Exile (2 page)

My phone buzzes again. One of my blogger associates,
FreakyLizzy
, has checked in to tweet a “SQUEE!” in support of Postcards’s next song: “You’re My Forever.”

I remember when Ethan Myers first strummed that song idea for me last fall, after fish tacos on Venice Beach. I remember thinking,
Damn
.

“Have you had any more thoughts about colleges?” Dad asks. “Applications are due in a few months.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe I’ll major in pre-law.”

“Law?” It’s hilarious watching Dad try to suppress his excitement. He works for a major construction firm downtown, managing the books. Concrete numbers, pounds of
cinder block, foot lengths of two-by-four. The kind of guy who wears a tie even to a rainbow-colored burrito joint on a Sunday night. He doesn’t say anything more, but I know exactly what he’s thinking:
Finally
.

Of course I can count on Mom to say it. “Well, that would be a relief.” Mom’s use of pearls (on a Sunday! Eating burritos!) is like Dad’s tie. They’re like a law firm of their own. Carlson Squared, Parental Attorneys.

“Yep,” I say, still behind a sarcasm shield. And yet . . . would law be so bad? It sounds like about the furthest thing from art and passion, but where have those gotten me? I could stop going by my middle name, Summer, and switch back to the ol’ parent-conceived identity: Catherine S. Carlson.

What’s the “S” stand for?
a striving jock attorney might ask me over cocktails in a mahogany bar off-campus where all the cool pre-law kids go.

It stands for “Settle out of court,”
I’d reply. And everyone would laugh expensively.

“You could do entertainment law,” Aunt Jeanine suggests, also missing my sarcasm, or maybe not. She’s the only adult at the table who seems to actually empathize with my current plight. Maybe the only one who’s actually noticed who I’m really trying to be. “You could work to protect artists’ rights.”

“Meh,” I say, “I was thinking corporate law. You know, taking down the riffraff, those troublemakers like
Greenpeace and MoveOn. Fight for the rights of the poor shareholders.”

Normally I’d revel for a moment in my parents’ total lack of response to that comment, but that old satisfaction just isn’t there, not even with the glycemic bliss that the
Orgasmo
is providing.

My phone hums with more updates from Silver Lake. Postcards has started their encore with “Never Leaving You.” I had to admit, it’s the perfect choice. Ethan has that lyric in there:

And suddenly I seize up.
Dammit!
My breath catches and my eyes spill.

“Cat?” says Mom, using her old pet name for me. No matter what I do, I’m still Catherine to my parents, always have been, always will be.

I hate nothing more than having my parents see me cry. I try to hide my tears. What I want to say is, Please, no sympathy, no hugs, if you want to care just shut up, because anything you say will just sound patronizing, like my pain validates your worry, and yet your worry makes it worse . . . and around we’ll go!

But I never say things like that to them. Instead, I dab my eyes with my napkin. “I think there was some cayenne in my
Orgasmo
,” I wheeze.

“Have some Coke.” Aunt Jeanine pushes my soda toward me. There’s a tissue between her fingers.

I snatch it and flash her what I hope is a thankful smile.

“I’ll Google colleges with the best law programs,” says Dad, my tears only further motivating him. “We can plan some trips.”

“Dad . . .” but I can’t finish, have to beat back this feeling, the overwhelming sense that life is already over, that I’ve missed the one best chance I had for doing what I really love, and that, in a beat-up rock club across town, the life I want is moving on without me, leaving me here in the same burrito joint, on the cusp of the future—

So, now what, then?

—with no idea how to answer the question.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

Formerly Orchid
@catherinefornevr 1hr
Senior Year existential sandwich. Me = the tofurkey between slices of whole grain Optimism and Oblivion. Pass the baconnaise! #Iworkedhardforthatmetaphor #stilllame

Seen from above, Mount Hope High looks so random: a spill of blocks, a bad joke of architectural trends, cost overruns, and budget shortfalls. Every five years it has to be added on to in order to support the town’s widening belt of sprawl and spawn. It looks like a slow flow of geometric lava. A five-year-old could do better with Legos.

Safety regulations have made it bulletproof, earthquake proof, heatproof, smog proof, nuclear fallout proof. It has a greenhouse that’s used for calculus classes, and the painting club has to meet in the chem lab. It has seven stairwells, twenty-two locker rooms, sixteen supply closets, and yet
the only safe place to hook up during the school day is the vice principal’s office.

[pause for laughter]

The school has graduated 96 senior classes. Five hundred forty-eight kids per class, give or take an asterisk.
1
That’s 52,608 human beings with hopes and dreams and wishes that have passed through its halls. I am some number between 52,609 and 53,156. And more will come after me, over and over, for as long as the antibiotics stay ahead of the bacteria and the sun doesn’t throw a supernova tantrum. Someday, long from now, when California is a desert island and humans are halfway back to dinosaurs, archaeologists will unearth this structure, read the inscriptions on the cockeyed bathroom doors and try to figure out who we were, and what we were thinking, and they’ll get it all wrong.

Of course by that time, myself and the rest of my senior class will have joined the entire current population of the earth in a fingernail-sized sheet of sediment.

Okay, maybe that’s a little extreme.

“Summer!”

I turn from where I’ve been rooted to the steps, watching the minnows file in through the barred-window doors
of school. Contemplating the meaninglessness of my existence feels easier than going inside.

No one’s said hi to me. I’ve spotted a few people I could have greeted, but didn’t. Every now and then I get a glance that says,
Oh yeah, her. She hung out with that band all the time. Too cool for the rest of us. Then she got dropped. Who knows what will become of her now?

Nice to see you, too.

I should’ve made a sign to wear around my neck: “It takes a lot of hard work to manage a band. I was also maybe in love. It happens. We’re all nice people. Can’t we just talk about this?”

Or maybe just: “Don’t look directly at it! It burrrns!”

“Hey!”

But there is one person who seems to be holding nothing against me: Maya Barnes, a sophomore and someone who is as serious about music as I am. She zips up the steps, dressed in a professional black skirt and tights, white shirt, thick platform shoes, and a lime-green scarf even though it’s going to be in the eighties today. She has thin oval glasses over giant almond eyes, her streaked-blonde hair pulled back in a big clip. Her look is so hardworking and optimistic compared to my lazy ponytail, slouchy jeans, slate-gray hoodie, and faded denim jacket. The only flair I’m sporting is all the shiny band pins on my jacket pockets.

Oh, to be young.

“Happy new year!” she says, breathless with perk.
“Your senior year. Are you excited?”

Maya is a fan of mine. My only fan I think. She manages a band called Supreme Commander. She can be a little clingy, and I can be sullen. Still, most of the time it’s nice to have an ally.

“Excited . . . ,” I say. “On a molecular level, I suppose. I was just standing here thinking about how by geologic timescales, nothing we do here will amount to anything more than a sliver of sedimentary rock.”

“Jeez, and I still had my will to live . . .” Maya makes a cartoonishly glum face.

It makes me smile. A smile! Feels like the first time all week. “I am a little excited,” I admit. “Not for econ, or Mr. Salt’s World Cultures class, but maybe . . .”

“To find a new band, right?” says Maya. She starts walking and I fall into step beside her. Cool to be entering senior year with a sophomore? Who even cares?

We pass through the doors and it hits me: the smell of First Day optimism. Well, that and the overwhelming odors of body spray and perfume, and also that strangely sour fear BO that wafts off the skittering freshmen. Oblivion be damned, everyone here still thinks they can make that enduring mark, a game-winning catch, the ultimate year-book candid, the perfect song. A memory that will cheat time, viral and immortal. Senior year. Five hundred forty-eight dreams, one hundred and eighty days of possibility. Maybe I can’t resist it.

And so even though I feel like Maya’s question deserves an answer in a grizzled, smoked-too-many-packs, seen-too-many-things voice, the veteran taking the shine off the newbie, I allow myself to be upbeat instead. “Yes, to find a new band.”

“Just don’t steal mine!” she says with a nervous laugh. We reach a main branch in the halls. “So, I’ll see you at the kickoff concert today?”

“Definitely.”

“I’ll save you a seat!” She’s a touch too loud, a touch too eager. It’s going to get old, but it hasn’t yet.

“Cool. Thanks.”

I slog my way through the morning: Economics (suck), Survey of World Cultures (information not-suck, teacher mega-suck), Twentieth-Century English Literature (infinisuck). My brain is barely able to perform that dual trick that is the key to high-school success: moving fast enough to keep up with everything being said, and yet also being fine with how severely dull it all is. I don’t know how some kids do it.

Actually, I do. Academically, I’m ranked seventh in our class, a fact I tell no one. The part I don’t understand is how some kids thrive on it. My performance has everything to do with maintaining a cover story so my secret identity can flourish. My parents, while they know I’m into music and “that managing bands” thing, still have no idea how real it is for me. Things like the grades keep them happy. They’d
probably like some athletics, a student senate seat, too, but all shall fall subservient to the great letters A and B (well, B as long as it comes with a +).

I get a second wind as I head to lunch. Today, we’re allowed to eat out in the east courtyard, where the kickoff is happening.

At Mount Hope High, most things—econ classes, cafeterias, athletic fields—look like the ones at any other budget-strapped public school. It’s when you enter the east courtyard that things start to look different. You walk out of doors off the cafeteria and find yourself in an actual stone amphitheater: curved seating that steps down to a half-moon stage. It looks like something out of ancient Greece, but aside from the yes-these-are-actually-stone seats, the stage and lights and sound system are all state of the art.

Welcome to the Don Henley performance stage. Yes,
that
Don Henley. His kid went here a while back. But that kind of thing is normal at Mount Hope High.

Fifteen years ago, Mount Hope was a normal high school, but then a band from here called Allegiance to North happened. There was all this press, including a big article in
Spin
. In that article, the members of the band, Eli White, Kellen McHugh, Parker Francis, and Miles Ellison, happened to mention a curious fact: their assistant principal, Mr. Abrams, had allowed them to practice after school in a classroom, and even gave them credits for a class he invented called Applied Popular Art, to make up for their
less-than-model academic performance in virtually every other area.

Next thing you knew, Mr. Abrams was the principal, and parents from all over LA, especially former rockers, started moving to Mount Hope so their kids could go here. Now, PTA meetings are like a leather fashion show. And the money pours in for Mr. Abrams’s brainchild: Popular Arts Academy.

As a result, if you play football at Mount Hope, you can be part of one of the lamest programs in Southern California, but if you play guitar, you can take a class called the Physics of Volume, which is held in the Amp Lab, an acoustically perfect room that houses a wall of classic and modern amplifiers worth so much money it requires a twenty-four-hour guard. And there’s just as much for bass, drums, vocals, keyboards, songwriting, recording, video shoots, and management. This school literally rocks.

One of the annual traditions is the kickoff concert, held during the lunch periods in the amphitheater. The bands have been playing for probably an hour already when I arrive, working up from freshmen to senior. As I head in, there’s a decent group with a girl singer on piano called the Progress Reports.

“Summer!” It’s Maya again, up in the back row, waving two notches more enthusiastically then she needs to. We’re both in the industry track of PopArts, which has classes and its own student-run record label called Lion’s Den. (Our
school mascot is a lion, and the label’s logo is a lion in a cave kicking back, paws behind his head with big headphones on. Corny? Yes. Kinda cool? I think so.)