She was in the cemetery that day, sitting on a headstone, playing Tchaikovsky. She had always liked him, as a composer, for the obvious reasons (his work was lively and his name tasted like almonds, both bitter and sweet) and the other reason (he was gay, which made Rachel feel a kinship she didn’t fully understand when she was twelve and more focused on whether she won first chair than figuring out who to kiss). The problem was that Tchaikovsky never completed his own cello concerto, so she was actually playing the Leonovich, based on a fractured set of bars from Tchaikovsky’s papers.

It was murder on her hands, and she wasn’t very good at it. Or she was technically good, but Rachel knew about the huge leap between mastery and the magic that comes with playing with a piece like it matters.

Like playing it is the difference between life and death.

She was fretting about it when a girl in a white overall dress and a black T-shirt and the big spilling tongues of boys’ work boots came wandering out of the woods and sat astride the fence, stripping the petals off flowers and watching her play. It was nice for a few minutes, and then it was irritating.

Rachel ripped her bow away from the strings. “How long are you going to stay?”

“Until I’m sure you’re real.” The girl stared at Rachel, and a name came to her in a sudden burst. Imogen.

Rachel laid her bow down in the long grass and set the cello on its side, carefully, as if she were putting it to sleep. “Why wouldn’t I be real?”

“Sometimes I hear things in the woods,” the girl said, waving vaguely at the redwoods behind them. “It sounds like the trees are talking to each other.”

“You don’t think it’s real?” These questions were there when Rachel opened her mouth. She didn’t have to reach for them nearly as hard as she did for fifth and seventh positions. They slid out, like notes that played themselves.

“Ummm,” Imogen said. “Trees are just wood.”

“So is this,” Rachel said, rapping the side of her cello with her knuckles.

“Yeah, but you’re the one making it make that sound,” Imogen argued.

“Maybe there are people in the woods and you can’t see them.” Rush tried to sound like an expert, because for some reason she cared if Imogen believed her. “People don’t see other people all the time. I can stand right in front of my parents and they don’t see me.”

Imogen seemed to take this problem seriously. She devoured Rachel with her dark eyes. “You look really uncomfortable in that,” she said, pointing at literally everything Rachel was wearing.