Open your eyes.

Look down at your hands.

What do you see?

---

Your life is never the same after you get into the car with that bitch Sophia, who was for once not a bitch and instead very drunk. She walked out of the crash unscathed. You walked out with broken fingers. Other injuries, too, but you could deal with a cast, a few weeks of physical therapy. What mattered was that you couldn’t play violin properly anymore, and so now you have to do roleplay stimulation therapy, which you hate but will hopefully get you fixed up enough to sit as concertmaster at your orchestra’s next performance.

Your therapist calls it something else. She calls it a lot of things. Mind-body realignment and self-reflexive and fine motor skill rehabilitation. She clucks when you call it roleplay stimulation therapy.

“Simulation,” she says. “Stimulation is something different.”

But you’re seventeen and you think it’s funny, so you keep doing it.

Today, you run through two sets of exercises in moving your virtual fingers before the pressure building behind your eyes makes them feel like the cork on top of a champagne bottle that got jiggled by a really enthusiastic bride. Your therapist unjacks you, says it’s good progress for your third session. You step from the SimBox.

The first few moments after a sim are always the worst. You tabulate your fingers and toes, making sure all twenty are still there, and that they move when you tell them to, even if your fingers still unfold too stiffly. You wipe your palms on your shirt. Your therapist gives you a popsicle and says see you next week.

Her office is in one of those medical buildings with vases of plastic flowers along the halls and too many windows. It looks like you’re not going to get to the elevator before it closes, but the girl inside holds it open for you. She’s holding a cherry popsicle, and her lips are stained red, a bright pop of color against her black fringe and dramatic eyeliner. Her eyes flick to the dark splotch on the side of your neck. She smirks, like she thinks she knows what it is.

“Thanks,” you say.

You suck your popsicles in awkward unison. She looks about the same age as you, though you wouldn’t be surprised if she were a sophomore or senior instead.

“You’re also in VR therapy?” she says as the door closes.

“Yeah,” you say. “My therapist thinks that learning to pilot my virtual body will make my brain communicate with my nerves better.”

The other girl finishes off her popsicle, runs her tongue over the stick to get the remaining juices. “So, there’s nothing actually wrong with you.”

You want to pull up the doctor’s notes, tell her about the physical therapist saying you’re the strangest case he’s seen. You’re a medical mystery. You’re special.

“Guess there’s something actually wrong with you?” you say instead because you don’t want to look desperate to prove your damage.

“I was cutting,” she says, and you manage not to contort your face in confusion as to how roleplay stimulation therapy is supposed to fix that at all. She fingers the hem of her skirt. “Do you want to see? It’s mostly stuff my boyfriend calls me when we get into fights.”

You look away when she lifts her skirt. You see her grin in the elevator’s mirror. She must’ve had braces—that’s a perfect smile.

“Not ex?” you say.

She shakes her head.

You shrug, conceding. Fair enough.

---

Your first orchestra conductor was the harshest. He made you all hold out your hands before class started. He would prod at the fingertips of your left hand. You were his favorite because you had the most calluses. Before you went to sleep every night, you would rub your calluses over each other, savoring the friction.

---

You sit on the fire lane curb outside the medical center with too many windows, waiting for your mom to pick you up because obviously you can’t be trusted to drive anymore. She’s late again.

The other girl—Charlotte, you’ve learned—gets picked up way before you, by an Accord driven by a blond guy who must be her boyfriend. She offers to throw away your popsicle stick for you. You wave her off. After her boyfriend’s car drives off, you break the stick in two and pick off the splinters. You’re surrounded by wooden shavings when your mom’s car finally pulls up.

“Hey, Emma,” she says as you clamber in. “How was it?”

“It was good. I think I’m getting better.” You test your finger against the car window button. It opens farther than you intended it to.

She hums. “That’s good. If you ever want to transition to Virtual Instruments, though, I don’t mind paying for the program.”

Your mom is sympathetic, of course. She sat by your bed at the hospital. She didn’t say I told you so, and she’s willing to pay for these sessions in an experimental therapy technique after the months of physical therapy didn’t work. But there’s also some part of her that can’t forgive you for stepping into that car. You can’t blame her. You can’t forgive yourself for it either.

The wind is a dull roar through the too-open window. You look at your reflection in the glass and think about how you look the exact same as you did when you were a prodigy and capable and whole.

When you arrive home, your dad is still taking meetings in his SimBox. There’s still a few hours before dinner, so you slink into your room, close the door behind you.

Evidence of your passion is littered all over your room. The folding music stand you’ve had since you were six. A tuner and metronome on your nightstand. Folders of sheet music delineated by origin—one for your school orchestra stuff, more for the state orchestra, individual recital material, and that one quartet you play with Sunday afternoons in the park for shits and giggles.

You unclasp your violin case. You rosin your bow. Fit your shoulder rest against the hip of the violin, your body relaxing into the familiarity of the routine. This is the only thing you’ve ever been good at. When you were picked last during PE and when you didn’t get the grades you wanted, you told yourself—that doesn’t matter, because I’m good at the violin, I’m better than any of you.

Now, slot the instrument between your chin and shoulder and neck. The metal bites at the hickey that’s worn itself into your neck over the years, a pain you welcome like an old friend, an indication that you’re doing something right, though now it feels too much like you’re jamming a puzzle piece into a mismatched space.

Now, wedge the fingers of your right hand onto the bow. Position the ones of your left on the ebony fingerboard. The other kids put tape on their fingerboards to demarcate the notes, but your teacher didn’t let you; he wanted you to learn the relationship between the notes, learn the muscle memory of where to put your fingers, the micro-adjustments to get in tune.

For a moment, as you play the open string to tune the instrument, you think that all the roleplay stimulation therapy has worked; you think that you can be good and special again. It’s done. It’s over. You’re back to being you.

Then your fingers make an involuntary jerk, and you turn the tuning peg too sharply. The A string snaps. You’ve never thought about the implicit trust between your brain and muscles until it’s been broken.

The bow falls from your hand. It clatters against the hardwood, wood against wood like the crack of a tooth.

You let out a shaky breath.

The violin is the only thing you’ve ever been better at than everyone else.

At dinner, your mom doesn’t comment when you get a second helping of dessert. She looks at you with a complicated pity because none of these walls are fucking soundproof, and so she knows you’ve been trying again.

---

Once upon a time, you were Emma Clark, concertmaster of the state youth orchestra and measuring stick of every aspiring violinist within a fifty-mile radius. You played Carnegie Hall. You dreamed of holding a Strad. People said you should play professionally because your talent would be wasted if you went to school for anything else.

Then you got into a car with a drunk girl.

---

You don’t remember that night well. It was the first time you’d ever drank because that bitch Sophia had snuck a bottle to the postconcert celebration, and you didn’t want her to call you a pussy prude, and you definitely didn’t want her to think you were perturbed by how close she was getting to de-seating you as concertmaster. So, you took the shot she offered, chased it with water.

She was wearing berry-tinted lip gloss to match her dress. All afternoon, since the preconcert rehearsal, you couldn’t stop thinking about how wet it made her lips look. You wanted to ask her where she got it. You took the next shot she handed you.

When she offered to drive you somewhere else—she said there was this one bend of road that Yuchen and Iris from Leo Club always parked their car to fuck in the back seat—you said the responsible thing. You had been drinking. Neither of you should be driving. But she said her brother at NYU had driven across the Brooklyn Bridge, crossed out of his mind, and been perfectly fine, and she had only had three shots anyway, and what kind of prude actually believes all that stuff about abstinence and alcohol being a gateway drug anyway?

After the car smashed into the traffic pole, you were crying from the pain and the panic, but you still remembered to wipe the berry color from your lips before the cops and the ambulance arrived.

---

Take a deep breath in. Take a deep breath out.

Look down at your hands. Count all your fingers.

Out loud, Emma.

When the green light flashes, your hands will dissolve.

I don’t want you to concentrate too much on putting them back together. Instead, think about how it feels to put your palm against a block of ice. Think about how it feels to dip your fingers into the ocean. Try to visualize all of your fingers.

Imagine making a fist.

Deep breaths, Emma. Come on. Deep breaths.

---

Your mom is late again. You live a ten-minute drive from the medical center. You’re pretty sure she hasn’t even left the house yet. You think she might be late on purpose to punish you. She was never late when she picked you up from your violin lessons.

Charlotte is sitting on the fire lane curb with you today. She says her boyfriend is probably late because he wanted to ask his professor some questions during office hours, but also he might be giving her the silent treatment.

“Do you want to walk to the park?” you ask. “It’s a few blocks away. Me and my friends used to hang out there after school.”

“That sounds fun. Let me ask my boyfriend if I can come.”

You can’t keep the condescension from your tone. “Like you need his permission?”

She gives a half-apologetic, half-smug smile, like she’s privy to some secret of womanhood you aren’t. “Yeah.”

You text your mom to pick you up later. Charlotte’s boyfriend gives his permission. Your beat-up sneakers and her tastefully retro Mary Janes tap against the sidewalk in different rhythms. Her skirt rides up—she must know it exposes the cut skin of her thighs—and you can’t help thinking of your violinist’s hickey, and how you got your calluses because you’re a hard worker and she got hers because she’s head over heels boy crazy. There’s blood crusted beneath her fingernails. You don’t give her the satisfaction of asking why she doesn’t wash it out.

Instead, you sit on a swing designed for an ass half the size of yours. Behind you, kids call to each other from the rungs of a monkey bar. Their parents chat at the stone picnic tables.

“What do you even do in roleplay stimulation therapy?” you say, trying not to put too much emphasis on the you. It’s just that you’re in roleplay stimulation therapy because there’s something physically wrong with you, and you don’t see what it would do for her.

She drags the tips of her shoes against the blue rubber mulch, grinding out an unpleasant sound. “We run through scenarios that happened to me. Like that time a guy walked up to me at Albertson’s and asked me if I was younger than eighteen or not and I just froze. But like, what if I wasn’t trapped in my own body. My therapist says it’s about reclaiming agency.”

“Jesus,” you say. “Guys are such creeps. You know, a guy once walked up to me when I was waiting for my mom to pick me up after my violin lessons and hugged me without asking. I guess I never thought I could have therapy for it.”

A boy with a propeller hat shuffles up to you like he wants a turn on the swing. Neither you nor Charlotte move. After enough awkward seconds, he runs off to spin on some metal apparatus with his friends, who are screaming their faces off.

Charlotte kicks her feet, setting the swing into motion. “I’m progressing pretty slowly in the simulation, to be honest. It’s a lot to get through.”

You mirror her. The afternoon wind is warm against your skin. “Me too. My therapist says I’m kind of a rare case.”

“Yeah, but you’re only trying to relearn the violin. Why don’t you just sim it?”

You give a noncommittal answer and change the topic.

---

Your mom doesn’t understand either: why don’t you just sim it? Your dad spends more time in the SimBox than outside it. Your brother got recommended the social-situations sim to practice high-anxiety interactions before he could encounter them in real life. All in all, the simtech has fulfilled its promises of increasing access and personalizing learning and all those words your English teachers like.

The Virtual Instrument software has been nationally lauded for democratizing the arts and promoting accessibility for low-income families. Anybody can learn an instrument from their living room. Reaching level twenty mastery on an instrument is considered a boon on college applications. Your current violin was a couple grand. The Virtual Instruments software is a fraction of that.

For what it’s worth, playing isn’t easy in the sim. You still have to learn the instrument, train your ear for the correct intonations. It would probably take even you some time and effort to get to level twenty.

Let the record show that you’ve tried. You got into your SimBox and opened the software, accepted the violin that floated to you from the virtual ether. You can play a Strad in here, if you want. You’ll never get calluses on your fingertips. You are not bad at the virtual violin. You have spent a lot of time trying to figure out why you hated the Virtual Instrument so much and have never come up with an answer that would satisfy a nonmusician.

So you keep going to roleplay simulation therapy. You keep walking to the park with Charlotte, your tongues dyed blue and orange and purple from the popsicles like you’re just like the other kids clambering over the equipment. When she offers to have her boyfriend drop you off instead of having your mom be late all the time—your house is on the way for him anyway—you agree, and thank him.

---

You are sitting in the back seat of a sedan that smells like Doritos. A roll of toilet paper unravels across the rubber mats with every left turn. You might as well not exist to Charlotte and her boyfriend, whose name you’ve already forgotten because she only calls him baby in a tone you didn’t know she had. Dirty shoe prints pattern the toilet paper.

“You know, Hailey came by today,” the boyfriend says. You don’t know a Hailey. This conversation isn’t for you. “She asked me if I wanted to get lunch with her sometime.”

“What a slut. Did you say yes?”

“Of course not.”

“Did you think about it?”

“Why are you asking?”

“I don’t know. Why did you tell me if you didn’t want me to ask?”

His hand wanders to her thigh, gives a squeeze that seems affectionate. She sucks in a sharp breath. He says, “Because you got mad when I went for brunch after class with Nadine and Jessica, and I don’t want you to get mad again.”

You think that this is really not a very healthy relationship. Charlotte wants too badly to be the cool girlfriend. You would never stay with a guy who talks to you like that, and you’ve had too much violin practice to ever date seriously, so you feel pretty confident you’re not being a hypocrite about it.

---

When you were in middle school, you made rubber band friendship bracelets that were the exact circumference of your wrist. You gave the bracelets to your friends. You noted who the bracelets were loose on, and whose wrists stretched the bracelets. It was how you decided how much you would put on your lunch tray every day.

Now you’re in high school, you make ridiculous deals with acquaintances for recital videos of every other violinist close to your level. You note every mistake they make with underhanded satisfaction. You have a list of everything you’re better at than that bitch Sophia, who’s never called you since the accident, like she didn’t get drunk and crash a car, like she didn’t kiss you before she did.

All this to say: sometimes, you ask Charlotte about her relationship so you can think about how you’d never stay with someone who makes you cry in the Panda Express line and makes snarky comments when you hang out with your friends who aren’t him. You listen to their conversations and think that you’d slap someone who gripped you like he’s gripping her, the way someone holds a dog who’s trying to jump out of their lap.

You’re not sure if you want to be better or worse than her. You’re not sure what better and worse mean.

“Why are you even still with him?” you blithely ask one day.

She kicks her feet dramatically so her swing crests higher than yours. “It’s fun,” she says, then laughs a bit. “You know, the other day, he posted a picture of himself with these two sorority girls because he wanted to see if I would get jealous. I’ve kind of learned to filter the stuff he says.”

Then his car pulls into the playground parking lot, and you both get in.

---

The boyfriend is in a better mood today. He didn’t have to stay for office hours. He’ll be going out for drinks with his friends tonight. Over these last few weeks, you’ve learned that a lot of his friends don’t talk to him anymore because he’s a college guy dating a high school girl, and he thinks they’re all two-faced snake motherfuckers.

“I better not get a call at 2 a.m. because you’re drunk and lonely,” Charlotte says.

His white teeth gleam in the rearview mirror. “You know you like it.”

Their conversations make you uncomfortable; they also fascinate you, these glimpses into what girls who like boys say, and what their chosen boys say to them back.

Her friends don’t understand why she stays either. She tells you about those girls who just don’t get her in a half-laughing tone, the look in her eyes begging you to laugh too, and so you do.

She says, “Well, I also have to wake up for school tomorrow. If you’re lonely, I’ve given you plenty of pictures to jerk off to.”

“You know, I can’t believe you guys actually start school at 7 a.m. I would kill myself if I had to do that now. I only register for classes that start at noon, earliest.”

“You better not drunk drive to my driveway again. Do you know how hard that was to explain to my mom?”

“I took nine shots over six hours that day,” he says, fingers thrumming on the wheel. “I wasn’t even buzzed.”

“Baby, I’ve seen you at frat parties. Your tolerance is not that good.”

“Is.”

“Is not.”

The toilet paper roll bumps against your ankle after a particularly sharp turn. When you try to respool it, the squares snap off in your shaking fingers.

You think about opening the door and jumping out. You hope your fingers could do that. When the voices from the front seats escalate, and you examine your nails, you find that one of your calluses is peeling from your fingertip.

---

When you were in middle school, your nicest orchestra teacher told you that athletes have to retire eventually, but a musician can play his instrument as long as he can hold the bow. You still think of Mr. Robertson fondly. He thought you were one of those kids who’d be slotting the violin against your body until the day you die.

You open your violin case again.

You’ve been doing roleplay stimulation therapy long enough for results. If you can just play, you don’t have to sit on the faded red curb ever again. You don’t have to wonder if your mom is being late to punish you. You don’t have to get into a car with a guy who doesn’t care about drunk driving.

You remember the fluid motion of the bow hand: all wrist and elbow, no shoulder. And the unconscious dexterity of the fingers dancing across the fingerboard, trusting your calluses to protect you from the sting. Muscle memory. Impulse to envisionment to action, just like your therapist says.

The sunlight sears into your face through the open window. You don’t close the curtains. The chair bites into your ass—your first teacher always said it wasn’t good for musicians to be too comfortable. You set bow to string and pull.

You pull in an arc. It’s supposed to be a line. Not a sawing motion, all shoulder and none of anything else. You know this. You know what good music looks like, sounds like, feels like, the wooden body humming against yours, in acoustic rooms at midnight and before an ensorcelled crowd that holds everyone you have ever loved, sweat pimpling your face.

You are so aware of the you inside the broken body, the you that knows how to play but not how to tell your body to cooperate.

You wipe the rosin dust from the violin, tuck it back into its case, and kick the music stand across the room, which you haven’t done since you were eleven and frustrated your fingers wouldn’t move as fast as you wanted them to. At dinner, your mom remarks that she felt something crash upstairs through the ceiling. Your father says he didn’t feel anything at all and asks you whether you’re tired of roleplay stimulation therapy yet.

---

This is why you can’t live with the Virtual Instrument:

There is no moment right after you finish a Mendelssohn when the last notes cling to the air, reverberating. You can’t feel the violin humming against your neck as you coax out a cadenza. You can’t get a hickey from the SimBox. A SimBox has no resonance.

---

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte says when she sees you picking the last of the calluses from your fingertips.

You haven’t touched the violin since the last time you dropped the bow like a clumsy child. “It’s really bad,” you say. “My therapist had to make me a custom treatment plan.”

When you could play, you fantasized about passing out in the orchestra room and waking to find everybody fawning over how hard you push yourself.

“My therapy has been getting worse, too. I don’t get why, to be honest. I mean, you’re more marked up than I am,” she says, gesturing to your violinist’s hickey. “And you don’t even have a boyfriend.”

---

You remember this distinctly: when you were newly a freshman, when everything about high school was bewildering and you were still adjusting to a school that had stairs, your friend, the first chair of the cellos, leaned over to you and whispered about how Annette from the woodwind section and Brenda, who wasn’t in orchestra at all, were apparently fighting over Nick Travolo. There were cheating allegations. There were group chat screenshots circulating. There were revenge porn allegations.

You didn’t care much about it at the time because you spent all your lunches in the orchestra room, sitting crisscrossed on the stained carpet. It was gossip. Interesting for a reaction, but you were ultimately above all that. You had actual things to worry about. Like the next orchestra seating.

But you get a call from Sophia as you’re preparing to go to roleplay stimulation therapy, and you pick it up thinking she’s trying to make amends for the drinking and the car crash. You’ve been expecting this, but it’s still surprising. You have a spiel prepared about how you could never forgive her. You open your mouth to give her a piece of your mind.

“Do you remember Annette, the piccolo girl?” she says without preamble. “Apparently, her boyfriend killed her, right there in their kitchen. I can’t believe it. Can you? Anyway, I just thought you’d want to know.”

She manages a blasé tone throughout, but her voice catches on the last word. She hangs up before you can comment. You think about calling her back. You think that you’re still in love with her, and you think about going to Charlotte’s therapist so you can live that night over and over, retroactively pretending agency, refusing to take the shot and refusing to get in the car and then waking to a world where you did none of those things, and you wonder how it could possibly be good for Charlotte to do just that.

---

Take a deep breath in. Take a deep breath out.

Unclench your left fist, Emma.

Let’s take it finger by finger. Thumb first.

Now unclench your other one.

---

“Doesn’t it hurt?” you ask Charlotte when she fiddles with the hem of her skirt, the scabbing lines flashing into visibility before disappearing again.

You’ve never tried to read the letters. You wonder if Annette cut words into her thigh before she died. You wonder if you’re a bad person for thinking of Annette only after her death reminded you she existed. You can’t stop thinking of her, and you don’t know why. You can’t even really say you knew her, any more than you could say you know Charlotte.

Her gaze wanders to some faraway point behind you. “It’s supposed to.”

You are so tired of this game. “What are you in roleplay stimulation therapy for?”

“I’ve tried cutting in the SimBox too, you know. It didn’t work. It’s not the same.” She frowns, still not looking at you. “There’s going to be a party at Acacia next week. We have an extra bid, if you want to come. I don’t want to be the only high schooler there.”

---

When you, in your post-car-crash desperation, searched for possible cures and the physical therapist threw her hands up and said she didn’t know what was wrong with you, in much nicer words than that, she referred you to a novel treatment.

Your current therapist explained to you that these simulations were still in their experimental phases with regard to physical wellness. The simulations started as an empathy-inducing measure for greater environmental consciousness, you see. If you realize how bad the coral have it, if you watch your polyps die one by one as you struggle for breath, maybe you’ll be radicalized against coral bleaching and ocean acidification will be solved. The specific effects of therapeutic rehabilitation are still being studied.

You thought this was kind of weird. You thought dying coral were sad without needing to be shoved into the body of polyps. You don’t need to like boys or cut yourself to know that Charlotte wants you to be there for her.

---

You will never play the violin again.

You know that now. You know that some injuries don’t heal. Sometimes life isn’t fair, and you lose the rest of your life because of a lapse of judgment when you were drunk, except you could have killed someone, so maybe it is fair. Your future for the one you endangered.

When your mom asks you why you keep attending roleplay stimulation therapy despite the lack of results, you tell her that it’s important to you. You tell her that a girl you barely knew got killed by her boyfriend, mostly to guilt her into not nagging you about the price of the lessons, a little because you want her to say oh, Emma, and rub your back and pretend she doesn’t see you wipe the tears away. But she can feel you against her, like your body has become something like the instrument you’ve held to yourself so many times, shuddering with a feeling you can’t put in words, and maybe then she understands.

---

Charlotte asks you if you’ve decided whether you’re coming to the party tonight. She doesn’t beg you to reconsider when you say no.

You drag your foot against the rubber mulch until your swing comes to a stop. She keeps swinging.

You say, “I think you should break up with your boyfriend.”

“I don’t want to,” she says, with no real heat behind the statement.

In the distance, his sedan turns onto the street. You’ve already absolved yourself of the guilt. If she got into that car and it crashed, none of it would be your fault, and you could tell yourself how much cleverer and level you are. It would still make you sad. You think it would make her sad to go to this party with this boyfriend.

“I’m quitting roleplay stimulation therapy,” you say. “We can meet up some other time if you want, but this is my last day here.”

“Guess I’m more damaged than you.”

You could agree with her. She’s right enough; you make—made—something productive of the red marks all over your body, and hers are because she has a shitty boyfriend. You could disagree with her. Half your conversations are some variations of this disagreement.

The sedan pulls into the parking lot. The boyfriend rolls his window down, gestures for you to hurry up and come over. They are going to a party tonight. He is someone who’s willing to drive drunk.

“I don’t want this to be the last time I ever see you,” you say, and her swing grinds to a halt.

She looks up at the sky. Her eyes are glassy. Her fingers tremble against the chains of the swings, quivering like yours do sometimes. The boyfriend yells something from the car. She doesn’t look away. She looks very flimsy, like she could fold if you touched her the wrong way.

“I can go talk to him for you,” you say.

Her grip tightens around the swing. “There’s this new dessert place opening close to my house, if you’re free tonight.”

“I am,” you say, and when she smiles, and you let out a breath, you think this is the wrong sort of resonance, but you don’t mind as much as you thought you would. “Are you?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I’ll be free.”