I get a second wind as I head to lunch. Today, we’re allowed to eat out in the east courtyard, where the kickoff is happening.

At Mount Hope High, most things—econ classes, cafeterias, athletic fields—look like the ones at any other budget-strapped public school. It’s when you enter the east courtyard that things start to look different. You walk out of doors off the cafeteria and find yourself in an actual stone amphitheater: curved seating that steps down to a half-moon stage. It looks like something out of ancient Greece, but aside from the yes-these-are-actually-stone seats, the stage and lights and sound system are all state of the art.

Welcome to the Don Henley performance stage. Yes, that Don Henley. His kid went here a while back. But that kind of thing is normal at Mount Hope High.

Fifteen years ago, Mount Hope was a normal high school, but then a band from here called Allegiance to North happened. There was all this press, including a big article in Spin. In that article, the members of the band, Eli White, Kellen McHugh, Parker Francis, and Miles Ellison, happened to mention a curious fact: their assistant principal, Mr. Abrams, had allowed them to practice after school in a classroom, and even gave them credits for a class he invented called Applied Popular Art, to make up for their less-than-model academic performance in virtually every other area.

Next thing you knew, Mr. Abrams was the principal, and parents from all over LA, especially former rockers, started moving to Mount Hope so their kids could go here. Now, PTA meetings are like a leather fashion show. And the money pours in for Mr. Abrams’s brainchild: Popular Arts Academy.

As a result, if you play football at Mount Hope, you can be part of one of the lamest programs in Southern California, but if you play guitar, you can take a class called the Physics of Volume, which is held in the Amp Lab, an acoustically perfect room that houses a wall of classic and modern amplifiers worth so much money it requires a twenty-four-hour guard. And there’s just as much for bass, drums, vocals, keyboards, songwriting, recording, video shoots, and management. This school literally rocks.

One of the annual traditions is the kickoff concert, held during the lunch periods in the amphitheater. The bands have been playing for probably an hour already when I arrive, working up from freshmen to senior. As I head in, there’s a decent group with a girl singer on piano called the Progress Reports.

“Summer!” It’s Maya again, up in the back row, waving two notches more enthusiastically then she needs to. We’re both in the industry track of PopArts, which has classes and its own student-run record label called Lion’s Den. (Our school mascot is a lion, and the label’s logo is a lion in a cave kicking back, paws behind his head with big headphones on. Corny? Yes. Kinda cool? I think so.)

You can also get internships at real labels. I was all set to have one last summer at Candy Shell, but after things happened, I backed out. Maya took my place, and she was cute and asked my permission, which I obviously gave. I even managed to do so without offering her any dark jaded comments like Watch your back.

As I make my way to her, I pass within orbit of a group of five girls. There is a lull in their conversation, but not one long enough for exchanging hellos. I suppose I could have forced it, but Callie, Alex, Beatrice, Melanie, and Jenna resume talking before any of us has a chance. Once upon a time, three years ago, they all shared a birthday booth with me at Burrita Feminista. Now they sit in a pentagon across two steps, all long legs and perfect hair.

We were thick as thieves back in middle school, and even into the breakwater of high school, but out in the deep, I lost them. By the end of sophomore year, we barely spoke. There were serious riptides pulling us in different directions: athletics, boys, and student senate for them, and music and then managing Postcards for me.

But something bigger happened, too. If we check the records, we’ll see that technically, I stopped calling first. Partly it was an accident of being really busy with Postcards. But maybe it was also a little bit because I sensed this slow-motion way that all of them were morphing into their parents: the looks, the gestures, the beliefs. I started to feel like I could see the future versions of them, someday pulling up to Mount Hope in a woefully fuel-inefficient crossover SUV, dropping off their kids while dressed for morning yoga. It’s the version of me that I refuse to let happen.

Of course lately I’ve wondered: What exactly will I be doing? If you’d asked me last spring I would have said sitting in a cool loft office in New York City, managing my small but visionary roster of bands. Now? I might avoid your question.

I’m just past them when there’s a unison peal of laughter, and I think, Don’t look! because I don’t want to know what they’re saying except dammit I look back anyway but none of them are looking at me. They’re laughing too hard at their own thing. It makes me wonder if maybe I was the curse, the hex of the hexagon. Look out! Geometry joke! They wouldn’t have laughed at that. Ethan would have. He was secret smart, too. Bastard.

“So, which band are you excited about?” Maya asks me as I sit.

“I’m not sure,” I say, looking over the program I was handed on the way in. “Definitely not Supreme Commander.”

She smiles, but also nods seriously. “Good.”

“So, hey, how was the internship?” I think to ask.

Maya sighs. “Oh, you know, it was okay.”

“Maya.” I try for my most professional smile. “You can be honest.”

Maya’s face collapses into a big grin. “Okay, it was so excellent! Candy Shell is such an amazing place! Well, you know, not all of it, but I was in publicity, not with the sharks who stole Postcards from you—”

“It’s fine. I get it. I’m glad it was good.”

“They’re actually keeping me on this fall, a couple afternoons a week.”

“Oh, nice.” I keep my smile up for as long as I can, and turn back to the band. I am maybe a little jealous. Would I want to be at Candy Shell? No way. Well . . . no, but would I like to have done so well at an internship at a record label over the summer that they asked me to stay on? Yes.

The Progress Reports finish and there is a quick gear switch. Black-clad members of the Tech Squad scurry around, moving instruments, running new cables and wielding gaffer’s tape with ninja-like speed, their Chucks scuffing and their oversized key rings jangling.

The next band up is greeted by a barrage of screams from the gaggle of freshmeat girls crowded on the grass up front. They’re all legs and shoulders and smiles, like sacrifices waiting to be gobbled up by the music gods. I think, You’ll learn, girls, but also make a mental note because having enthusiastic fans is a key to getting your band off the ground.

“Hey, everybody,” says the singer, an awkward underclassman, slouching at the mic with an oversized guitar and too-tight flannel shirt. “We’re the New Past Lives.”

Okay, candidate number one. For the first time in too long, things feel like business. I pull out my graph-paper notebook and flip to a new page. I prefer the grid to normal old straight lines. It might seem rigid, but I actually find it freeing. Any direction is in play. Up, down, left, right, or a diagonal against the perfect squares. That’s how you have to think in this business. Lined paper has only one direction, the acceptable one. Lined paper is so Carlson Squared.

Four stick clicks and the New Past Lives are in. It’s edgy guitar, busy drums, and within moments I knew the verdict: decent, but not polished enough. The singer is too unsure of himself. Some time in the future, his third or fourth band will probably be pretty excellent, but by the time the New Past Lives finish their fifteen-minute set, I can barely remember anything I just heard.

Next up, Maya’s band: Supreme Commander. I liked this band last year. Dreamy, sci-fi pop. They’ve gotten better. I’m ever-so-slightly jealous of this, too.

“Good job,” I say to Maya.

She beams. “Why thank you.”

After them is a band called the Theo Alvin Four. I think I read online that this is the new version of Square Pets, one of last year’s decent bands. Maybe they’ll be the one? But then the lead singer begins with, “Hey, we’ve had a mind-blowing summer, and our sound this year is going to be a little . . . different. This first song is dedicated to one of the masters: John Scofield.”

I should have known by the new interest in facial hair and the hipster hats they’re all wearing: Square Pets have been bitten by the jazz. And it’s not the good melodic kind, like they made a half century ago. Ethan and I used to study to Kind of Blue, the Miles Davis record. The good kind of jazz seems to be all about vibe, mood, and feel. This is the bad kind of jazz, where the music feels like a math problem. After a minute, I’ve totally lost track of the song, and when I look around, most everyone is talking among themselves except for two uber-fans down front, both wearing suit vests, one in a fedora, bobbing their heads wildly and waving their fingers like the music is a cloud of moths they need to swat out of their eyes.

I spend their set working on my econ homework. The band I’m really waiting to see is the one that comes on next. A senior band: Android Necktie. What I remember from last year: edgy, indie, with really cool melodies. In fact, they’d been widely considered the heir apparent to Postcards from Ariel. As I remember it, they have a pretty great lead singer. They were terrible at promotion though. Which could be where I come in?