“Dawn has disappeared.”

“What?”

“Nobody’s seen her since last Tuesday. Her roommates reported her missing yesterday, and the police were all over the dorms last night. They talked to me for a long time.”

Angelica has joined me at breakfast before the last book group of winter quarter. She rarely eats in the cafeteria, but now she’s nursing a coffee and nibbling on some toast.

“Holy shit. That’s awful!”

“I just thought, I don’t know . . . she takes off sometimes. She goes home to Seattle a lot, and not just on weekends. When she didn’t show up at the concert, I figured that’s what she must have done. She’s been having a hard time with school, and focusing on anything. I think PORTALS is too broad and amorphous for her.”

“What does that mean again? PORTALS?”

“Personalized Options Reaching Toward Affective Learning Skills.”

“Yikes.”

“Yeah, how Evergreen is that? It’s kind of all over the map, a lot of random reading and writing assignments, lectures, a film series. She hasn’t been able to decide on a subject for her individual project, which she’s supposed to have started by now. She’s kind of gotten into witchcraft and the occult, Madame Blavatsky, that kind of thing, and she wanted to do a paper on this Russian spiritualist P.D. Ouspensky, but her adviser thought it was a bad idea. I don’t know why.”

“What do the police think happened to her?”

“I don’t know. They won’t tell me anything. Her roommates assumed she had gone to Seattle. But then one of them realized she hadn’t taken her big winter raincoat with her—it was still hanging behind the door of her room—and when they looked around her room, they found her backpack and flute, and some other things she probably would have taken with her. They called her parents in Seattle, but they hadn’t heard from her in weeks, so that’s when they called the police.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Monday night, a week ago. Nobody has seen her since she left for the concert on Tuesday. One of her roommates helped her decide what to wear. I saved her a seat, but she never showed up, as far as anyone can tell. I was pissed off about it. I wanted her to hear us sing. I thought she’d dig it.”

The concert had been a success for Alma’s band and Lulu’s trio. We played the Webern piece and the weird “Blackberry Blossom,” and the audience’s response had been positive. But later I realized that not a single one of my friends, including Alma and her band, ever said anything to me about our performance. It was as if it never happened.

I sat with Jenny for the main jazz band set, and she had been flush with excitement about her performance with Alma. But she never said anything about Lulu’s trio, or acknowledged that I had also just performed. At the time, I was so happy to be sitting next to her—huddled together, holding hands, in public—that I didn’t think much about it. But a few days later, after discovering that Walt, Sally, and Eric had also been at the concert, but never said a word about the music I’d played with Lulu, I started to wonder. Did they think what we did was bad or weird but were too polite to say anything about it? Did they think my oddball, “out” version of “Blackberry Blossom” was pretentious, or just stupid?

There’s a bluegrass band in New York called Country Cooking that has put out a couple albums of modern bluegrass instrumentals. Mr. Emerson played some cuts from one of their records for us one day, and I borrowed the album so I could listen to the whole thing. The band is cool—inventive, intense, and exciting—and all the players are excellent, especially the guitar player. But the consensus among Walt, Sally, and even Eric, who is anything but a trad diehard, is that they are trying too hard to be weird, that being weird is not what bluegrass is all about. Maybe they had the same reaction to what Lulu, Sofía, and I did, although what we did couldn’t be called bluegrass. If Lulu hadn’t introduced the “Blackberry Blossom” thing by name, there would have been no indication our performance had anything to do with bluegrass or fiddle music.

“Have you and Dawn been on good terms?”

“Pretty much. I thought so. It’s been off-and-on. Sometimes we don’t see each other for a few days or more. She’s kind of a night owl and parties a lot, she rarely spends the night in my room. I don’t think she’s cheating on me, but I’m pretty sure she’s more into drugs than she lets on. She hangs out at one of the party pads in ASH, sometimes all night. I think that’s one reason she goes to Seattle so much: to see an old high school friend who I’m pretty sure is a dealer. She’s definitely a pothead, and I don’t have a problem with that, but she might also be into harder stuff, maybe bennies, maybe coke. I’m really afraid that she’s a go-between for the party pads in ASH and her friend in Seattle. She always has a little more cash on her than I would expect, considering her parents aren’t particularly well off. Her mom’s an elementary school teacher and her dad’s some kind of office manager. Dawn says they’re always on her case about money.”

“Did you tell the police about the dealer friend?”

“No.”

“Why not? Couldn’t that have something to do with her disappearing?”

“It’s not like it’s some kind of Mafia thing, and I’m not going to rat out her friend with no evidence. It’s just a guess. I have no idea if he’s really a dealer. If I get her friend busted and she shows up tomorrow, I might as well forget about ever seeing her again. Plus, I don’t even know if the name she gave me for him is real. Once she called him ‘Tony’ and once it was ‘Tommy.’”

“Why would she make that up?”

“I don’t know. She was probably high, or confused. Anyway, I told the police where she hangs out in ASH. If they talk to those jokers, they’ll figure out pretty quick they’re druggies.”

“I’m so sorry, Angelica. But she’ll turn up, probably wondering what everyone’s all freaked out about.”

“Oh, god, I don’t know if I can . . .”

She stares into her coffee cup, which is still almost full. I reach to touch her shoulder, but she leans away to avoid my grasp, not looking up, not acknowledging my feeble, silent attempt to console her.

“Are you sure you want to go to book group?” I say. “You can skip it, you know. I’ll tell Mr. Coleman what’s going on.”

This seems to rouse her, the realization that she has something to do, somewhere to be. She raises her head and looks around and past me, as if longing for someone else, hoping to see another approaching behind me. But seeing no one, she snaps to.

“It’s the last meeting of the quarter, right? I should be there. Maybe it’ll take my mind off this. If I just stew at home, I’ll drive myself crazy imagining all the horrible things that could have happened to her.”

“What about rehearsal? Are we still on for this afternoon?”

“Yeah. The concert is Wednesday. We need another rehearsal and today’s our only chance.”

“Lucas?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Did you hear my question?”

“Sorry, no. I was thinking about something else, sorry.”

I glance at Angelica, although Dawn’s disappearance isn’t the only thing drawing my mind away from the discussion. After the group’s disenchantment with USA, which I’m guessing nobody finished (I gave up after the first thirty or forty pages of the second volume, 1919), Mr. Coleman suggested we find other twentieth-century American novels or short stories to read that had something to do with music, or that shed some light on music and American culture. He gave us a long list of suggestions, some of which were in the college bookstore and some of which were in the Library, and today we’ve been talking about what we’ve read.

Gabe talked at length about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. He had issues with some of it, especially the weird political organization that dominates the second half, but his report made me want to check it out. Shelley read Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, though it isn’t fiction—she seemed to be unclear on the assignment—and while she said she loved Didion’s writing, she was annoyed at the book’s anti-counterculture slant, which also intrigued me. I made a note to ask Shelley if I could borrow it.

I’m conflicted about the assignment and haven’t said anything yet. I read a few things that might be applicable: the Don DeLillo book that Marty lent me, Great Jones Street; an Ishmael Reed book I borrowed from Gabe, Mumbo Jumbo; and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, which I found in the bookstore, a required text for another program. But I don’t feel inspired or qualified to talk about any of them. Great Jones Street, ostensibly about a musician, is really more about drugs and fame, two subjects I have little interest in. I get annoyed that drugs and music always get conflated, and I tire of hearing about drugs and addiction, although maybe it’s just a nagging feeling that my sobriety may eventually bar me from any creative music scene. I liked Mumbo Jumbo—a cryptic, discursive novel about various weird organizations trying to suppress the rise of Afro-American culture in the 1920s—but I had no idea what was going on most of the time. I enjoyed it in the way I enjoy music that I don’t understand, taking in the sounds and the way everything interacts, or, in the case of books, the words and the images they convey, without worrying about what it all means, what the message is supposed to be.

All three books are imbued with a kind of libertarian paranoia, a fear of unseen forces controlling society, which I have some sympathy for. It makes for good fiction, but I think it’s ultimately a copout. Granted, it’s easier, and more fun, to imagine some secret, quasi-religious organization or underground, obscenely wealthy grand vizier controlling the workings of society than accept that our creeping dystopia is self-inflicted.

“I asked whether you wanted to share anything with us about what you’ve been reading?” Mr. Coleman says to me.

“Right. Yeah, I read a few things, but I don’t feel ready to talk about any of them, if that’s OK?”

“Well, as this is our last meeting for the quarter, if you don’t want to talk about what you read, I’d like you to write something for me.”

“OK, I can do that.”

“Angelica?”

“Yeah?” she responds, raising her gaze from the spot on the floor she’s been studying for the last few minutes.

“Do you have anything you want to talk about?” His question is vaguely phrased, and I wonder if he knows about Dawn.

“No, I don’t think I can . . . Oh, a book, you mean?”

“What else would I mean?”

“I thought maybe . . . Um, I’m sorry, yeah, I . . .”

“Angelica’s been going through some heavy shit,” Gabe says. Angelica must have told him about Dawn. “Maybe we can cut her some slack.”

“It’s OK, Gabe,” Angelica says. “Maybe we should talk about it, in case anyone knows anything.”

“Knows anything about what?” Mr. Coleman says.

“My girlfriend, Dawn, disappeared, about a week ago, after the jazz concert, or before . . . We don’t really know.”

“I’m sorry, Angelica. I did hear about that,” Mr. Coleman says. “I didn’t know she was your friend, though. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s OK,” Angelica says.

The room remains darkly quiet for a few minutes until Gabe breaks the silence.

“So, if anyone knows anything about Dawn, or has seen her in the last week, you should contact campus security. Right, Angelica?”

“Yeah, or the Thurston County Sheriff’s office, I think. But uh, yeah, Evergreen security is . . .” Angelica stops abruptly, and her gaze returns to the ground.

“Angelica, if you want to talk to me about it, I have some time after our meeting today,” Mr. Coleman says. “Or, I can put you in touch with a counselor.” Angelica nods, but doesn’t respond.

“Since we still have some time this morning, maybe we should talk about what we’re going to be doing Spring quarter,” Mr. Coleman says.

“I think I do want to talk about something I read,” Angelica says, suddenly, raising her head. “The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. My mom gave it to me. It might be too hard to talk about right now, I don’t know. But . . .”

“That’s OK. Just say whatever you want. Take your time,” Mr. Coleman says.

“There’s one thing I’ve been trying to hold in my mind. There’s this character, an awful man, actually. He doesn’t know his father and his mother abandoned him, and he’s endured some awful, crazy-ass shit. And he does some terrible things to his daughter, who is the main character, or one of them. It’s kind of relentless, and pretty hard to take at times. Especially, if you’ve . . . Anyway, the author says something I’ve been thinking about, something about music. She says that maybe the only way you can express the kind of horrible things this guy’s gone through—the depth of suffering, all the random, inexplicable horrors in his life—is through music. That only a musician could make sense of it. I don’t have the quote here, but it’s about connecting and expressing the pieces of your life through music, what she calls the ‘black and white rectangles’ and the ‘taut skins and strings echoing from wooden corridors.’ I love that. She says that only a musician would realize that having to endure the horrors of a life like that would give you, ironically, a sense of freedom. It took me a while to understand that, because the freedom this man had—this feeling that it didn’t matter what he did anymore, right or wrong, good or bad—left him free to molest and abuse his daughter, which is the main source of the tragedy in the book. But that idea of using music to make sense of all the crazy shit and weird pockets of your life that maybe you don’t want to try to make sense of, because they’re too difficult to think about, let alone do anything about, and that you really just want to forget about, that all you want to do is to run off and get wasted or stoned or fuck someone . . . or fuck someone up or . . .”

Angelica’s voice breaks. The room is silent. She seems to want to continue, the resonance of her words still lingering in the air, unfinished. Maybe she’s run out of words, or maybe she’s embarrassed by her naked display of emotion, though I’ve never known her to shy from stark emotional honesty. But this is different. This is personal, knowable, recent pain. Everyone in the room is too stunned to say anything. Maybe they’re in awe of her eloquence in the face of such deep sadness and confusion, and are waiting, politely, for her to continue, if she can, if she wants to. Maybe they’re too uncomfortable with the raw, almost physical, emotion hanging in the room.

Finally, Angelica looks around the room, her eyes unfocused yet fiery, defiant.

“Anyway, it’s a great book. I recommend it.”

I smile, glad to see in her something other than self-pity and sadness. Her emotional strength will have to assert itself if she’s going to come through this. Whatever “this” turns out to be.

“Why is this so hard? It worked last time.”

Angelica glances at me and then turns away. We’ve just finished a run-through of “Cold Blue Steel” with the new groove Charlie and Gabe adapted from Little Feat, but it’s not working. The rhythm doesn’t gel, and Angelica is having trouble fitting the song’s irregularly phrased lyrics into our ragged groove. She has abandoned the guitar, since the part we had worked out for her doesn’t fit the new groove, but she’s still struggling. I missed the band’s last rehearsal—Lulu talked someone in the Evergreen recording studio into recording our version of “Blackberry Blossom,” and the time slot they gave us conflicted with Angelica’s regular Wednesday afternoon band rehearsal.

“Can you play your thing?” Charlie asks me. I play the part I worked out with Gabe’s help a couple of rehearsals ago.

“That should work,” Charlie says, and Gabe nods in agreement.

“But it’s two different feels, it’s like two different songs,” Angelica says.

“What do you mean?” Charlie says.

“I can sing it with you three”—she nods at Charlie, Gabe, and Alma, who is playing electric piano—“and I can sing it with Lucas,”—we tried it at our last guitar lesson, Angelica singing while I played my new rhythm part on acoustic guitar—“but when we put it all together, it doesn’t work.”

Nobody says anything. It feels like they all know that I’m the problem, but nobody is willing to say it.

“Maybe we should come back to it later,” Alma says.

“It’s not going to get any better,” Gabe mumbles. I hope I’m the only one who heard him.

“Let’s try ‘Pecola’s Eyes.’” Angelica says. This is one of her new songs. It started out as a Bessie Smith–style classic blues, but has since been transformed, like “Cold Blue Steel,” into a funky groove tune. The groove Charlie and Gabe came up with is based on Edwin Starr’s “War,” but “Pecola’s Eyes” has a more complex chord progression and melody. I’m supposed to play a James Brown–style rhythm part and then solo on a simple minor-key vamp. I’m not comfortable with the spiky, syncopated part I’m supposed to play, in part because I haven’t been practicing Angelica’s songs much outside of band practice. I’m using Ezra’s Starfire guitar on everything now, but it spends most of the time between rehearsals in the closet in my dorm room. I don’t have an amp, and the Starfire sounds stupid and lifeless without one, so I practice with my acoustic. That means that once I get to band rehearsal, I have to adjust to the feel of the electric guitar all over again, especially when the volume gets cranked up, which is most of the time now that the grooves have gotten funkier: more R&B, less folk-rock.

I’m frustrated with my inability to lock in with Gabe and Charlie, and as my confidence dwindles away to nothing, I play a horrible, disjointed guitar solo, which should be the easiest thing I have to do in this band. My lame playing doesn’t affect Angelica’s singing this time, but everyone knows the song is not working, and a heavy stillness follows our last notes.

“Well, you know what they say,” Alma says, breaking the silence, “A lousy rehearsal means it’ll be a great gig!”

“Let’s hope so,” Gabe says, frowning.

I feel bad for Angelica. After the last rehearsal, she told me she was pleased with how the band was sounding. I noted, however, that I hadn’t been a member of the band she praised. But I hoped I would be able to fit in unobtrusively at the next rehearsal: this one.

I was wrong.

It’s about time for Gabe to leave for his weekly bass lesson on campus, and I need to get a ride back with him. If Jenny was here, I would stay and hitch a ride with Angelica later, but I feel sheepish about hanging out at Willowberry without Jenny, especially since staying would effectively mean inviting myself to dinner.

The dismal rehearsal isn’t entirely my fault. Angelica forgot a few lyrics and missed a couple of cues, but this is forgivable, almost expected, considering her emotional state. A better showing from the rest of us might have picked up her spirits, though. After another, only marginally improved, run-through of “Pecola’s Eyes,” she wanders off toward the house without saying goodbye, leaving Gabe and me to pack up in silence.

As I slide into the passenger side of Gabe’s car, a Volkswagen van he’s borrowed from his roommate, he reaches into the back seat, grabs a cassette, and tosses it into my lap: James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, Vol II.

“Here, listen to that . . . a lot,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s wrong?” I ask.

“With me?”

“No, with me, with my guitar playing.”

“I don’t know exactly. It sounds like you’re pushing too hard. You need to lean back on the beat, not punch into the next one. Maybe it’s all that bluegrass you’re into, maybe it’s just cause you’re white.”

“Well, that’s . . .”

“I’m kidding . . . kind of. I don’t know. Charlie and I lock in to those feels pretty easily, and you just . . . don’t. I don’t know why. It’s not that you have bad time, you have . . . a different sense of time. You feel the groove in a different way, maybe because of the music you grew up with, I don’t know.”

“That could be, I guess.” I’m trying not to get offended and just listen to what he’s saying, find something in his words that could be useful, but it’s not easy. It’s not much fun to be told I’m just an unfunky white boy with bad time, or rather, “different” time. But maybe it’s inevitable. He’s right. The background music of my early life was anything but funky. I’ve listened to way too much radio pop and clunky white rock, and while bluegrass may be influenced by black music, it’s not black music. It makes we wonder what I’m doing in this band. This will be the first James Brown album I’ve ever listened to. Maybe it will help, as long as I can keep my roommate Eddie from complaining. He hates On the Corner.

As if reading my mind, Gabe says, “So, yeah, listen to that, not On the Corner.”

“Wait, why not?”

“On the Corner is pretty happening, I dig it, but there’s something manufactured about it. There’s too much going on—the groove just disappears sometimes. Listen to JB. JB is the shit, and he always has great guitar players. Not great like ‘flashy solos great,’ but just perfect feel and groove. You know, the stank you feel in your bones. But also, it’s like . . . you have to know how to fry an egg before you try to make a soufflé.”

NEXT: Chapter 20: April 14: Fiddling