by Amy Spalding
Yeah, I am not sending that one.
After forty-five minutes, I do not have a masterpiece, but I’m pleased enough to hit send.
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
subject: Fencing Club
hi ted,
i’m emailing about the fencing club because i am definitely interested in joining. i don’t know if it’s like yearbook with staff positions or whatever but i’m not picky, as you probably already know from the roar (like anyone else would have so happily covered the new fertilizer used on the courtyard flowers!).
—riley crowe-ellerman
www.thegolddiggersmusic.com
I tell myself I won’t sit at my computer refreshing my inbox, but of course that’s what I do. Going downstairs isn’t an option. Ashley has friends over, and I’m not up for stepping into their bubble of giggling and eye-shadow experimentation.
My phone seems to radiate its lack of activity, and I remind myself that even if Lucy calls, I won’t answer, so what does it matter? I still turn it off and on, just to check, even though I’ve never done that and had magical missing voice mails or texts appear. But, miraculamazingnessly, when I look back at my computer, there’s a (1) beside my inbox.
The bolded, brand-spanking-new email is, indeed, from [email protected].
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
subject: RE: Fencing Club
We meet on Thursdays in Ms. Matteson’s room right after school. Bring a notepad or a laptop.
Okay, it’s not exactly a declaration of love, but it’s still amazing Ted Callahan had to think about me and read words I typed. I’m calling it a win for the day.
But then it hits me.
Thursdays are the Gold Diggers’ weeknight practice nights. And Thursdays are important. It took us forever to come up with a night that didn’t conflict with anyone’s extracurriculars or families or Settlers of Catan game nights (okay, that one is just Reid). I’d give up anything for Ted Callahan—like food and water and air—but not my band.
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
subject: RE: Fencing Club
this sucks, but I have band practice on thursdays so I really can’t join. thanks for letting me know at least. if you ever change nights, i’d be totally interested.
—riley
www.thegolddiggersmusic.com
Hopefully that makes me seem responsible and devoted to my craft, qualities I feel like Ted Callahan would appreciate in a person.
Oh man, maybe Reid’s right. Maybe Ted is a dork.
I’m reading some album reviews at Pitchfork and mulling over the Dork Possibility when Ted Callahan makes a glorious return to my inbox.
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
subject: RE: Fencing Club
No problem. It’s a good reason to miss it at least!
That’s a nice thing to say, and his lightning-fast response makes it almost like we are chatting in real time, which is an awesome fantasy. No, not awesome, oh my god. I am not so nerdy that my awesome fantasies should include INSTANT MESSAGING.
Then, andIamnotkiddingaboutthis, the (1) is back. Ted, you’re back!
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
subject: RE: Fencing Club
Your band’s demo tracks are really good. Do you guys have any shows coming up?
I call Reid immediately.
“Yo,” he says.
“I think you have to give up ‘yo.’ I don’t think it suits you.”
“It will suit me,” he says. “I’m working on it. What’s up?”
“The Crush just sent me a nice email.”
“I know it’s Ted Callahan. You can just say ‘Ted Callahan.’”
“TED CALLAHAN JUST SENT ME A NICE EMAIL!”
“What does it say?”
I read it to him. I hate how it doesn’t take me any time because that shows it is not exactly a message of epic length.
“It’s good, Ri,” Reid says. “It’s a good sign.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m not saying he’s taking you to prom. I’m saying it’s a good sign.” He pauses. “Though ‘Walk Around’ is solid. And I know you don’t actually want to go to prom.”
“I wish we had a gig coming up,” I say. “Not just because of the Crush—”
“Say his name; it’s weird now.”
“NOT JUST BECAUSE OF TED CALLAHAN. We need a gig. Things have been so weird. We need to feel like a band again.”
“We should talk to Nathan,” Reid says. “He always seems to know stuff.”
“If he knew stuff, wouldn’t we already have a gig?”
Reid’s silent for a moment, and then another. “Do you ever think about the band breaking up?”
“All the time,” I say.
“We’ll start something else,” he says with confidence, like it’s on credit from some cool guy Reid most definitely is not.
“Okay,” I say, not because I believe him, but because I want to.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Qualities About You That Girls Might Like, by Riley
Great taste in music (and a good vinyl collection for girls who care about that*)
Have your own car and also access to your mom’s
Know about fancy restaurants**
Dress pretty well now
Good at enough of school to be smart, not at so much you’re a geek
Duh, you’re in a band!!
Qualities About You That Guys Might Like, by Reid
Really good taste in music
Hair is good color and length and thickness
Have fun when you’re out, never just stand around looking over it
Pretty good body (refuse to go into details, so don’t ask)
Not popular but everyone seems to like you or think you’re cool
In a band (duh indeed)
CHAPTER TWELVE
“We should think about scheduling a gig,” Reid says at practice the next day.
Nathan and Lucy are leaning over their guitars, tuning up, but they look right up at him.
“What?” Lucy asks. “I couldn’t hear you.”
“WE SHOULD SCHEDULE A GIG,” I say, which is restrained considering the fate of the world, or at least me and Ted, rests on this.
“Are you okay, Riley?” Lucy laughs and goes back to tuning. “Did you have caffeine today?”
“No more than usual,” I say. “No, it’s just, it’s important, getting shows, having people see us.”
“Yeah,” Reid says, looking right at me, “people, in general.”
“Yeah,” I say in my Reid voice. Captain Chipmunk. “Not three specific girls or anything.”
“What are you guys even talking about?” Nathan strums his guitar a little. The tuning is not good. “Crap, not there.”
“Almost,” Lucy says like he needs validation.
“What about this?” he says, and they do the thing where they make eye contact and play notes and chords at the same time to make sure they’re literally in tune with each other. They’ve done this forever, way before the Incident, but now I feel like I should leave the room while it happens.
“Riley and I were just saying we should look for gigs.” Reid always sounds diplomatic at practice.
“Yeah,” Nathan says. “I can talk to my cousin again.”
“Why?” I ask. “Is he marrying a second person?”
“Ooh, it’s like fundamentalist cults,” says Lucy, since she loves reading about cults and other creepy groups of people. “We can learn haunting religious music.”
“Reid can grow an old-fashioned beard,” I say, which causes Reid to clutch his hands over his bare chin, which probably isn’t up for growing a beard, old-fashioned or otherwise, yet. “We can braid our h
air.”
“Guys.” Nathan only needs one word to express how annoying our tangents are. “Jack liked our set, and so maybe he knows someone.”
“Great idea,” Lucy says.
“I had an idea, too,” Reid says.
That’s news to me.
“I just thought of this. What about the fall formal?”
“What about the fall formal?” Lucy wrinkles her nose. I feel this surge of relief my friend hasn’t become obsessed with dances and froufrou dresses and romantic nights in a school gym just because she has a boyfriend.
“They sometimes hire a band, right? Why not us?”
Actually, it isn’t a bad idea. All of us agree.
“It’s in a few weeks,” Nathan says. “We have to move fast on this.”
“I’ll talk to Ms. Belman tomorrow,” Reid says. For his free period he’s an office assistant. “I don’t know where they normally find bands for events.”
“It doesn’t count as going to the fall formal if you just play there, does it?” I ask. I’m not against high school functions in general, but even with my Hunt for Ted Callahan in full swing, the thought of intentionally going to a school dance makes me feel like the kind of person I never want to be.
“Definitely not, Ri,” Reid says. “We can still be cool.”
We all laugh at that and start playing our newest song, “Garage.” It’s sloppy, but it’s starting to sound like an actual song and not all of us just randomly jamming. The moment when that happens is like magic, how it all gels together and settles into something bigger than the four of us and our instruments.
I remember always loving music. Dad played CDs constantly when I was little, and I thought all kids grew up listening to Nirvana and the Pixies nonstop. When I was in kindergarten and everyone else thought they’d grow up to be firemen or nurses or horses (to be fair, that was just Holly Long, and she’s still weird), I insisted I’d grow up to be a rock star. (I accompanied these declarations with drawings of me looking like David Bowie.) By now everyone else wants to be lawyers and professional bloggers and geneticists, but I’m still on the path to being a rock star. If I didn’t believe that, I couldn’t see the point.
After practice I rush out after Reid (and it’s hard to rush with your drums in tow) because I figure Nathan and Lucy want alone time. Today Nathan’s right behind us, though, and then Lucy appears.
“Can you hang out?” she asks, and I realize she’s talking to me. “Mom got all of these berries at the farmers’ market today, and I was going to make fancy lemonades.”
“Oh, um.” I look at Reid like he’s going to save me. Those words echo in my head—save me—and I wonder if I’m stupid for needing to be saved from the girl who was my best friend. Is my best friend? Plus, fancy lemonades sound great! “Reid and I were going to work on a thing.”
“Yes,” Reid says quickly. “Lots of work to do.”
Saving me. Actually. The way best friends do. It’s weird how that switched around.
“Do you need help?” she asks. “I don’t have to make the lemonades tonight.”
“No,” I say as quickly as a person can. “No thank you, I mean.”
She watches us for a couple moments. I’ve stood by Lucy so many times when she was worried about something, so I know this is exactly how she looks. Back when the something wasn’t me, I would have done anything to take the blank look from her eyes, to make her nearly constant smile reappear.
But the something is me.
“Okay, Riley. See you tomorrow.”
I wave and finish loading my car. Reid hangs nearby and watches me. It’s good we don’t have to say much to know what’s going on with the other.
“Can you really talk to Ms. Belman tomorrow?” I ask.
“Yeah, it’s no big deal,” he says. “I should have thought of it before.”
“You should have.” But I smile because I’m kidding. Mostly.
“I have to go do a thing,” he says. “I didn’t have time to tell you earlier, but it’s all in here.”
I catch the Passenger Manifest as he tosses it to me. It’s impressive because if you combined our athletic abilities, you might come up with the skills of a sad kindergartner. “Go do a thing. We have Family Night tonight.”
“Rock on with that.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Sad Animal Project, by Reid
I learned today that Jane works as a volunteer at Paws for People, which is this animal rescue charity that finds homes for abandoned animals. She couldn’t be a better person.
So I’m going to “accidentally” walk past Paws for People tonight. Next door there’s an organic coffee place that’s pretty cool, so I’ll go there and then “stumble across” the rescue place. Jane will be there, and I can pretend to really consider getting some sad animal.
Then tomorrow I can talk to her some more about it, show her how I’m researching whatever its health condition is or maybe what breed it is, and do this for a while so we have to talk every day. Then finally I will have to tell her I literally just found out my brother’s allergic, so I can’t. But by then she’ll be used to talking to me every day, so we’ll keep doing that and before long maybe she’ll fall in love with me. And since I’m already in love with her, it’ll be great and easy once it actually starts.
Probably she’ll be volunteering with some jerky douchebag and none of this will actually happen, though. I won’t even go in if I spot any jerky douchebags.
Crap. This is doomed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I don’t know if Family Nights were Mom’s or Dad’s idea, because they present everything as a United Front. The two of them read more books than people in, like, library school, so I’m sure it was advice from some parenting manual that led them down this road. Tonight at least we’re out at the Palace, which isn’t as fancy as its name would have you believe but is pretty much my favorite Chinese food around.
“What’s new with you, Riley?” Mom asks. “Besides the Gold Diggers?”
Apparently, I had been communicating by always answering every question about what was going on by mentioning the band and only the band. I can’t help that it’s the most important thing in my life, and, anyway, do Mom and Dad really want to hear about Lucy and Nathan doing it or how wonderfully worn-in Ted’s hoodie looks?
“Yearbook’s okay,” I say.
“The Roar!” Dad says with a crazy grin. It’s a pretty lame name for a yearbook, but Dad thinks it’s the Weirdest Ever. “I wish—”
“That every school’s yearbook was the sound their mascot made?” It’s not a bad joke, but he’s only made it twenty-seven thousand times.
Ashley rolls her eyes with flair she probably picked up from reality TV villains who aren’t there to make friends. For once I am totally on her side.
“Anything else?” Mom asks, as if Dad hasn’t interrupted and I haven’t interrupted him. I think this is how Mom maintains her sanity.
“Not really,” I say.
Mom and Dad share a look like they’re forming a mind meld to decide whether or not I’m joining a cult or doing drugs or being the worst student Edendale High School’s ever seen.
“Aren’t you going to ask what’s up with me?” Ashley asks.
“Absolutely, Ashley,” Mom says, folding her hands in her lap and looking right at Ashley. “What’s new with you?”
Ashley tells a long and confusing story about her friends Jenica and Hayley and their usual lunch table, and I’m sure the insides of my parents’ brains are flashing images of the smart and articulate and yet easily-amused-by-the-same-joke-ten-times children they expected to produce.
Lucy calls while I’m out, and since it’s been crazy long since we’ve talked on the phone, and because I feel bad about my lack of involvement with the fancy lemonades, I call her back when we get home. She answers with an enthusiasm that makes me feel like a bad person. I wonder if I am a bad person. I wonder if she is, too, in a different way from my bad-person-ness.
I wonder if everyone is a bad person, somewhere, deep down. Probably not Jane Myatt, with her constant attention to the rescue of damaged, overstocked, and irregular animals. Probably not Garrick, with his devotion to school and science and the quest to end diseases that get you just because of who you’re born as. And probably not Ted Callahan, because I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what’s inside his head and heart, and there’s never been one hypothetical bad item of note.
“My parents can be so annoying,” I say. It is the safest topic ever. “Ugh, have you started your English lit yet?”
“Yeah, I worked on it for a while. It isn’t bad once you get going.”
Lucy always says things like this, but it’s only because she’s smarter than I am.
“Do you think we could really end up playing the dance?” she asks. “Sometimes I feel like Nathan and Reid have these ideas that are more than we can actually do.”
I start to agree with her, but my brain gets stuck on the idea of divulging secret inner-band opinions to her of all people and—sweet merciful gods of timing, Reid is calling.
“I have to go,” I say. “Sorry. Mom needs my help downstairs.”
“See you tomorrow,” she says. “Are you doing anything after school?”
“I don’t know, I’ll check,” I say as if I actually will. “Bye.”
I click over. “Hey. How did the Sad Animal Project go?”
“Oh man, Riley.” He is smiling so wide I can hear it. “I’m so in.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Sad Animal Project, Continued, by Reid
