“Van Morrison,” Gabriel added.
“My father,” I said, and flicked the quarter. They turned to look at me but I aimed my gaze at the fountain, pretending to notice only the tiny plunk of the coin smacking water.
“Dude,” Gabriel said. He stared at me with unusual focus. “Van Morrison’s your father?”
Lynn and Josie burst into laughter. On the opposite end of the park, a man who’d been napping beneath the shade of a jacaranda turned over, smashing a dirty sweatshirt against his ears.
“What?” Gabriel asked.
“No,” Josie said in the deep, drawling baritone of Darth Vader, “I am your father.”
She held her arms out in front of her like a zombie and Lynn’s laughter escalated. I tried to laugh too. Though it may not have been obvious to the others, my friendship with Lynn had remained strained since I met her father. We still hung out almost every day, but our interactions were tense and hesitant, often punctuated by awkward stretches of silence. I didn’t think I could handle any more of it. I’d lost so much already—my father, my old friends, my old life—and everything I had now, everything I’d become, was tied to her.
So when she smiled at me, her expression soft with familiar ease, I smiled too. I just wanted to go back to the way things were.
She handed me the water bottle and I took a bold, burning sip, allowing the whiskey’s warmth to cocoon me. I sat down next to her.
“I just meant that my father has played here,” I told Gabriel.
“Oh. That’s cool. Not as cool as Van Morrison being your dad, but still pretty awesome.”
“When?” Luke asked.
He was facing away from us, examining the unending traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard, and for a moment, I wasn’t even certain he was talking to me.
“I’m not sure of the exact dates. A number of times in the nineties.”
“They were really good,” Lynn said. “Imagine if Joe Cocker had a love child with Paul McCartney, and that child was raised by, like, Cheap Trick.”
Josie shook her head. “You lost me at love child.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell us about him?” Gabriel asked.
“I thought I had,” I said, but of course, the only person I’d told was Cameron. He was the only person I had told a lot of things. The rest of the boys must have known very little about me.
Luke turned to me. A tiny thrill crept across my skin. “What were they called?”
“The Vital Spades.”
He tapped his ash into the grass, nodding.
“You’ve heard of them?” I asked.
He shrugged as if to say, Maybe.
“They broke up right on the verge of a major record deal,” I said, compelled to explain, “so they only ever released small-press EPs. Limited runs.” With my fingers, I plucked at the tears in my tights as if they were guitar strings. “Isn’t it weird? Back then the internet barely existed, and if your band broke up, everything was gone. Now, the music can still live online forever. I guess we’re all lucky in that way. Pretty much everything the Spades had is gone by now.”
“Except you,” Lynn said, resting her head on my shoulder.
“I don’t think I count,” I said.
“It all counts.”
I sighed, hoping she was right.
“Speaking of recording,” Josie said, “what’s the deal with Cody’s guy? Has he set dates yet?”
“Should be soon,” Gabriel said. “He wants to finish up with Deerskin Ocean before we lay anything down. Says he doesn’t like to be in two sounds at once.”
My pulse quickened. Recording? With Cody’s guy? No one had mentioned this to me.
Josie and Gabriel continued talking about the band Deerskin Ocean. Across from us, Luke reclined in the grass. His demeanor did not suggest that I had purposely been left out of the recording conversations, but Luke’s demeanor rarely revealed anything. He always seemed so quiet, uninterested, and I had started to question whether he merely feigned detachment. He must have been scrutinizing Cameron and me for months before I ran into him at that party, noticing what I didn’t—what I couldn’t. I wondered if Luke sensed it now, the interminable ache I felt for Cameron despite (or perhaps because) I was losing him. I wondered what else he’d been able to glean.
Above us, the sky had mellowed into a dusky mauve. Because there were no clouds to catch the rays of light, I knew the night would be dark and clear. Perhaps I would even be able to see Orion. Next to me, Lynn lit a cigarette and squinted out in the direction of the setting sun. She appeared to be looking at Luke, too, and I wanted to know what she’d heard about Cameron and me. Probably everything. She had predicted this, after all.
“He doesn’t like me anymore,” I said softly, so that only Lynn could hear.
A moment of silence passed between us, and then she offered me her cigarette. I inhaled, so grateful for the staggering lightness slipping through me that when she finally spoke, voice almost inaudible against the whoosh of evening traffic, it took a few seconds before I understood. “You and me both,” she had said. And maybe it’s selfish, but in the moment, I didn’t really care who she was talking about. I found comfort in the fact that she felt the same way I did, because the only thing worse than suffering is having to suffer alone.
The Endless West played second that night. Everything began as planned. Onstage, Luke unearthed the tambourine from the depths of his suitcase and handed it to me—a preshow ritual that we’d engaged in ever since my debut on New Year’s Eve. Then he led us in with four counts on the kick. Our set list was solid, the same five songs as always, with the same transitions and a variation of the same interlude banter. And yet, from the very first verse of “Coastal Blues,” I knew. Something had changed.
At first I assumed the shift was just a result of that day, my already-edgy emotions altering what would have otherwise been a decent performance. And I really do believe that if we’d been anywhere other than the Troubadour—if this had been any other show, any other venue, any other night—I might have never noticed anything wrong.
But this wasn’t any other show. I knew exactly where we were.
The room had filled in during the first band, and from the stage it looked like a black, swirling ocean. Before, that view had always fascinated me; no matter how many people were in the crowd, whether three or three hundred, you couldn’t really see them, transformed into phantoms by the angle of the lights. Most of the time, I lost track of the crowd completely. That night, though, I gazed out from the stage more than usual.
This is the truth: I was still searching for my father, for answers, for the past. For the stripe of a broken spotlight that had long ago been fixed.
Instead, I saw face after face alighting behind cell phones. I saw bodies crashing into each other like storm-churned waves. I kept singing, forcing the words to barrel out of me as they always had, but for the first time I felt truly apart from them. And nobody—not even the boys—twitched when Alex accidentally repeated the first verse of “Runaway” for a whole two bars before correcting himself, or when Cameron dropped his pick during the solo of “Coming with Me” and tried to overcompensate, hitting a handful of muted notes. It was as though no one else was actually paying attention. As though they hadn’t been listening at all.
And maybe they weren’t. People came to see the Endless West because they wanted a good show, to have a good time, to get wasted. The boys, too, coveted these things, and even I’d had a lot to drink that night, most nights, becoming used to the way whiskey calmed my nerves and gave me courage. I beat the tambourine against my palm. I could barely feel the impact.
But when was the last time any of the boys had written a new song?
When had I?
The week of the rainstorm, I hadn’t even been able to play the Martin for more than fifteen minutes because my hands had grown too soft and awkward. When I pressed my fingers against the strings, I felt like I was a child again, sitting in my father’s studio beneath an
instrument I couldn’t decipher—only my father was gone, and the studio was gone, and his final tape was gone. Everything he’d had, gone. Except me.
We ended that night with “Don’t Look Back.” The song hadn’t been recorded yet, but somehow, over the months, a surprising number of people in the crowd had learned the beat. They knew when to clap their hands, when to speed up, when to stomp the ground and thrust their fists in the air. They’d even learned my lyrics, chanted the chorus like an anthem. I waited for elation to fill me up, to buoy me like helium in a balloon, but as the crowd kept singing, projecting my lyrics back across the narrow room, the words turned hollow and tasteless in my mouth. I knew then that my song, with its once weepy guitar and raw, windblown melodies, no longer existed. “Don’t Look Back” had transformed into something else.
When our set was finally done, I threw the tambourine in Luke’s suitcase and helped him carry his drum kit out to the van, deflecting the usual post-set pleasantries. I used to thrive on these tiny approvals, however routine they might have been. But this time the words ignited in me a quiet, smoldering rage. It wasn’t a great set. The boys fucked up. I fucked up. Luke was the only one who didn’t, and thank God for that, because if the drumbeat had crumbled, we’d have had nothing left to hold us together.
As we finished wrestling our equipment into a Tetris-like configuration in the back of the van, I wanted to tell Luke how grateful I was. He shut the trunk. Alex and Cameron had already gone back inside. Gabriel was smushing the butt of a cigarette beneath his shoe, angling toward the Troubadour’s back door, obviously waiting for us. I turned to Luke, blinking, my lips pulled taut.
Somehow, I knew he understood.
He tilted his head toward the venue. “Coming in?”
I nodded, and followed them inside.
We had just merged back into the sway of people when I heard someone say my name. I swerved around, unsure of where the sound had come from. Even between sets the room remained dark, and so many people were packed together, some raspy punk band straining from the house stereo. My eyes swung past a scraggly blond curtain of hair. I kept walking.
Then, my name again, more certain this time, and the shock of fingertips grazing my forearm.
“Have you forgotten me already, Hayes?”
“Nick,” I said, stunned to find him in front of me—stunned that I’d looked right past him. “What are you doing here?”
“I got your text,” he said. “Surprise.”
I shook my head, momentarily confused. Then I remembered: I’d texted him after sound check. At the time, I’d just expected him to be excited for me, for his own enthusiasm to reinvigorate my own. I never imagined he would actually come—yet here he was, solid and real and exactly how I’d remembered him all these months, his chlorine-curled hair, a glaze of freckles bridging his nose. The sight of him in that moment produced such profound comfort that I smiled, even though my insides felt tangled and torn apart. I leaned in for a hug. “It’s so good to see you.”
The warmth of his voice sinuated my ear. “I want to kiss you,” I thought he said.
“What?”
“I’ve really missed you. And when you said you were here?” He grinned, eyes sparkling like the surface of water. “There’s no way I’d have skipped this. You were amazing up there.”
I bit the inside of my lip, fighting the urge to tell Nick everything I felt onstage that night, because “everything” also included Cameron—someone I’d conveniently never mentioned to him. I said, “It wasn’t our greatest set.”
“Well, from out here, it sounded pretty damn good. And that last one”—Nick whistled— “I remember those lyrics.”
“You do?”
He nodded. “I read them in the Last Bean. Had to tear them out of your hand first, though.”
I laughed. “That was so long ago.”
“Yeah, but how could I forget gold-record material like that?”
“You should have heard it originally,” I said. “It was really beautiful, and really different from what the band played tonight. Just acoustic guitar and vocals, with this great dueling harmony between us.”
“Who’s ‘us’?” Nick asked.
A flush flared in my cheeks. “The lead guitarist,” I said, as evenly as possible.
“Ah.” His mouth pushed into a tight line.
I said, “No one knows I wrote it.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged, felt something tug in my gut. It was such a simple, impossible question. “I guess the origins just never come up. It’s the band’s song now, so people probably assume the band wrote it together.”
Even as I said this, I knew it wasn’t true. People probably thought Cameron wrote the whole song, as he’d written all the others. And people probably saw me as nothing more than a tambourine player, an unnecessary flourish. Not a real musician. Not a songwriter.
“Well, I know you wrote it,” Nick said. “I’m really proud of you, Hayes. And really impressed. Like father, like daughter, right?”
Up onstage, the next drummer started beating his tom while the other band members checked their tunes. My eyes bounced from one to the next, some distant awareness yanking at me. Something about the front man, in particular. He was tall, gangly. As he tucked his long hair behind his ears, I couldn’t shake the certainty that I knew him.
“School doesn’t feel the same without you,” Nick said.
“That’s probably just your senioritis.”
“Maybe. I honestly can’t wait for this year to end. Did I tell you? I just received acceptances from USC and Chapman. I’m still waiting to hear back from a few places, but at least I’m going to college, you know? It’s all starting to finally feel real.”
“You were always going to college,” I said. “But I’m really happy for you, Nick. Congratulations.”
“What about you? Heard back from any schools yet?”
“A few,” I lied, realizing for the first time that I hadn’t received a single letter from any of the schools I’d hastily applied to. Rejections wouldn’t have surprised me, but the lack of any response seemed, suddenly, alarming. “I’m not sure what I want to do yet, though,” I added.
“Hey, everyone,” the singer called from the stage. “Thanks for coming out. We’re Los Funerals.”
And then his voice pealed across the room, gruff and atmospheric, backed at first only by the sultry reverb of simple chords on his guitar. With eyes scrunched tight, he let the words overpower him: It’s old news now that everyone has done you wrong. On the far right, the pianist began striking spiky, off-kilter keys. Each vibration pulsed through the floor, piercing me with a jab of movement: the twitch.
“Have you heard this band before?” I asked Nick.
“No, have you?”
I shook my head. I didn’t think so.
In between songs, Nick and I attempted to talk by shouting in each other’s ear. He told me about his final water polo season, his continued patronage at the Last Bean, and the short film he’d worked on to advertise the school’s annual spring carnival, which raised a record amount of funds that year.
“The treasurer must’ve been thrilled,” I said then.
“She was,” he agreed.
“How’s Cara doing?”
“Good. Really good. She got into Berkeley.”
“That’s incredible! Berkeley’s been in her top five since we were in, like, seventh grade. I can’t believe—”
But I didn’t finish the thought, because that’s when Lynn appeared at my side. She tossed her arm across my shoulders, her voice booming into my ear. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “Hey, who’s your friend?”
For a moment I hesitated, but there was no escaping the introduction now. “This is Nick, from my old school. Nick, Lynn.”
“Nice to meet you,” he said, reaching across me to shake her hand.
“Likewise.” She flashed a smile as their fingers intertwined.
I interjected myself
between their grip. “What’s up?”
“I just thought you should know,” Lynn said, leaning into my ear. Her breath was sharp, biting.
“Know what?”
She placed her hands on my shoulders and spun me around, guiding my sight in the direction of the bar. In the far corner, I spotted Cameron pressed up against some girl. I couldn’t see her face. He dipped forward, spoke into her ear, and she threw her head back, laughing.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Lynn said, “but I didn’t want you to go over there and get sideswiped. Maybe he’s just doing the same thing you are.”
The last chord of a song rang out, filling the room with its echo. I could not peel my eyes away. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You and Surfer Boy sure looked—”
“He’s just a friend,” I said, and though I hated the thought, it emerged anyway: Would Cameron be jealous if he saw me with Nick?
I doubted it. Nick was a stranger, an outsider. But Cody . . .
My eyes flicked around the room in search of him, only to remember that Fire Society was playing last. Cody must have been upstairs somewhere, preparing.
I shook my head, ashamed at the course of my thoughts.
“Fine,” Lynn said. “Whatever. I’m on your side. I’m just saying that if it was me, I’d want to know.”
“Would you?” I said, but the singer started talking again, and Lynn did not seem to hear me.
“We’ve got one more for you tonight,” he announced, and I veered my attention back to the stage. I’d been expecting this, I reminded myself, imagining Cameron with another girl for weeks—and yet the foresight made no difference. In the end, the reality was still crushing.
“You okay?” Nick asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“This is a very special song, written by a brilliant artist who passed away a couple months ago. Before he died, he said we should play it every goddamn show”—laughter pierced the air, and my vision snapped into focus—“so that’s what we’re doing.”
The singer put one fist to his chest and angled his face toward the ceiling, where his features caught the light. I looked to the bassist—but no, he wasn’t familiar. Nor the drummer in the back. Then, there, on lead guitar. Though his round face was mostly hidden now behind facial hair, I could still make out the faint traces of acne scars, and suddenly, I saw the two of them as clearly as if they’d been standing on the curb in front of my old house.
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