AFTER A SEVEN-HOUR SHIFT at Tres Locos, Daniel’s wrists were sore from bean scooping, pepper chopping, and burrito wrapping. On Roland’s kitchen table was an empty box for a Neumann microphone, and Daniel picked up the receipt and let out a low whistle. The mic had cost two thousand bucks. He removed the Carlough College forms, now crumpled after being in his pocket, and left them on the counter.
The couch pulled out into a bed where he slept, his backpack and guitars stashed at its feet. Roland’s roommate Adrian was either working or at school or at his girlfriend’s place, and Roland was mostly out as well, taking classes, transporting art, working on a construction crew for gallery installations, modeling for a designer friend, helping friends in other bands. Daniel sank onto the couch and took his guitar out. Despite his sore wrists, he wanted to work on a song.
He heard keys in the door, and before he could put his guitar away, Roland came in. “What are you playing?”
“Just fooling around,” Daniel said.
They looked at each other. “Listen.” Roland shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I want you to know I’m not mad or anything.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“We’d barely practiced.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Come listen to something I did today.”
Daniel sat on Roland’s bed as Roland opened Pro Tools on his computer. A line trickled out, Roland’s voice, a Psychic Hearts song. Roland pressed a button. It was the same line, but altered with plug-in effects to sound scratched up, scuzzified. Daniel didn’t get it. It was using cheesy CGI effects in a historical film, a bad vintage photo filter.
“Hutch, the Jupiter booker, is into this shit,” Roland said. “After you left last night, I ended up talking to him about the bands he’s worked with. You know he helped Jane Rust blow up, right? And Terraria. Brutal percussion, guitars in overdrive. Now they’re huge. I’m thinking Psychic Hearts should go in this direction.”
“You want to change the band for Hutch?”
“I want to play Jupiter. I want to get signed.”
“What about your own music? You don’t even care?”
Roland shrugged. “Art evolves.”
“Oh, give me a fucking break.”
“We don’t have to.” Roland hit pause. “But we should.”
“It’s not like Hutch is going to book us after last night anyway.”
“Nah, I talked to him. And Javier’s playing a show in a few weeks, nothing big, but we can have one of the opening slots.”
“With the new sound. That Hutch likes.”
“Yeah, of course.”
Still, Daniel was closer to it than ever before. The oldest burrito wrapper at Tres Locos, a red-haired white guy named Evan who dropped frequent mentions about how New York had been so much cooler and more dangerous in the nineties, was thirty-six and still trying to get his band off the ground. Daniel had gone to see Evan open for four other acts on a Tuesday night, and the guy could barely sing. At work today, when Daniel mentioned he’d played the loft party, omitting the part where he had run away, Evan had said, “Get the hell out of here” and plopped down a spoonful of pintos with such force, bean juice had splattered his chest. If Psychic Hearts played Jupiter, he would be sure to invite Evan. In high school, Roland used to tell the other kids, “You have to see Daniel play,” and if they did a show and no one said anything Daniel would fall into a funk, consider tossing his guitar in the trash. But when people called him amazing he basked in it, couldn’t sleep, reviewing the compliments over and over in his mind.
He wanted to be complimented again, to be called amazing. “Okay,” he said. “The new sound.”
“We should record at Thad’s studio, the one that does cassette demos. This summer, after we have a few more songs. Or even before.” Roland had ferried a crate of his parents’ old eighties tapes down from Ridgeborough, the ones he and Daniel had once studied like they’d been unearthed from a Paleolithic cave and were now as bewilderingly valuable as the rarest, most pristine vinyl. Daniel had to admit there was an oddly comforting quality about tape’s crusty, decaying sound, a sincerity, a depth that digital couldn’t reach.
“Sure,” he said. This summer, he would be going to classes at Carlough, living in his old room in Ridgeborough. He wouldn’t be playing music at all.
“Where’d your parents go, to a hotel?”
“They went home.” By now they would be back in that big, cold house, reading in bed. He fiddled with his sweatshirt. “Oh, I got a strange e-mail a while back. From this guy I’d grown up with, when I lived with my mother—my birth mom. Before I came to Ridgeborough.”
“What did it say?”
“He said he had something to tell me about my mom. I didn’t write him back, but I’m a little curious.”
Daniel knew what Roland’s response would be before he even said it.
“Don’t do it. You’ll regret it.” On the topic of parental ghosts, Roland was dependable, unwavering. His own father had died when Roland was too young to remember, and he’d never shown interest in learning more. Daniel craved Roland’s decisiveness for himself. He had always wished he could be so sure.
HE PICKED UP THE Carlough application forms and put them back down. He returned to his guitar, played the refrain that had been bouncing around earlier, reshaped it, scribbled a few lines, then pictured Kay’s face, teary, as he told her he had found out what happened to his real mom. The song slipped away. Thinking of his mother brought a low, persistent ache in a spot he could never get to. He put his guitar away and picked up his laptop. Just a quick search; Peter and Kay would never know. In junior high, he had done these searches every few months, until the urge to know more had fallen away. He had stopped searching after realizing he was averting his gaze while scrolling through the results, relieved to never find the right one. Not knowing more excused him from having to change the life he had gotten accustomed to, and it had been years since he had searched for Michael Chen—Michael’s name had always been too popular, with nearly half a million results—or Polly Guo, or Guo Peilan, in English or even in Chinese characters, which never brought up anything matching his mother. He had never found the right Leon or Vivian Zheng.
But tonight he typed in “Michael Chen” and “Columbia” and pulled up a website for a university biology lab, scrolled down the page and saw Michael’s name and a headshot of a lanky guy, smug and happy in a dark shirt. Michael’s face was longer and he didn’t wear glasses anymore, but Daniel could see the kid version there, the wide-eyed ten-year-old who would go anywhere with him, the closest thing he’d ever had to a brother. Someone who had known Deming.
He shut the laptop screen as if it were on fire. If Michael had information about his mother, it wouldn’t change the fact that she had left him. Roland was right. There was no need to stir up bad memories.
He paced the living room, the kitchen, toyed with the box for the microphone, imagined Roland onstage at Jupiter as he sat in a college lecture hall. He couldn’t make Roland and Peter and Kay happy at the same time, but he might as well try.
Three