The Lola Quartet Read Online Free PDF

than that ?"
       "It's no big deal."
       "Right, that's what I think." She drew savagely on her cigarette. "It's no big deal. There's another game next week and I'm going to win it back."
       "Right," he said.
       "I will miss swim team, though," she said. "That's the one thing about high school I didn't hate, that and the music."
       "Have you seen Anna around?" A week had passed since he'd left Anna and Sasha in the haze of their backyard.
       "I've seen her around school a couple times, but I haven't talked to her. I've been staying at my dad's place."
       "I think she's avoiding me."
       "The kid's a screwup," Sasha said. "I'm sorry, you know I love her, but."
       Gavin didn't know this, but he said "Sure," and made a conciliatory gesture. Everything in his life seemed awkward and graceless except the school he was entering at the end of summer. In his mind Columbia University was taking on the dimensions of the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz , a hard spired brightness on the horizon. He was going to be a different person there, someone confident and urbane who never got laughed at for wearing a fedora.
       "Sasha, is she okay? At home, I mean?"
       "Why wouldn't she be?"
       " Those bruises she gets. She'll say nothing's wrong, but come on."
       "She's anemic," Sasha said. "She forgets to take her iron pills. She bruises if you look at her funny."
       "I'm serious," he said.
       "Look," Sasha said, "she got the short end of the stick where parents are concerned, no question." Sasha flicked her cigarette butt onto the sidewalk. She drummed her fingers on the cigarette box for a moment and then lit another one. "But seriously, she can look after herself," she said. "She always has. Another year and she's out of the house."
       Gavin didn't know what to say to this, so he looked down at the sidewalk and said nothing. The day was too hot and he felt the familiar weight in his limbs, the leaden exhaustion that would turn to dizziness and then heatstroke if he didn't get indoors quickly.
       "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