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Informationen zum Autor Catherine Con Morse was one of the inaugural Writers in Residence at Porter Square Books. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA from Boston University, where she taught undergraduate creative writing for several years. Her work appears in Joyland, Letters, HOOT, Bostonia, the Racist Sandwich podcast, and elsewhere. The Notes was shortlisted for the CRAFT first chapters contest and is her first novel. In high school, Catherine attended the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, a public arts boarding school, where she was as intrigued with her teacher as Claire is with Dr. Li. Catherine continues to play and teach piano today. Most recently, she taught English at Choate Rosemary Hall, and lives in the Connecticut River Valley with her husband and daughter. Klappentext "A reserved Chinese American teen at a Southern performing arts boarding school comes into her own under the tutelage of a glamorous new piano teacher while grappling with her first love, adolescent and academic pressures, and mysterious, personal notes"-- Leseprobe Chapter 1 We saw Dr. Li before we met her. In the dining hall, she wore knee-high black leather boots and sunglasses so large they practically rested on her cheekbones. It was early September in Green Valley, South Carolina, but even our winters didn’t call for boots like that. Jenny and I watched as she nudged a tray along with just the tips of her fingers, as if wanting to touch it as little as possible. She stood on the colored tiles in front of the green beans spotted with bacon, the mashed potatoes and their vat of gravy, the dripping kernels of sweet corn. In her black sheath dress, a black leather tote on her shoulder, she looked out of place, her outfit more fit for an office than a school. Somehow, already, we could sense her disappointment. Maybe it was the way she had walked into the room, the sigh when she entered, the pause in front of the trays before resigning herself to take one and approach the counter. Well, if this is what I have to work with, she seemed to be saying, so be it. “Whatchoo want, baby?” said Barbara, the dining hall manager. She wore plum-colored lipstick and spoke to Dr. Li in the same way she did us, her whatchoo like a sneeze, then a dip into the long, low want, ending in a high, soft baby that nearly sounded like babe. Dr. Li did not seem the least bit taken aback about being called baby. She said, “I’ll have some of this, please,” and pointed to the wet, dark green mass that we knew to be canned spinach. Her voice was cool and quiet. When she spoke, it was nearly accent-less, unlike my mother, who spoke English fluently but not without some remnant of her native Mandarin. The spinach was slapped onto the plate. “What else?” said Barbara. “That’s it,” said Dr. Li. “That be all?” “Yes, thank you.” The plate, a bright orange plastic disk, was passed over, and Dr. Li set it on her tray. One hip cocked, one black boot pointed toward the tables, she carried her tray to the salad bar, her shoes clicking on the tile. She stood over the soup and lifted the ladle, inspecting the contents of the tureen. Chicken noodle. At a table by the windows, Dr. Li sat down and took her sunglasses off. I saw that her eyes were dark and her skin pale and smooth. Her long hair, set loose to the humidity, had begun to curl just the slightest bit at the ends. She ate the spinach quickly but neatly, as if wanting to get it over with. Of course, it hardly needed chewing and, in fact, was a weekly offering we all avoided. It would be reheated and re-salted for a casserole on Saturday, when the dining staff took the leftovers from the week and baked them twice between sheets of flour. Dr. Li didn’t know yet that meals were never this calm at Greenwood, but today—three days before the fall semester—was a...
