Adagio's eyes first belonged to her mother, the tan of her skin to her father. Indeed, even the blood in her veins first belonged to the stars – but Adagio's dream belonged only to her.
"That's because when you dream the Universe dreams, and when you create the Universe expands," said Miss Cadence over the top of a music stand. It was still many months before Adagio's audition.
"What if I don't make it?" Adagio hesitated, her fingers pausing in their turning of a page of her étude workbook. "How much courage does it take to succeed?"
"No more than the courage it takes to begin, my dear girl," Miss Cadence said, flipping open her copy of the same book. She lifted her rose-gold flute. "Starting stops most. Will it stop you?"
Though Adagio did not know it yet, few things could stop a girl like her.
So Adagio turned twelve in the twilight of her bedroom with an étude on her lips and a melody in her hands. When her audition solo finally became part of her fingers and lungs – indeed, a part of Adagio herself – she sat back, let out a great breath, and turned thirteen. Time passed without approval for in those young years the world is known to morph and shift, the planets to spin and spin. Gradually Adagio began noticing her friends change: first the girls with straight hair bought curlers, then the girls with curly hair bought straighteners, and by the start of eighth grade each had amassed a questionably growing collection of drugstore mascaras. Adagio began noticing boys noticing her friends; with the bright eyes of girlhood she discovered that some boys saw her as a person and some saw her as a girl. When her friends became inevitably excited and hurt, excited and hurt by the objects of their affections, Adagio concluded quietly as she counseled them she was not missing out. Out of the blue she stopped packing swimming goggles for the beach and, as her body changed, made up baptisms and dental cleanings to excuse herself from attending her friends' backyard pool parties.
It was not strictly that Adagio did not think of herself as beautiful. If anything, it was that she did not think of herself at all.
And in those years, Adagio prayed. She was not the praying type of girl except, she found, when she was desperate.
"Why do you think people do it?" Dorian asked, smirking a little. "People use people, and when that doesn't work, they pick a god and use him."
To whom she prayed, or to what, it was hard to say – in some ways it mattered little who was on the receiving end of Adagio's hope. "Every dream comes true in your mind first, your life second," Miss Cadence said some weeks before Adagio's audition. So Adagio played out her dream in careful detail each night as a tailored lullaby – she would've done it even if no one suggested it. It was terrific fun, after all, having things go exactly your way.
Some nights Adagio wondered if anybody out there heard her prayers. She figured it was unlikely, what with the amount of praying going on all the time all over the place. Surely wishes got lost occasionally. On the night before her audition it occurred to her as she lay falling asleep that of all beautiful things and in all curious ways, the best thing to have in the world was a chance.
What Adagio never, ever imagined was that each of her prayers, every last one, was being carefully logged and recorded on a blinking ship many lights years away. She never imagined that she was helped by the Universe, or that it even knew she existed.
For a few days after her audition, Adagio didn't know what to do.
how to measure time. When the past years of your life were a countdown, what do you do when you reach
But Adagio is a reasonable girl in a reasonable world, so the glimmering coastline of Adagio's hometown sleeps on beneath a disappearing dome of spring stars as warm Atlantic waves lap the long shore of the rich. In this part of the state the wealthy drive silent cars and the youth drive loud, and when they stop at the same red light each pretends they don't envy the other. But money can't buy what's not for sale so when the light turns green the people of Port Alms nod down their sunglasses and speed off into the glowing horizon, grateful for what they want and happy with what they might have.
