Kevin Emerson: Exile

Nice to see you, too.

I should’ve made a sign to wear around my neck: “It takes a lot of hard work to manage a band. I was also maybe in love. It happens. We’re all nice people. Can’t we just talk about this?”

Or maybe just: “Don’t look directly at it! It burrrns!”

“Hey!”

But there is one person who seems to be holding nothing against me: Maya Barnes, a sophomore and someone who is as serious about music as I am. She zips up the steps, dressed in a professional black skirt and tights, white shirt, thick platform shoes, and a lime-green scarf even though it’s going to be in the eighties today. She has thin oval glasses over giant almond eyes, her streaked-blonde hair pulled back in a big clip. Her look is so hardworking and optimistic compared to my lazy ponytail, slouchy jeans, slate-gray hoodie, and faded denim jacket. The only flair I’m sporting is all the shiny band pins on my jacket pockets.

Oh, to be young.

“Happy new year!” she says, breathless with perk. “Your senior year. Are you excited?”

Maya is a fan of mine. My only fan I think. She manages a band called Supreme Commander. She can be a little clingy, and I can be sullen. Still, most of the time it’s nice to have an ally.

“Excited . . . ,” I say. “On a molecular level, I suppose. I was just standing here thinking about how by geologic timescales, nothing we do here will amount to anything more than a sliver of sedimentary rock.”

“Jeez, and I still had my will to live . . .” Maya makes a cartoonishly glum face.

It makes me smile. A smile! Feels like the first time all week. “I am a little excited,” I admit. “Not for econ, or Mr. Salt’s World Cultures class, but maybe . . .”

“To find a new band, right?” says Maya. She starts walking and I fall into step beside her. Cool to be entering senior year with a sophomore? Who even cares?

We pass through the doors and it hits me: the smell of First Day optimism. Well, that and the overwhelming odors of body spray and perfume, and also that strangely sour fear BO that wafts off the skittering freshmen. Oblivion be damned, everyone here still thinks they can make that enduring mark, a game-winning catch, the ultimate year-book candid, the perfect song. A memory that will cheat time, viral and immortal. Senior year. Five hundred forty-eight dreams, one hundred and eighty days of possibility. Maybe I can’t resist it.

And so even though I feel like Maya’s question deserves an answer in a grizzled, smoked-too-many-packs, seen-too-many-things voice, the veteran taking the shine off the newbie, I allow myself to be upbeat instead. “Yes, to find a new band.”

“Just don’t steal mine!” she says with a nervous laugh. We reach a main branch in the halls. “So, I’ll see you at the kickoff concert today?”

“Definitely.”

“I’ll save you a seat!” She’s a touch too loud, a touch too eager. It’s going to get old, but it hasn’t yet.

“Cool. Thanks.”

I slog my way through the morning: Economics (suck), Survey of World Cultures (information not-suck, teacher mega-suck), Twentieth-Century English Literature (infinisuck). My brain is barely able to perform that dual trick that is the key to high-school success: moving fast enough to keep up with everything being said, and yet also being fine with how severely dull it all is. I don’t know how some kids do it.

Actually, I do. Academically, I’m ranked seventh in our class, a fact I tell no one. The part I don’t understand is how some kids thrive on it. My performance has everything to do with maintaining a cover story so my secret identity can flourish. My parents, while they know I’m into music and “that managing bands” thing, still have no idea how real it is for me. Things like the grades keep them happy. They’d probably like some athletics, a student senate seat, too, but all shall fall subservient to the great letters A and B (well, B as long as it comes with a +).

I get a second wind as I head to lunch. Today, we’re allowed to eat out in the east courtyard, where the kickoff is happening.

At Mount Hope High, most things—econ classes, cafeterias, athletic fields—look like the ones at any other budget-strapped public school. It’s when you enter the east courtyard that things start to look different. You walk out of doors off the cafeteria and find yourself in an actual stone amphitheater: curved seating that steps down to a half-moon stage. It looks like something out of ancient Greece, but aside from the yes-these-are-actually-stone seats, the stage and lights and sound system are all state of the art.

Welcome to the Don Henley performance stage. Yes, that Don Henley. His kid went here a while back. But that kind of thing is normal at Mount Hope High.

Fifteen years ago, Mount Hope was a normal high school, but then a band from here called Allegiance to North happened. There was all this press, including a big article in Spin . In that article, the members of the band, Eli White, Kellen McHugh, Parker Francis, and Miles Ellison, happened to mention a curious fact: their assistant principal, Mr. Abrams, had allowed them to practice after school in a classroom, and even gave them credits for a class he invented called Applied Popular Art, to make up for their less-than-model academic performance in virtually every other area.

Next thing you knew, Mr. Abrams was the principal, and parents from all over LA, especially former rockers, started moving to Mount Hope so their kids could go here. Now, PTA meetings are like a leather fashion show. And the money pours in for Mr. Abrams’s brainchild: Popular Arts Academy.

As a result, if you play football at Mount Hope, you can be part of one of the lamest programs in Southern California, but if you play guitar, you can take a class called the Physics of Volume, which is held in the Amp Lab, an acoustically perfect room that houses a wall of classic and modern amplifiers worth so much money it requires a twenty-four-hour guard. And there’s just as much for bass, drums, vocals, keyboards, songwriting, recording, video shoots, and management. This school literally rocks.

One of the annual traditions is the kickoff concert, held during the lunch periods in the amphitheater. The bands have been playing for probably an hour already when I arrive, working up from freshmen to senior. As I head in, there’s a decent group with a girl singer on piano called the Progress Reports.

“Summer!” It’s Maya again, up in the back row, waving two notches more enthusiastically then she needs to. We’re both in the industry track of PopArts, which has classes and its own student-run record label called Lion’s Den. (Our school mascot is a lion, and the label’s logo is a lion in a cave kicking back, paws behind his head with big headphones on. Corny? Yes. Kinda cool? I think so.)

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.