Paul stops walking to listen. A couple of times, people have caught him, and when they do, he immediately stops playing and starts walking.

But right now, in the pitch black, he’s pretty sure he’s alone. He straps the guitar over his shoulder and, in his mind’s eye, sees himself stepping onstage, in front of thousands of people. The crowd goes wild, clapping and screaming his name.

Paul steels himself. Summons his nerves.

He starts to play.

Sings.

The crowd roars in approval. The women are hysterical. Some have fainted.

Paul is getting into a good rhythm, singing at the top of his voice, when he hears someone behind him shout: “Hey!”

Paul stops playing.

Whips around and sees a man—a policeman—approaching him.

Oh, God, I’m going to get arrested for a breach of the peace.

“Was that you I heard playing the guitar?”

Paul considers lying, even though it’s crystal clear he’s been caught red-handed.

Even as his heart pounds, he decides to go with the truth.

“Yes, sir.”

The policeman, tall and burly, towers over him. If he gets arrested, what will he tell his dad?

“Can you give me guitar lessons?” the man asks.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I was so much older then

I’m younger than that now.

—“My Back Pages”

John and Paul’s new project is to crack the intro to Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day.”

They’ve been going at it for weeks.

The friends sit in chairs, practically toe to toe, and watch each other play guitar. It’s like “holding a mirror up” between the left-handed Paul and the right-handed John.

John rarely goes to class. When he does, he’s outspoken. Rebellious. Argumentative and stubborn.

“I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular,” John later says. “I wanted to be the leader…I wanted everybody to do what I told them to do, to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss.”

At Liverpool College of Art, some classmates and teachers like him, though many despise him.

But no one ignores him.

Still, he is most in his element at the “eyeball to eyeball” sessions he and Paul undertake at Paul’s empty home. Every weekday except Mondays, Paul cuts school at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, and they take the green double-decker 86 bus—sitting up top, outside, so they can smoke.

John finds the well-worn furniture, with its protruding springs hidden by cotton covers, comforting and warm—much more like his mum’s than Mimi’s more austere house. John takes a seat and removes his glasses from his pocket.

Paul is staring at him.

You never knew I wore glasses because I never wear them. When he started having vision problems, Mimi took John to the eye doctor. The other kindergartners ridiculed the thick lenses needed to correct his severe nearsightedness, though, and he still refuses to wear his glasses in public.