'm not really sure why, but there are two days in my life that I remember more clearly than all the others.
The first was the night of my town's annual charity concert when I was in the seventh grade. It was the concert my dad always performed at, but since he was dead they asked me that year. It would have been my first real performance and I couldn't have felt more confident and excited.
Nobody ever mentions that night to me. They all know that it was the reason I had given up violin.
The other day I remember was the day I started playing again. It was the same day that I first saw him.
It was love at first sight. Actually, at first sound, since it was his piano playing that I fell in love with. It was the sound that made me go home, restless, and take out my violin from its case. This wasn't the easiest thing for me to do. I spent most of the time just crying over it. It was the violin I had learned on, the one Dad had given me the last Christmas we ever spent together.
I had no idea how I had lasted that long without playing a single note. Playing violin, to me, had been like breathing. I just did it without question and it had always been there, a constant. It had been my one comfort when Dad died. There had been no life without it. How could I have given that up so easily?
Yet, as quickly as I had stopped, that's how quickly it all started again. I couldn't go a day without practicing, even if it was just for
fifteen minutes when my mom ran out to get milk from the store. It was turning into a
compulsion. It had been three years since I'd even picked up my violin, but everything came back to me with surprising ease. The way the chinrest fit against my jaw. The way the bow was gripped in my hand exactly the way my father had taught me all those years ago. I was even starting to get a little red mark from where my violin rested. I'd have to figure out some way to hide that from my mother, just like I was hiding everything else.
That was the other thing; nobody knew that I was playing again. I locked myself up in the music room, making sure that all the windows and doors were tightly closed. Nobody ever found out, either. Well, until that one day when I dared crack open a window to get some fresh air, but I didn't have to worry about that. After all, the little nine-year-old girl refused to speak. I was safe. Who was going to know?
Based upon this excerpt, Stephanie was accepted to attend the New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf Campus, Middlebury College, Vermont.