“I know,” he said, snapping back to life. “I’ll crack a joke, get back into it, like yesterday. It’ll be fine. I just need to tune out the bullshit, focus on the music.”

“Is there more bullshit?” I asked, wondering what else he hadn’t told me.

He leaned against the wall to button his shirt. “Things are kind of weird with my parents.”

I wavered, surprised, but didn’t say anything.

“While you were away, I couldn’t get a straight answer from anybody on tickets for them to come up for tomorrow night. It went from ‘Yeah, we’ll handle it, we’ll fly them out and put them up at the W’ to ‘We’ll make sure they’ve got seats for the performance’ to ‘We can talk about that later’ and—”

“Who?” I stepped closer. “Who was saying all this?”

“Your dad, mostly.” Oscar sighed. “He got distracted while you were gone. He’s been . . . I don’t know, pressured.”

I glared at the ceiling.

“And it wasn’t just that. I got the sense—and again, I might be totally paranoid here—but I feel like Ms. Visser doesn’t want them there. Like she’s been going around telling donors I’m an orphan.”

Nora wouldn’t—I blinked. Yeah. She probably would.

“Anyway, picture me explaining all this to my folks, trying to make it clear that I’m not disrespecting them, I really do want them to come, but I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes.” He groaned. “I keep getting texts from my boys at Farnwell too, saying they want to come up, where can they get tickets—”

“Your parents are coming, though, right?” I leaned in to button his last button. “Please tell me they’re coming.”

Oscar’s arms dropped. “I don’t think so. My mom got her back up about it, sent me an email saying she respects my space and is looking forward to listening to a recording of it. Smiley face, exclamation point.” He faked a grin to demonstrate. “Sometimes there’s no reasoning with her. And this is after the first argument we had . . .”

He slumped against the wall. I shook my head.

“Ah. Right. I didn’t tell you about that one either. In my own defense, I was working pretty hard to impress you at that point.” He smiled. “Didn’t want you to think I was an idiot.”

I laughed, stealing his comb to sift through my curls. “Why would I think that?”

“I signed something when I got here.” His face went abruptly grave. “I wanted to do it myself instead of running it by my mom like some little kid, so I read it, it seemed fine, I signed it.”

“What was it?”

“The rights to my symphony.”

My skin went cold, a rolling tide. “You hadn’t written it.”

“The publishing rights to anything I composed in the program. Which obviously includes—”