“Oh. Yeah. He said you’d stop by,” the woman said.
He?
“His room’s over there.”
What room?
Nick walked inside the house. The carpet was beige, the couches were beige, and there was very little art or any sign of personality in the décor—it was standard JCPenney catalog furniture, with the occasional Target end table thrown in.
“Second one to the right,” she directed. This must be Johnny’s mother; Taj’s description of her was accurate. She looked haggard and exhausted, and shuffled rather than walked.
He found the room. It was small, about the size of a jail cell, the walls painted crudely with black and silver paint. There were books everywhere, guitar magazines, and instruments of every variety, from six-foot-tall amps to a stand-up bass. He noticed something tacked on the closet door—a picture of the MiSTakes, inscribed with the words For Johnny—don’t we look great? Love, Taj. With a start, he realized he was in Johnny Silver’s room. Taj was telling the truth. He was just some kid from the Valley. Everything was so ordinary. Ordinary and cheap.
Nick drew in a long breath and sat down at Johnny’s old desk. What exactly was he looking for? Why had he received the postcard? He opened the desk drawer. Pens, pencils, sketchbooks, music sheets, paper clips, old copies of music magazines—Wire, Magnet, Alternative Press. Nick was systematic and efficient. He looked under the bed and unearthed Johnny’s old guitar cases from the closet. He went through every niche, cranny, and possible hiding place. But he found nothing.
His phone rang. Taj. “Where are you?” she asked.
“Out,” he said. He hadn’t told her about the postcard yet. She’s not who you think she is. The writer was obviously talking about Taj. Not that Nick put any stock in anonymous notes. “You?”
“I’m with a friend,” she said. She sounded tired, almost defeated. He thought of the other night. The two of them, alone in the station. The feel of her skin, the smell of her hair, the softness of her lips. They’d been hooking up almost every day since it happened. Nick sneaking into her bedroom in the flats, or having her up in Bel-Air on the weekend when no one was home. The two of them running around the giant empty house wearing nothing but their underwear. “Call me when you get back?” she whispered.
“Of course.”
After a few hours of futile searching, he yawned and lay down on Johnny’s bed. He looked up at the ceiling, hung with glow-in-the-dark stars that Johnny must have put up when he was a little kid and had never taken down. He picked up the postcard, glancing at the bright little house glowing under similar faint stars. Something on the ceiling caught his eye. A miniscule jagged edge.
Could it be?
Nick stood up on the bed, reached over, and tapped on it. Nothing. He pushed in, but nothing gave. Finally he slammed his fist against it in frustration. And the crack jogged. Nick gasped and lifted the wood. His arms flailed about the ceiling’s crawl space, searching … and then his fingers touched something.
Taj
TAJ QUICKLY HUNG UP THE PHONE WHEN SUTTON came back onto the terrace. “I want you to meet someone,” he said.
A boy walked behind him.
At first, Taj was convinced Johnny had come back. But then she realized it was only a trick of the light, a trick of the eye. But it was a very, very good trick indeed.
The boy standing in front of them had Johnny’s brilliant platinum hair, although if you squinted you could see the dark roots on his crown. And Taj would bet that his violet eyes were due to contacts. Still, the boy had the same thin build, the same aristocratic nose, the same scrawny hips that looked good in a pair of low-rise Levi’s.
This wasn’t Johnny. This was a reproduction. A copy. A clone. What was Sutton doing?
“Who are you?”
“Me?” The boy looked at Sutton. “I’m not sure.”
“Leave us.” Sutton dismissed him.
“You said Johnny was here.”
“He was. He is. I don’t know where he went. He really was here, just a minute ago.” Sutton giggled. “Oh, Taj, you’re too funny.”
“Where is he?”
“You just saw him. With your own two eyes. If that’s not Johnny, I don’t know who is,” Sutton said. “Impressive, isn’t it? Only very few people are going to be able to tell the difference. I found him through TAP, of course. One of Johnny’s most ardent fans. And the thing is, he really believes he’s Johnny. It’s fantastic.”
“You’re not thinking of …”
“Oh, yes.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m nothing but serious,” Sutton said. “Haven’t you checked your in-box? Tickets go on sale next week. I suggest you buy them now. The comeback concert of the decade. The missing rock star rising like a phoenix from the ashes.”
“You knew this would happen,” Taj whispered. “Supernova. You knew what would happen to Johnny. You planned this.”
“I guessed,” Sutton said. “I didn’t know. There’s a difference.”
“Bastard. You pushed him too hard.”
“Me? I didn’t do anything. Not like you, Taj. Not like you.”
“I’m leaving.”
“You used him too, Taj.”
“Not like that. Not the way you did. This is sick, Sutton. He’s a human being. But I want to know—why? Why the disappearance? Why the return?”
“If Elvis came back tomorrow, don’t you think tickets would get sold out in an instant? You know there are people out there who still believe the King is alive. And his estate makes more money now that he’s gone. It got me thinking, what if we created that phenomenon? The missing rock star—Kurt Cobain—coming back from the grave. Wouldn’t it be delicious? And lucrative?”
“This is all about money. That’s all it is.”
“Taj, you make it sound so dirty.”
“But why?”
“Johnny Silver is more of an idea than a real person,” Sutton said. “People just need to believe in icons. Rock stars aren’t real. They’re beyond real. Almost a figment of the imagination. If you remember, Johnny Silver isn’t even his real name. Johnny Silver is an illusion. A mirage. Which means he can be replaced.”
Taj gritted her teeth. Sutton had a point. Johnny Silver had been born John Smith.
Nick
IT WAS A BOX.
It was an old shoe box, and Nick carried it down from the ceiling with care. The lid was taped shut with several layers of packing tape, and Nick had to rip it open with a fingernail—a hard task since he bit his nails down to the quick. The tape made an angry sound as he unwound it from the box.
There’s nothing in here, Nick thought. Probably a bunch of kid stuff. Johnny Silver’s old secret hiding place. He wasn’t sure what he was going to find—a diary? Notes? Plane tickets? Or nothing at all? A bunch of rocks?
He took a deep breath and lifted the lid.
• • •
Nick called Taj and asked her to meet him at the Beverly Center. It seemed an innocuous place; plus, Taj had voiced a hankering for more of those chocolate chip cookies. When she arrived, he told her about the mysterious postcard but not what was written on it. Told her how he’d traveled to Van Nuys. How he’d been inside Johnny’s own house, and how the woman at the door seemed to be expecting him. Then he showed her what he’d found inside the box.
It was a notebook. With Johnny’s name scrawled on the front.
“Where did you get that?” Taj asked, looking alarmed.
“I found it in the ceiling. Hidden, in a box.”
She started paging through it. It was the kind of scrapbook that every angsty high school kid kept, full of doodles and profound statements that were actually lyrics from popular rock songs. You got me blowin’, blowin’ my mind. Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?—Jimi Hendrix, “Purple Haze.” I’m so happy ’cause today I found my friends. They’re in my head.—Nirvana, “Lithium.” There were sketches of Taj sitting moodily on a bed, a profile of Johnny with a guit
ar, and pages and pages of what looked like the full lyrics to several of Johnny’s songs—“Secret Chord,” “Alternate Reality,” “What Is My Mind”—with many scratches and corrections. She put it down, looking a bit relieved, he noticed.
“Why would anyone want me to find Johnny Silver’s notebook?” he asked.
Taj looked pensive. “Nick, I have to tell you something. This isn’t Johnny’s notebook.”
“What do you mean? It’s got his name on the front.”
“I know. I put it there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean …” Taj shifted on her feet and looked anxious. “No one was ever supposed to know. But I wrote the songs. Johnny’s songs, I mean. All of them. The journal is mine.”
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“I know it looks bad, okay. That’s why I didn’t say anything before.”
“What are you pulling here? Did you send me the postcard? What kind of game are you and Johnny playing, anyway? I thought you said he was a musical genius.”
“I guess I should start from the beginning,” she said quietly, twisting the edge of her shirt with her hands. “We met online. I told you that, right?”
Nick nodded.
“He sent me an e-mail promoting his show. I don’t think anyone even listened to it that much back then; it was before the whole TAP thing really took off. But I found it, and I liked what he was doing. Then I started calling him during the show. I would suggest a couple of songs, even. A lot of songs. He seemed to know what he wanted to play, but Johnny actually didn’t know a lot about music.”
“Goon.”
“But he was really interested to learn, so I told him everything that I knew, bands that I liked, singer-songwriters that I loved. We talked and talked and talked, late into the night, and it was nice because I had a friend … I mean, I have friends, but not like Johnny was. Deck and Div—they’re not interested so much in music. Sometimes I think all they have on the brain are skateboards. But not me. I mean, it’s fun and all, but I don’t want to go pro or anything. I mean, be serious.”
Taj nibbled on a cuticle on her thumb.
“So you told Johnny what to play … what bands, what songs … ,” Nick prodded.
“Yeah, I’d e-mail him playlists, suggestions, tell him about the history of stuff. I don’t know, I was kind of running the whole show. Then the ratings started going up, and he got picked up on TAP. It started getting huge. We DJed together as the MiSTakes.”
She sighed. “What you have to understand about Johnny is that more than anything he wanted to be a musician, to be famous. He showed me what he’d written—but it was awful. I felt bad for him. So I showed him the stuff I was working on.” She sighed.
“And he would sing it, and it was really good. So he released that demo—you know, the one everyone downloaded? And then it got even bigger, and then there was all that buzz when he played at that party, and then Sutton came along, and record companies started calling, and they wanted an album, so I worked on a couple of songs for him. All right. I worked on all the songs.”
“You did all that? And you never wanted anything for yourself? Credit, at least?”
“Don’t you see? It would have ruined it. What if all those kids, all those fans, knew that Johnny didn’t write his own songs? He’d be laughed at. Look at Kurt Cobain—even his friggin’ journals are bestsellers. Jim Morrison. Jimi Hendrix. If you don’t write your own songs, you might as well be Britney Spears. And just between you and me, even she writes her own songs.
“Anyway, I didn’t really want anything. I just wanted him. Johnny. I loved him, even if it felt like he was only with me because of the music, because of the songs I wrote. I didn’t care. At least we were together.
“But I was getting nervous. It was kind of fun for a while, to pretend, to have created this thing, this ‘Johnny Silver’ dude. It was a game. It wasn’t real. But then people started calling him the new Bob Dylan. Rolling Stone was shooting him for the cover. I told him we had to stop. We couldn’t be part of this fraud that Sutton was spinning. I told him if he kept going, he’d be some kind of false idol. But he wouldn’t listen. He was addicted to it by then—the attention, the money. I told him I was quitting. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I didn’t want to be part of it. Kids were, like, going crazy thinking he was this genius or something. They wanted nothing more than to be like him, to be him. It was getting scary.”
“So he booked,” Nick said. “The night of the Viper.”
“Yeah. I guess. I don’t know what happened. I felt bad. Maybe I was too harsh on him. It’s why I kept the show going—I was trying to tell him that wherever he is, it’s okay. I forgive him. He can come back; it’ll be all right. I’m not angry. Whatever happens … I mean, it’s not like it’s so bad to sing someone else’s songs, right? That Jeff Buckley song he always played on his show—‘Hallelujah’? Buckley didn’t write it. It’s a cover. Johnny never even knew that. He thought that song was so great, I didn’t have the heart to tell him.”
“Taj.”
“Yeah?”
“What about the postcard?”
“I have no idea who sent you the postcard, or why.”
She was lying. He had found other things in the notebook. He’d ripped them out before showing her. Pages and pages of notes: “Wish List Requirements”; “Angel-X?”; “Angels’ Practice: a Manifesto.” Odd scribbles of pronouncements—“Allegiance is required”; “Membership is final”—and weird recipes, as well as notes that looked like incantations, and rules. “Goddess Worship.” “Scheduling.” “Phenomena.” “Experiments.” None of it made any sense. And if it was her notebook, were they her notes, too?
She isn’t who you think she is.
Nick drove off the parking lot and into traffic. “This is fine for me, thanks,” Taj said when they reached the fringes of West Hollywood. “I can skate home from here.” She hopped out of the car and shouldered her backpack and skateboard.
“Sure?”
“Yeah, I feel like being outside anyway.” She paused. “Hey, Johnny was a good guy. He didn’t do anything wrong, you know? He just wanted to be a star. Don’t think too badly of him, okay?” she asked. She probably meant, Don’t think too badly of me.
Taj
IT HAD BEEN A RELIEF TO FINALLY ADMIT THEIR secret to someone else. She’d been holding that information inside for so long, she hardly believed it was true. Maybe she was just dreaming it; maybe Johnny had written all those songs. But seeing her old composition notebook again brought it all back to her.
All those nights sitting alone, listening, writing, dreaming, doodling … the words coming out of a dark secret place.
She hoped Nick wouldn’t judge Johnny too harshly. They had only been doing what seemed best, for both of them. Johnny had wanted it so much, and she had loved him so much she wanted him to get everything he wanted.
The way it started had been so innocent. She had shown him her lyrics, and he’d played a few chords on the guitar. She’d suggested different ones, ones that worked better.
Then they’d recorded a few songs with his computer. Scratchy, Velvet Undergound-type lo-fi technology. It sounded awful, really, but they’d put it up on the site, under the name Johnny Silver. Johnny had posed for it, and they’d made up the whole background for him: the homeschooled rumor, the weird fetishes—they’d made him up. Johnny Silver didn’t exist, really. He was their creation. It was a costume, like the skinny suits Johnny wore. Although the hair and the eyes were real enough.
They’d tried it first with the MiSTakes, but the four-way group didn’t catch on like Johnny Silver did.
They’d never meant for it to get this far. But Sutton, he’d forced them—no, Taj thought, they’d been willing accomplices. Sutton knew everything. That Taj wrote the songs and Johnny sang them. Knew their secret all along.
And he’d shown them the workings of TAP. Thank God Nick hadn’t found all the other stuff that was in there. The
stuff they’d been working on. She had to tell Sutton it was over; they had to stop it now. They’d gone too far. The missing kids. Johnny’s disappearance. It was getting way too freaky. That’s not what she had wanted when she’d volunteered to help with the project.
But the roller coaster had already taken off, and she was strapped in her seat. She only hoped she could get off before it plunged over the cliff.
Nick
THE CALL CAME WHEN NICK LEAST EXPECTED IT. THE conversation with Taj was still bothering him. He was wondering if he should confront her with the other things he’d found. His head was swimming. He didn’t know what to think. But if she was so involved with Johnny, what was her relationship to TAP? Wasn’t TAP just a front to sell Johnny’s records, then? What was her relationship to Sutton? And what did a made-up rock star have to do with those weird Friday night parties in the back room? How did it all tie in together? And the wish list rule—what was that all about? All these questions buzzed in his brain.
The voice on the phone was calm. “Is this Mr. Nick Huntington?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve got your sister here. Says she wants to come home.”
Fish was in the hospital in Altadena, a half hour away from the city in the San Gabriel Valley. How had she ended up there? When Nick arrived, he was shocked to see how pale she looked, and how thin. The hospital explained that someone had dropped her off there that morning, leaving without identifying themselves. They’d found his number on her cell phone.
David and Evelyn were flying home. “Of course she’s fine,” they said. Even the fact that their daughter had been found in a hospital didn’t shake them from their belief that this was just an elaborate prank she had pulled to get attention.
“What happened?” Nick asked. “Have you been here all this time?”
“I don’t remember. I blacked out.”
“You’ve been gone for two weeks.”
“God, really?” Fish asked.