The Lola Quartet Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

    T h 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