by Ann Hood
From time to time I glanced over at Jessica, who was grinning a huge grin, and Nora, who was bouncing up and down in her seat, and Peter, who from time to time glanced over at me. Friends, I thought. And for the first time since April break, I didn’t miss Michelle. Not even a little.
Sometimes I could actually hear that famous Lennon-McCartney harmonizing that I listened to over and over again at home on my record player, the harmonizing that my father said was the best in musical history.
As I listened to it, I thought about my father, way far away in Japan, and how he was supposed to be here with me tonight. The Beatles were the only thing that belonged to just us, and he was missing them. Would he be impressed that I’d made it to Suffolk Downs on my own? Suddenly, meeting Paul McCartney became even more important, and it was already really important. But standing there in Suffolk Downs with the Beatles singing “Baby’s in Black,” I missed my father so much, and my heart ached so bad at how he maybe hadn’t thought of me even once since he left, that meeting Paul McCartney became vital. I could picture my father’s face when I told him what I’d done.
I didn’t have time to get too sad about my dad because all of a sudden, behind the big amplifiers on the stage, a girl appeared. Throughout the whole show so far girls had tried to storm the stage, but security guys kept pushing them back. Not this girl. Somehow she’d gotten up there and now she was making a beeline for . . . George Harrison? Who would do that if they had the chance to grab any Beatle? Which was exactly what she was doing. She had George in a hug from behind, and she didn’t look like she was going to let go. George looked pretty surprised, and John and Paul were laughing pretty hard, and the crowd was cheering her on because every one of us wished we were the one up there onstage hugging a Beatle. A bunch of guys eventually pulled George from her grip and escorted the girl offstage, but even as the Beatles began their next song I was still dying of jealousy.
Until I remembered:
In less than two hours, I would be face-to-face with Paul McCartney.
* * *
* * *
It was about 10:30 when the final chords of “Long Tall Sally” faded away and the Beatles were jumping back into that black limousine. As much as the four of us wanted to stand there basking in the best thirty minutes of our lives, there was no time for that. We had to make our way through 24,996 other Beatles fans, out of Suffolk Downs, and get to the Hotel Somerset before the Beatles did.
This time we couldn’t mix up Inbound and Outbound. We couldn’t miss our stops or fail to switch from the Blue Line to the Green Line. We couldn’t waste time on lost purses or horseshoes. This time we had to do everything exactly right, or we would lose the one-time opportunity in our entire lives to meet Paul McCartney.
I looked each member of the Robert E. Quinn Beatles Fan Club right in the eyes.
“Let’s do this,” I said with the determination of Agent April Dancer, the Girl from U.N.C.L.E.
We linked arms again and pushed our way through the crowd. As we moved forward, I caught a glimpse of auburn hair and heard the tinkling of bells. Penelope Mayer was there after all!
“Penelope!” I called to her, feeling happy and proud at the same time. Happy she did see the concert, and proud that I’d managed to get me and my friends there.
She turned her beautiful face in my direction and smiled.
“Weren’t they wonderful, Gertrude?” she said.
“Yes!” I told her. I wished I could say more, compare notes on the concert and everything, but the Beatles Fan Club couldn’t stop. Not yet.
* * *
* * *
The Hotel Somerset was located at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Charlesgate East. It was an enormous imposing stone building with a courtyard in front and, I noticed right away, a lot of entrances.
Even though our plan had been to split up, once we were confronted with the actual hotel, we felt too scared to separate. How would we find each other again? How would we let each other know if we’d spotted a Beatle?
“We should have brought walkie-talkies,” Jessica said. “That’s what we did for the Orienteering merit badge.”
“It’s too late for that now,” I said, staring up at the hotel facade and the hundreds of windows looking down at us. Some of those windows belonged to the Beatles. Did it make more sense to go inside and try to find them?
“Maybe we should go inside,” Peter said, as if he’d read my mind.
“Oh! We could pretend we’re room service!” Nora said. “I saw that on the Movie of the Week. These gangsters pretend they’re room service and that’s how they get in the room of the men they’re after. One of them hid on the cart,” she added. “Under a tablecloth.”
That might have worked on the Movie of the Week, but in real life it sounded like a flimsy plan. First of all, there were probably security men guarding the Beatles’ rooms, if not their entire floor. Second of all, how were four kids going to get their hands on a room service cart? Third of all, we didn’t know which floor the Beatles were on, and I felt pretty certain that wasn’t information hotel clerks gave out freely.
I didn’t get a chance to share what a bad idea I thought the room service ruse was because right then, from around the back of the hotel, a black limousine turned onto Commonwealth Avenue, passing right in front of us.
We all gasped.
Then, under the light of the streetlight, the limousine’s interior was illuminated.
It was empty.
The Beatles were already back in the hotel. And our opportunity to meet Paul McCartney had passed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah)
We stood in a stunned disappointment, silent.
Until Jessica started to cry.
Of course, I wanted to cry, too. But what good would it do? We’d missed our chance. In a few weeks I’d be back in school, Ger-trude Mixer, the girl who hadn’t met Paul McCartney. And even if my father was impressed that I’d made it to the concert, I had nothing special to tell him. Some other girl managed to find her way onto the stage and hug George Harrison. Me? I was just the loser who couldn’t even meet a Beatle when I was standing right in front of their hotel.
“It’s okay,” Nora was saying to Jessica. “We got to see them onstage. We got to hear Paul sing ‘Yesterday.’”
“That’s not enough,” Jessica said. “I need a lock of his hair or I’ll never see my brother again.”
“What?” I asked.
“That’s my seventh lucky thing,” Jessica said.
She opened that big bag with the embroidered flowers and pulled out a piece of paper. Along the left side was the logo and the name Western Union. I had never seen a telegram before, but it looked like someone had just typed a letter. This one began: I regret to inform you . . . and as I skimmed the words I saw Jessica’s brother’s name.
When I looked up, Jessica was eyeing me.
“He’s MIA,” she said.
“Missing in Action?” Peter said in a voice that seemed to hope there was another kind of MIA.
“But not everybody who’s MIA is dead, you know,” she said quickly. “So I thought if I could reverse our family’s luck, Stephen would be found alive. I mean, maybe he’s a prisoner of war somewhere and he’ll escape or get found.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
In the movies, prisoners of war plan elaborate escapes all the time and succeed.
“Like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape,” Peter said.
I wished he would stop reading my mind.
“And William Holden in The Bridge on the River Kwai,” I offered.
“Right!” Jessica said, brightening.
But almost immediately her face fell again.
“Except without a lock of Paul’s hair, I don’t have my seven lucky items.”
“Ma
ybe he’ll escape anyway?” Nora suggested.
Suddenly, everything about Jessica made sense to me, all the lucky pennies and four-leaf clovers and even taking that horseshoe. A burst of optimism and bravery surged right through me. If Steve McQueen and William Holden could escape war prisons, then we could find Paul McCartney.
“Why are we just standing here?” I said. “Let’s find the Beatles!”
* * *
* * *
An hour later we were still looking. We’d been asked to leave the lobby, twice. We’d tried every door we could find, making our way around that behemoth of a hotel, yanking doorknobs and even trying to climb in a basement window. We stood, defeated, in a side alley underneath the dark starry sky.
“Maybe we should just go home,” Jessica said sadly.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that we’d already missed the last bus.
“Look,” Peter said softly, pointing up at that big starry sky.
The Milky Way spread out across it, a spray of milky white against the inky night.
“See Sagittarius, the archer?” he asked. His fingers traced lines for us that drew a centaur aiming his bow and arrow.
Nora sighed. “I never can make out constellations. Even the easy ones like Orion.”
My knowledge of astrology kicked in. Sagittarians, I knew, were idealistic. They aimed high, pointing their arrows at what they wanted and then going after their dreams.
“We can’t give up yet,” I said, determined anew.
“Trudy, it’s hopeless,” Jessica said. “The Beatles are all in bed asleep by now.”
“Or not,” Peter said.
He wasn’t looking up at the sky anymore. He was looking down the alley, at the back of a lone figure in a black suit enveloped by a cloud of cigarette smoke. Beneath the streetlight, he looked otherworldly. I blinked, twice, to be sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.
I took in the dark shaggy hair, the black suit with the green—velvet, I realized now—collar.
I gulped.
We all did. Then we all looked at one another.
The Robert E. Quinn Beatles Fan Club had just found Paul McCartney.
* * *
* * *
Carefully, quietly, practically on tiptoes, we made our way toward him, down the alley. At the corner, he paused, but we kept moving stealthily toward him. He stayed put, also gazing up at the starry sky.
When we were about six feet from him, we heard him sigh softly, and then he slowly turned around.
I don’t know who was more surprised. Him, for finding four kids staring at him, or us. Because we had not found Paul McCartney after all.
Looking at us, startled, stood George Harrison.
Now you might think I would be flooded with disappointment in finding George instead of Paul. But to my own amazement, I was gobsmacked. I, Trudy Mixer, was so close to a Beatle I could have hugged him, like that girl onstage did.
I stuck out my hand the way my father had taught me to do when I was introducing myself.
“Trudy Mixer,” I said. “President of the Robert E. Quinn Beatles Fan Club.”
George looked at me, bemused.
“George Harrison,” he said in that Liverpool accent I’d come to love. “Beatle.”
We shook hands. Which is to say that I, Trudy Mixer, had officially touched a Beatle.
“Isn’t it a little late for you to be out here?” George asked.
“We were just about to give up,” Jessica admitted.
“But Trudy said we should keep trying,” Peter said. “So we did.”
“We had to,” Nora said. “We really have to meet Paul McCartney.”
I thought George might be insulted, even though he was probably used to things like that. But instead he just nodded and smiled, showing his beautifully imperfect teeth.
“So it’s Paul you came to find, is it?”
“Yes,” Nora said. “Not that it isn’t great to meet you,” she added. “Oh. I’m Nora, by the way.”
“Jessica,” Jessica said.
“Peter,” Peter said.
George shook each of our hands in turn. Then he asked, “Where is this Robert E. Quinn, anyway?”
“Rhode Island,” I said. As the president I thought I should be the one to speak up.
“Is that far from here?” George asked.
“Kind of,” Jessica said.
“And we’ve missed the last bus,” I said.
“What?” Nora said. “We have?”
I nodded.
“Did you catch the concert?” George asked.
We all nodded.
“It was the greatest thirty minutes of my life,” I said. “Until now.”
“And why did you come all the way here to meet Paul?” George asked.
I felt like he was asking me, as the spokesperson for the fan club, so I said, “Remember when you were first on The Ed Sullivan Show?”
George smiled again. “I do,” he said.
“The very next day I started the Beatles Fan Club,” I said proudly. “And it was the most popular fan club in the whole school.”
“Was it?” George said, also proudly.
“Until this year.”
“Oh,” George said, and I swear his face fell.
“Future Cheerleaders,” Jessica grumbled.
George shook his head. “Seriously? They’ve displaced us?”
“I thought . . . ,” I began, intending to tell him how meeting Paul would immediately elevate me in everyone’s eyes back at school. That I would be important again. Somebody.
But inexplicably, my eyes stung with tears.
“I thought my father would notice me if I did something grand,” I said.
“I thought my mom would come back,” Nora said.
“I thought I’d save my brother’s life,” Jessica said.
“All that from meeting Paul?” George said softly.
Boy, did I love that accent.
“How about you, lad?” George asked Peter.
Peter hesitated, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded paper.
“Mr. Harrison,” he said, “I’ve written a song that I think is perfect for the Beatles. And I wanted to give it to Paul McCartney.”
“What kind of song? Rock and roll?”
Peter shook his head.
“It’s a love song,” he said. “For Trudy Mixer.”
* * *
* * *
On August 18, 1966, I did something grand. I met George Harrison in an alley beside the Hotel Somerset in Boston, Massachusetts.
But that wasn’t even the grand part. The grand part was that I, Trudy Mixer, learned the power of hope, the power of honesty, and the power of friendship. For months I had been upset and embarrassed that the only kids who would hang out with me were the three losers left in the Beatles Fan Club. That night, I realized that every one of us is suffering. Every one of us is dreaming. Every one of us is special.
Even the least favorite Beatle, George Harrison.
How foolish of me to fall for the Cute Beatle and dismiss the others! I knew this that night because George turned out to be sweet and funny and kind. And let’s not forget that George is the Beatle who sings lead vocals on one of my all-time favorite Beatles songs, “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”
I remembered that as soon as he leaned down toward me and said, “Listen . . .”
I could almost hear him singing Listen, do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?
But he didn’t sing. Instead, he said, “Listen, can you stay right here, Trudy? I’ve got something I want to give you.”
“Sure,” I said.
We watched George go back inside through one of the very doors we’d tried to enter.
“W
hat just happened to us?” Jessica said, her voice all trembly.
“Oh, not much. We were just hanging out with GEORGE HARRISON!” I practically screamed.
Then we were all dancing around in a circle. We had actually met a Beatle. And even though it wasn’t the Beatle we’d hoped to meet, George Harrison was officially one of the Fab Four.
“Now here’s a sight,” someone said in that Liverpudlian accent.
Grinning, arms draped around one another, we turned toward it.
There was George again.
And standing next to him was Paul McCartney.
“I hear I’ve got some pretty big magic to do,” Paul said.
My knees buckled a little because Paul was every bit as cute in person as he was on The Ed Sullivan Show.
“Which one of you is Trudy Mixer?” Paul said.
That’s right. My name, Trudy Mixer, came out of Paul McCartney’s mouth.
“Me,” I squeaked.
Paul grinned and I tried not to faint.
“Here’s fifty signed pictures of me and the boys for your fan club.” He winked. “That might get you some new members,” he said. “Now what’s your dad’s name?”
“Charles?”
“Charles,” Paul said. He took out a felt pen and signed a picture:
to Charles Mixer, Your daughter Trudy is the most wonderful bird in America. Take good care of her!
Paul McCartney
That’s what he wrote with his left hand, just like all the fan magazines said.
“And where’s the bloke that wrote me a song?”
Peter stuttered, “Th-th-that’s m-m-me.”
“Hand it over then,” Paul said.