We All Looked Up

  The mood at Hamilton was understandably subdued, so Anita had to keep her exhilaration on the DL. Only a little more than half the student body was bothering to show up anymore, which left the halls strangely wide and quiet. Certain classes, specifically the ones in which Ardor was never referenced, became surreal exercises in trying to ignore the unignorable. Anita’s mind, usually a faithful partner, began to cheat on the chalkboard equations with random thoughts and daydreams. It stole out of the present moment and into the future, wondering what tonight’s show at the Crocodile would be like. Though she couldn’t imagine enjoying Andy’s music (based purely on the way he dressed), she still felt confident that she was meant to be there to hear it.

  When eighth period rolled around, Anita went to the discussion group that Mr. McArthur and Suzie O had put together. It had already become her favorite part of the school day. This week they were discussing ancient philosophers; Anita had spent the last couple of nights reading about the Stoics and Cynics, the Epicureans and the hedonists. Socrates believed that in a perfect world, every person would be doing the thing that they were born to do. Which meant that if you really believed your true calling was as a singer, to do anything else would be to break the most fundamental rule of the universe.

  The subject today was happiness—an appropriate one, given ­Anita’s current state of mind. Having read all the relevant texts, she still wasn’t sure where her sudden joy had come from.

  “Some people think happiness is impossible in the face of death,” Mr. McArthur said, “but Epicurus tells us that there’s no reason to fear death, because we don’t get to meet it. While we exist, there is no death. And when death comes, we’re not there anymore.”

  “That’s stupid,” some junior boy said. “Waiting for something is the worst part. Like when you have to get a shot or something.”

  “Epicurus would argue that anticipation is the stupid thing. Why spend your life worried about something that hasn’t happened yet?”

  “I didn’t get the hedonists,” said Krista Asahara, Anita’s chipper student-council nemesis. “What kind of life would that be, just pursuing pleasure all the time?”

  “An awesome one,” somebody joked.

  “Actually,” Suzie O said, “the hedonists weren’t as selfish as most people think. Sure, they valued pleasure above all else, but they also thought that most people didn’t understand what true pleasure really was. The hedonists believed that justice and virtue were the real pleasures of life, while sex and meals were only good for a ­couple hours.”

  “Even that’s pretty optimistic,” Mr. McArthur said.

  “Depends who you’re with,” Suzie answered, and everyone laughed.

  Mr. McArthur had been right—there was consolation to be found in reading the works of all these dead people who’d struggled to figure out what life was about. The first day of the discussion group, Suzie O said that the secret goal of all philosophy was to figure out the best way to die. Weird how the most depressing stuff could turn out to be the most comforting.

  Anita didn’t say much at the meetings; a few dozen students usually turned up, and in any group that size, there would always be a couple of people willing to speak for everyone else. But that Friday, after the discussion was over, she followed Suzie back to her office in the library.

  The counselor was already Skyping with a pretty girl in a dorm room when Anita came in.

  “Hey, Suzie. Are you busy? I can come by tomorrow or something—”

  “No, it’s fine.” She turned to the girl on Skype. “I’ll call you back in a bit.”

  “Okay,” the girl said, and shut off her camera.

  “Who was that?” Anita asked.

  “My daughter. She’s a senior at Rutgers.”

  “I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

  “Well, now you do. So what’s up?”

  “I had a sorta weird question.”

  “I love weird questions.”

  Suzie sat there expectantly as Anita figured out the best way to word it. “I guess I was just wondering if I should be worried. About myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m . . . happy.”

  Suzie frowned. “You’re worried because you’re happy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you feel hysterical?”

  “No. I feel peaceful, actually.”

  “And why do you think that is?”

  “I guess because I realized that nothing really matters.” A few bars of Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” played in her head.

  “Are you sure about that? We’ve still got a shot at surviving.”

  “I know. But I don’t mean that nothing matters anymore. I mean nothing ever mattered. Like, if it’s all so fragile anyway, then it was never really real, you know? Even if there weren’t an asteroid, I could still die tomorrow. So why worry? It’s like Andy said. ‘Whatever it is, it’s not worth it.’”

  “Andy’s a good kid, Anita, but I’m not sure I’d pick him as a philosophical role model. We all have to believe in something.”

  Anita shrugged. “I guess.” She wasn’t exactly sure what she’d expected to get out of this conversation; it wasn’t as if Suzie was going to tell her not to be happy. “So what’s your daughter studying at Rutgers?”

  “Economics.”

  “It must be hard to have her so far away, huh?”

  Suzie smiled. Then, without any warning, her face crumpled up like a paper bag. “Shit, I’m sorry,” she said, and let her head fall into her hands.

  “Oh, it’s okay.”

  Anita put her arms around Suzie’s wide shoulders and held on until the shaking stopped, as if the emotion were just a bit of turbulence. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen her mother cry. Had she ever?

  “It’s just a sore spot right now,” Suzie said, pulling a Kleenex from a box hidden inside a porcelain turtle. “I thought she’d come right home, but she’s got this boyfriend who lives in New York that she doesn’t want to leave. And we haven’t always gotten along.” She blew her nose. “I’m really sorry, Anita.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “What a load of good I’m gonna be, huh? The students need to see someone keeping it together.”

  “Are you kidding?” Anita said. “I think you should cry in front of everyone who comes in here. Then they’ll know it’s okay not to be okay.”

  “Thanks.” Suzie shook out her hands and blinked away the last of the tears. “All right, I think I’m stabilizing. And even if I’ve lost all credibility as a counselor, at least I proved my point.”

  “What point was that?”

  “There’s still time for you to do things that matter. Even if it’s just being there for someone who’s freaking out.” Suzie took hold of ­Anita’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “Don’t forget that.”

  Anita hadn’t been downtown since the night of Esperanza Spalding’s show, and things had definitely changed. There were so many people out on the streets, as if a big concert had just gotten out and nobody wanted to go home. The Crocodile was packed wall-to-wall with Seattle’s misfits—aging rocker types in studded leather pants, pairs of spiky-haired girls holding hands, big-bearded metalheads with arms as densely decorated with tattoos as the venue’s bathroom stalls were with graffiti. Anita sat at the bar, alone with her suitcase and a glass of orange juice, feeling scared and lonely and excited all at once. She was really doing it. She was running away from home.

  Now all she had to do was find a place to stay.

  The first band was made up of four guys who might have been contestants in a Dracula look-alike contest. One of them played a synthesized church organ. Next up came a group of skinheads; the lead singer liked to take the whole microphone into his mouth while screaming into it. The dance floor looked like a breakout at a mental hospital for the criminall
y insane.

  Around ten, Andy and Bobo stumbled onstage and began to set up. Both of them had clearly been drinking. Their music was messy, bland, and painfully loud all at once. Over the feedback and the constant shimmer of crash cymbal, it was impossible to make out a word of Bobo’s manic screech. He was a decent front man—struttingly confident and unafraid to look crazy—but the songs themselves were incomprehensible.

  Anita was disappointed. In spite of herself, she’d been expecting magic. All she was getting out of Andy’s “band” was that special sort of despair she always felt after listening to truly terrible music. Well, that and a ringing sound in her ears.

  After a period of time which might have comprised two songs or two dozen, Andy stumbled out from behind his drum kit. He was so thoroughly wasted that you could see it in every part of his body; his limbs moved like overfilled water balloons, and he almost dropped the guitar when Bobo handed it to him. He grinned goofily out at the crowd—kinda cute, actually.

  “This is a song of mine, about not wanting to deal with other people’s shit. Maybe you can relate to that. Or not. Whatever. It’s called ‘Save It.’”

  He hit a couple of wrong notes before locking into a slow arpeggio, clear and quiet, reverbed like a rubber band. And what came out of the speakers after that was, without a doubt, the craziest thing Anita had heard since the news that an asteroid might soon blow them all to kingdom come. The little skater punk, with his too-tight jeans and bangs that wouldn’t stay out of his eyes, was playing soul music. His voice was frail and unsure, and the audience was thrown by the sudden shift in tone, and even Andy himself didn’t seem to totally understand what he was doing, but Anita got the message loud and clear, like neon runway lights pointing the way toward her future. Like second star to the right and straight on till morning. Like fate.

  Andy

  SAY WHAT YOU WOULD ABOUT Bobo, but the dude knew how to draw a crowd. The Crocodile was jam-packed by the time Perineum took the stage. It had been a few months since their last show, and as Andy climbed onto the throne behind the beat-up house kit, he felt the prickle of butterflies drowning in the four beers (delivered by a sympathetic bartender) he’d already put in his stomach. The lights were too bright, and he couldn’t seem to find a good distance from the snare.

  “Hello, Crocodile!” Bobo said. “We’re Perineum, and this is our first song!” Andy counted it off. Somehow, without consciously ordering his body to start drumming, he was there right on time, and then the flow of it, the crazy speed trip that was punk rock, swept him out from the chorus to the verse and back again. One song became another. He was immediately soaked in sweat—a well-oiled machine keeping the beat coming and going like a set of windshield wipers—and through the rainbow glare he could see that the moshing was intense, a ­jumble of limbs and leather. Was Eliza out there? She had to be. Anything else would be a failure on the part of the universe. They made it through about ten of their two-minute songs before Andy noticed that the room had gone silent. Bobo was offering up his guitar.

  “Hey,” Andy said into the mic. “I’m gonna do something a little different here. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “I mind!” someone shouted. Andy shielded his eyes and saw Golden standing right at the lip of the stage. The light glinted off the links of his necklace.

  “This is a song of mine, about not wanting to deal with other people’s shit. Maybe you can relate to that. Or not. Whatever. It’s called ‘Save It.’”

  He started playing. It wasn’t a song you could mosh to. It wasn’t punk. It wasn’t even rock. He’d written it a little more than a year ago, about this freshman girl he’d started dating only to find out she was batshit crazy (she claimed to brush her teeth for an hour and a half every night because she “liked the sensation”). Nobody booed him offstage, so they couldn’t have hated it too much, even if the applause was sparse and the cheer loud when Bobo returned to the mic. He gestured to Andy to start the beat for their last song.

  “Thanks for coming out on this fine Valentine’s Day evening,” Bobo said. “As you may know, tonight’s concert is about more than music. This is the beginning of a movement. Unless we’re all ready to stand up when the time comes, we’ll get trampled into the dirt.” The crowd cheered. “If any of you give a shit about your civil liberties, pass your e-mail to my girl over there.” He pointed to Misery, momentarily spotlighted at the edge of the stage. She’d dressed up for the occasion like a true punk-rock slut—short pink-and-black tartan skirt and spiderweb tights, tight pink tank top, and a black bow in her hair. Maybe it was just because they wanted to talk to a pretty girl, or maybe it was because there was a giant ICBM of a rock bearing down on them, but Andy saw people start to crowd around her.

  They finished their set. Andy felt the molten lava of performance anxiety draining from his bloodstream, and he quickly replaced it with a couple of the tequila shots Golden was buying by the dozen. He was shoving his way through the crowd, searching for Eliza, when he ran face-first into Anita Graves.

  “Heeeeeeeeeeey!” he shouted. “It’s Anita Bonita!” He hugged her, coating her in a layer of 60-proof sweat.

  “Hey, Andy. I liked your set.”

  “Really? Awesome!”

  “Well, not your whole set. Just the one you sang. The rest of it kinda sucked.”

  “Oh. Cool.” He felt flattered and offended at once. “Uh, have you seen anyone else here?”

  “Anyone else?”

  “From Hamilton, I mean.”

  Anita looked around the room. “Half of this crowd’s from Hamilton.”

  “Yeah, but I mean, have you seen anyone specific? Like, a specific girl?” Andy wasn’t sure how to ask about Eliza without actually asking about Eliza.

  “You’re drunk, Andy. I think it’s time to call it a night.”

  “No way! The guys are all going to the Cage. Golden said he can get us in.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “You wanna come? That is so great! Anita Bonita at the Cage!” He hugged her again.

  “I’m definitely driving,” she said.

  The outside air sobered Andy up a bit, enough for him to realize how weird it was that Anita had come to the concert. He would have asked her about it, but she didn’t give him the opportunity.

  “So do you have any other songs like the one you sang?” she asked.

  “A couple. But I’d—”

  “Have you ever considered having someone else sing your songs?”

  “I guess, as long as—”

  “And how do you feel about collaborating on new songs?”

  “Well, Bobo and I tri—”

  “Who are your musical idols?”

  It was like being interviewed for Rolling Stone by a journalist with ADHD. Eons seemed to pass before Anita found a parking space and Andy could escape the interrogation.

  “We’re not done talking about this,” Anita warned.

  “I’m sure we’re not.”

  The Cage was Seattle’s most famous biker bar. A huge black guy in an orange trucker’s cap sat outside a door built into a spiked wooden palisade. As Andy and Anita approached, he looked up from the book he was reading—Man’s Search for Meaning—and emitted a ­single dry chuckle.

  “What are you? Sixteen?”

  “We’re with Golden,” Andy said.

  “And you’re already wasted, aren’t you?”

  Andy looked guiltily to Anita. “I’ll keep him on a short leash,” she said.

  The bouncer sighed and picked up his book again. “Whatever, man. I’m quitting tomorrow anyway.”

  There was a wide-open patio space on the other side of the palisade. Golden and his crew were seated at the centermost table, already festooned with a half-dozen foamy pitchers of beer. Bobo had positioned himself at Golden’s right hand and seemed to have captured the drug lord’s attention. An
dy had always been impressed by his best friend’s familiarity with the street scene; even back in middle school, Bobo had been able to chat up the crackheads and the gangbangers and even the homeless, as if he were one of them.

  “Which one’s Golden?” Anita asked.

  “Head of the table. Dude’s one of the biggest dealers in the city. Sweet, right?”

  “Dealer? You mean a drug dealer? And you think that’s cool?”

  “I don’t know. Dealers make bank. Even Bobo can pull down a couple hundred bucks in a good week.”

  “Musicians are way cooler than drug dealers, Andy. They don’t end up in prison. Usually.”

  But Andy wasn’t paying attention. He wanted to find out what Golden and Bobo were talking about. “Wait here a second, okay?”

  “I’m thinking we do the same kind of thing, only on a bigger scale,” Bobo was saying. “That way, you’ve got people when the time comes. But we’ve got to move on it. Like, next weekend or something.”

  Golden nodded sagely, a general in consultation with his lieutenant. His necklace was the exact same color as the glass of beer in front of him. He noticed Andy lingering nearby.

  “Andy, nice set tonight.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “So Bobo here wants to put together a little fiesta next week. You think that’s a good idea?”

  “Bobo’s full of good ideas,” Andy said, but he was so drunk he’d already half forgotten the question. “I mean, whatever he says, I’m in. I just want to enjoy myself before the end, you know?”

  “I do, Andy. I really do.” Golden gestured for Andy to come closer. “You wanna hear a secret?”