Friend Is Not a Verb by Daniel Ehrenhaft

had no taste; every song was of equal merit.
    “I also left a couple of apologies on your phone,” she said. “I think I might have clogged your voice mail.”
    “Thanks, Emma,” I said. I placed the CD on top of my bureau, right beside the joke of a stereo I owned. “But isn’t that Titanic song called ‘My Heart Will Go On’?”
    “Yeah, but that’s not the song I put on there. It’s the actual soundtrack score when Leonardo DiCaprio starts making out with Kate Winslet—you know, on the deck of the ship. No lyrics.”
    I peered at the case. “Why are some of the songs starred?”
    “Those are the ones you’ve danced to in public,” she said.
    An embarrassing memory flashed through my mind: trying to teach Emma the dance moves to the macarena last Christmas break in the basement of some senior’s brownstone, one of the few big Franklin blowouts we’d talked ourselves into attending.
    “How long did it take you to make this?” I asked.
    “Not very,” she said. “I did it in my dad’s office last night. Now, remember, when you listen to this mix thirty years from now, you’ll have a perfect little snapshot of this crucial moment in your life. Scientific studies prove that music is a great stimulus for triggering memories. It’s true; I saw a documentary about the brain on PBS. It’s the second-best stimulus, in fact—right behind odors.” She tapped her chin absently. “I tried to capture my own breath in a Snapple bottle, but it was harder than I thought.”
    “I thought you said that this wasn’t a crucial moment in my life,” I reminded her.
    “I’m not talking about being in Petra’s band,” she groaned. “I’m hoping you’ll come to your senses about that sooner or later. I mean, if you’re doing it to keep your mind off Sarah, I can understand…”
    Emma kept talking, but I didn’t hear a word after that.
    Instead, I heard: “ That morning, Henry ‘Hen’ Birnbaum’s head was in an understandably dark place. He was back in the band, but solving the mystery of his older sister’s disappearance weighed on him more heavily than ever. He found himself faced with two pressing questions. Would he return his bass teacher’sstolen manuscript? And if so, would he do it in secret?” (Dramatic pause) “When he was thirteen, Hen read the unauthorized children’s biography of Kurt Cobain : Kurt Cobain (They Died Too Young). Cobain was no stranger to petty theft….”
    The man speaking was Jim Forbes, the narrator of Behind the Music . At some point yesterday, without warning, he had popped into my head to provide moving commentary on my life. I couldn’t get rid of him. Last night at dinner, in fact, his soulful drone allowed me to completely block out whatever Sarah and my parents were blabbering about. (Which brand of mulch was best for the garden? Something like that.) But I didn’t mind. I figured it was natural, given the hours I’d spent watching Behind the Music reruns—coupled with the newfound certainty, thanks to Emma, that every vital moment of my existence would someday be chronicled in documentary form.
    It was all very clear now.
    Yes. If everybody else in my life could inhabit a fantasy world that they somehow willed into reality, then I could, too. I would be a professional musician. Just like Dad wanted. More important, I would be a rock star. Duh. Of course I would be a rock star. And being a rock star would dazzle my family so much that they would spill the beans about Sarah’s absence and return, because people always tend to lose their inhibitions and act stupid around famous people. It’s a fact. Best of all, this horrible secret that they couldn’t share with me, that Gabriel couldn’t even write about—whatever it was—would seem laughably trivial by comparison. We’d all be a lot happier, andI’d buy them all yachts.
    Seriously: How could the future turn out differently? I was back in the band, and Dawson’s Freak would be huge. I knew it. Even