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The girl on the far end of the riser, small, with copper braids and eyes that are currently taking up most of her face, mutters, “Is that… Echo?”

“It is,” Miss Flack confirms, her hands finding the keys. “She is joining us this morning. Treat her like a human being rather than a monument, and we will all have a much better time. From the top of the bridge.”

Nobody moves.

“Ruby,” Miss Flack snaps, waving her hand in front of her. “Top of the bridge.”

Ruby straightens and opens her binder, though her eyes are still on me.

I pull a stool from beside the door and sit at the edge of the room. “I’m just listening for now. Pretend I’m not here.”

“That’s not possible,” announces a girl in the second row with paint dried into the sleeve of her hoodie.

Miss Flack doesn’t look up from the keys. “Zo.”

“I’m being honest,” Zo replies.

“You can be honest and sing simultaneously,” Miss Flack says pleasantly. “From the top.”

They run the bridge of what turns out to be a Lizzo arrangement. I identify it in the first four bars and listen with my eyes on the floor so none of them feel watched. There are two problems: the entry is collectively early by half a beat, which means it’s a shared habit nobody has flagged, and the girl on the left, small and deliberate in everything she does, is holding her final consonants too long and dragging the line off its rhythm.

I listen to it twice and say nothing.

I say nothing because the fastest way to shut down a room full of young girls is to arrive with a list of corrections. Instead, I wait for Miss Flack to pause them, turn on the bench, and look at me.

“Thoughts?” she ventures.

“Can I try the bridge once?” I ask.

She gestures at the space in front of the piano.

I stand up and sing the bridge back to them. Once, slowly, not performing it, just placing it in the air at the tempo it’s supposed to sit at with the entry landing where it’s supposed to land.

The room goes quiet. Their full attention is on me. Ruby’s mouth opens. The girl in the back row with natural hair in a high puff, who has said nothing since I walked in, lets go of her binder entirely. Even Zo stops performing indifference.

“Oh,” Ruby breathes.

“Again,” Miss Flack directs, playing the opening chord, and this time she means all of us.

We run it again. And again.

Something happens between the third and fourth pass that has nothing to do with me. The girl with the glasses, whose name I learn is Priya, stops catching her consonants mid-word, and the line opens up like a window cracking in a hot room. I hear it happen and glance at her, and she is frowning at her binder like the binder is responsible, which makes me love her completely.

“You felt that,” I say.

Her frown shifts. “What changed?”

“Your Ts and Ds,” I say. “You were holding them before. Then you let them go.”

She mouths the last word of the phrase to herself, testing it, and nods once, filing it away for later.

By the sixth run, the blend has settled into something that sounds like itself. Miss Flack lifts her hands from the keys, and the room holds the quiet for a moment. I feel it in my chest, the satisfaction of a broken thing working, and it is exactly what it has always been.

“Better,” Miss Flack observes.

“Significantly,” I agree.

“Can we do the whole song?” asks the girl in the back row with the high puff, whose name turns out to be Deja. She asks with the quiet confidence of someone who already knows the answer is yes.