Exile (3 page)

You can also get internships at real labels. I was all set to have one last summer at Candy Shell, but after things happened, I backed out. Maya took my place, and she was cute and asked my permission, which I obviously gave. I even managed to do so without offering her any dark jaded comments like
Watch your back
.

As I make my way to her, I pass within orbit of a group of five girls. There is a lull in their conversation, but not one long enough for exchanging hellos. I suppose I could have forced it, but Callie, Alex, Beatrice, Melanie, and Jenna resume talking before any of us has a chance. Once upon a time, three years ago, they all shared a birthday booth with me at Burrita Feminista. Now they sit in a pentagon across two steps, all long legs and perfect hair.

We were thick as thieves back in middle school, and even into the breakwater of high school, but out in the deep, I lost them. By the end of sophomore year, we barely spoke. There were serious riptides pulling us in different directions: athletics, boys, and student senate for them, and music and then managing Postcards for me.

But something bigger happened, too. If we check the records, we’ll see that technically, I stopped calling first. Partly it was an accident of being really busy with Postcards. But maybe it was also a little bit because I sensed this
slow-motion way that all of them were morphing into their parents: the looks, the gestures, the
beliefs
. I started to feel like I could see the future versions of them, someday pulling up to Mount Hope in a woefully fuel-inefficient crossover SUV, dropping off their kids while dressed for morning yoga. It’s the version of me that I refuse to let happen.

Of course lately I’ve wondered: What exactly will I be doing? If you’d asked me last spring I would have said sitting in a cool loft office in New York City, managing my small but visionary roster of bands. Now? I might avoid your question.

I’m just past them when there’s a unison peal of laughter, and I think,
Don’t look!
because I don’t want to know what they’re saying except dammit I look back anyway but none of them are looking at me. They’re laughing too hard at their own thing. It makes me wonder if maybe I was the curse, the hex of the hexagon. Look out! Geometry joke! They wouldn’t have laughed at that. Ethan would have. He was secret smart, too. Bastard.

“So, which band are you excited about?” Maya asks me as I sit.

“I’m not sure,” I say, looking over the program I was handed on the way in. “Definitely not Supreme Commander.”

She smiles, but also nods seriously. “Good.”

“So, hey, how was the internship?” I think to ask.

Maya sighs. “Oh, you know, it was okay.”

“Maya.” I try for my most professional smile. “You can be honest.”

Maya’s face collapses into a big grin. “Okay, it was so excellent! Candy Shell is such an amazing place! Well, you know, not
all
of it, but I was in publicity, not with the sharks who stole Postcards from you—”

“It’s fine. I get it. I’m glad it was good.”

“They’re actually keeping me on this fall, a couple afternoons a week.”

“Oh, nice.” I keep my smile up for as long as I can, and turn back to the band. I am maybe a little jealous. Would I want to be at Candy Shell? No way. Well . . . no, but would I like to have done so well at an internship at a record label over the summer that they asked me to stay on? Yes.

The Progress Reports finish and there is a quick gear switch. Black-clad members of the Tech Squad scurry around, moving instruments, running new cables and wielding gaffer’s tape with ninja-like speed, their Chucks scuffing and their oversized key rings jangling.

The next band up is greeted by a barrage of screams from the gaggle of freshmeat girls crowded on the grass up front. They’re all legs and shoulders and smiles, like sacrifices waiting to be gobbled up by the music gods. I think,
You’ll learn, girls
, but also make a mental note because having enthusiastic fans is a key to getting your band off the ground.

“Hey, everybody,” says the singer, an awkward
underclassman, slouching at the mic with an oversized guitar and too-tight flannel shirt. “We’re the New Past Lives.”

Okay, candidate number one
. For the first time in too long, things feel like business. I pull out my graph-paper notebook and flip to a new page. I prefer the grid to normal old straight lines. It might seem rigid, but I actually find it freeing. Any direction is in play. Up, down, left, right, or a diagonal against the perfect squares. That’s how you have to think in this business. Lined paper has only one direction, the acceptable one. Lined paper is so Carlson Squared.

Four stick clicks and the New Past Lives are in. It’s edgy guitar, busy drums, and within moments I knew the verdict: decent, but not polished enough. The singer is too unsure of himself. Some time in the future, his third or fourth band will probably be pretty excellent, but by the time the New Past Lives finish their fifteen-minute set, I can barely remember anything I just heard.

Next up, Maya’s band: Supreme Commander. I liked this band last year. Dreamy, sci-fi pop. They’ve gotten better. I’m ever-so-slightly jealous of this, too.

“Good job,” I say to Maya.

She beams. “Why thank you.”

After them is a band called the Theo Alvin Four. I think I read online that this is the new version of Square Pets, one of last year’s decent bands. Maybe they’ll be the one? But then the lead singer begins with, “Hey, we’ve had a mind-blowing summer, and our sound this year is going to be a
little . . . different. This first song is dedicated to one of the masters: John Scofield.”

I should have known by the new interest in facial hair and the hipster hats they’re all wearing: Square Pets have been bitten by the jazz. And it’s not the good melodic kind, like they made a half century ago. Ethan and I used to study to
Kind of Blue
, the Miles Davis record. The good kind of jazz seems to be all about vibe, mood, and feel. This is the bad kind of jazz, where the music feels like a math problem. After a minute, I’ve totally lost track of the song, and when I look around, most everyone is talking among themselves except for two uber-fans down front, both wearing suit vests, one in a fedora, bobbing their heads wildly and waving their fingers like the music is a cloud of moths they need to swat out of their eyes.

I spend their set working on my econ homework. The band I’m really waiting to see is the one that comes on next. A senior band: Android Necktie. What I remember from last year: edgy, indie, with really cool melodies. In fact, they’d been widely considered the heir apparent to Postcards from Ariel. As I remember it, they have a pretty great lead singer. They were terrible at promotion though. Which could be where I come in?

But I can tell immediately that there’s something different about them as they take the stage. Where’s that singer boy I remember them having?

“Hi,” the bassist says softly. “We’re Android Necktie.
Well, most of it.”

Most people probably miss it, but I catch the glare he gets from the keyboard girl. Bassist has just violated a sacred rule onstage: Never show your dirty laundry.

They start, and the song is pretty catchy: cool bass-and-keyboard unison riff. But when the keyboardist starts to sing, her voice is shrill and grating.

“Didn’t they have a boy singer?” I ask Maya.

She nods. “Caleb. He quit over the summer, kinda out of the blue. It was quite the scandal. The band name was the bass player’s idea, though, so they’re trying to press on. I saw fliers up for new singer auditions.”

“What happened to Caleb? Does he have a new band?”

“Nah. He’s been basically exiled at this point.”

Well, we’d make a pair
. I feel a stir at this, but then remind myself that what I need is an actual, functioning band. And about the last thing I need is to take my already shredded reputation and pair it with another that’s equally tattered. But still . . .

“Wasn’t he good?” I ask.

“He was hot,” Maya replies.

“Hot and good?”

“Hot and hot. And yes, good, too. I saw him down in the Green Room before I came up here.”

“What’s he up to?”

“How would I know? I could never talk to Caleb . . .” Maya blushes at the thought. “But I did Twitter-stalk him
and I remember him saying something about how everything had changed, and that he needed to start fresh. That was right around when he left the band. Actually then I think he disappeared offline, too.”

“Hmmm . . .” As Necktie drones on, I search Twitter. Caleb Daniels. Easy enough to find. Interesting. He has only seven friends, and four tweets, starting in August. Classic signs of a fallout and reboot.

The first three tweets are from the same night.

Caleb Daniels
@livingwithghosts 14 Aug
Now I wear you on my sleeve / waking from a silly dream / Where I find you, alive and well / And your smile erases all the hell. . . .

The fourth is from last night.

Whoa. This is all some major drama. It feels like there’s more going on with him than just a band breakup. What’s between these dark and lyrical lines, Caleb?

Stop it. Caleb is damaged goods!
Of course, but . . . so am I. And I know things need to happen, fast, but if he’s talented . . .

And besides . . . I look down at my notebook. My pen is tapping, not writing. Because it’s not happening here. In fact, I’ve totally forgotten Android Necktie is playing. I focus in on them again—

It would be so good, to get back at you good
, Trevor warbles weakly—

This is not the band. I just know it. And the only band left to play today is Fluffy Poodle and the #’s of Doom! and I’ve seen them, with or without the foam hashtags they wear around their necks and the pink poodle tails, and while they are certainly something, they’re not what I’m looking for.

I close my notebook. “You said he’s down in the Green Room?” I ask, gathering my things.

“He was,” says Maya. “Why?”

“Gonna go try to find him.”

“You are?” Maya sounds awed. “I can’t come, can I?”

“You have your band,” I say. “Besides, it probably won’t lead to anything.”

“If it does, I will be so completely jealous.”

I half smile. “I will do my best.”

I make my way across the top row of the amphitheater. For a second, I catch the eyes of my former friends. But they keep doing their thing, and I’m off to do mine.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

Formerly Orchid
@catherinefornevr 6m
This gumshoe is off to chase a lead.

The Green Room is kinda excellent. It’s a long rectangle with yes, green walls, except for one, which is a soundproof window looking out on the main auditorium stage. There’s an actual espresso bar in the corner, surrounded by little tables and chairs, and, in the other corner, a long table covered in art supplies beside a copy machine for making old-school flyers and zines. Everywhere in between there are musical instruments on stands, in cases, stacked, hanging from the walls. The room smells like coffee beans and rubber cement.

I love being in here, with all the creative energy of the place. Sometimes it bums me out a little, though, because for as much as I love music, I’m not a musician. There were
piano lessons briefly when I was a kid, but when I didn’t seem to “excel at classical instruction,” preferring instead just to bang out chords and sing, Carlson Squared deemed them not vital to my education. They thought my after-school time was better suited to science clubs and math labs.

I’ve always had the voice of a crow, at best, but there were years when I could have gotten somewhere with piano, or tried drums or guitar or something, when my parents could have noticed the Summer waiting to bloom in their Catherine, but those years have passed. People always say you have all the time in the world to do whatever you want, and that may be true for some things, but not if you really want to get to the highest level. And what other level is there?

Don’t get me wrong. I love managing. I love perfecting the potential of something, of teasing out greatness. But sometimes, when I’m in the Green Room watching everyone noodling happily on their instruments, I do think it would have been cool to be a band kid instead of a “suit.” That’s what the musicians sometimes call us (not all of them, just the jerks). It’s a natural rivalry, though, mainly because it’s the role of those of us on the production side to be critical of what the musicians are doing. And yet the very personalities who are adept at creating music are also deeply sensitive, and they get defensive easily. A lot of times, with artists, it’s not what you tell them, it’s how you tell them. And this understanding is maybe what I’m best at.

It’s quiet down here now; everybody’s at the show. Wherever the mysterious Caleb is, I must have missed him.

I’m turning to leave when I hear something muffled, distant. I move toward the far end of the room, and look through the door into Mr. Anderson’s office. He’s the PopArts coordinator, but we call him Coach. He’s not here either.

The sound reverberates again: guitar.

Now I notice a bright orange extension cord leading from the wall out the back doors. I follow it, leaving the Green Room and entering a hallway of practice spaces. Each officially recognized band at Mount Hope gets one.

The extension cord slithers past these, connects to a second one, then takes a left at the next intersection. The guitar is getting louder, but it’s not coming from any of the practice spaces. There’s maybe singing, too.