Emily St. John Mandel: The Lola Quartet

"I have to go," he said. "See you next week at the concert?"

"It'll be the best concert ever," Sasha said.

G a v i n d i d n ' t see Anna again until the night of the concert, when he looked up from playing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" on his trumpet in time to watch the paper airplane sail toward him through the dusk.

They had attended a school devoted largely to music. None of the quartet aspired to be professional musicians except Jack, but the local public schools were atrocious and the High School for the Performing Arts was the magnet school closest to their houses. If you were in Jazz Orchestra it was possible to earn extra credits by forming your own ensemble under the supervision of the faculty, so four of them had established an outfit they'd called the Lola Quartet after a German film they'd all liked with Lola in the title. They'd been playing together for three years and had gradually become good enough to win awards at regional and state high school music competitions, but now it was almost over. Now they were graduating and going to college in different states and it was wrenching, actually, the thought of the quartet being finished. Gavin had been trying not to think about it.

For their farewell performance they'd set up behind the gym in the back of a pickup truck with two battery-powered lights rigged up on the cab, shining over their instruments and casting long shadows on the grass. Daniel on bass and Gavin on trumpet, Sasha on drums and Jack on his saxophone that evening. Jack was going to music school for jazz piano, but he was freakishly talented and could switch instruments as the song required. The two dozen or so kids slow dancing in the sun-scorched grass were mostly drunk members of the Swing Dance Club and their friends and dates, except that they'd been at this for a couple of hours by now and the music wasn't really swing or even particularly danceable anymore. Everyone was a little strung out from the heat, lapsing into slow motion.

The Lola Quartet was playing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" for the second time and a pretty girl named Taylor from Choir was singing in her best dusky lounge voice. They were all in love with the music and also a little in love with Taylor, or at least Gavin was and he imagined that everyone around him was caught up in the same dream. And then he caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye and that was the paper airplane, arcing down through the air to land at his feet. He knew only one person with aim that perfect. He looked up and saw her, Anna standing just beyond the dancers at the edge of the light, and he half-smiled around the mouthpiece at her but she didn't smile back. There was something urgent in the way she looked at him. They hadn't spoken in two weeks.

Jack was taking a solo. Gavin picked up the airplane, unfolded the wings and read the two words written across the creased page: I'm sorry. And the night kept moving, the dancers swaying and the music unceasing, but it seemed to Gavin that something had shifted, an electrical charge passing through the air. When he looked up Anna had disappeared. He jumped down off the back of the truck and made his way through the dancers, his trumpet a long dim gleam in his hand, and Sasha called after him but he didn't look back.

This far out into the suburbs the scrub forest was everywhere, peninsulas of low bushy trees creeping in between subdivisions. He called Anna's name. He thought he saw her once, a flash of white that could have been her dress, but it was only moonlight. He couldn't hear the music anymore. Gavin kept walking until the brush opened into a bulldozed swath of dark earth, a future development of some sort. A 7-Eleven glowed bright on the far side. Beyond the convenience store the outer suburbs continued, glimmering toward the distant black of the swamps. He turned away from the lights and walked back into the trees, back to the high school where the music was over now, the dancers dispersing and Sasha packing up her drum kit, Taylor singing drunkenly in her boyfriend's arms.

"Where'd you go?" Sasha asked.

"I thought I saw Anna."

"She was just here a few minutes ago. After you ran into the trees."

" Where is she now?"

"I don't know, I didn't see where she went," Sasha said. "I was packing up the drum kit."

"Well, if you see her, will you tell her to call me?"

But Anna didn't call, and school was over. Gavin had taken his last exam. He called Anna six times and left messages but she didn't call back, and no one answered when he knocked on her door. He called Sasha, but Sasha was staying at her father's house and hadn't seen her sister since the day of the concert. She was distracted and tired, working two jobs to save up before college. In two of his six messages Gavin had asked Anna to come to the senior prom with him, so he went by himself in the hope that she might be there. He sat for a long time in the gymnasium under streamers hung from the ceiling, watching girls in bright dresses and boys stiff in rented tuxedos dance to music he didn't like. Anna was nowhere. Late in the evening Taylor slid into the chair beside him, hopelessly drunk with fake diamonds in her hair. Her dress was a cloud of pink.

"Hey," she said, "I heard Anna's pregnant."

"What?"

"Is it just a rumor?" Her smile was lopsided. She was sliding off her chair.

"It's just a rumor," Gavin said. " Where did you hear.?" But a knot of her friends had swirled around her, helping her up. She stood, giggling and unsteady, and they swept her away. He saw Jack in a corner, drinking too much from a sloppily concealed flask with a redheaded cellist from the eleventh grade, but Sasha and Daniel were both absent. He remembered that Sasha was working tonight. Out in the parking lot Gavin tried to call a taxi, but half the schools in Sebastian had prom that night and the dispatcher's phone rang unanswered. He looked back at the school, at the light and the music spilling out from the gymnasium and all the girls in long dresses who weren't Anna, and he wanted very much to get away from there so he set off on foot, five miles of heat that brought him to his knees just inside the front door of his house and sent him to the hospital for a night.

"You can't do this kind of thing," Gavin's doctor told him. Gavin had had the same doctor all his life. There was a degree of mutual exasperation. "I've been treating you for heat exhaustion since you were a kid."

"Surely you don't expect him to miss his own prom," Eilo said. She'd driven down from college to be with him and had so far been his only visitor.

"I expect him not to walk five miles in hot weather," the doctor said. "You'd think he'd have figured this out by now. Have your parents arrived yet?"

"They're stuck in traffic," Eilo said, because this was easier than explaining that their father was on a business trip and their mother was most likely at home drinking. She flashed the doctor her most winning smile and left the room to deal with the discharge paperwork.

F l o r i d a w a s caught in a tropical heat wave. The air conditioner in Gavin's bedroom rattled and hummed, and when he stood by the window he felt heat radiating through the glass. Three days passed before he was well enough to go outside again, and Anna still hadn't called. Two months slipped by without her. He was leaving for New York in a matter of weeks. The quartet was a memory. Jack was still around but Daniel had left town already without saying goodbye, which was puzzling. Gavin supposed they weren't best friends, exactly, but they'd spent an enormous amount of time together and he'd thought they were fairly close. He'd known Daniel since the first grade and didn't understand why he'd disappear without saying anything. Daniel had told Jack he was going to Utah. Jack thought he'd maybe gone there to work for his uncle's construction company like he'd done the past two summers. Sasha was working days in a clothing store and nights in an ice-cream parlor.