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The first song she could ever remember hearing was
the aria "Song to the Moon" from Dvorak's Rusalka. It
wasn't even that she remembered hearing it, exactly. She
knows her parents played it to her on their scratchy
record player when she was small. They'd told her so
when she heard it again, when she recognized it and could
not place it. She was thirteen years old that day, and
she'd paused mid-stride, frozen by the sound, transfixed
by the voice soaring over the piano.

Seeing it all again now in this subway station, she
wonders why the devil even has to ask. She thinks she
sold her soul that night, as soon as she wrote the words
"GOALS: SING FOR THE REST OF MYLIFE" on the pink
Post-It note and stuck it, with great care, on the wall
above her bed. No, she thinks, she hadn't even sold it.
She'd given it away.

Sitting in tenth-grade biology class, she watched her
teacher draw red blood cells on the whiteboard, tracing
their familiar shape in squeaky dry erase marker. She
turned her wrist over and stared at the vein, running blue
and bright beneath the pallor of her skin, and wondered if
perhaps, just for her, they weren't blood cells after all.
Not blood cells but whole notes, humming through her
body, delivering music in place of oxygen to her brain, to
her heart, to her limbs. She imagined the sharp lines of a
sixteenth note, sticking in her arteries. A sickle cell.

In high school gym class her junior year, she sat in a
freezing-cold classroom, put two fingers to her neck, and
counted out her heartbeat. It beat in a medium-paced six-
eight, graceful and dancing. Outside running on the
track, she counted out her footsteps, falling in a slow

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