Five Flavors of Dumb

by Antony John

  Baz leaned back and prepared himself, but he wouldn’t make eye contact.

  After half an hour, Dumb had performed “Let Go, I Feel Crappy” eight times. Seven of those were incomplete versions, aborted mid-song following catastrophic collapses that caused the entire group to surrender en masse. The other one was bad enough that Ed looked deflated and Tash looked psychotic.

  Another half hour, another six versions (four of them complete!), but I didn’t need to hear Dumb to know they were playing out of time with each other. To make matters worse, they were wearing down now and I knew they didn’t have many more renditions in them. Even Josh reluctantly sat down between takes, as dismayed as the Energizer Bunny to discover his batteries were running low.

  I told Baz to take five, and I joined the band next door. They all removed their headphones, but only Ed looked up as I walked in.

  “So here’s the deal. Baz wants to edit useable sections of each track together to make a single good performance,” I explained.

  Tash was already nodding vigorously. “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

  I held up my hand. “If that’s what you all want, fine. But I think we can get one perfect continuous take.”

  “Who cares?” Josh shrugged. “No one’s going to know either way.”

  I gave the others a chance to have their say, but no one else seemed to have the energy. “It’s true, no one else will know. But you will, and I think you can do it. I saw you on the school steps, and you had everyone transfixed. You’re too good to cheat your way out of Dumb’s first original song.”

  I don’t know what I expected anyone to say, but I certainly didn’t imagine that Will would be the one to agree. “Yeah,” he said, nodding his head in slow motion. Then: “Yeah.”

  Suddenly Tash seemed to have a change of heart as well. “I guess it would be more satisfying to nail it.”

  “Okay, good,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “So how can we make this work?”

  “Well, the problem is, I’m not used to wearing headphones while I play,” explained Tash gruffly. “And the clicks are throwing me off. And my guitar sounds weird.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. I hate not being to hear the others the way I normally do. It’s weird.”

  Everyone else nodded too.

  “So leave the headphones off,” I said.

  “It’ll be hard to stay in time without the click track,” cautioned Ed. “The acoustics here aren’t the same as in the garage.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that these kinds of issues must arise for most bands the first time they record in a studio, and that Baz would know what to do. But having rejected his earlier suggestion, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him for advice now. This was my band, and my problem. I needed to fix it myself.

  “What about Ed’s metronome?” I said finally. “It has a flashing display. You could all watch that.”

  Ed shook his head. “It’s LCD. We’ll never see it.”

  “What if I relayed it to you from the control room?”

  “You mean . . . you’re going to conduct us?”

  It was so completely insane that I expected everyone to laugh. But no one did. Instead, Ed reached behind himself and pulled the little black box from his bag. He moved a dial, set the display flashing, and handed it over. Then he ran out to the hallway and grabbed a broom.

  “Take this,” he said. “Make sure the handle hits the ground in time with the light. It’ll make the beat really clear. But you’ll need to go back to the control room, or the microphones will pick up the sound.”

  A minute later I was standing behind the window once again, smiling anxiously as Baz watched me banging my broomstick up and down. He could have said something sarcastic, but to his credit, he didn’t. If anything, I felt like I’d won him over in some small way.

  For the next hour I pounded my broom, and Dumb pounded to the steady beat of “Let Go, I Feel Crappy.” I felt the broom’s beats jarring my body like mini-earthquakes. Blisters formed on my thumb and palm, but I never took my eyes off that stupid flashing display. If Dumb could play through the pain, so could I. When else would I get to feel it too?

  At 2:55 Dumb finished the twentieth and final rendition of the song, making it abundantly clear that their favorite version was number 17. At 2:59 Baz burned a CD of it, ejected the disk, and signed off for the afternoon.

  “They need to practice harder,” he said. “If they’re really going to do this, they need to work much harder.”

  “They will,” I assured him. “But they got better, right?”

  Baz laughed. “Are you going to stand in front of them during their gigs too? If so, make sure you get equal billing. People will pay a lot to see the girl with the broom.”

  Tash kept up a running commentary for the three miles back to her house, but I didn’t make any attempt to listen, or to catch snippets of her monologue by lip-reading in the rearview mirror. I could make a wild, stab-in-the-dark guess about what she was saying, and I wasn’t exactly thrilled with how things had gone either.

  Eventually it was just Ed and me, but he hesitated when we reached his house. I could see in my peripheral vision that he wanted to say something, so I turned to face him, hoping it wouldn’t be too critical.

  “I’m sorry, Piper,” he said. “I let you down today.”

  Okay, that was the last thing I expected him to say. “What are you talking about?”

  “I made so many mistakes. One of the times the song broke down, it was my fault.”

  I had to keep from laughing. “You feel guilty because you screwed up once? Wow, if that’s our new standard I should be looking to replace Tash and Will ASAP.”

  Ed smiled at that. “I don’t mean it like that. It’s just . . . I don’t want to sound cocky, but I’ve had a little more experience than them, you know? But that session was so new. No audience to distract me. Nothing but one song and a microphone that’s waiting for me to screw up.”

  I held out my hand to stop him. “Look, Ed, if anyone should be feeling dumb right now, it’s me. I was the one banging a broom handle on the floor.”

  “No, you did great! You held us together. Besides, that’s how people used to conduct orchestras before batons: They just hammered a staff into the ground.” I laughed. “No, I’m serious,” he protested.

  “But not real musicians.”

  “Absolutely,” he gushed, gaining momentum now we were back on his favorite topic. “You’re following in the illustrious footsteps of composers like Lully.”

  I made him spell out the name for me, but it didn’t help. “Never heard of him. Was he any good?”

  “Sure. Right up to the moment he rammed the staff on his toe, got gangrene, and died.”

  I snorted. “Now I know you’re kidding.”

  Ed bit the inside of his mouth, furrowed his brows. “Actually, I’m not kidding at all. But hey! It looks like your feet are doing just fine. Nice shoes by the way.”

  He opened the door and climbed out before I could say good-bye. And it wasn’t until I started to pull away that I remembered I was wearing a new pair of Chucks.

  CHAPTER 15

  Determined to prove they were up to snuff, Dumb scheduled an extra rehearsal for Wednesday lunchtime. With Ed on board, we’d even gotten permission to use the large music classroom. Unfortunately, Josh had also scheduled an audience.

  I should have realized immediately that Kallie’s appearance at the back of the room was no accident. The music block is on the far side of school, and doesn’t lead anywhere else. More significantly, Kallie was there to stay—she pulled up a chair and sat down, crossing her freshly waxed legs as though she was discouraging the boys from taking the closer look that her miniskirt seemed to demand.

  I stared at her in a way that was meant to say What are you doing here? But Kallie just smiled right back, her lips parting by the smallest degree, revealing perfect white teeth.

  I’d like to say that Kallie’s presence went
unnoticed by the band, but nothing could be further from the truth. From the moment she showed up, Josh’s performance deteriorated. Within seconds his focus was on some acrobatic dance moves that seemed more suited to Disney than Dumb. Meanwhile, Tash gripped her guitar like it was an assault rifle. I estimated ten minutes before someone got hurt.

  I tried to shut out the madness while I wrote an e-mail to Phil Kirchen c/o WSFT-FM, explaining that Dumb’s mentor, Baz Firkin, had made us aware of his call for bands (which was almost true since I’d seen the notice at Baz’s studio). A little web-based research revealed that budget cuts and a declining listenership threatened to bankrupt the station, so I added a line saying that if he promoted Dumb I could guarantee at least a thousand new listeners from our high school, where the band had a cult following (again, the sentiment was true even if my numbers were somewhat unscientific). True, the station’s tagline—“the softer side of Seattle”—had me a little worried, but I figured minor details like musical style and genre could be negotiated later.

  As soon as I’d sent the e-mail, I noticed Josh standing in front of me, stamping the ground as if he were trying to put a hole in it. I peered over the top of the computer and realized all eyes were on me.

  “Ed said that stamping my foot is a socially acceptable way of getting a deaf person’s attention,” explained Josh, confused that it took me so long to notice.

  At the back of the room, Ed rolled his eyes. “But not during a band rehearsal, remember? I told you, there are too many other vibrations. Just wave your hand somewhere that Piper can see.”

  Okay, I admit it—it kind of sucked to have all this explained in front of me, like it was part of a lesson on the care and feeding of the deaf girl. It especially sucked to have it play out in front of Kallie Sims, like we were a study in opposites, textbook definitions of “cool” and “uncool” with real live representations of each (for illustrative purposes only!). But at the same time, it was difficult to be too bummed since Ed had obviously told them all this stuff before, when I wasn’t around. And although Josh had forgotten, there was something quite comforting about knowing that he’d tried to take note, and that I had some behind-the-scenes help for whenever he (and everyone else) forgot.

  Josh accepted Ed’s criticism with a curt nod, then looked back at me and grinned like we were sharing a joke that no one else could understand. His eyes twinkled, and I felt myself turn bright red. A moment later he stood beside me, clearing his throat to get everyone’s attention.

  “Guys,” he announced, smiling brilliantly, “I think we can all agree that we’re coming together, musically speaking. But there’s still something missing. Thankfully Kallie will change that for us.”

  Tash smacked her right hand against her guitar strings, eliciting an angry response from her amp. “We don’t need a stylist.”

  Josh laughed. “Don’t worry, Tash. I wouldn’t want to change your style anyway.”

  Tash narrowed her eyes, but decided to take it as a compliment.

  “No,” continued Josh, “Kallie’s not here as a stylist. She’s here as our new member.”

  I didn’t wait for the others to voice their outrage. I just closed my laptop, grabbed Josh’s arm, and dragged him into the neighboring practice room. I slammed the door shut and hoped the crumbling soundproofing on the walls still worked.

  “What the hell, Josh. You know she can’t join.”

  The smile never left his face. “Why not?”

  “For one thing, the contracts have been finalized.”

  “I don’t see any contracts.”

  “That’s ’cause my mom had to redo them to add Ed’s name, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah, Ed.” Josh picked at the wall, flicking a fingernail-sized chunk of white foam across the room. “I’m glad we were able to find a place in the band for your best friend. I really mean that.”

  “He’s not my best friend,” I said, wondering why I felt so defensive. “Anyway, we needed a drummer.”

  “And now we need Kallie.”

  “Why? What does she play? For all I know she could screw up the band’s sound completely.”

  “The way Geek Boy Ed screwed up our image, you mean? Sure, a dork with bad clothes—that’s just what we needed.” The words came out faster than usual, and though he tried to salvage the comment by smiling again, it was a smile that didn’t extend beyond his mouth. “I don’t mean that, of course. It’s just that, well . . . look at us. My brother looks perpetually stoned even though he’s never touched drugs in his life. Tash precisely fits the FBI’s profile of a future serial killer. And Ed has all the flair of a bank clerk. See what I’m saying?”

  I nodded, half because I was still reeling from his attack on Ed, and half because, though I hated to admit it, I saw his point. Josh was the ideal lead singer—energetic, charismatic, and hopelessly in love with himself. But the band’s token feminine influence was Tash, and viewing her in certain types of light was enough to put you off your food. I thought about the photos I’d taken, and how Kallie would change the way people looked at the band. So what if she contributed nothing musically? She’d be a figurehead, a media darling, the paparazzi’s dream. But still . . .

  “We need Kallie,” pressed Josh, clearly sensing my waning resistance. “We need someone to make us look good. And believe me, Kallie makes us look amazing.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You just want to hook up with her, don’t you?” I asked, hoping he’d seize the opportunity to deny it.

  “Don’t make this about me, Piper. Dumb needs Kallie. Kallie is Dumb.”

  “Do you mean that literally or figuratively?” I snorted.

  He laughed loudly. “Probably both. Does it matter?” He flashed his irresistible smile, confirming that we’d just shared an intimate joke. We were colluding.

  OMG! did u hear? piper vaughan and josh cooke were caught colluding in a music practice room!

  Josh chivalrously held the door open for me as we left, still chuckling, and it wasn’t until we’d entered the classroom that I realized he thought he’d convinced me to accept Kallie. And I guess he had. After all, he knew a whole lot more than me about bands, and his logic seemed flawless. Sure, I still despised Kallie with every fiber of my being, but that didn’t seem like an especially persuasive line of defense.

  “Okay, guys,” he shouted, presumably for my benefit. (He had so much to learn.) “This is a democracy. Let’s have a show of hands. All those in favor of Kallie joining Dumb.”

  As Josh and I raised our hands, Will looked down, and Tash scowled. Only Ed’s vote was in doubt. I peered at him expectantly, but he shook his head. If I’d been thinking clearly I’d have realized that Ed’s refusal to play along was a last-gasp rescue attempt, a warning sign written large in bright neon lights. Heck, I’m sure I’d have breathed a sigh of relief. But at that moment, all I could see was that Ed was voting against me, and my face must have registered my sense of betrayal. Immediately, as if it had a mind of its own, Ed’s hand crept slowly upward, while his eyes studied the floor.

  Josh clapped his hands together and attempted to shake my hand like it was all my idea. But I wasn’t looking at Josh. I was watching Tash, her nostrils flaring, eyes shooting daggers at Kallie.

  Yes, we had our eye candy, but it didn’t take a genius to see that she was in danger of being eaten alive.

  CHAPTER 16

  It was like Groundhog Day: Mom waltzing in with the revised contract as if she were a servant proffering a gift to a monarch. It was supposed to make me laugh, to keep some of the growing tension at bay, but I knew I was about to make things worse.

  Before you give that to me, I need to tell you something.

  Mom ditched her faithful-servant impersonation. What is it?

  I need you to add another name.

  I already added Ed’s name.

  Yes. A different name.

  Mom’s shoulders slumped, but her gestures were surgically efficient, her face suddenly sharper than before. It’s pre
ferable for your band to be able to fit onstage.

  Mom was almost never sarcastic, especially when signing, so I knew she was really exasperated. Or maybe just exhausted, as she was getting back later every day.

  It’s just one more person—

  Today, yes. By the time I redo the contract it might include half the school.

  I clammed up because Mom was making fun of me, and she knew it too, because she sighed and changed gear. So who’s new?

  Kallie Sims, I finger-spelled, then added school goddess in angry gestures that surprised us both.

  And what does the school goddess play?

  I was about to answer when it occurred to me that I didn’t know, because Josh hadn’t told me. I had to know, of course. If I didn’t, then the band really was a joke. How could it not be? And yet ...

  Mom hugged me, saving me from having to incriminate myself. When she stepped back, she tilted her head to the side. Are you sure you want me to redo this contract?

  I wanted to say that I didn’t have a choice, but I didn’t want Mom to think even less of Dumb than she already did, so I nodded with manufactured confidence.

  Okay. Kallie, right? She finger-spelled the name for confirmation.

  I nodded again, but I’m sure a part of me died right there.

  Mom was halfway out the door when she stopped. Would you like me to add a clause about new and departing members? Just something to keep the group fixed at five.

  Yes, I signed with a desperation that must have completely given me away.

  An hour later, Mom reappeared with an updated contract. This time she’d printed it on our regular home printer, so it wasn’t on the snazzy off-white bonded paper from her office. But I couldn’t blame her for that. After all, she probably figured it wouldn’t need to last very long.