Hence was as talkative as I’d ever seen him. “I like how serious the guys are,” he was saying. “Riptide isn’t a hobby to them—it’s their lives. Besides, they’re good guys. That will be key when we go on tour together. Once the album’s done, we may even get to do an international tour. The U.S. and Western Europe.”
“You’ll love Europe,” I said, a little absently. “It’s magical—all the villages and castles.” Somewhere around the edges of my consciousness, an unpleasant new thought was creeping in, one I hadn’t let myself entertain until now.
“I’ll love seeing it with you,” he responded. “Between gigs, you can take me around to places you’ve been.”
But by then the unpleasant thought had formed and taken hold. “When would this be, this tour of Europe?”
“It would probably start next summer. Does it matter? I’ll have to quit The Underground, but your dad will understand.”
“Um.” I barely knew where to start. It wasn’t like I hadn’t mentioned my college plans to Hence. More than once, I’d gone on and on about the trip to Cambridge my family took when I was ten, about how much I’d loved it there—the redbrick buildings and the cool, leafy courtyards. It was true that I hadn’t said much about the applications I was starting to fill out. I hadn’t mentioned the plans I’d been working on for Hence’s education, and how I was going to convince Dad to help out with tuition. “How long would the tour be?” Maybe it would just be a summer thing. That would be fine.
Hence laughed. “Oh, I don’t know, Catherine. It’s all hypothetical right now. Our manager is still working out the details.”
“Hypothetical.” That sounded better. I rested my hand on Hence’s knee. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t read my mind. I made my voice as light as I possibly could. “You know, I’ve been thinking, these last few weeks. About what comes after graduation.” I bit the bullet. “Have you ever thought about college?”
Hence snorted, and the woman across the aisle looked up from her Daily News to give him a disapproving look. “What would I need college for?”
“Everyone needs college. To get in the door anywhere, you need a bachelor’s degree.” It was my father’s speech, coming through my lips. “Even creative people. Especially creative people.”
“Get in what door?” Hence said. “I’ve already got a job. Riptide’s the only door I need to get into….” His expression changed. “We passed our stop. Now we’re going to have to walk ten blocks.”
“Big deal.”
“You’re not the one hauling an amp.” This was the first time Hence had ever gotten angry at me, and I didn’t like the edge to his voice. At the next stop, we carried his stuff out onto the platform, and our conversation stalled while we climbed up into daylight.
“Musicians go to college,” I told him once we’d reached the top of the stairs. “Lots of bands meet at college.”
“I’ve already got a band,” he said. “What are you saying?”
“I’m going to Harvard.” I said it straight out, just like that. “If they accept me. I’ve been planning it for years.”
“Harvard.” Hence’s frown deepened. “It doesn’t get any snootier than that, does it?”
“Snooty?” We were blocking the sidewalk. Annoyed commuters were dodging us, some of them swearing, but I couldn’t have cared less. “I’ve wanted this all my life. I’ve worked hard for it, too.”
“So what am I supposed to do? While you’re up there in… wherever it is.”
“Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everybody knows that.”
Hence raised a single eyebrow at me. “Everybody? Maybe in your world.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” The words came out louder than I’d intended. This wasn’t at all how I had imagined this conversation going. Asking him to move with me to Cambridge should have been a romantic gesture. Instead, we were yelling at each other, putting on a show for smirking passersby.
“Not everyone lives in your world. Believe it or not, not everyone wants to.” With a sour look on his face, Hence picked up his amp and plunged into the crowd. I struggled to keep up, not wanting him to have the last word.
“If you don’t want to live in my world, why did you even come here?” I waved my arms. “In this world, Harvard is the best school—the most prestigious.”
“Prestigious?” Now he was mocking me, and I didn’t like it one bit. I let go of his guitar case. Actually, I threw it down to the pavement. “Carry your own damn guitar.” I stomped off through the crowd.
“Hey!” I heard him shout behind me, but I was running, bumping into people, leaving a trail of pissed-off pedestrians in my wake. I didn’t stop till I reached The Underground. I let myself in, locked the door behind me, and tore up the stairs, too angry to wait for the elevator. Up in my room, I flung myself facedown on the bed. Hadn’t I tried my best to help Hence, to support him, to be with him, even when it meant distancing myself from my own brother? And had he ever so much as asked me what my plans were, what I wanted out of life? Did he expect me to trail along behind him from show to show, watching adoringly while he had all the fun?
“Selfish jerk,” I growled into my pillow. Would I have to choose between Hence and my future? That hardly seemed fair.
Just then, someone knocked on the door.
It was Hence, his hair damp with sweat. He didn’t look as angry as he had before.
“What are you doing up here? What if Q hears you?” I took a step out into the hallway.
“I don’t care what he thinks,” Hence said grimly. “I only care about you.”
After that, I couldn’t be angry with him anymore, though I still sort of wanted to be. I clasped my hands behind my back to keep from reaching out to brush the damp bangs from his eyes.
“The thing is, I can’t go to Harvard with you,” Hence continued, but at least he didn’t sound scornful when he said it.
“It wouldn’t have to be Harvard. There are tons of colleges up in Boston—all different kinds. You’re the smartest and most creative person I know. You’d get in somewhere, and maybe I could talk Dad into helping with tuition, and—”
“Catherine.” He scuffed one lime-green Chuck Taylor against the other. “When I left home, I dropped out of high school. I didn’t even finish my junior year.”
“Oh.” Now it was my turn to look down at my own sneakers, ashamed. “I didn’t realize….”
“That’s okay,” he said. “But you see why college is a problem.”
“You can get your GED. I’d help you. You’d breeze right through it.”
“But there’s no point,” Hence said. “I came to New York to break into the music business. And now I’m in a band… a really good band, with a future.”
“There are bands in Boston.”
“Riptide is here.” His voice was starting to take on that unpleasant tone again. He inhaled sharply, and for a moment I thought he was going to break up with me. Instead, he gave me a pleading look. “Isn’t New York City the capital of the world? Aren’t there colleges here?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Aren’t some of them as good as Harvard?” He tipped my face gently up toward his, and I felt myself thaw.
“Columbia, maybe. Or Fordham.” After all, Harvard without Hence didn’t sound like the glorious college experience I’d been imagining.
“If you went to one of those, we could live together here, get an apartment of our own, once I get home from my tour. Maybe you could come with me for the summer part of it? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” I told him. “I’d like that.” Wasn’t Hence more important to me than anything else?
After that, I urged him to get downstairs before Q could catch us together and complicate our lives further. I sat on my bed for a long time, revising my plans. So what if I’d lived in New York City all my life? I’d already traveled to plenty of other places. Hence was right—New York was at least as cool and exciting as anyplace else. And it was easier
to imagine a life without Harvard than a life without Hence. So I made up my mind: I would apply to Columbia, NYU, and Fordham—all good schools.
Still, I couldn’t help wanting to apply to Harvard, too—just to see if I would get in. What would it hurt? Maybe it would be enough to know they wanted me. I could go somewhere else, secure in the knowledge that I had been accepted into my first-choice school. And, besides, who was I kidding? A million people must apply to Harvard every year. They probably wouldn’t accept me, anyway.
Catherine
A few nights later, at three in the morning, the ringing of the phone beside my bed woke me. Over the pounding of my heart I could barely make out what the voice on the other end was saying—something about an emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital. “Are you related to James Eversole?”
“He’s my father.”
“Can you get here? Right away?”
I moved in what felt like slow motion, out the door and down the stairs. Q’s bedroom door was locked, so I pounded on it, screaming his name. When he opened it, I flew into his arms. “Dad’s had a heart attack.” I sobbed the words into his rumpled T-shirt.
We took a cab to the hospital. Q urged the cabdriver to run each of the million red lights we hit, but he refused. In the painfully bright light of the waiting room, the nurse wouldn’t let us in to see Dad, saying he was in surgery. “I don’t care,” I kept insisting. “He would want us there. I could hold his hand so he would know I was with him.”
But she kept shaking her head. “Wait right over there.” She pointed to a bank of empty chairs. “I promise, I’ll come get you the second you can see him.”
What could we do but comply? The wait seemed to take hours. I rested my head on Q’s shoulder, all our differences forgotten, and I could feel him clenching his fists, then releasing. Clenching, releasing.
Then the doctor came out—a black-haired woman in a white coat—and she was moving her mouth, trying to tell us something, and I was screaming so I wouldn’t have to hear her.
We didn’t even get to say good-bye.
Chelsea
Alone in The Underground, I couldn’t seem to relax. I kept glancing up at the window, remembering the girl whose face I’d seen there, only now when I imagined her face it wore the panicked look I’d seen on Jackie’s statue. Though I knew it was crazy, I checked the window’s lock to make sure it was still fastened. Of course it was. But even that didn’t make me feel less jumpy.
There was still so much of my mother’s journal left, but getting through it had become harder. At first reading each entry had been like tasting a delicious little piece of her. The more I read, though, the more scared I was that when I reached the end, that would be it—I’d have uncovered all of her that was left. When I got to the part about my grandfather’s death, I had to put the book down, to take a break from all the sadness. Even reading the happier parts gave me this dizzying feeling of forgetting who I was, of losing track of my own life and getting caught up in hers.
The whole thing made me confused. While I was reading, I found myself liking Hence. Her Hence, that is—the young, vulnerable, romantic one. And it got harder to hate the Hence I knew—older, crankier, in need of a shave. Weirder still, as I read I found myself rooting for her and Hence to get together in the end, stupidly hoping the Catherine in the journal would find a way to get everything she wanted—Harvard and Hence at the same time. It was disturbing to catch myself rooting against my own father. Against my very existence.
I couldn’t help wondering: If she was alive, would I rather see her reunited with Hence than with my dad? If I found her, would I help make that happen? I wasn’t sure of the answers to those questions anymore, and that made me feel uncomfortable. Disloyal. Confused.
Then there were the poems, each one a puzzle waiting for me to unlock its secrets. Like this one:
Riptide
The crash of waves like an invitation
wakes me from my nap,
calling me into the drama
of high winds and foamy surf.
So I strip down to my suit
and dip my toes in ice water.
Once I’m in up to my hips,
I know I won’t be turning back. I dive
and slice through gray saltwater.
In love with the unreachable horizon,
I lose track of myself—too far
out of the lifeguard’s sight,
when a riptide washes back from shore
to tug me under and fling me like driftwood
farther and farther away
from everything I know. I flail
and tread water, wanting nothing
but dry sand beneath my feet,
nothing but the warm, familiar beach.
Too late. To my friends on their blankets
who shield their eyes and squint at the sea
I’m nothing but a speck—
going, going, gone.
Given the title, it had to be about Hence and his band. Of course my mom would have been thrilled that her boyfriend was becoming a rock star. Who wouldn’t be? But all that business about being tugged away from shore and flung around like driftwood sounded sad, or maybe scared. Then again, what did I know about poetry? My mom’s creative-writing genes had completely skipped me. Lately my language arts grades had been profoundly disappointing, according to Dad. Maybe the poem was all about being swept away by happiness, and I just wasn’t getting it. I reread it over and over, waiting for light to dawn.
Finally, the sounds of unloading on the street below broke into my reading. There was a show that night—which meant Cooper must be back. I tucked the journal into its hiding place and cursed the pokey old elevator all the way down to the first floor.
Sure enough, I found Cooper out front, instructing the roadies about what went where. He kept going about his business, helping to lug a drum kit onto the stage while I watched, waiting for the right moment. But the suspense was killing me. I shifted from foot to foot.
Finally, drums in place, he looked up to find me there. “Oh,” was all he said.
“You got my note?” I asked. “About what I said last night? I was just mad at Hence for jumping to conclusions.”
But instead of replying, Cooper scanned the room, looking for the next task to turn his attention to, as if I weren’t standing there, right in front of him, practically begging for his forgiveness.
“Please don’t stay angry,” I said. “You’re the only actual friend I have right now. Nobody else knows where I am and what I’m going through. Besides, I can’t help what comes out of my mouth when I get mad. It’s, like, my tragic flaw.”
Cooper’s lips twitched in what might have been a smile. “It’s tragic, all right.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I said.
But the smile disappeared. “You know what really would be tragic? If I lost my job. I took a real risk last night. It’s pretty clear Hence doesn’t want me anywhere near you.”
“But that’s ridiculous! He’s crazy and paranoid. He’s…” I could feel myself starting to sputter. Knowing I might be about to veer into saying the wrong thing again, I bit my lip so hard I actually drew blood.
I inhaled and began again. “You said you and he are friends, right? Maybe if you tried explaining to him…”
“Explaining what? The truth is, Hence wouldn’t like the fact that I showed you those pictures of your mother. He wouldn’t like…” Unable or unwilling to finish, he dug his hands into his pockets and looked off into the distance, his blue-green eyes full of some kind of distress.
“Wouldn’t like what?” I asked.
“Us being friends,” he whispered.
“Oh,” I said. That was when my lower lip started to tremble, because although I hadn’t given it too much thought, it was true: Coop and I had become friends. And now suddenly we weren’t, and I was back to being completely on my own.
“I’m not here to make friends.” I whirled around so he wouldn’t see me b
linking back tears, and stomped off in the direction of Hence’s office. Like it or not, I needed to talk to him. I had to find my mother so I could get out of this place where nobody liked me and never come back.
When Hence looked up from the papers on his desk, his jaw dropped at the sight of me in his doorway, but I spoke before he could start yelling.
“Calm down,” I said, in no mood to take any more crap from him. “I promise to leave before the club opens. I won’t get you in trouble with the NYPD or the FBI, or whoever it is that cares about underage drinking.”
Hence gave me a funny look, like he was searching for something scathing to say but couldn’t find it.
“I went to see Jackie this morning,” I said. “My mom’s friend.”
To my utter surprise, his expression softened. Without saying a word, he beckoned me to sit down in a spare chair on the other side of his desk, so I did. It was a pretty ordinary office—just some file cabinets and a gray metal desk—except that the walls were plastered with eight-by-ten glossies of bands that had played The Underground.
“Did you find out anything useful?”
I ran through the memory of all that Jackie had told me, hardly knowing where to start. It had all been interesting, but was any of it useful? Then I remembered. “She might have been in the building,” I told him. “This building. In fact, I’m sure she was, even though the front was boarded up. She could have climbed up the fire escape and in through the window.”
Hence made a teepee with his fingers. Above it, his eyes twinkled unpleasantly. “Did you find out anything I didn’t already know?”
His words stung as though he’d slapped me. “You could tell me things,” I said. “But you don’t. You just sit there smirking at me.”
As soon as I said the words, I regretted them. I thought he’d blow up at me again, but to my surprise, that didn’t happen. Instead, he unlocked his desk and pulled something out. It looked like a postcard. “How much do you know about your mother and me?” he asked, his voice neutral, like he was working not to betray any emotion.