From "Piano Obsession" by Ibtisam Barakat Reem is a Palestinian girl who attends a school for refugees, operated by the United Nations. She befriends a girl named Rania, who introduces her to the piano. Read the passage carefully. Then, answer the essay prompt.

1 Rania led me to an elephant-sized piano that squatted serenely in a corner of the church. Before I touched the piano, the sight of it touched me. It reminded me of the first and only time I had visited a zoo. I twirled with delight.

2 A notebook filled with lines and bead-sized dots had been left open. “These are notes. One can read them like numbers in a math book. They translate to phrases, passages, long songs,” she explained.

3 Songs? Now the beads became birds on the page, long rows on electric wires, singing. Was it possible that these beads could really sing like birds? What must I do to make them do it?

4 “Open the lid,” she said. A large number of black and white teeth smiled at me. I became more excited, happy, afraid, all at once. The lid was more of a lip. And I instantly knew why the piano might sing, why the notes could be more than a row of birds. The piano could be a person who loves numbers.

5 Rania’s father came over to watch us. He noticed the stunned look on my face. “You don’t have to read the beads. Just sit down; play the keys.” I remained reluctant. “There are no rules for playing,” he explained. “You don’t have to make songs. Just make music.” He shut the bead book.

6 “There are no teachers here. This is not a school,” he encouraged. “I am a church guard. I did not finish my schooling because I didn’t like homework or teachers. Just play like a child would.”

7 I raised a finger as though it were a foot about to enter a new world. I dipped my finger onto a white bar. I dipped other fingers. All dropped inside a sweet, liquid sound. The white and black might have been sugar wafers, or chocolate bars for a person’s ears. I licked my fingers.

8 Rania and her father applauded. A thrill of importance ran through me. I had touched a piano, unlike most refugee-camp children, and tasted its music. I had also entered a church, all in an hour.

9 I came to the church every day after school. Other girls thought about boys, but I thought about a piano. Songs ran in my mind nonstop, like hamsters on wheels. My life began to have a sound track that made me dance in steps and skips as I composed it. I integrated the fragments of my thoughts into notes that made me cry when they finally met.

10 I closed my eyes and touched the piano. I told it my secrets; it broke them down
into sounds. I told it the equations of life I could not understand. The piano simplified the stories bracketed in my heart; it turned them into simple notes, echoing with the possibility of solutions. It solved for y. I understood its explanations.

11 And I imagined the keys of the piano leading to doors, the doors leading to rooms where the sound slept lonely, untouched, and frozen as a prisoner. The keys were in my hands. I turned them. I set the sound free, let it escape its silence.

12 No one knew it, but with the piano I had come out of the crowd of life to listen to myself. Images from the hungry life at the camp, angry sounds of street
confrontations with soldiers, splinters of the stories refugees carried silently in themselves, all surfaced in the grand silences between the sounds. I kept my fingers singing.

13 As it listened, the piano made my life more equal to what I had hoped it would be. It became my playground, with notes flat as pastures I ran into, notes sharp as mountains I climbed up, and phrases spoken from atop mountains. The piano repaired my days like a sewing machine repairs a dress.

Source: Excerpt from “Piano Obsession” by Ibtisam Barakat. Copyright © 2004 Ibtisam Barakat. Reprinted by permission of the author.

You have read a passage from "Piano Obsession". Think about how the author develops the theme of the text. Write an essay in which you identify the theme of the story and analyze how the theme is developed. Be sure to include specific details from the text throughout your response. PLZ HURRY I NEED A SHORT LITTLE ESSAY