The premise couldn’t be simpler: a large brown envelope for acceptance, a small white one for rejection. But it wasn’t a question. As she painfully knocked her elbow against the music stand and grimaced good-bye to the two broadly smiling judges, Sara knew which envelope she would find in her mailbox in a week; they’d applauded after she lifted off her bow and let the last note resonate through her violin. Applauded.

She surprised her fellow Alto Café baristas by coming to her 9 a.m. shift early that day, but 15 minutes of unpaid work couldn’t seem more insignificant when her entire future was determined at 8:17 a.m.

“Our favorite musician!” Kathy-the-manager, Sara’s former roommate and five years at the café to Sara’s 10, rushed up as if welcoming a guest. “How was it?”

“Great!” Sara replied. “The judges applauded.”

She delighted in seeing Kathy’s smirk slip just the slightest bit.

“Oh? How was your rhythm?”

Sara stiffened. “Good.”

As she greeted her customers with big smiles, poured cappuccinos with delicacy, gave the smoothie machine an extra polish, she felt Kathy’s eyes on her. Ten years of her coworkers spying on her taught her that she was soon to be the subject of a gossip session. Indeed, not even an hour later, her trained musician ears picked up Kathy’s soft whisper: “You see Sara? She’s up to something. I know it.”

How rude! Sara thought, accidentally scooping too much ice into an Indian lady’s tea. She’s just jealous that I won’t be part of the slave labor class anymore.

How Sara wished she was still in Vienna, shaking the conductor’s hand in front of an Austrian crowd. Concertmaster in an internationally recognized student orchestra – any schoolgirl’s dream, and Sara’s reality. But she was 13 then, not a grown woman struggling with social anxiety and still living with her parents because minimum wage couldn’t cover the rent.

Sometimes, Sara wondered why she ever went to music school. Two degrees in violin performance hadn’t helped her find a real job, hadn’t helped her become that successful lady in business casual one would see walking down the street.

The expected text arrived exactly at noon, her lunch break.

how was the rhythm honey??

Her father, always blunt. Sara knew he would relate whatever she texted word-by-word to her mother over the phone. When it came to audition results, suddenly her two music professor parents were never busy. It had always been that way, ever since they forced her to start violin at age four. Perhaps they should have realized after 23 years, Sara thought bitterly, that their daughter would never possess the rhythm-keeping abilities to play professionally.

good, daddy, she texted.

Sara’s shift ended with Kathy’s sing-song “good luck,” and as usual, she walked up the driveway to her parents’ house, passing the circle of white lilies – perfect, like everything her parents owned – under the green mailbox. For the first time that day, she let memories consume her: the pitch darkness outside her window as she bowed the opening again and again, her toes tapping an irregular pulse; the exasperated look her violin teacher (the best one in the city) gave her as she attempted to sing subdivided beats; the helplessness she felt as she thumbed through her collection of rejection letters, each one with impatient scrawl telling her to improve her rhythm and to use a metronome.

Of course she used a metronome! She’d gone through four of them in her 10 years auditioning, all to no avail. It seemed like a bad joke: every single audition season, every time she performed, as soon as the metronome ticks disappeared, so did any sense of pulse that Sara had. Every one of the 10 audition mornings prior, she’d stepped into the familiar room knowing that rhythm would do her in.

But the eleventh, that morning, had been different. In a dim corner of the audition building, she’d stuffed her ears with her white earbuds, pulled the cord underneath the fabric of her black dress, and opened the metronome app on her phone. Her long brown hair revealed no trace of the forbidden white cord as she walked into the room to the beat – and as she walked out, smiling, knowing the judges would never discover her clever ploy.

Without question, Sara was a cheat. But what else could she do? Face her coworkers’ ridicule? Eavesdrop on her parents’ late-night conversations about their failure of a daughter? Take the moral ground when her entire career could be fixed with just a little help?

She unlocked her front door.

•••

It didn’t feel like a week. It never felt like a week. When the day arrived, her flats slapped a cacophony against her parents’ driveway; even walking she couldn’t keep rhythm. The lilies circled the mailbox in a ring of white, but as Sara reached to open the box, she noticed the pristine petals were torn up and chunks of the leaves were missing. A rodent, she thought, reaching in.

In a moment, the large brown envelope was in her hands, with “congratulations” stamped on the left side; but Sara neither breathed a sigh of relief nor smiled at this confirmation that she’d turned her life around. Instead, she felt oddly small, like she could scurry away into a corner knowing that nobody would ever report her missing, that nobody would ever want to.

She’d barely slit open the envelope when her fingertips brushed something glossy and unexpected – a photo. Quickly, she pulled it out. The white backing greeted her with blue cursive: Welcome to the family! – Milton Symphony Orchestra

She flipped it over. There she was, standing with her violin next to the music stand, eyes downcast and face contorted in pain as she rubbed her elbow, white earphones plainly visible against her mouse-brown hair.