Face the Music

by Brian Weisfeld

  “Hi, guys!” Harriet chirped.

  Joe snapped his eyes open and glared at her. “Harry! What are you doing? You know I’m in the zone!”

  “I know. I just wanted to see how it’s going,” Harriet said. “And see if I could get you guys to sign this—”

  “So stupid!” yelled Larry, standing and giving the amp a kick.

  “I’m sorry!” said Harriet. “But you don’t have to be mean—”

  “Not you,” Larry said. “The amp. It keeps glitching, turning on and off.”

  Sam glanced up from his phone for a second. “Did you try unplugging—”

  “Of course I tried unplugging it!” Larry interrupted.

  “What about jiggling the—” Sam said.

  “Sam! I tried jiggling the thing!” Larry was fully exasperated. “It’s fried! The stupid thing’s more fried than a drumstick at Nantucket Fried Chicken!”

  “You mean Kentu—” Harriet started.

  “Everyone,” Joe scolded, eyes squeezed tight. “Respect the zone!”

  “Well, there’s nothing we can do about the amp now,” said Sam in a whisper. He touched the top of his hair gently to make sure it was still shellacked into place. “We don’t have another one.”

  Larry sighed loudly. “I’ll go set this up on stage. But I wanna go on record that this is going to be a disaster.”

  “It’s on the official record,” said Sam.

  Harried jumped in front of Larry and shoved the T-shirt and gold marker into his hand.

  “Before you go, sign this super fast, would you?” she asked. “Use my back.” She spun around and flattened her back into a suitable writing surface.

  Larry sighed again, even louder this time, but he dutifully signed, then handed the marker to Sam, who did the same without even taking his eyes off his phone.

  “Give Joe the marker,” Harriet told Sam.

  “He’s in the zone,” Sam warned.

  “He’s in zone overtime!” Harriet replied. “The show was supposed to start twenty minutes ago.”

  Sam pressed the marker into Joe’s open palm. “Harry says you gotta sign the shirt.”

  Joe opened one eye, then the other. He looked accusingly at Harriet, who, still in flattened-back position, shuffled over to the bench so that Joe didn’t have to move.

  “Remember our show at the Salt Factory?” he asked Harriet. “Last spring?”

  “Yeah,” Harriet replied. “But, Joe, that was because you had a sore throat. It would’ve happened no matter what.”

  “It was because I was in the zone and I got interrupted!” Joe snapped. “So I got jinxed, and I sounded like Kermit the Frog. And let me remind you that I did not choose those words—the reviewer did when she blogged about it.”

  “I know—” Harriet said.

  “Kermit the Frog,” Joe repeated, uncapping the marker. “Those were her exact words.”

  He leaned over and signed his name hurriedly on the bottom of the T-shirt, then handed the shirt and the marker to Harriet, who stood and stretched her back out.

  “My zone has been completely broken now, Harry,” said Joe, and his voice was somber. “There’s no stopping the jinx now. I only hope I don’t get struck by lightning.”

  “Sorry, bro!” called Harriet over her shoulder as she ran out of the backstage area. “Good luck!”

  Harriet found Val standing next to the merch table, making unhelpful observations that were clearly driving Resa to the brink of her sanity.

  “What you need is a system,” said Val.

  “I’ve been saying the same thing,” muttered Didi, not as quietly as she’d intended.

  “We have a system!” Resa shot back at Val.

  “You call that big old heap of shirts a system?” asked Val, her eyebrows raised.

  “Yes!” Resa spun around to face Val so suddenly that her arm accidentally hit an open bottle of lemonade that Amelia had set down on the table. It fell over, directly on top of the shirts, and was half empty by the time Resa had the presence of mind to grab it.

  “No. Way.” Amelia lifted a T-shirt from the pile to check out the damage. There was a huge wet splotch on the side, and a stream of lemonade trickled down onto the table.

  “This is my point exactly,” said Val, putting her hands on her hips.

  Resa turned to face Val again, this time with excruciating slowness.

  “If you’re not out of my face in five seconds…” growled Resa.

  She didn’t need to finish her thought. Val beat a hasty retreat, though not before grabbing her marker and signed T-shirt out of Harriet’s hands.

  “Why would you leave a bottle full of lemonade right next to our product?” asked Resa.

  “Oh no, you don’t.” Amelia shook her head firmly. “This is all on you.”

  “Please!” Didi pleaded. “Let’s just clean up the mess!”

  “Hello, Market Street!” boomed Joe’s voice. Harriet breathed a sigh of relief. The concert was starting. The crowd, too, seemed relieved. They let out a roar of appreciation.

  “Are we ready to—”

  Suddenly Joe’s booming voice dropped out. A second later, it boomed back, midsentence. “—arty started!”

  There was some scattered applause, but the crowd seemed confused. So were the girls at the merch table.

  “What’s up with the sound system?” asked Amelia as she wrung out a drenched T-shirt.

  “They’re just having some amp problems,” Harriet said. “No big deal.”

  She heard Sam hit his drumsticks together and count off: “A five! Six!…”

  In the silence that followed, someone in the crowd yelled, “Did you forget how to count, dude?”

  “Oh no,” Harriet moaned. “Joe was right! It’s the jinx!”

  14

  “There’s no such thing,” said Amelia confidently, “as a jinx.”

  “There is,” insisted Harriet. “And this was a whopper of a jinx. This was the jinx to end all jinxes.”

  The concert had just ended, and the girls were cleaning up their table, sorting the soaked shirts from the not-soaked ones and packing leftover supplies in boxes. A few customers hadn’t picked up their T-shirts yet. And the girls were hoping they’d just forget all about the shirts, because most of the ones they had left were super citrusy, and not in a good way.

  “I’m with Amelia,” said Resa. “The problem was a broken amp, not a curse.”

  “It wasn’t just a broken amp, though,” Didi observed quietly. “What about the drum?”

  “Sam just hit it a little too hard,” said Resa. “And poked a little hole in the top.”

  “He’s been playing the drums since he was six,” said Harriet, “and that has never happened. He once broke a drumstick because he hit the drums so hard, but he’s never broken a drum.”

  “No matter what it was,” said Amelia, “the crowd did not like it. They did not like it at all.”

  Didi grimaced. “Yeah, when they started chanting ‘Rad Skinks stink’? That was pretty ugly.”

  Harriet dropped her head into her hands. “It’s all my fault! I broke Joe’s zone.”

  “You!” The voice cut through Harriet’s gloom, snapping her back to attention. Reginald was standing in front of her, his finger pointed straight at her face. He was not happy. “You broke Joe’s zone! I saw you! This is all your fault!”

  “Nobody asked you,” Resa replied without missing a beat.

  Reginald looked different, and it took Harriet a few seconds to figure out why. He was now wearing a Radical Skinks T-shirt. But it wasn’t the one he’d bought, at least Harriet didn’t think so, because it had her brothers’ three signatures on it, in the exact locations where they’d signed before the concert started.

  “Where—” Harriet said, totally confused. “Where’d you get that T-shirt?”

  “Why should I tell you anything?” Reginald replied.

  “Come on, Reg!” Harriet coaxed. “I’m sorry I insulted you. I was just delirious fro
m the apple fumes.”

  “Yeah, that smell was revolting,” said Reginald. He scanned the crowd exiting the park. “I got the shirt from that girl over there.”

  There was a glint as Val’s sequined shirt caught the light of the setting sun.

  “That girl just gave you her shirt?” asked Resa, incredulously.

  “Sure, after I gave her fifty bucks,” Reginald said. “She set it all up with me days ago.”

  As Reginald walked away, Resa looked at Harriet, her eyes wide and emphatic. “Told you.”

  “At least someone’s making money off our T-shirts,” Harriet muttered.

  Joe, Sam, and Larry, looking haggard, approached the merch table.

  “What was that about?” asked Joe. “He did not seem like a happy customer.”

  “There were some problems with the T-shirts,” replied Resa.

  “Well, there were some problems with our performance, so at least we’re consistent,” said Sam. His pompadour had collapsed, and bits of hair were going in every direction.

  “Not only don’t we have enough money to get a guitar, we now have to replace a drum,” said Larry. “Which is even more expensive than a guitar. There is no way we can play at the Battle of the Bands now.”

  “Thanks a lot, Harriet,” said Joe, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Thanks for everything.”

  15

  Harriet lay in bed. She wasn’t sleeping but had decided to pretend she was.

  “Harriiiiiiet!” came her mother’s voice, again, from downstairs. “Come doooooooown!”

  No, Harriet decided. She would not come down to breakfast—or, more likely, lunch, since it was two o’clock in the afternoon. She was too demoralized, too defeated, too glum, to talk to her mother. So she stayed put, lying under the covers, with Zappa on her belly.

  “Haaaaaaaarry!” her mother yelled.

  Harriet was hiding from her brothers—all of them, even Larry—because they all hated her. She couldn’t blame them. After all, she’d jinxed them and turned their show into a train wreck. The only place in the house where she definitely wouldn’t run into them was her room. So there she would stay, forever if necessary.

  Harriet’s stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten anything all day, and her stomach was running out of patience.

  There was a knock on her bedroom door. Harriet squeezed her eyes shut and slid down farther under the covers.

  She heard the door creak open and several sets of footsteps. Was it her mother or her brothers coming to confront her about how she’d messed everything up?

  “Now this is what I call sleeping in,” came Resa’s voice.

  Harriet opened her eyes to see Resa and Amelia standing by her bed. Didi, her long hair jammed under a baseball cap, hovered by the door like she was prepared to bolt at any moment.

  Harriet looked at the girls for a minute, trying to decide her next move. Then she yanked the covers over her head.

  “Harriet.” Amelia giggled as she peeled the covers back down.

  “We’ve been calling you all morning,” said Didi from the door. “Your mom kept saying you were sleeping.”

  “Finally, we had to come and make sure you were still alive,” Amelia said.

  “Well, I am,” said Harriet. She stroked Zappa on her stomach. “I’m just dandy.”

  “What’s the matter, Harry?” asked Didi, her brown eyes full of concern behind her glasses. She took a few tentative steps closer to the bed. “Why are you pulling a Rip Van Winkle?”

  Harriet busied herself, picking a loose thread on the wrist of her pajamas. “My brothers hate me,” she said quietly. “For real this time.”

  “No, they don’t!” Didi protested.

  “They’re just mad. Big deal,” said Resa, pulling up Harriet’s desk chair. “My brother’s mad at me, like, ninety percent of the time.”

  “But they’re all mad at me. And the worst part is, I deserve it,” said Harriet. She swallowed hard to make the lump in her throat go away. “I broke Larry’s guitar, and it’s my fault Sam’s drum is busted. I ruined the T-shirts. Then I jinxed the band. I ruined everything.”

  “Nuh-uh,” said Resa, clapping her hands together quickly to shake Harriet out of her sadness. “Sit up, Harriet Nguyen.”

  Without even meaning to, Harriet followed Resa’s instructions. Zappa, roused by the movement, slithered into Harriet’s pajama sleeve to hide.

  “Pity party’s over,” said Resa. Her voice was so firm that it took Harriet a minute to realize Resa was cheering her up. “You did not break Sam’s drum. He broke it all by himself. You did not ruin the T-shirts. We all made those T-shirts together.” She paused for a second, then said quickly, “You did break Larry’s guitar, and that is totally on you, but so what? Everybody makes mistakes.”

  Harriet was surprised to find she felt considerably more cheerful. “You really don’t think it’s my fault?”

  “I already said so once,” said Resa. She grabbed Harriet’s hand and pulled her to her feet. “Now get dressed.”

  Harriet placed Zappa gently on her bed and pulled the covers up over her green scaly body. “She needs her beauty rest,” she said, walking to her closet. “So where are we going, anyway?”

  “For ice cream!” sang Didi, inching toward the door. Now that Zappa was loose, she was ready to hit the road.

  “I do love ice cream,” said Harriet. “It always turns the glum into fun.”

  “It does,” said Amelia. “And it gets the brain fired up, too.”

  * * *

  A half hour later, the girls walked through the door of the ice-cream shop near the park. The bell on the door jangled, and Eleanor looked up from the stool where she sat behind the counter, a calculus textbook open on her lap. She closed the book and got to her feet.

  “Twenty minutes!” Resa grumbled. “I still can’t believe it.”

  “These outfits won’t pick themselves,” said Harriet, gesturing to her yellow tunic covered in enormous black peonies, which perfectly matched the large yellow flower clipped onto her side ponytail.

  “How long does it take you to get dressed, Resa?” asked Amelia.

  “Exactly two and a half minutes,” replied Resa with pride. “Three if you count tying my Converse.”

  “Speaking of clothes,” Harriet said to Eleanor, “I love your dress. Are those … pockets?”

  Eleanor was in a white button-down shirt with short sleeves under a burgundy corduroy dress, with black combat boots. Eleanor always wore outfits whose components seemed totally incompatible but somehow came together just right on her. Now she slid her hands into the dress pockets and struck a pose like a fashion model. “Oh, I gotta have pockets,” she said.

  She stepped over to the counter and pulled an ice-cream scooper out of a cylinder full of cold water. “What can I get you, ladies?”

  “Strawberry in a cup,” Resa said without hesitation.

  “Nice going, Pistachio.” Eleanor smiled. “A girl who knows what she wants!”

  Harriet was confused. “Didn’t you just say strawberry?”

  Resa smiled. “It’s her nickname for me. Because the first time I came in, I couldn’t make a decision to save my life—until I decided I wanted pistachio.”

  Eleanor was a whiz with a scooper and had handed out the ice cream (chocolate marshmallow for Amelia, cookies and cream for Didi, and rainbow swirl for Harriet) before the girls could even get their money together.

  The girls were the only customers in the store, so they had their choice of tables. They opted for one at the back of the shop, near the oven, where Eleanor was baking fresh waffle cones.

  Resa ate a spoonful of creamy pink ice cream, then pulled her trusty Idea Book out of her pocket. “I made a list,” she announced, “of all the ways we screwed up.”

  “Oh, great,” said Amelia with a good-natured eye roll.

  “I thought this was cheer-up ice cream,” said Harriet, licking her rainbow cone.

  “It is,” said Resa. “But it’s also fig
ure-out-what-went-wrong ice cream.”

  “Why? It was an epic fail, and we’re definitely not doing it again,” Harriet said. Resa’s problem, she thought, was that she did not know how to have a good time. She wanted to work, work, work all the time. She invented work even when there was no work to be done!

  “It’s only an epic fail if we don’t figure out what we did wrong,” argued Resa. “I mean, you win some, you lose some. But if we figure out what mistakes we made, it’s not a fail. It’s a priceless learning opportunity.” She uncapped her pen. “So come on! If we were going to do it again, what would we change?”

  “The logo,” said Didi, looking down at her ice cream. “I kept telling you all that we should make sure people liked it before we placed the order.”

  “We rushed things too much,” agreed Resa, nodding. “We should’ve gathered more feedback beforehand.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like we could’ve sent the logo to every single person ahead of time and gotten them to vote,” said Harriet.

  “Sure we could’ve,” said Amelia. “It’s a little something called social media.”

  “We should have made a poll!” said Resa. “Joe and Sam could’ve posted it. They’d get tons of responses.”

  “We should’ve asked for sample shirts, too,” said Amelia, her mouth full of chocolate marshmallow ice cream. “The logo printed out super small and squashed; we would’ve fixed that if we’d gotten a sample.”

  “Yeah, and also, those shirts ran really small,” said Didi. “It totally messed up our orders, having to switch sizes around.”

  “Sample shirt. Great idea,” said Resa, scribbling notes in her Idea Book.

  “And honestly, we paid too much for those T-shirts,” said Amelia.

  Harriet started to protest, but Amelia kept on talking. “I love Lucy and all, but we should’ve negotiated with her. We had to make our prices too high to make any profit, and since the shirts were so expensive, not that many people wanted to buy them. Especially since they were, um, fashion-challenged.”