furtively, as though she’s been caught out at a lie. But there’s no one to hear her, no one to mark the flush the name brings to her cheeks. “Cass,” she says again, letting the word drop into the silence of her room like a dare. Maybe I’ll see you again, the girl said, her grey eyes serious. What would they do? Steal more beer? Go shopping? Watch television? Maia is not allowed to watch television, other than the news when her parents have it on. She racks her brain for samples of teen activities. Board games? Tag? She imagines herself walking up to Cass, surrounded by urchins and dogs, and suggesting a game of tag, and buries her head in her hands in despair.
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    After dinner she takes the Ravel to the piano and pages through it. Oscar likes her to spend a week reading the music without touching the piano, but sometimes his fussiness grows wearisome, and anyway she’s itchy to try the piece out.
    Her mother comes into the room and watches her practice for a while. Maia is always nervous playing in front of her mother, for no real reason. Her parents aren’t like the other parents of the ambitious teens she competes against, most of them failed classical musicians themselves who inflict their own thwarted ambitions on their children, or else career musicians whose luminous talents outshine their unfortunate offspring, doomed forever to labor in their shadow. Her mother likes her to be good at things, and she is better at the piano than either of her parents are at anything they do—even her mother, respected scholar and tenured professor though she is, does not bring to the study of antiquity the rare gift that Maia has for the piano. But as difficult as Maia’s mother