Jay Versus the Saxophone of Doom

by Kara Kootstra

  “Jason? Question three, please?”

  I freeze and look down at my binder, turning the pages, trying to find the question I’m supposed to be answering.

  “Perhaps next time you will follow along with the rest of the class. Christine, can you give us the answer for number three?”

  I feel my face flushing and I sink back in my chair. Even though my eyes are pointed down at my desk, I sense that Mick is looking at me, laughing even, and it makes my face feel even hotter. The day is off to a rough start, and it’s not even Music class yet.

  In fact, it’s not even nine o’clock.

  By the time Music rolls around I am feeling a bit better. Mostly because Mick got called on to answer a math problem and totally got it wrong. And then, at recess, one of the eighth-graders was dared to drink a whole can of soda in a minute, and he tried it but totally failed, and there was soda everywhere, and it even came out of his nose. It. Was. Awesome. Also, a new thought has occurred to me: What if it turns out I’m actually really good at the saxophone? I mean, I’ve never tried to play an instrument before. Maybe it will be like the first time I laced up a pair of skates and got on the ice. Kind of wobbly at first, sure, but after a while I’ll get the hang of it. I might even be pretty good. For all I know, I’m some kind of musical prodigy! Okay, that might be taking it a bit far, but the point is that I might be making this out to be a lot worse than it is. Maybe it’s all in my head!

  I take my seat in the saxophone section (I’m not sure you can call three kids a section, but whatever) and open up my case. Last class, Mrs. Jennings helped us assemble our instruments, and now I realize that I should probably have been paying more attention to which part goes where. I look at the rest of the saxophone players putting their instruments together at a shockingly fast pace. What, are these kids doing saxophone speed drills at home? I try to copy them as best as I can. I’m feeling so good by the time it’s finished (after all, it certainly looks like a saxophone) that I almost forget that I am going to have to play the saxophone. That is, until Mrs. Jennings taps her music stand and asks us all to turn to the first page of our music books.

  “Now, in today’s class, we are all going to try to play a concert C on our instruments. For some of you, that note will look like this,” she draws a strange symbol on the board, “and for others, it will look like this,” more circles and sticks. “So, we’ll go through each instrument section, I’ll give you the fingering, and we’ll give it a try! Oh, can’t you just feel the music inside of you, ready to burst out!” Mrs. Jennings claps her hands together a few times.

  I don’t feel music inside of me wanting to burst out. I feel lunch wanting to burst out. I try to calm my nerves and wait for my section to be called.

  Clarinets. Trumpets. Flutes.

  “And now, my brave saxophone players. Look at your chart and find the fingering for concert C. Does everyone have it?”

  I am desperately putting fingers on metal buttons, trying to make it match the chart.

  “Okay, now I hope all of you moistened your reeds!”

  Moistened my what? Oh, right, the little wooden thing. I quickly stick it in my mouth to give it some moisture, then fumble as I slide it into place underneath the metal part on the mouthpiece.

  “And a 1, and a 2, and a 1, 2, 3, 4…”

  Tightening the small screws as fast as I can, I take a deep breath in on “4” and blow as hard as I can into the saxophone. An enormous, high-pitched squeak comes out of my instrument, and I almost fall out of my chair, the sound is so loud. The entire class is erupting with laughter while Mrs. Jennings is tapping furiously on her stand. For the second time that day, my face turns red.

  “Class…class! We do not laugh at budding musicians, we applaud our classmate’s effort! Come on, everyone, let’s give a nice big round of applause!”

  I can’t decide if it is more embarrassing to have everyone laugh at my terrible, high-pitched squeak or have everyone clap for it.

  At any rate, I think I can officially say I am NOT a musical prodigy. If you were to put this experience on a scoreboard, it would probably look a little something like this:

  CHAPTER 5

  It is almost the end of November and the classroom is a little louder than normal, mostly because of the announcement that we will finally get to go outside during our lunch period. At the beginning of the week, Parry Sound suddenly got super cold and the teachers had to keep us inside for three days. It’s a good thing it finally started to warm up because kids were kind of starting to climb the walls and most of the teachers looked like they were going to have some kind of a breakdown. Luke and Max (who is my other hockey-obsessed friend) are sitting at their desks and I plunk down beside them into my own, unzipping the top of my lunch box.

  “Took you long enough,” Luke says, taking what looks like a bunch of lettuce out of a Ziploc bag. “Did you walk home to get that or what?” He is peeling off the top leaf of the lettuce, which reveals a piece of ham and a thick spread of some description.

  “I had to go the bathroom, and the ones by our lockers were closed because the floors were being cleaned, so—” I start to respond, but Max interjects, looking at Luke.

  “I think the better question is, what the heck are you eating? Hasn’t your mom ever heard of a sandwich?” Max picks up his own sandwich to show Luke.

  “It is a sandwich,” Luke explains, “it’s just…made with lettuce,” he finishes, a bit defensively.

  “No, a sandwich, by definition, is two pieces of bread with something in the middle,” Max says, taking a big bite out of his own and wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “That’s totally not true. A sandwich is when you put something in the middle of two slices of something else. It doesn’t have to be bread. Right, Ralph?”

  I ignore the nickname and just hold my hands up to indicate I am staying out of this debate.

  “Dude, that’s ridiculous. Read a dictionary.”

  “Oh, so you’ve read the definition of a sandwich in the dictionary, huh?” Luke asks, giving him a doubtful look.

  “I don’t have to, everyone knows what a sandwich is. You are born with the knowledge. Like knowing that ice cream is delicious and sisters are terrible human beings.”

  “You were born an idiot,” Luke says, grabbing the ham from the middle of the lettuce and shoving it into his mouth.

  “After all that, you aren’t even going to eat your so-called sandwich?” Max asks, finishing his last bite.

  “I said it was a sandwich. I didn’t say it was good,” Luke responds, putting the lettuce back into the plastic baggie and rolling it up into a ball. He attempts to shoot it into the garbage pail by the teacher’s desk, but it misses, landing a few inches beside the can. Max stands up and claps and I let out a few whistles, which causes a couple of girls from my class to turn around and giggle. (Those girls are always giggling, and I find this both strange and annoying.)

  Luke responds with a shrug. “Not my game,” he mumbles on the way to pick up his trash.

  After our lunches are finished (well, the good parts, at least), we pack up our stuff and head outside to enjoy our last bit of freedom before the bell rings for afternoon classes.

  “So, a little one-on-one?” I ask Luke, gesturing to the basketball nets.

  “You’re hilarious,” he replies, sarcastically.

  “No, I think Jay is right. You should definitely show off some more of your moves. I mean…you’ve got skills,” Max chimes in, grinning.

  “Oh, you don’t think I’ve got skills? Would a guy without skills be able to do this?” Luke knocks off Max’s hat with one hand and catches it with other. He tosses it my way, I catch it, and I throw it back as Max comes toward me.

  We spend the rest of the lunch hour playing keep-away with Max’s hat, which I realize is kind of an immature game but…what can I say? It’s hilarious. And I never claimed to be mature.

  My mom says that I am a “procrastinator,” which I thought
sounded really cool the first time I heard it. Doesn’t it totally sound like an awesome movie with a lot of fighting and aliens and robots and no kissing? Wouldn’t you go see a movie called The Procrastinator? Unfortunately, being a procrastinator actually means leaving everything to the last minute. And when I learned that, well, it just didn’t seem like it would be much of movie if it was just some guy sitting around NOT doing anything. (Although you could still have a cool movie tagline like, “The Procrastinator: This deadline might be deadly,” or something like that. Okay, you might have to tweak it a little, but what do I look like, a screenwriter?) At any rate, I am a procrastinator. This is probably why I have waited until November before approaching Mrs. Jennings about a music tutor. I guess I kind of thought that if I continued to pretend to play along with the rest of my section it might eventually translate into…uh…actually playing? I know, the theory wasn’t without flaws, but I heard someone once say that you have to “fake it until you make it.” Apparently, that person has never fake-played a saxophone.

  It’s just after Music class and I take my time putting away my gear (or whatever music people call their…stuff) before making my way up to Mrs. Jennings’s desk. At least, I assume it’s a desk. The top is covered with papers and mugs and small plaques that say things like, “You’d better C Sharp or you’re going to B Flat.” Here are a few more:

  • “Life should be a crescendo!”

  • “Treble maker”

  • “If it’s not Baroque, don’t fix it!”

  I have no idea what any of these mean.

  Mrs. Jennings is sitting behind the giant mess, humming so furiously to herself that she does not even notice me standing there.

  “Excuse me…Mrs. Jennings?”

  “Oh! My dear…I didn’t see you! When the music takes over, well…you know!”

  I don’t know.

  “Sure…well, I was kind of hoping that I could talk to you about—”

  “About the saxophone. Of course, dear. I’ve noticed that you’ve been struggling a bit in class, but you know what they say, practice makes perfect!”

  “Right. Practice. You see, that’s kind of what I was hoping to talk—”

  “I remember when I was just a young musical artist like yourself. The first time I sat down at a piano, my fingers touching the glossy black and white keys, the sound of the metronome…tick, tick, tick, tick…”

  Mrs. Jennings has that far-off look in her eyes, and I know I need to pull her down to earth before I lose her for good.

  “I want a tutor!”

  Mrs. Jennings immediately snaps back into reality and gives me a puzzled look. I’m not quite sure if she’s confused because I want a tutor, or just…confused.

  “I mean…I was hoping I could get a tutor, if that’s possible…please.”

  “I’m sure we could arrange that. But you know, I always say that the soul,” she clutches her chest and gives a dramatic pause, “is the best tutor.” She stares at me.

  I stare back. Am I supposed to say something? Is there a proper amount of time to make it seem like that’s really “sunk in”?

  “I have the perfect tutor for you. I’ll get back to you with a date and time,” Mrs. Jennings says hurriedly, and then she immediately returns to her humming.

  I leave the classroom only 75 percent sure that my tutor will be an actual human being.

  After only a few more classes, school is over for the day and I get to go over to Luke’s house. We don’t have practice today and as much as I love hockey, I’m kind of stoked to be able to just chill out for a couple of hours.

  We immediately go to the kitchen to get a snack. Luke’s mom is what one might refer to as a “health nut,” so there’s always a bowl on the counter with nutritious snacks. Most of the time the stuff is pretty good, although there always seems to be an alarming amount of seeds in everything she bakes. This not only makes the texture of her peanut butter cookies a little strange but has also led to embarrassing scenarios in which I have been alerted to the fact that there are tiny black seeds between my teeth. Needless to say, I have started to do a once-over in the mirror before leaving Luke’s place. Today, the bowl is full of a bunch of fruit, and the baking looks fairly safe. We grab a couple of things and then head out to the driveway to shoot some pucks off of Luke’s garage door.

  As soon as we step outside, my ears are instantly frozen. I put on a toque and pull some gloves out of my coat pockets. Parry Sound winters are for REAL. You pretty much have to have a hat and a pair of gloves on you at all times, and a spare set not far away. This one time, a bunch of us were going to play pond hockey and I couldn’t find any of my pairs of gloves. Dylan was wearing his and had left his other set at school, so my only option was a pair of Jodie’s. They were purple with sparkly silver thread sewn into the fabric, and they looked absolutely ridiculous on me. But I wore them. Like I said, Parry Sound winters are for REAL.

  “So,” Luke is dumping a bunch of pucks out of a netted bag, “what were you doing after Music class, anyway? I was trying to find you to show you some new cheat codes for our game before Social Studies.”

  “I was…I decided to ask her about a tutor,” I say, taking my first shot. “I guess she’s gonna hook me up with someone.”

  “So, you haven’t figured it out yet? I mean, how hard can it be to play the saxophone?” Luke takes a shot and it hits just to the right of the X that we have stuck to the garage door with duct tape.

  “Says the guy whose instrument is basically a big bucket you hit with sticks.” I take my next shot, but at the last moment the stick slips and the puck goes whirling too much to the left.

  Luke grins. “Can I help it my last name starts with a B? You should really file for a legal name change.” He shoots again, still just a little to the right.

  “Tell me about it. But I doubt that I can manage that before our Music test. So…tutor it is.”

  “Well, good luck with that,” Luke says, still grinning.

  “Hey, keep laughing,” I say, pulling back my stick. I focus on the garage door target and bring the stick down, sending the puck flying forward to hit the mark directly in the center of the X.

  Luke whistles. “Well, you’ve got that going for ya.”

  We continue taking turns shooting pucks against the door, not noticing that it’s getting dark, until Luke’s dad calls him in.

  “What time is it, Dad?” Luke shouts back.

  “It’s 5:15,” his dad says, walking out to put some garbage by the curb.

  “I gotta go or I’m gonna be late for dinner,” I say, putting away the sticks and dropping the pucks into the bag before I start walking home.

  “Hey, the Bruins are playing the Habs tonight, right?” Luke says, shoving the bin to the side of the driveway.

  How could I have forgotten?

  “Yeah,” I call over my shoulder, already starting my walk home. “See ya!”

  I barely manage to get to the table before dinner is served. We eat our dinner (something gray and mushy), and as soon as the meal is over I race up the stairs to my bedroom to quickly do my homework before the game starts. As soon as the last math problem is completed, I grab my jersey (aka, one of the few things I would grab in a fire) and toss it on. It is, of course, a Boston Bruins jersey. And you can probably guess what’s on the back:

  ORR

  4

  In the living room my whole family has taken their usual positions: Mom and Dad are on the loveseat, Jodie is sitting cross-legged on the floor, and Dylan is spread out on the couch. I take my place in an armchair, and Dylan tosses me a half-empty bag of licorice. On the coffee table in front of him is a wide variety of chips and candy, along with a couple of cans of pop. Everyone is wearing their jerseys, silently waiting for the face-off. The only sounds in the room are the crunching and chewing and sipping and slurping.

  This is what a Boston Bruins game night looks like in my house. It is the one activity that no one misses, the one family night no one com
plains about. From the day you are born a Roberts you are taught the sacred tradition of being a Boston Bruins fan (and, by extension, a Bobby Orr fan, because one simply cannot exist without the other). Game nights just become a part of who you are and what you do. And there is no better game night on the planet than the lineup tonight:

  Boston Bruins

  vs.

  Montreal Canadiens

  Boston and Montreal (or the Habs, as they are traditionally called) are longtime rivals, so you KNOW it is going to be a good game. Tonight we have the home-ice advantage, but that doesn’t mean much when you have two teams who are ready to play with a vengeance.

  “Hey, can you pass the licorice, Jay?” Jodie asks, her hand sticking out toward me. Usually, she would say something like, “Hey, you gonna eat the whole bag or you gonna give me some?” or something to that effect, but there is kind of an unwritten sibling truce on game night.

  “Sure. Here,” I say, tossing the bag.

  “Boston Garden. Man, I’d love to see a game there again,” my dad says. “I was just six years old when your Grandpa Joe took me to see a game at the Garden. It was 1974, before Bobby Orr retired. And your old man got to see him in action. I’ve told you about that game, right?”

  He has. A million times. But we sit and listen to it again because he tells it with such excitement that it’s almost like being there watching it with him. I’ve seen footage of Bobby Orr, but I can’t imagine what it would be like to see him play in an actual arena. Listening to my Grandpa Joe and my dad talk about it is just about the closest I’ll ever get to the real thing.

  As soon as the puck is dropped the silence returns until the game really gets going. Then the room is filled with a lot of shouting and frustrated grunts and cheering. I have to admit that on nights like this, my family almost seems…not half bad.