Finding Abbey Road

To the exiles . . .

10:18 a.m.

I hold my breath.

Don't dare say more.

Stopping time with my lungs.

Afraid of what comes next.

Beyond our safe place in the shadow of a metal sun, the universe continues to expand. There are some galaxies so far from us, heading in the opposite direction, that we will never see their light. Whole parts of the universe we will never even glimpse. There is also an entire galaxy on a collision course with ours.

All of this is beyond us. There is so much we'll never even know. So little we can control.

“Fuck,” says Caleb quietly. He flips the navy blue guitar pick between his fingers. Its gold lettering catches the light reflecting off the sun.

Regent Sounds.

A guitar shop in London.

A pick dropped on the floor in a basement club in New York City, three days ago. Dropped when its owner fled the scene. It's been in my pocket, a burning secret, since then.

Caleb's breakfast burrito sits on the grass between us, half-eaten. I should have let him eat a little more before I told him. If I were him, and I just got this news, it would be the end of food for the day. He tears off a corner of the foil wrapping and balls it up between his fingers. Shoots it out onto the sidewalk. It spins out sunlight like a disco ball, a tiny falling star.

A far comet.

I allow myself to exhale. Risk taking his hand. He's going to freak out, any second now. . . . And he has every right to.

It's not every morning that you find out your long-dead father is actually alive.

I try to keep from asking dumb questions.

Are you okay?
Of course he's not.

What are you thinking?
A million things, obviously.

Caleb stares into the distance between us. He seems stuck, like his brain is overloaded, too many thoughts at once, the little wheel spinning. I see his chest moving, rapid breaths, his lovely eyes flicking, eyelids battered by storm clouds.

Finally, his thumb starts to rub the back of my hand.

“Tell me again.”

“Your dad is alive,” I say. “Eli . . . is in London. I don't know how. But I saw him.”

Caleb nods. He sits there frozen for another few seconds and then those dark eyes find me. “Thank you.”

“For what? Ruining your day, your year—”

He manages a sort-of smile. “All that was already ruined. Thank you for telling me.”

I lean over and wrap my arms around him. “I'm so sorry.” I feel him collapse against my shoulder. I can't even imagine what this is like for him. I kiss him gently, then harder. . . . In spite of everything, his lips are as soft as ever and I want him to know that I am here for him, right now, that we are unbreakable, a perfect fit. . . .

But after a second, he pulls back. “It's okay. Actually . . . it's fine.”

“Tell me.”

He sighs. “I don't know, it's like, all my life I've been living with this weird ghost. It was right in the corner of my eye, but I couldn't quite see it. When I found out Eli's identity, and the ghost got a name, a face, and a past, that just made it worse. The emptiness I used to feel became this hole. . . . And now? I don't even know. A part of me always hoped he might be alive, might be out there somewhere, even though I knew that was impossible. I never wanted to admit that. I knew it was stupid . . .”

“Not stupid. And, apparently not impossible.”

“I wish I'd seen him.”

“I wish you had, too,” I say. “If Jason hadn't shown up . . .”

This is the part that kills me the most. So many things happened last Friday night in New York. The whole day had already been crazy enough: We followed a note from Eli White that led us to his old guitar at the Hard Rock Cafe. We thought we'd find his third lost song there, but the guitar was empty . . . and then Jon defected to join stupid Ethan Myers's band, Postcards from Ariel, and Val's mom and boyfriend showed up at the gig, and Matt got punched and Val ran off and pretty much everything was shattered.

Caleb went after Val. Randy took Matt to the hospital, and so I was alone when the mysterious texts started coming in, pointing me toward a club called Ten Below Zero, with the promise of finding Eli's final song. Time was short. I took off without waiting. . . .

Typical Summer. If I had just waited for Caleb, we could have gotten to Ten Below together, both seen Eli White alive and onstage, and Caleb could have met his father . . .

Or maybe if I waited it would have been too late, and he would have already been gone. There was so little time.

So instead, it was just me. Watching Eli White as he sat on stage, hunched over a guitar, playing a song from beyond the grave. And then Jason Fletcher showed up, and Eli pulled his vanishing act before he could be recognized by anyone but me.

For three days I've been carrying this secret, wondering what to do with it, whether it would hurt Caleb more or less if he knew the truth.

But he was already hurt.

He deserved to know.

We crossed the country, risked our band and our futures, probably lost both. Sure, we have two of Eli's three lost songs, but that no longer feels nearly as important as the fact that we almost had
him
. And all we have left now is a location:

London.

That's where Eli is. At least, I'm pretty sure.

“So,” says Caleb, “now what?”

As always, that is the question.

“I don't know,” I say. “Go back to fourth period?” It feels so lame. Here we are, outside the bounds of time and space. It's hard to even remember that it's just a Monday in February and we are supposed to be in class. How can we possibly just go back to everything as usual?

Caleb smiles, but only for a second. Then he's dead serious again. “We have to find him.”

I get out my phone. “I'll try our mystery lead again. . . .”

I send a text to that same phone number that led me to Eli. The same unknown person who delivered Eli's old guitar case to Caleb's door on Christmas Day.

Summer: Caleb knows. We want to get in touch with Eli.

“How did he do it?” Caleb wonders. He picks up his
burrito, takes a halfhearted bite, then drops it on the grass again.

“You mean Eli? How'd he fake his death? I have no idea.”

That's been eating at me, too. It seems like kind of a massively huge deal to erase yourself like Eli did. Like something you'd need help to pull off. Not just actually faking a drowning, but connections to get out of the country, money . . . all that cinematic stuff.

“I went back to the Wikipedia page,” I say. “There's no mention of whether Eli's body was ever found. I always just assumed it was, or there would have been a story there. The article in the
LA Times
from when it happened says that his wallet was found on the Santa Monica pier, his car was in the lot, and his shirt was found washed ashore a few miles down the beach the next morning. At that time the search was still ongoing. But then there's never any mention of a body.”

My phone buzzes:

(424) 828-3710: That's not possible. I'm sorry. Too risky.

I show the text to Caleb.

He laughs and stares into the grass, the computer overloaded again, but then he nods to himself. “Tell whoever that is that if he doesn't help us, we're going public with the songs, and about Eli being alive, all of it. We'll call CNN or
Rolling Stone
or whoever will listen.”

It lifts my spirits to hear him say this. To want to fight.
But I still have to ask: “Would you really want to do that?”

Caleb shrugs. “Why not? He owes us, doesn't he? Don't I have the right to talk to my own father, who's been avoiding me my whole life?”

I kiss him. “Yes, you do.”

“So then if he won't make the choice, we'll make it for him. Don't you think?”

“Definitely.”

Summer: If you don't help us, we're going public with everything.

(424) 828-3710: Aren't you supposed to be in class right now?

Summer: Not a priority today.

(424) 828-3710: Are you even at school?

Summer: We're serious. Please help us.

. . .

“What's he saying?” Caleb asks. He's taken out his phone and started texting. I want to ask who with, but I resist. I don't want to be the girlfriend who's in every inch of his business (even though I want to be), especially not today.

“Waiting . . .”

(424) 828-3710: Ok listen: go to the athletics hall at school. Trophy case by the gym doors. Bottom left corner. See what you find. I'll be in touch shortly.

“Weird.” I hold out the phone so Caleb can read. He doesn't look up for a second, still finishing a text, and I fight
another urge to know who with.

Then he reads my phone. “What does that mean?”

“I don't know,” I say.

“Well, let's go,” says Caleb, standing. “We can't stay here all day, and there is no way I'm going to sit through my classes.”

We stand and leave our oasis beneath the metal sun, the spot where Caleb first told me about Eli. We pass the spot on the sidewalk where I first kissed him, which seemed so obvious in the moment and crazy in hindsight and like two years ago now.

Every step feels odd. A little dizzy. Like, who knows where we are heading now?

I finish my burrito as we walk. It's a warm day even for LA in February, sweat between my shoulder blades and behind my knees. Part of me misses that biting cold in Chicago and New York last week, being wrapped in layers. Or maybe I miss being wrapped in certainty. There was something about that road trip. We had purpose, a mission. We were off the grid, space travelers with velocity. Now we're back and I feel adrift and exposed.

When I throw away my wrapper, Caleb tosses out the rest of his burrito. He shoves his hands in his pockets. I reach for his arm, holding him by the elbow. He is still distant, shell-shocked. I want him back, present, arm around me, a kiss even, but of course he's withdrawn. I try to imagine what it would be like to have your world change so much in
these singular bursts, all over the course of six months:

Your mom sitting you down and revealing who your dad actually was . . .

Your dad speaking to you through tapes from beyond the grave . . .

Finding out that grave is actually empty.

10:41 a.m.

We walk silently back through the mall toward school. Everyone seems fake to me today: moms in their yoga pants with their expensive strollers; business types in their crisp folds talking at full volume into earpieces like they are the most important objects in the universe. I want to lash out at them and tell them, Wake up! Not everybody is living in your little bubble of self-satisfaction. Not everything is so perfect.

But maybe I'm just feeling wounded.

The moment I got back from New York City I was grounded for the lies surrounding my Stanford interview. That's a whole other thing. I was offered an interview and ditched it, telling my parents that it actually happened. Who does that? Me, apparently. Which leads me to wonder who exactly I am these days. The two versions, who I want to be versus who my parents want me to be, feeling more and more different.

Of course the interview ended up working out, through
no fault of my own. The interviewer, Andre, called my house when another available time came up, only I was on the way to New York when he called. Whoops. I guess I could have defied my parents further, refused to fly home when they caught me . . . but then what? It would be kind of ridiculous to run away, to live like Val. Compared to her life, I should probably be whistling happily along. So how come I don't feel that way?

Since I got back, I've been feeling furious at my parents and the interview, even mocking Andre with his list of questions.

“How do you picture yourself impacting the Stanford campus?”

Like a success supernova!

Like an android my parents built.

Like brooding dark matter . . .

Actually he was a pretty cool guy. And side note: I probably nailed the interview. I might well be this strange and precious “
Stanford material
” that Dad dreams about, in spite of myself.

And then when I'm not feeling angry, I'm racked with guilt: for letting down my parents, for lying and being irresponsible, even though I don't actually believe in the very expectations that I'm supposedly
not
living up to.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not their Catherine at all anymore. But is Summer a liar, a coward? I feel like if I was somehow a better version of me, I could be both. I don't
know why I can't pull off being what they want and also what I want. Maybe some stronger version of me could make my parents see the value in
my
version, the value in Summer and her dreams, without having to lie, to hide myself from them.

Maybe I could have been more honest with them this winter, this whole last year, not just about my interview, but also my uncertainty about what I really want to do next year. I could have really put it on the table for them and explained why managing Dangerheart is so important to me.

But I also know my parents. They don't make it quite that easy. Then again, have I ever given them the chance?

It doesn't help that the future of Summer hinges on a band that is currently scattered in fragments. Caleb and Matt are the only members who are even at school today. Jon is getting home this afternoon, according to his posts, but he played two more shows with Postcards from Ariel and is flying back with them. I'm not sure he could even be called a band member at this point.

And worst of all, we still have no idea where Val is. I know Caleb and Charity have tried getting in touch with her. I've sent texts to no reply. I keep thinking she'll resurface, if for no other reason than she knows Jason Fletcher, the scout at Candy Shell Records, is expecting an answer from us today. He offered us a huge record deal, on one condition: we turn over the tapes of Eli's lost
songs. Can we possibly do that?