The Lucy Variations Read Online Free PDF Page A

detail, and the way he’d never let anyone forget the competitive aspect. Or maybe it was that Lucy loved the programme she’d prepared, especially the Brahms. The Rhapsody in B Minor. Her mother had wanted her to do something showier, and Grandpa nearly fired Grace Chang over it, but Lucy and Grace wanted to prove she could be expressive as well as technical.
    Madchen and her mother had come to hear Lucy play and smiled through it even though Madchen’s piece that morning hadn’t gone well.
    Maybe it was all of those things.
    Her mother stopped staring at the picture, and before leaving said, “Try the silk pillowcase I bought you. It helps with the frizz.”

 
    By the weekend Lucy’s mother and grandfather had accepted that Temnikova was dead and it was no one’s fault. They turned their attention to plotting what, or who, would be next for Gus and did it mostly behind closed doors.
    Lucy was anxious to know what was going on but didn’t ask. She knew her grandfather would think she had no right to be involved or even have an opinion. Not any more. Of course she did have one, and always would, especially when it came to Gus. She wanted someone good for him. Not just musically. Someone he could look up to, the way he used to look up to her.
    But her family had no reason to listen to her, so she avoided it all as much as she could by holing up in her room to work on her next paper for Mr. Charles.
    They were studying short stories. Each student had to choose a writer, read at least five of his or her stories, and write a paper on that body of work. It would account for a big chunk of their fall-semester grade, and Lucy wanted to impress Mr. Charles. After a little googling in the wee hours, she’d discovered he’d gotten a special award at Harvard for a critical paper he’d done on a writer named Alice Munro. So Lucy picked her.
    Sunday afternoon she was taking notes on a Munro story when Gus came up to visit, a book in his hand, asking if he could read in her room.
    “As long as you’re quiet,” Lucy said.
    He lay on his stomach on the floor, a pillow from Lucy’s bed tucked under his arms. She sat nearby, also on the floor, typing a few sentences now and then.
    In every assignment she did for Mr. Charles, she tried to find that perfect balance of sounding smart without coming off like a know-it-all. She didn’t want to be like Bryan Oxenford, who sprinkled his papers with esoteric words arranged in overly complicated sentences that wound up making no sense when he read aloud in class.
    “Can I ask something?” Gus said.
    “You just did.”
    “Do you think Temnikova went to heaven?”
    “Sure,” she said absently. “Why not.”
    “So you think there
is
a heaven?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Then why’d you say Temnikova went there?”
    “I didn’t.”
    “What about Grandma?”
    Lucy swirled her finger on the touchpad. They didn’t often discuss Grandma, and she didn’t feel capable of it at the moment. “I don’t know, Gus. She never talked about that stuff.”
    “So? Not talking about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
    “I
know
,” Lucy said. “Now let me work.”
    After a few minutes of quiet, Gus said, “Can I say something else?”
    “No.”
    “I think maybe they got somebody,” he said. He didn’t look up from his book. His finger rested on the upper corner of the right-hand page, ready to turn it but on pause.
    Lucy immediately knew what he meant. “You’ve been meeting people?” she asked, surprised.
    “No.”
    “They’re not going to hire someone you haven’t met.” She deleted a sentence on her screen and considered how to reword it in a non-Oxenford way.
    “I heard them talking.” Gus rolled over and sat up, his book still open. “They were in Mom’s office. Dad was in there, too.”
    Lucy moved her laptop aside. Surely even her grandfather wouldn’t pull something like this. Gus should have some say in who he worked with; he wasn’t five any more.