Regular, that is, until third period Friday, when Dr. Campbell hands out another take-home test for us to finish by Monday.
“Aw god,” I groan to Benji, who’s waiting for me outside of class.
“No sweat.” He tries to take my arm, but I pretend I’m reaching for something in my bag. “So, after school? Or tomorrow maybe? What do you want to do?”
“Is it cheating,” I ask him, genuinely unsure, “if we work on it together?”
He stops walking, stares after me in disbelief.
“Sugarcakes,” he says, “Campbell doesn’t care how we find the answers. He knows these tests are both easy and impossible. He just wants to see if we can do it. That’s the game to him—if we can do it. He doesn’t care how.”
I consider this. Consider the delighted look on Benji’s face while he talks.
“That doesn’t really seem like, you know, real teaching, if you ask me.” I head toward my locker.
Benji follows. “Man’s got a PhD. He doesn’t care.”
“So I should not at all feel guilty that I’m about to agree to collaborate with you?”
I open my locker, and Benji sticks his head around the edge.
“Of course not. The real thing you need to be thinking about is: your place or mine?”
I roll my eyes, grab my lunch, and try to catch the side of his face as I slam the metal door shut.
He sniffs. “What’s for lunch? I love sushi.”
“You’re disgusting.” I’d elbow him too, but something makes me feel like he’d just enjoy it. So I keep walking to the cafeteria and the table by the Coke machines where I’ve been sitting to avoid an unusually-bitchy-this-week Whitney. I always look busy sitting here—mostly because I am. Usually writing in the notebook to Trip. Like about how I discovered that Lish must’ve switched her schedule, because now she has lunch this period too. She was walking out to the parking lot to go off campus with D’Shelle the other day. Which is maybe another reason why I’m not joining Oliver out by his car right now.
“Don’t you have class?” I ask Benji.
“Eventually.” He shrugs, not caring about the bell ringing over our heads.
“Well, I have practice on Saturday,” I say, to say something.
“I’m free this afternoon.” He blinks. “And practice for what?”
“Practice for none-of-your-business is what.” But I can’t help grinning at him a little. “This afternoon, though, I could do.”
He offers a charming little bow. “I love a woman who doesn’t make me wait.”
I wonder, Why doesn’t Trip like him? while Benji salutes and says, “See you at the last bell.”
Chapter Five
On Monday, Trip gives me back the notebook, but reading what he’s written is like trying to decipher the scrawls of a crazy person. Turns out he was at a party Friday at Chris Monroe’s and spent a good portion of the time in some corner, criticizing the entire thing for my benefit. He also seems to have had an entire bottle of peach schnapps or Jägermeister during the process, because his writing is a mess and he eventually trails off, trying to describe different couples making out around him. His last entry is about how he woke up on the floor in what he figured was Chris’s dad’s study, made his way out, and drove himself home, slept off his hangover most of Saturday. Sunday he watched Bruce Lee movies with his dad.
“You’re drinking too much,” I tell him when I see him after lunch period. “It makes me worry.”
“Thanks for the input, Straight Edge.”
“I am not straight edge. I’m just not a lush.”
“I’m sorry.” He concedes, but he’s put off. “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing at this age? I think it’s in the manual.”
I frown at him. “You’re supposed to be working on new music. Like I am.”
His eyebrows go up. “You are?”
His genuine surprise makes me feel sheepish about not telling him before. I let the long slant of my bangs fall between us. “What did you think?”
“I just didn’t think—I mean . . .” He recovers a little: “I didn’t know you were.” He looks startlingly solemn. “But maybe I need a break from all that.”
“It’s fine if you need a break,” I growl. “But the rest of us are going ahead.”
He looks at me with that serious blankness, and I immediately regret what I’ve said. I start to put my hand on his arm, to apologize and tell him what I really want is for us to still be talking about songs and music, that I don’t want everything to be so weird. But he steps away from the wall, away from me.
“I gotta go,” he says.
When I slide into my desk, the only thing that’s worse than discovering I only finished five of the ten questions we had to answer for today is realizing I also didn’t give the notebook back to Trip.
“I can’t make it to practice this afternoon,” I tell Oliver outside of psych.
He is immediately annoyed. “Why not?”
“Well, I just—to be honest, I need time to write. I’m just not used to having to do this, you know, on demand. By myself.”
He jerks open the classroom door so that he doesn’t have to look at me. He waits, holding it. I have no other choice than to walk past him into the room.
I hate Oliver being in a mood. I hate anyone being in a mood, really. Trip was enough for one day. I need to turn this around, for both of us.
“It was easier for me when this was just, you know, a hobby. And not some actual, really happening rock band that is going to rocket to immediate glamour and fame. It’s hard to write when I’m all busy going, ‘What will Coldplay be like when they open for Sad Jackal?’” I’m tapping my finger against my chin, gazing at the ceiling dreamily. Making myself the fool is the only thing that works in this situation.
And it does. Work. He twists a reluctant grin at me. “Cold-play’s lame.”
“Maybe it’ll be easier when I can write in my limo. Or on the tour bus.”
“Shut up, Spider.” But he is chuckling.
“You guys should just have some get-to-know-you time, anyway, without a girl around.” I lower my voice as Ms. Neff comes in, balancing a big stack of folders and her ever-present travel mug of coffee.
He slits those blue eyes at me, sly-grinning. “Are you a girl?”
“Enough of one for Whitney to be jealous,” I retort.
Oliver’s lips puff out, sighing at the mention of his girlfriend. “That girl, man.”
I don’t say anything back. I don’t have to.
“I thought you were riding with Oliver today,” Gretchen says when I catch her at the car after school. “You’ve been so attached lately. I feel like I’ve barely seen you.” We stand together against the back of the car, waiting for Darby to finish saying good-bye to all her fellow freshmen. I want to point out that the reason Gretchen’s barely seen me is that she’s been with her boyfriend, and that I’m not any more attached to Oliver than I was this summer, but since she’s being nice, I decide to be, too.
“The band’s been practicing a lot for the Halloween dance.”
She’s impressed. “Oliver and them are playing?”
I nod, trying to be cool about it.
She whistles. “Now I really have to get Max to go.”
“Where is he, by the way?” I ask, making sure to sound neutral.
She groans. “Wrestling’s started.”
She launches into all the reasons why she thinks wrestling is completely stupid, but I only half listen. Instead I’m scanning the parking lot crowd: kids hanging out in groups around each other’s cars, other bunches of them walking away together, up to the square. I don’t see Lish but I do see her friend Kiaya with Bronwyn, walking together, probably up to the Yogurt Tap. Far off, near the back fence, I see Trip, too. Beside him Chris Monroe is laughing, both of them surrounded by several other people I’m not sure I know. The way Trip just walked off like that today, the way he wasn’t there before psych—it burns in me. Fine, I beam in
laser thoughts toward him. Smoke and drink with your new friends, you big asshole. Waste your potential for all I—
And then there’s Benji’s clattering Volvo, slowing down. He’s got one hand draped over the steering wheel, a cigarette between his fingers.
“’Sup, Coastal,” he says, winking at me.
I feel Gretchen beside me, suddenly curious.
“Coastal?” I challenge, not moving from my spot against the trunk of the car.
He shrugs. “Just a thing I’m testing out. See how it fits.” The sun behind me is making him squint. I can’t quite tell where he’s looking, exactly.
“You let me know how that works out for you.”
“I will do that.”
He rolls off without waiting for me to reply, that hand of his saluting.
Gretchen snorts beside me. “He certainly thinks he’s cool.”
“He certainly does,” I agree.
When we get home, Darby and Gretchen and I take out the chicken divan left over from the other night and eat it at the counter, cold, straight from the pan. When Jilly was here, we grouped together in pairs: me and her, and then the two of them. We were all mostly tolerant housemates of each other, not really intermixing much. Hanging out with them like this now is actually nice.
After we eat, though, Gretchen goes upstairs to their room and Darby goes straight to her best friend, Facebook. It’s not even four o’clock. I need to do what I said I was going to do and work on some songs, but the fight with Trip makes it hard to focus. Working on the songs right now will make me think about not working on them with him, and not seeing Fabian, either. Maybe I should just walk over there now. I can show up late. But Oliver’s expecting new songs, and I’m certainly not going to get much writing done there.
But ultimately I decide I can work on Sad Jackal later, when I’m not so distracted. I take some time to email my sister about everything instead.
Chapter Six
Four important things happen between Monday afternoon and rehearsal on Thursday:
1. Benji gets an A on his 20th Cen. test, while I get a B+. How we didn’t earn the same exact grade, I don’t know, but I don’t care, because at least this is an improvement. We make plans to study again Friday afternoon. It crosses my mind that afterward we could go to the movies or something, though I’m not really sure what Benji would want to see or why I would want to sit alone in the dark with him.
2. I get the postcard for Mom’s upcoming art show. It is glossy and sleek. Her name is on it and everything. I think about calling Jilly, but just text her instead.
3. Thanks to Gretchen’s loud and painful breakup with the Wrestler, I come up with the lyrics to two new songs: “You’re Ugly, Too” and “Just Hang Up.” A third one, “Foreign Tongue,” comes from looking at pictures Jilly took when her chorus went to Berlin to sing with a German choir there. None are quite as good as “Disappear,” but they’ll do.
4. Trip tells me he’s signed up for martial arts classes at the new aikido place that just opened. “To get Dad off my back,” he says. “And to give myself some structure.” I try to be supportive, but I thought the whole reason for quitting Sad Jackal was so he could work on his own material, not quit music altogether. That night he plays two songs for me: “Kung Fu Fighting” (to make me laugh) and this other really cute Japanese pop song. I can’t help but wonder if he heard the second one from Chris Monroe.
After school on Thursday, my jaw is going crazy again, knowing I’m about to see Fabian. Why this wasn’t my first thought upon waking, why I stayed snoozing until the absolute last possible minute and left myself with my standard fifteen minutes to get ready for school, I don’t know. I mean, sure, yes, he already saw me in a schlumpy outfit when we first met, but I shouldn’t be sabotaging myself for a few extra minutes of sleep.
When he arrives at practice, though, it’s not like he really notices. He smiles at me, but he smiles at everybody. Which makes me really wish I had a better outfit on. Something that might stand out.
Irritated, I take my seat on the couch as they start, warming up with “Afterlight,” since that’s the simplest. As usual, it takes Oliver a few verses to get into it. But Abe, emboldened by Eli and Fabian, is trying something different with the drums. It makes up for Oliver’s twitchiness, and when they finish, I tell Abe how good he sounds. He gives me a pleased thumbs-up, and I want, stupidly, for Fabian to notice.
“We need to work on the new ones,” Oliver says, sounding irritated, too.
“Do ‘Cage Time,’” Eli says, thumbing a few strings. “Charlotte hasn’t heard what we did with it yet.”
The new song begins with a twangy riff. At first it’s just Oliver playing, but then Fabian joins in with some eerie ghost chords, giving it more depth. Soon Eli starts, moving his hand slowly up the neck of his bass. Abe is still quiet, listening, waiting, his head cocked toward the others like he’s lost in the woods and just heard a stick snap.
“A bag of peanuts in your hand,” Oliver sings, low and quiet, leaning into the mic. “Looking for something you used to understand.”
A wave of unexpected pleasure sweeps over me, and I hunch down farther into the cushions, not wanting anyone to see if they look up. This is my song—this sad, lame, weird thing I wrote, this mysterious thing that came out of me—and they’ve made it into something.
When Oliver starts the chorus, though, something’s wrong. The band sounds fine, but Oliver’s doing this screeching thing with his voice: an angry, squalling sound that’s awful. I know it’s a song about the zoo, but I’m not sure howler monkey is what we’re going for. I grit my teeth, wait for Oliver to drop back into crooning for the next verse.
It goes fine from there, until he comes back to the chorus: “You put me in this cage, now you want me out of it; You’re enlivened by this rage, now you want to stifle it.” Apparently I can’t contain my grimace anymore, because Oliver stops, seeing me, and goes, “What?”
He has never halted mid-song like this. Not even with Trip.
I’m aware, immediately, of all four guys looking at me. Of my face turning what must be an excruciating shade of red.
“It’s just—” I clear my throat. “I’m just not sure the, you know, angry sound is the best way to go.” I try to make this sound like an apology.
“You’re enlivened by this rage.” Oliver holds his hand out like I’m dumb.
“I know it’s talking about being angry, but the point, kind of, is that she—I mean, the speaker—is . . . over it. Like, ‘You used to love it when I got all dramatic, but I’ve been held down by you for so long that I’m not sure I can work myself up anymore.’”
A memory comes into my head: Dad and Mom fighting, the tired sound of Dad’s voice, simply not wanting to engage with her. I didn’t know that’s what the song was about.
“Melancholy,” Eli says, nodding. “Tired.”
Oliver’s face clenches. “Well, you sing it, then,” he says to me.
Clearly this is too much criticism from me. But also, Oliver suspects I’m right. He’s holding the mic out, but in a way that means he doesn’t want me to take it.
“No, you just—” I start, but at the same time Fabian goes, “Show us, Charlotte. Please?”
I cannot possibly be any more uncomfortable. Not only Oliver, but Abe, Eli, and Fabian are staring. They want me to sing for them. And I’m not going to. It’s just too weird. And yet, now you want to stifle it rings between my ears just as clear as Jilly’s voice.
“Charlotte,” Fabian says, “it’s your song, right? Just show us.”
His voice is like Trip’s: a gentle combination of praise and understanding. He’s acknowledging my fear but wants to help me get past it.
I look at Oliver, whose face is a mixture of things. Frustration. Unwilling need. Embarrassment. Resignation.
I force myself to stand up.
“Okay.” I wipe my sweaty hands on my jeans before I take the mic from Oliver. “The buildup to the chorus.” My voi
ce is wavering. “I won’t sing it, but you know.”
Oliver’s off to the side amid a ton of cords and black boxes on the floor. He watches Abe for the count. Around me the music starts up. I hear the last lines of the first verse in my head: Will you look at the real me? When will you see enough?
Somehow the chorus unfolds out of me: careful, apologetic, worn. “You put me in this cage, now you want me out of it; You’re enlivened by this rage, now you want to stifle it.”
Eli stops, with the others drifting to a halt soon after.
“Do it again,” he says to me. He has kind of a scowl on his face, but I can tell he’s just thinking. To Abe and Fabian he says, “There, then slow.”
Fabian nods, knowing what he means. He gives me an encouraging look. Oliver’s jaw tightens. They start up again. I hear the song all around us, feel the way Eli’s altering the rhythm—slowing it, only slightly but still noticeable. It comes out of me, again, stronger: “You put me in this cage, now you want me out of it; You’re enlivened by this rage, now you want to stifle it.”
“Keep going,” Eli hollers. I don’t want to, but I do. Charging through the second verse, taking up the chorus again, slowing down, feeling how their music supports my voice—it’s easier to relax. I close my eyes, sing: “Stare and stare and stare all day / Bent and crushed under all this weight.” I’ve only heard Oliver do the melody once, but thanks to Fabian, it’s easy enough to hear basically where I’m supposed to be. I don’t mess up too much, even when we go into the bridge and the key changes. At the end, Eli and Fabian just keep playing, so I start repeating “Walking away from me,” quieter and quieter. Getting to stand there and alter the song myself while it’s being played, hearing how the words can be shifted, is actually pretty cool.
Not that I want to do it again. As soon as it’s over I hold the mic out for Oliver. He won’t look me in the eye.
“Okay, well, how about we start at the beginning and I’ll—” he tries.
Being Friends with Boys Page 7
