The Lola Quartet

by Emily St. John Mandel

Music had always been bright and now it was dimming. He knew his teachers only wanted him to be the best pianist he could possibly be but they all knew he was missing something, whatever it is that carries a musician over the gap from merely proficient to outright spectacular,

“We’d be listening to a musician, someone really good, and Jack would go, ‘Damn, he has the music,’ or ‘She has the music’—” “He used to say that in high school too, but I don’t think I really understood what he meant.” “The way I think of it,” Liam said, “it means the musician’s a conduit. It means music’s something that moves through him, like religion or electricity.

How many times in your life do you get to flee town? How often do you get to lose everything and start all over again?