“Fresh tunes?” one said, grinning.
“Yeah, very.” I licked my lips, tasting salt there. “Things are going great.”
PART III
REHEARSALS
The Black Death had a distant twin.
At the same time the Plague of Justinian was raging across the Roman world, a great empire in South America, that of the Nazca, was also disappearing. The Nazca temples were suddenly abandoned, their cities emptied of life. Historians have no clue why this vast and sophisticated culture, thousands of miles away from plague-ridden Rome, vanished at exactly the same historical moment.
Most people haven’t heard of the Nazca, after all. That’s how thoroughly they disappeared.
It wasn’t until the 1920s that the outside world discovered their greatest legacy. Airplanes flying over the arid mountaintops of Peru spotted huge drawings scratched into the earth. Covering four hundred square miles were pictures of many-legged creatures, vast spiders, and strange human figures. Archaeologists don’t know what these drawings mean. Are they images of the gods? Or of demons? Do they tell a story?
Actually, they’re a warning.
It is often noticed how they were built to last, cut into mountaintops where rain hardly ever falls and where there’s almost zero erosion. Amazingly, they’re still clearly visible after fifteen hundred years. Whatever they’re trying to say, the message is designed to last across the centuries.
Maybe the time to read them is now.
NIGHT MAYOR TAPES:
282–287
13. MISSING PERSONS
— PEARL-
The halls of Juilliard seemed wrong on that first day back to school.
This was my fourth year here, so the place was pretty familiar by now. But things always felt strange when I returned from summer break, as if the colors had changed slightly while I was gone. Or maybe I’d grown some fraction of an inch over the last three months, shifting everything imperceptibly out of scale.
Today I couldn’t get used to how empty the hallways felt. Of course, it made sense. All my friends in Nervous System (or ex-friends, really, thanks to Minerva’s meltdown) had graduated last year, leaving the school full of acquaintances and strangers. That was what I got for hanging out with so many seniors when I was a junior.
I picked up my schedule from the front office and checked over the signs saying which classes and ensembles had been canceled due to lack of interest. No baroque instruments class this year. No jazz improv group. No chamber choir?
That was kind of lateral.
But all my planned classes were still scheduled. They made you take four years of composition and theory, after all, and my morning was full of required academics: English, trig, and the inescapable advanced biology.
So it wasn’t until lunch that I began to see how much had really changed.
The cafeteria was the biggest room at school. It doubled as a concert hall, because even fancy private schools like Juilliard couldn’t take up infinite space in the middle of Manhattan. My third-period AP bio class was just next door, prime real estate for getting to the front of the food line. Walking in ten seconds after the lunch bell, I was happy to see all the vacant tables. The familiar floury smell of macaroni and cheese à la Juilliard, one of the nonfeculent dishes here, made me smile.
Even if the System was gone, it was good to be back.
I got a trayful and looked around for anyone I could sit with, especially someone with useful musical skills. Moz and I might want to bring in backup musicians one day.
It only took a few seconds to spot Ellen Bromowitz all alone in the corner. She was in my year and a fawesome cellist, first chair in the orchestra. We’d been temporary best friends in our early freshman days, back when neither of us knew anyone else.
I took a seat across from her. Cellos could be cool, even if Ellen sort of wasn’t. Besides, there was hardly anyone else there.
She looked up from her macaroni, a little puzzled. “Pearl?”
“Hey, Ellen.”
“Didn’t expect to see you here.” She raised an eyebrow.
“Well…” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Just thought I’d say hi.”
She didn’t answer, just kept looking at me.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Interesting question.” A wry little smile played across her face. “So, you don’t have any friends to sit with either?”
I swallowed, feeling more or less busted. “I guess not. The rest of Nervous System were seniors. All your friends graduated too, huh?”
“Graduated?” She shook her head. “No. But no one’s back yet.”
“Not back from where?”
“Summer.” She looked around the cafeteria.
The place still hadn’t filled up. It seemed so quiet, not like the lunchtime chaos I remembered. I wondered if it had always been this spacious and peaceful in here, and if this was just another of those little summer-shifted perceptions making everything feel wrong.
But that didn’t quite make sense. Things seeming smaller every year, I could understand. But emptier?
“Well, it was a pretty feculent summer,” I said. “Between the sanitation crisis and the rats and stuff. Maybe not everyone’s back from Switzerland or wherever else they escaped to.”
Ellen finished swallowing some mac and cheese. “My friends don’t go to Switzerland in the summer.”
“Oh, right.” I shrugged, remembering how scholarship students always hung out together. “Well, Vermont, or whatever.”
She made a little sighing sound.
“Still, it’s great to be back, huh?” I said.
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re in an awfully good mood. What’s that all about? Got a new boyfriend or something?”
I laughed. “No boyfriend. But yeah, I’m really happy. The weather’s finally cooler, the subways are working this week, and I’m getting another band together.” I shrugged. “Things are going great, I guess. And…”
“And what?”
“Well, maybe there’s a boy. Not sure yet if it’s a good idea, though.”
I felt an embarrassingly nonsubtle grin growing on my face.
True, I wasn’t sure whether it was a good idea at all, but at least the downright feculence between me and Moz had finally ended.
Having a band had wrung all the resentment out of him. He never complained about our early Sunday morning rehearsals anymore, just showed up ready to play. Moz could be so amazing when he was like this—like my mom said, totally fetching—focused when he played, intense when he listened to the rest of us.
So maybe sometimes I imagined distilling that concentration down to just the two of us, putting his newfound focus to work in other ways. And maybe, writing songs in my bedroom, I occasionally had to remind myself that it wasn’t cool to jump the bones of your bandmates.
Mark and Minerva had shown me how much trouble that could cause. I’d heard he’d cracked up completely over the summer. Must be tough, losing your girlfriend and your band on the same day.
So I bit my tongue when Moz starting looking really intense and fervent, reminding myself it was for the good of the band, which was more important to me than any boy.
But that didn’t mean I never thought about it.