I’ve never seen Mabley play the saxophone before. She sits in a row on a plastic cafeteria chair with everybody else in the wind section. Her short yellow hair falls across her face, and she has to flick it aside, so she can read the music. The conductor, Mr. Hoskins, is a stocky guy, kind of square, with short gray hair, almost like a crew cut. He’s wearing a blue jacket that comes down pretty low on his pants. When he waves the baton around, it’s like his feet are stuck in cement in the ground and his whole body is trying to get away.

They’re playing the theme tune to some movie—I think it’s Braveheart. It starts out slow and squeaky and then gets loud and squeaky. The acoustics in the gym are pretty terrible anyway: it’s like a bad radio. Also, there are a lot of flutes. It’s one of those songs that’s meant to make you feel happy and sad at the same time, it’s pretty cheesy, but even though I don’t want to, that’s what I feel. All these kids are playing their best, and it’s not very good because they’re kids; but when they grow up, they’re probably going to stop playing musical instruments anyway, because that’s what most people do, and this is really the one time in their lives where they’re going to try to be good at stuff like this.

We spend the last class of the day watching a movie and then the bell rings and even before it’s stopped ringing kids are headed out the door. It’s like they’ve all eaten ten bars of chocolate, everybody’s got a sugar rush. I have to get my bags together but at least I can skip the traffic jam by the lockers in the hallway. Mom is a little late, but I wait for her by the Toyota, in the afternoon sunshine. The temperature is something like sixty-five degrees; it feels like a spring day in New York. Kids are streaming out, cars pull into the parking lot or inch their way behind the buses. Teachers come out, too. I see Mr. Tomski with something in his hair, like he keeps trying to get it out, rubbing his head with both hands, but he’s also smiling. And then someone stops to talk to him, and it’s my mom, and I wait for a few minutes watching them before she heads over to the car.

“There you are,” she says, opening the door. “Well, we made it. People say the first six months are the hardest.”

“First six months of what?”

“When you move somewhere, when you start over.”

“After that, everything’s easy.”

“Everything’s a piece of cake,” she says.

On Christmas Eve, my dad calls. Granma picks up the phone. She has a short conversation and then I hear her say, “Do you want to talk to the big one or the small one? All right, all right,” and she passes me the handset.