Emily St. John Mandel: The Lola Quartet

The last time Gavin had spoken with Anna, a little over ten years before Karen left him and his shower in New York started dripping, they were sitting together on the back porch of her house in Sebastian and his shirt was soaked to his back with sweat. Gavin was eighteen, in his last month of high school. At the end of summer he was going to New York City to study journalism. Anna still had a year of high school left and the weight of the conversation they hadn't had yet— the what happens to us now that we'll be in different states? talk— was opening up longer and longer silences between them.

"Have you ever wanted to live somewhere colder?" Gavin asked, as a means of avoiding the conversation for at least a few more minutes or perhaps, he realized as he spoke, as a way of approaching it indirectly.

" Where would I go? I've never left Florida."

"I don't know," he said, "but I've been fantasizing about cold weather since I was five."

"I love Florida." Anna's voice was languid. "Permanent summer." She was watching the fireflies rise up from the grass.

"Don't you ever want seasons?"

"You're just too pale and heat-sensitive. Summers are easy for everyone else."

"I've heard that," Gavin said.

"Well," she said, "you'll be leaving soon."

Gavin took her hand. He heard voices at that moment somewhere in the house behind them, a shrill escalation and response. Anna's parents were fighting again.

"When I saw you the other day," he said, "you said there was something you needed to tell me."

He'd run into her in a school corridor. She'd seemed nervous and tense. But now she only shook her head, distracted. The tenor of the fight was growing louder and sharper. Anna and Gavin were silent for a moment, listening. Gavin watched the frantic fluttering of moths against the porch light.

"Listen," Anna said, "maybe you should go."

The screen door slammed and Anna's half-sister Sasha was outside. They shared the same volatile mother but had different fathers, and Gavin had always been under the impression that Sasha's father was better than Anna's. Sasha was usually at her father and stepmother's house across town. Tonight she nodded at Gavin and stepped away from them into the shadows of the yard. Her hands shook around the flame of her lighter. Sasha was a friend— they were in the jazz quartet together, Gavin on trumpet and Sasha on drums— but tonight she seemed foreign in the shadows by the porch, a tense stranger with bitten-down fingernails. She exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke.

"You should probably leave," Sasha said. "Don't go through the house."

"Will you be all right here?"

"We're always fine," Anna said. Gavin leaned in quickly to kiss her.

He walked around the side of the house, the fight still faintly audible through the exterior walls, down the driveway to the street. It was only ten blocks from Anna's house to his, but ten blocks was long for him in the heat. He stopped halfway to look up at the sky. He'd been reading about constellations recently, and had fallen particularly in love with the North Star. It always took him some time to find it in the haze of streetlight but there it was. True north, the direction of his second life, New York. He felt in those days that he was always on the edge of something, always waiting, his life about to begin. He was always impatient and always wanted to be somewhere else and as he walked away from Anna's house that night his desire to escape south Florida was almost a physical ache.

Later he heard sirens passing. Anna was absent from school the next day, and the day after that. They traded a few voice mails, but he could never seem to reach her. Her cell phone was always turned off when he called. He asked if he could come over but she said she wasn't feeling well. He saw her twice at school but only in passing, at a distance— getting into Sasha's car at the far end of the school parking lot, slipping quickly through the door to the girls' restroom at the other end of a long corridor. He loitered near the door for fifteen minutes but she didn't come out.

Th e l a s t official week of classes at the Sebastian High School for the Performing Arts passed, the drama production and end-of-year concerts and the art show. There were only exams now, running all week, the hallways deserted for long periods in the middle of the day. Gavin ran into Sasha on the day of his English and biology finals. She was smoking a cigarette on a bench by the parking lot.

"Hey," she said. She smiled fleetingly, but her voice was too flat.

There had been rumors about her in the past week. He'd heard she'd lost money in a poker game in some kid's basement, but the number shimmered and expanded with each retelling: she'd lost fifty dollars, no, a hundred. Five hundred, seven, maybe a grand.

"You waiting for someone?"

"I just had my math final," she said. "I've got a half-hour to kill before swim team."

"You okay?"

"Fine. I mean, you know, whatever."

He nodded, but was troubled by this. She was going to Florida State to study English literature and he'd never known her to be so inarticulate.

"I heard about the poker game," he said. He meant this to be sympathetic, but she winced and he immediately regretted mentioning it.

" Really? Where'd you hear about that?" She spoke without looking at him, smoking and gazing out across the faculty parking lot.

"I don't know," he said. "Around."

"That's one thing I won't miss about high school," she said. She exhaled a series of smoke rings. "The fucking small-mindedness of it all."

"Sorry, I didn't mean to stir up—"

"It's like, look, if I lose twenty-seven dollars at poker in some girl's basement, is that really actually the end of the world? Is that really worth spreading rumors about? I have a job. It's twenty-seven dollars. We usually play for pennies. Seriously, no one has anything better to talk about than that ?"

"It's no big deal."

"Right, that's what I think." She drew savagely on her cigarette. "It's no big deal. There's another game next week and I'm going to win it back."

"Right," he said.

"I will miss swim team, though," she said. "That's the one thing about high school I didn't hate, that and the music."

"Have you seen Anna around?" A week had passed since he'd left Anna and Sasha in the haze of their backyard.

"I've seen her around school a couple times, but I haven't talked to her. I've been staying at my dad's place."

"I think she's avoiding me."

"The kid's a screwup," Sasha said. "I'm sorry, you know I love her, but."

Gavin didn't know this, but he said "Sure," and made a conciliatory gesture. Everything in his life seemed awkward and graceless except the school he was entering at the end of summer. In his mind Columbia University was taking on the dimensions of the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz , a hard spired brightness on the horizon. He was going to be a different person there, someone confident and urbane who never got laughed at for wearing a fedora.

"Sasha, is she okay? At home, I mean?"

"Why wouldn't she be?"

" Those bruises she gets. She'll say nothing's wrong, but come on."

"She's anemic," Sasha said. "She forgets to take her iron pills. She bruises if you look at her funny."

"I'm serious," he said.

"Look," Sasha said, "she got the short end of the stick where parents are concerned, no question." Sasha flicked her cigarette butt onto the sidewalk. She drummed her fingers on the cigarette box for a moment and then lit another one. "But seriously, she can look after herself," she said. "She always has. Another year and she's out of the house."

Gavin didn't know what to say to this, so he looked down at the sidewalk and said nothing. The day was too hot and he felt the familiar weight in his limbs, the leaden exhaustion that would turn to dizziness and then heatstroke if he didn't get indoors quickly.