She looked up from her macaroni, a little puzzled. “Pearl?”

“Hey, Ellen.”

“Didn’t expect to see you here.” She raised an eyebrow.

“Well…” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Just thought I’d say hi.”

She didn’t answer, just kept looking at me.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Interesting question.” A wry little smile played across her face. “So, you don’t have any friends to sit with either?”

I swallowed, feeling more or less busted. “I guess not. The rest of Nervous System were seniors. All your friends graduated too, huh?”

“Graduated?” She shook her head. “No. But no one’s back yet.”

“Not back from where?”

“Summer.” She looked around the cafeteria.

The place still hadn’t filled up. It seemed so quiet, not like the lunchtime chaos I remembered. I wondered if it had always been this spacious and peaceful in here, and if this was just another of those little summer-shifted perceptions making everything feel wrong.

But that didn’t quite make sense. Things seeming smaller every year, I could understand. But emptier?

“Well, it was a pretty feculent summer,” I said. “Between the sanitation crisis and the rats and stuff. Maybe not everyone’s back from Switzerland or wherever else they escaped to.”

Ellen finished swallowing some mac and cheese. “My friends don’t go to Switzerland in the summer.”

“Oh, right.” I shrugged, remembering how scholarship students always hung out together. “Well, Vermont, or whatever.”

She made a little sighing sound.

“Still, it’s great to be back, huh?” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re in an awfully good mood. What’s that all about? Got a new boyfriend or something?”

I laughed. “No boyfriend. But yeah, I’m really happy. The weather’s finally cooler, the subways are working this week, and I’m getting another band together.” I shrugged. “Things are going great, I guess. And…”

“And what?”

“Well, maybe there’s a boy. Not sure yet if it’s a good idea, though.”

I felt an embarrassingly nonsubtle grin growing on my face.

True, I wasn’t sure whether it was a good idea at all, but at least the downright feculence between me and Moz had finally ended.

Having a band had wrung all the resentment out of him. He never complained about our early Sunday morning rehearsals anymore, just showed up ready to play. Moz could be so amazing when he was like this—like my mom said, totally fetching—focused when he played, intense when he listened to the rest of us.

So maybe sometimes I imagined distilling that concentration down to just the two of us, putting his newfound focus to work in other ways. And maybe, writing songs in my bedroom, I occasionally had to remind myself that it wasn’t cool to jump the bones of your bandmates.

Mark and Minerva had shown me how much trouble that could cause. I’d heard he’d cracked up completely over the summer. Must be tough, losing your girlfriend and your band on the same day.

So I bit my tongue when Moz starting looking really intense and fervent, reminding myself it was for the good of the band, which was more important to me than any boy.

But that didn’t mean I never thought about it.

The band had changed Minerva too. She could be nine kinds of normal these days. Maybe she still wore dark glasses, but the thought of going out in the sun didn’t terrify her anymore. Neither did her own reflection—mirrors were her new best friends. Best of all, she loved dressing up and sneaking out to rehearsals. Her songs evolved every time we played, the formless rages slowly taking shape, bent into verses and choruses by the structure of the music.

One day soon, I figured, the words might actually start making sense.

The funny thing was, Alana Ray seemed to help Min the most. Her fluttering patterns wrapped around Minerva’s fury, lending it form and logic. I suspected that Alana Ray was guiding us all somehow, a paint-bucket-pounding guru in our midst.

I’d gone online a few times, trying to figure out what exactly her condition was. She twitched and tapped like she had Tourette’s, but she never swore uncontrollably. A disease called Asperger syndrome looked about right, except for those hallucinations. Maybe Minerva had called it during that first rehearsal, and Alana Ray was a little bit autistic, a word that could mean all kinds of stuff. But whatever her condition was, it seemed to give her some special vision into the bones of things.

So now that we had a drummer-sage and a demented Taj Mahal of a singer, the band only had two problems left: (1) we didn’t have a bass player, which I knew exactly how to fix, and (2) we still didn’t have a name…

“How does Crazy Versus Sane sound to you?” I asked Ellen.

“Pardon me?”

“For a band name.”

“Hmm,” she said. “I guess it makes sense; you’re going to be all New Sound, right?”

“Sort of, but better.”

She shrugged. “It’s a little bit trying-too-hard; the word crazy, I mean. Like in Catch-22. Anyone who tells you they’re crazy really isn’t. They’re just faking, or they wouldn’t know they were crazy.”

“Okay.” I frowned, remembering why hanging out with Ellen could be a drag sometimes. She had a tendency toward nonenthusiasm.

But then she smiled. “Don’t worry, Pearl. You’ll think of something. You playing guitar for them?”

“No, keyboards. We’ve got one too many guitarists already.”

“Too bad.” She pulled up an acoustic guitar case from the floor, sat it in the chair next to her. “Wouldn’t mind being in a band.”

I stared at the guitar. “What are you doing with that?”

She shrugged. “Gave up the cello.”

“What? But you were first chair last year!”

“Yeah, but cellos…” A long sigh. “They take too much infrastructure.”

“They do what?”

She sighed, rearranging the dishes on her tray as she spoke. “They need infrastructure. Most of the great cello works are written for orchestra. That’s almost a hundred musicians right there, plus all the craftsmen to build the instruments and maintain them and enough people to build a concert hall. And to pay for that, you’re talking about thousands of customers buying tickets every year, rich donors and government grants… That’s why only really big cities have orchestras.”

“Um, Ellen? You live in a really big city. You’re not planning to move to Alaska or something, are you?”

She shook her head. “No. But what if big cities don’t work anymore? What if you can’t stick that many people together without it falling apart? What if…” Ellen’s voice faded as she looked around the cafeteria once more.

I followed her gaze. The place still was only two-thirds full, with entire tables vacant and no line at all for food. It was like nobody had been scheduled for A-lunch.

It was starting to freak me out. Where the hell was everyone?

“What if the time for orchestras is over, Pearl?”

I let out a snort. “There’ve been orchestras for centuries. They’re part of… I don’t know, civilization.”

“Yeah, civilization. That’s the whole problem…” She touched the neck of the guitar case softly. “I was so sick of carrying that big cello around, like some dead body in a coffin. I just wanted something simple. Something I could play by the campfire, whether or not there’s any civilization around.”

A weird tingle went down my spine. “What happened to you this summer, Ellen?”

She looked up at me and, after a long pause, said, “My dad went away.”

“Oh. Crap.” I swallowed, remembering when my parents had divorced. “I’m really sorry. Like… he left your mom?”

Ellen shook her head. “Not right away. You see, someone bit him on the subway, and he… got different.”

“Bit him?” I thought of the rumors I’d heard, that some kind of rabies was spreading from the rats—that you could see people like Min on the streets now, hungry and wearing dark glasses.