My sister and I started piano lessons when I was eight and she was six years old. It was a rainy summer day, for some reason that sticks in my memory. The two of us huddled with our mom on the front steps of a little house on Bross Street. White with black trim, like a piano key, I remember thinking. Excited and anxious but soon at ease as we met our teacher, Virginia Zebolsky, for the first time. We took turns at the upright piano, a blue booster cushion on its bench, a rickety pedal extender box on the floor, playing our first five-finger exercises.

The years flew by. Practice sheets, weekly goals, scales, cadences, repertoire pieces. Weeknight lessons, and Saturday morning group classes that if at first were a chore, being dragged out of bed so early, became something else as I got older: an all-too-brief hour in the presence of my years-long crush, Brandy Watson, the cute, quiet girl who sometimes played duets with my sister.

Every spring and fall, without fail, Virginia held a studio recital. The adult students went first, then the kids, increasing in age and ability to the closer, the finale, often a graduating senior. I would look up to them: Annie Clark playing Mendelssohn, Meredith Laitos playing Debussy, Caitlin McGugan playing Rachmaninoff. They seemed to have such confidence and poise, to be in such control of the piano.

I would sit in the church pew waiting my turn in utter dread. I hated it, hated, hated, hated it: the nerves, a burning in the chest and hands and shaking in the knees. Walking up to the stage as if out of body, not just worrying I had forgotten the notes but convinced of it. Waiting for a slip, fingers suddenly clumsy and stiff, suddenly very aware of everyone in the audience, the keys a blur.

The truth is a part of me would sit there and hope for it to happen to the other students, to whoever went right before me. Could I have felt that about Brandy Watson? My own sister even? It wouldn’t surprise me. Hoping however I did might not look so bad in comparison.

One time it was different. It was the final recital for Brandy and me, for the first time we were the last two. We both played Preludes. She played Chopin and played it beautifully, and I played Rachmaninoff, finally letting go of my vanity and insecurity. Somehow merging with the music, my eighteen-year-old hands big enough for the climactic chords, the awkward leaps. From some unknown place, the delicate polyphony, the descending lines singing the overlapping memories of my childhood, a journey back to a rainy summer day in a little white and black house on Bross Street. There is a photo of Virginia and me in front of the grand piano that captured the moment. It was something more than happiness, with tears in both our eyes. It was a moment of joy.