The announcement came on a Thursday afternoon.
Mrs. Albright clapped twice and waited for the room to settle.
"The school will be putting on a musical this spring," she said. "Oliver!. Auditions in two weeks. Notes going home today."
Immediate ripple through the room.
Tyler near the window had his hand up before she finished.
"Yes, Tyler."
"Is it Annie?"
"It's Oliver!."
Tyler considered this. Nodded. Put his hand down.
Ethan sat with it for a moment.
Oliver!.
He knew the show completely — every song, every scene, every character. He'd known it his whole previous life, absorbed it the way you absorb things that are simply in the air around you. But knowing a show and performing it were different things.
He thought about Oliver.
The character's quality of resilience — not defiance, not optimism, just continuing. The decision to keep going when continuing was the hardest available option. Every scene required an active choice. To ask, to trust, to stay, to leave.
And Where Is Love.
He'd been singing it as a demonstration piece for weeks. Showing what his voice could do. But he'd been singing the surface of it.
The song was actually about something.
A child in the dark asking whether love existed somewhere in a world that hadn't shown it to him yet.
He needed to get underneath that.
He had two weeks to figure out how.
He found Diana in the kitchen that evening.
She was making dinner, wooden spoon in hand, not needing to think about it.
He climbed onto the stool at the counter.
Four seconds.
"What's up?" she said.
"The school is doing Oliver!," he said. "I want to audition for the lead."
Diana set the spoon down. Turned around.
He held her gaze and let himself look the way he actually felt — which was simply that he wanted this. Clearly. Without anything else behind it.
He genuinely loved this show.
"The lead," Diana said.
"Yes."
"Rachel has commercials lined up—"
"I know. This is different. I want to do Oliver! because I want to do Oliver!."
Diana looked at him.
The expression arrived. Something in her face settled.
"Okay," she said. She picked up the spoon. "I'll sign the permission slip."
"Thank you," he said.
He slid off the stool and went to his room.
He had work to do.
The first thing he did was watch the show.
Diana had a VHS copy — she'd bought it years ago, before Ethan was born, because she was British and Oliver! was the kind of thing British households simply had. He found it on the shelf behind the television on Friday evening and put it on while Diana was in the kitchen and Robert was reading.
He watched it the way he watched everything — not just following the story but studying the mechanics underneath it.
The boy playing Oliver in this production was good. Genuinely good — clean voice, natural presence, knew how to hold stillness in a way most child performers didn't.
But Ethan watched the moments where the character's interior life was visible. The small decisions. The quality of Oliver's face when he was working something out. The way the performance lived in the eyes as much as the voice.
He watched Where Is Love twice.
The first time following the melody. The second time ignoring the melody entirely and just listening to what the song was actually saying.
Is it somewhere? Or did I just not get it?
He sat with that for a while after the tape ended.
Robert appeared in the doorway.
"Any good?" he said.
"Yes," Ethan said. "The kid playing Oliver is good."
Robert came in and looked at the blank television screen.
"But?" he said.
Ethan thought about how to say this.
"He's performing it. The emotion. He knows what Oliver is supposed to feel so he performs feeling it." He paused. "But Oliver doesn't know what he's supposed to feel. He's never felt it before. There's a difference."
Robert was quiet for a moment.
"That's a significant distinction," he said.
"It's the whole thing," Ethan said.
Robert looked at his son the way he sometimes looked at him — the attentive quiet look of someone hearing something they hadn't expected to hear from the person saying it.
"Good luck Saturday," he said.
He went back to his book.
He started practising Where Is Love differently.
Not in front of the mirror. Not running it over and over until it was polished.
He'd sit at the kitchen table in the morning before school while Diana made tea and just — sing it quietly. Like he was singing it to himself. Like it was a real question he was actually asking.
Diana would stop what she was doing sometimes when he did this.
She never said anything.
He noticed her stopping and kept going anyway.
That was the point — singing it like nobody was listening. Like it wasn't a performance. Like it was just a thought he was having out loud.
The difference was subtle but it was the whole difference.
He asked Mrs. Albright on Monday.
After class, while the other kids were gathering their things. He stayed behind and waited until the room had mostly emptied.
"Can I show you something?" he said.
Mrs. Albright looked up from her desk.
"Of course," she said.
He stood in the middle of the classroom and sang Where Is Love.
Not the polished version. The quiet version. The one he'd been working on at the kitchen table.
Mrs. Albright sat very still while he sang it.
When he finished she was quiet for a moment.
"That's what you're doing for the audition?" she said.
"Yes."
"Ethan." She chose her words carefully. "I want you to know that regardless of how the audition goes — what you just did was something I'm going to remember for a long time."
He nodded.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Yes."
"How did you learn to do that? To make it feel that real?"
He thought about the honest answer.
"I stopped performing it. And just asked it. Like it was a real question."
Mrs. Albright looked at him for a long moment.
"Yes," she said quietly. "That's exactly what you did."
He performed it for Mr. Kowalski on Wednesday.
Mr. Kowalski was the music teacher — mid-forties, patient, the kind of musician who had made peace with teaching because he genuinely liked watching people find things in music they hadn't known were there.
Ethan asked if he could use the music room at lunch.
Mr. Kowalski said yes without asking why.
He played the opening bars on the piano and Ethan sang it.
Mr. Kowalski stopped playing after the first verse.
Not because anything had gone wrong. He just stopped, and listened, and let Ethan carry it without accompaniment.
When it finished Mr. Kowalski sat with his hands in his lap for a moment.
"You know you're going to get the part," he said.
"Yes."
Mr. Kowalski smiled. Not the polite teacher smile — the real one.
"Then what are you practising for?" he said.
Ethan thought about it.
"I want to do it properly. Not just well enough to get the part. Properly."
Mr. Kowalski looked at him for a long moment.
"Come back Thursday. We'll work on the full scene. The blocking, the staging, what you do with your hands when you're not singing."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me," Mr. Kowalski said. He turned back to the piano. "It's the most interesting lunch break I've had in years."
Thursday with Mr. Kowalski.
They worked for forty minutes in the music room — Mr. Kowalski at the piano, Ethan on the small stage area at the front.
Mr. Kowalski worked the way Paul had worked in the Soho studio. Not telling him what to do — removing the things that were in the way of what was already there.
"Your hands," he said. "What do you do with them?"
"I don't know."
"Exactly. You don't know, so they do nothing, which is the right answer. But why do they do nothing? Oliver doesn't not move his hands because he's been trained not to. He doesn't move them because he's very small and very alone and moving feels dangerous."
Ethan stood with that.
Then he tried it again.
Same song. But now the stillness meant something. Now it wasn't the absence of movement — it was the presence of a child who had learned very early that making yourself small was safer than taking up space.
Mr. Kowalski stopped playing again.
"There it is," he said quietly.
Friday night.
He lay in bed and looked at the ceiling.
He'd done the work. Not the visible kind — not drilling lines in front of a mirror, not running scales. The invisible kind.
Two weeks of watching and thinking and singing quietly at the kitchen table and asking Mrs. Albright and working with Mr. Kowalski in the lunch room.
The work is invisible, Arthur had said through Margaret.
He understood it differently now. It wasn't just that the audience didn't see the preparation. It was that the preparation disappeared into the performance. If you did it right, you couldn't see it anymore. You could only see Oliver.
He closed his eyes.
Twenty-two kids tomorrow.
He was ready. Not in the way of someone who had prepared enough. In the way of someone who had arrived somewhere.
≪ SYSTEM UPDATE ≫
Acting Fans: 5 / 1,000,000
Music Fans: 7 / 1,000,000
Mrs. Albright — Acting Fan #5.
Mr. Kowalski — Music Fan #7.
He read it in the dark.
Five and seven.
Good, he thought.
He went to sleep.