Her face would create her destiny. That, and her music.

She understood that the year she turned seventeen. Until then
her mother’s incessant, simpering coo of, “Practice, Susan dear,
practice – you won’t regret it” was enough to make her want to
crush her own wrists so she would never have to sit at a Concert
Grand again. But when her parents insisted that she play at yet
another of their oh-so-tedious Connecticut dinner parties, designed
to impress Daddy’s clients, she decided to rebel. Down
came the French braid that her mother had woven tightly against
her skull, so that all that loosened, honeyed hair tumbled softly
against her shoulders and back. The clear pink lip gloss was replaced
with a color that made her mouth look like a plump, ripe
cherry just ready to burst, and the conventionally cut suit in a
color the designer called “cappuccino”, but which was really just
a fetid beige was thrown aside for a midnight blue silk dress that
shimmered to mid-thigh.

Her descent down the stairs into their
Thomasville appointed dining room was timed deliberately too
late to be sent back up again to change, and as she greeted their
guests with a little half smile at her mother’s quickly masked
shock, she thought, Now. Now they’ll finally see the real me.

A trivial teenage mutiny. It was meant to be nothing more.

As she’d been taught, she sat elegantly at her piano and began
to play one of her favorites, Chopin’s “Nocturne Opus 55 No.2.”
Wrapped in the melody, she was wholly unaware that she had
everyone’s mesmerized attention, not necessarily because she was
playing more brilliantly than ever, but more because of the
abrupt, startling appearance of her ingénue beauty. The combination
of that and the sounds she created with her graceful,
competent fingers flooded her audience’s senses. They could hear
only her music, they could see only her, and there were those
among them with the sudden craving to touch, smell, and taste
only her. All of the women, including her own mother, felt an
inexplicable fearful urge to flee, while the men watched her the
way a snake watches a rabbit. Or was it the way a rabbit is mesmerized
by a snake?

Eight months later, she played again at what she couldn’t know
would be her last dinner party with her parents. Her father’s
boss, a man fifty years her senior, stood up at the finish of her
“Fantasie Impromptu Opus 66.” Swaying on his feet, a sickly pallor
to his skin that had nothing to do with his age, he said, “I
love you, Susan,” in the same somber, matter-of-fact tone he
used when he addressed board members at corporate meetings.
Then, in front of the twenty horrorstruck guests, he drew a gun
from his suit pocket and blew out his brains, his blood spatter
permanently soiling her mother’s antique Belgian lace doilies.