Read I Am (Not) the Walrus for Free Online Page A

back?”
    But there’s no answer. Not from the cables, or the mike stands, or even the amplifier.
    Even the thing on the floor stays where it is.
    I take a long breath, fold the note into a one-inch square, and slide it into my wallet.
    I plug in the soldering iron, and wait for it to heat up. Once that’s done, it takes less than a minute to re-connect the broken cable, and not much longer to screw the plastic panel back on.
    With that done, it’s time for something to eat.
    On the way out of the door something catches my eye. I scoop it up off the floor. Zack’s napkin, with the chords for “Day Tripper.”
    Right. Of course. Zack will know what to do. I’ll ask him tomorrow.

5
    Thursday
    Horoscope: April 15, Aquarius:
    Sharing your deepest secrets could be especially romantic today when you unexpectedly run into an old acquaintance. If someone has been buying into your optimistic predictions about the future, then you may need to face
the music when the facts are discovered.
    â€œHow about the Nowhere Men?” says Zack, when I meet him on the seafront the following morning. “I’ve been thinking about it all night, and I think it sounds good.”
    â€œMaybe,” I say, as we jog down the long flight of steps into what was once the Municipal Air Raid Shelter, but is now the Port Jackson Aquarium. “I found something weird in the bass, yesterday.”
    This is our annual field trip. I should be psyched to spend a morning wandering around the spooky, dimly lit galleries. But now I have to make a decision as to how to deal with the note. Luckily, Zack ought to know the answer.
    Before we even have time to glance at so much as a goldfish, we’re ushered into an auditorium so we can spend our first hour being lectured by our spooky, dimly lit biology teacher, who is none other than Mr. Frost, or Frosty to those in the know.
    â€œDid you fix it, though?” Zack slides into a chair near the door and dumps his backpack on the desk in front of him.
    â€œYeah. It’s fine,” I say. I throw down my backpack next to his, and watch the rest of our class file in. “But guess what?”
    Frosty marches to the front of the class and tosses a pile of clipboards onto the lectern.
    â€œI think the Nowhere Men could work as a name,” says Zack. “It’s Beatles-related and it’s kind of surreal.” He crouches behind our two backpacks like a soldier under fire. “Guess what, what?”
    â€œMorning!” Frosty clamps his paws onto either edge of his desk as if he’s about to snap it in half.
    â€œMorning,” comes the chorus of reply.
    I sit up straight, but Zack sinks even lower behind his backpack.
    Frosty turns to the blackboard and chalks the word, F-I-S-H. “A fish,” he says, “is a gill-bearing, aquatic, vertebrate animal that doesn’t have any limbs with digits.”
    â€œZack, mate,” I mumble. “Something weird happened after you went home.” I pull my exercise book out of my notebook, jot down limbs with digits, and then lean closer to Zack. “I opened up the bass. I found the loose wire, and I soldered it back together, but guess what else I found?”
    â€œI don’t know.” Zack takes out his own notebook and a chewed-up pen. “The Lost City of Atlantis is actually located under Shawn’s bed?” He tries to scrawl some words, but the pen just makes empty furrows in the paper. “What do you think of the Nowhere Men as a name?” He leans over to me. “You got a spare pen? This one’s knackered.”
    â€œRight.” Frosty pivots around to face us. “Unlike groupings such as birds or mammals, fish are not a single clade but a paraphyletic collection of taxa, including,” he counts on his fingers, “hagfishes, lampreys, sharks, rays, ray-finned fish, coelacanths, and lungfish.”
    â€œThis might be pretty important as