Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng Page A

foul mood. She snapped at Shanita Grimes to spit out her gum. She barked at Jessie Leibovitz, who had just broken her A string and was fishing in her case for a replacement. “Hangover,” Kerri Schulman mouthed to Izzy, who nodded gravely. She had only a general sense of what this meant—a few times Trip had come home from hockey parties and had seemed, she thought, extra dense andgroggy in the morning, even for Trip—but she knew it involved headaches and ill temper. She tapped the tip of her bow against her boots.
    At the podium, Mrs. Peters took a long swig from her mug of coffee. “Offenbach,” she barked, raising her right hand. Around the room students riffled through their sheet music.
    Twelve bars into
Orpheus,
Mrs. Peters waved her arms.
    â€œSomeone’s off.” She pointed her bow at Deja Johnson, who was at the back of the second violins. “Deja. Play from measure six.”
    Deja, who everyone knew was painfully shy, glanced up with the look of a frightened rabbit. She began to play, and everyone could hear the slight tremor from her shaking hand. Mrs. Peters shook her head and rapped her bow on her stand. “Wrong bowing. Down, up-up, down, up. Again.” Deja stumbled through the piece again. The room simmered with resentment, but no one said anything.
    Mrs. Peters took a long slurp of coffee. “Stand up, Deja. Nice and loud now, so everyone can hear what they’re
not
supposed to be doing.” The edges of Deja’s mouth wobbled, as if she were going to cry, but she set her bow to string and began once more. Mrs. Peters shook her head again, her voice shrill over the single violin. “Deja. Down, up-up, down, up. Did you not understand me? You need me to speak in Ebonics?”
    It was at this point that Izzy had jumped from her seat and grabbed Mrs. Peters’s bow.
    She could not say, even when telling Mia the story, why she had reacted so strongly. It was partly that Deja Johnson always had the anxious face of someone expecting the worst. Everyone knew that her mother was an RN; in fact, she worked with Serena Wong’s mother down at the Cleveland Clinic, and her father managed a warehouse on the West Side. There weren’t many black kids in the orchestra, though, and when her parents showed up for concerts, they sat in the last row, by themselves;they never chitchatted with the other parents about skiing or remodeling or plans for spring break. They had lived all of Deja’s life in a comfortable little house at the south end of Shaker, and she had gone from kindergarten all the way up to high school without—as people joked—saying more than ten words a year.
    But unlike many of the other violinists—who resented Izzy for making second chair her first year—Deja never joined in the snide comments, or called her “the freshman.” In the first week of school, Deja, as they’d filed out of the orchestra room, had leaned over to zip an unfastened pocket on Izzy’s bookbag, concealing her exposed gym clothes. A few weeks later, Izzy had been digging through her bag, desperately looking for a tampon, when Deja had discreetly leaned across the aisle and extended a folded hand. “Here,” she’d said, and Izzy had known what it was before she even felt the crinkle of the plastic wrapper in her palm.
    Watching Mrs. Peters pick on Deja, in front of everyone, had been like watching someone drag a kitten into the street and club it with a brick, and something inside Izzy had snapped. Before she knew it, she had cracked Mrs. Peters’s bow over her knee and flung the broken pieces at her. There had been a sudden squawk from Mrs. Peters as the jagged halves of the bow—still joined by the horsehair—had whipped across her face and a shrill squeal as the mug of steaming coffee in her hand tipped down her front. The practice room had erupted in a babble of laughter and shrieking and hooting, and Mrs.