We worked on “Brian’s Song,” “Both Sides Now,” and a 1960s medley that began with “Blowin’ in the Wind” and ended ten minutes later with “The Age of Aquarius.” Between songs I heard the distant, tinny plucking of Markham’s guitar. I glanced back at him only once during class and he was staring right at me, his feet propped up and his pick hand fumbling inside the pocket of his Ron Jon’s T-shirt. When class ended I looked again, and his chair was empty.

I gathered up my books and was walking past the row of darkened practice rooms when a hand reached out of one of them and grabbed my forearm. In the next moment I was dragged inside, the door was shut, and a voice said out of the darkness, “Kerrigan.”

“What?”

“Keeerrrrriiigan.”

“I know who it is,” I said. “Open the door.”

The fluorescent light tube flickered against the low ceiling, flooding the tiny room with light. Markham was standing in front of the door. “You want to suck my what?”

“Let me out.”

“Not so fast.” He towered over me by half a foot. One of his hands reached out and pushed my breastbone so that I fell backward onto the piano bench. Then he dragged a folding chair between me and the door, sat down on it and stretched his legs out, planting a shoe on either side of the bench. “You’ve seen the junk,” he said.

“I’ve seen the what?”

“Junk,” he said. “Sucking dick must be making you deaf. You’ve seen the junk.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Your sister really isn’t your sister, is she? She’s, what, a cousin or something?”

“She’s my sister.”

“Your last name’s Kerrigan. Hers is Ragazzino. And she’s right—you don’t look anything like her.”

“We have different fathers.”

“Yeah, and both of them split, right? What’s wrong with your old lady? I mean, your old man lives, what, fifty feet away? Karen said you never see him. That’s got to be fucking weird.”

I stared at him, my face burning.

He folded his arms over his chest and mortared the heels of his sneakers into the green carpet. “Thing is, if you were really Karen’s brother, I wouldn’t worry about it. It would be cool because there’d be that blood tie.”

“We have the same mother,” I said. “There is a blood tie,” though I didn’t know what he was getting at.

He dug his fingers into the pocket of his T-shirt. “Then I can half trust you. At best. Because I know you saw that.” His hand snapped, and on the bench next to me landed a small plastic bag of white powder.

I felt my stomach implode. “I didn’t see that. I don’t even know what it is.”