“Or yell in general,” I added.
Tess’s jaw dropped. “We are an amazing presence in this school. Everyone should love us.”
“Then how come no one’s supporting us but us?” Tall Zach had actually leaped up from his chair. “Maybe you need to stop trying so hard to force an agenda on everybody.”
Tess gaped. Zach the Anarchist mumbled something about getting tea and disappeared into the crowd. I, meanwhile, nibbled on my fruity treat and was praying for someone, anyone, to come by the table at that exact moment and human-shield us out of the blast radius of Tess’s fury when a someone arrived.
“Hey hey!”
It was Meredith White, looking as sunny as always in two braids and a bright-blue sweater, one hand securely wrapped around the handle to her rolly backpack.
“Hey,” I said generously. Meredith might not be my first choice for emergency interloper, but her cheery annoyingness was infinitely more tolerable than one of my best friends ripping out the throat of another.
“How’s the bake sale . . . going?” Meredith’s smile dimmed as it went from various picked-over offerings of cupcakes and cookies to Tall Zach with his arms folded to a still-twitchy, knife-clutching Tess.
“Not bad,” I said. It was obviously going more than a little bad, but Meredith’s arrival was a welcome distraction.
“Yeah,” Tess said bitterly. “We’ve got almost five bucks in nickels alone.”
“Cool,” Meredith said. “Well, everything looks really yummy!”
“Thanks,” I said, just as Tess said, “You don’t have to lie.”
I silently stomped on Tess’s booted toes and grinned, no matter how much it pained me to pretend that yummy was a word normal sixteen-year-olds used.
Meredith fussed with the end of her braid. “What’s good?”
“The oat bars are gluten-free,” Tall Zach said.
“Oh, um . . .” Meredith looked uncomfortable, as if she didn’t know whether to praise them or avoid them for this.
“Try a snickerdoodle,” I heard a voice say. “They’re excellent.”
Meredith jumped and dropped the rolly-bag handle as Zach the Anarchist slid by her toward the table, a cup of tea in hand.
“Sorry.” Zach picked up the handle of her bag and handed it to her, like rolling backpacks didn’t deserve to be abandoned wherever they fell.
“Thanks.” She was smiling even wider now. At him. “Okay. Why not?”
She handed me over some change and helped herself to a snickerdoodle.
“Wow.” Meredith closed her eyes as she took a bite. “Did you make them?”
“Yeah,” Zach said, lowering himself into the chair next to me.
“That’s awesome,” Meredith said. She made a little humming sound. “Yummy.”
“I helped,” I said. “By the way.”
“Mmph.” Meredith spun a wait a sec finger by her braids as she polished off her snickerdoodle. “That was great. But actually, I came over to talk to Tess.”
“Me?” Tess jerked to attention from where she’d been sulking. “What?”
Meredith rocked on her heels. “Did you guys ever find a venue? Zach told me in econ there was a problem with the old one.”
“I did?” said Tall Zach.
“No, Zach West.”
I looked at Zach, or the top of Zach’s head, because Zach was back to reading about probability theory.
Tess sighed. “As of right now, for a cool extra seven hundred and fifty American dollars over budget, we’re having the dance at the ballroom at the Wister Holiday Inn.”
Tall Zach wrinkled his nose. “The one by the highway on-ramp?”
“No, the one by the gas station.”
“The one where they found a torso in a trash can,” muttered Zach the Anarchist.
“That was never corroborated!”
“Okay,” Meredith said slowly. “Well, my dad’s on the board of the Woodlawn Museum of Art, and they have this kinda big event room.” She tugged at one of her braids. “It’s got a mural on the wall and everything. It’s really great. And I asked him and he said that we could totally have it there, if you want.” She paused. “For free.”
“Are you serious?” Tess rocketed from her chair and flung her arms around Meredith. “We totally want.”
“Um, great!” Meredith squeaked from beneath Tess’s leather-jacketed embrace.
“Ugh. I could kiss you right now.” Tess let Meredith go. “Not that I will. Because I’m not trying to force an agenda on anyone.” She threw a pointed look at Tall Zach. He sighed.
“That’s awesome.” Zach the Anarchist glanced up from his math book, and Meredith bobbed her head. She looked . . . blushy. And she wasn’t exactly meeting his eyes.
“Well, I really wanted to help the cause,” she said. “Just because I’m not, um, you know—”
“I’m pretty straight, too,” Zach the Anarchist said. “So it’s fine.”
“Yes! See?” Tess pointed wildly from Meredith to Zach. “We’re doing it. We’re reaching the public.”
Meredith grinned. “Well, if there’s anything else I can do . . .”
“Great!” Tess cried. “Zach the Anarchist, don’t you need help baking all these?”
Zach the Anarchist darted the quickest look at me. “I mean, I had Nattie, but—”
“OMG! Nattie!” Meredith smacked her forehead. “I totally forgot to ask you. Did you know Sebastian’s band has an album out? Like, a full one?”
So much for being clueless.
“Um,” I said. “No.” I wiped my palms on my jeans a few times.
Meredith frowned. “Sebastian didn’t, like . . . tell you about it?”
Zach the Anarchist was not looking at his math book anymore. He was looking, just out of the corner of his eye, at me. And I could feel it.
“No,” I said, probably too loudly. My traitorous heart was beating like a drum machine in my chest. “Why would he?”
“Oh, um, no reason.” Meredith fiddled with the button of her backpack handle. “I thought because—”
“He and I aren’t really even friends,” I said, maybe a little too loudly. “I mean, I don’t know him super well.”
I glanced back at Zach the Anarchist, but he’d already gotten out of his chair.
“Oh, okay.” Meredith was back to a sunny, if confused, smile. “Well, you should totally listen to it. I can burn you a copy if you want.”
“I mean, I haven’t listened to them since the show or anything.” Lie. “It’s not really my thing.”
Mercifully, the bell rang.
“The bell!” I almost shouted. “Look at that!”
“Or hear that, even,” said Zach the Anarchist’s voice from behind me. Meredith giggled a very annoying giggle.
“Peace out, dorks,” Tess said. “I have to go announce our good news to student council.”
She swung her bag on her shoulder and clomped away. Then Tall Zach tucked the remaining fruity treats into his shoe box, gave us a salute, and bounded off. Which left just me, Meredith, and Zach the Anarchist. Well, us, and the rest of the people flooding out of the cafeteria. But I was suddenly a lot less concerned with them.
“Well,” Zach said. “Econ?”
“I’m not in econ,” I said.
“Not you.”
“Sure,” Meredith said.
“What about the money?” I said.
“Counted it,” Zach said. “And you’re the treasurer anyway.”
“Well . . . what about all this food?”
Zach looked back at the table. Besides the oat bars, two stalwart cupcakes were the only apparent survivors of the bake sale.
“Here.” Zach thrust one of the cupcakes into Meredith’s hands.
“Oh, I . . .” Meredith looked like she was about to refuse, but then didn’t. Something passed between her and Zach, like a subliminal telegraph, and it made me uncomfortable. “Thanks.” Unlike Tess, Meredith seemed to favor showing as many teeth as possible when
she smiled.
“There’s still stuff left, ahem.” I actually said the word ahem. “Shouldn’t we wrap it up or something?”
Not the oat bars, obviously, but I did feel bad for that poor smudged leftover cupcake. Someone really should’ve bought it. Gingerly, I picked it up and tipped it around to examine.
Meredith wrinkled her nose. “It looks like someone licked it.”
“Nobody licked it.” I clutched the cupcake to my chest, to the extent that I could without getting frosting on myself. “Someone just smudged the rose on top.”
“Don’t be gross, Nattie,” Zach said. “No one’s going to want a week-old cupcake that somebody licked. Just toss it.” He went to dump the assorted detritus from our table into the trash, and Meredith crowned it with the fluttering wrapper from her cupcake. They left together, her laughing at some remark I didn’t make out.
“Well,” I said to the trash can as I hefted the cashbox. “Didn’t that just work out perfectly.”
The smudged cupcake, abandoned on a heap of paper towels, Gatorade bottles, and gluten-free baked goods, did not answer.
From there, it didn’t get better. It got much, much worse.
When the word got out that Sebastian Delacroix’s band was actually a thing, I had to play it preternaturally cool as what felt like every heterosexual girl and even some of the boys at Wister Prep snapped up a copy of Sleepmore. When Ron’s Records, quite possibly the only physical music store still in existence, put up a giant poster of the same black-and-white Young Lungs photo I’d practically burned into my eyelids, I had to start averting my eyes every morning as Dad drove me to school down Main Street. When WPHL started playing the single in earnest during their evening music block, I surreptitiously flipped the kitchen radio to NPR and feigned an interest in national politics. I did allow myself to skim the Wister Register when the paper even ran an article about Sebastian and his small-town roots, only to find it qualified at the end with “Mr. Delacroix could not be reached for comment.”
Truer words had never been spoken.
The ironic kicker, the part that really bugged me, was how the threat of being revealed as some kind of sex goddess was making me feel the most ungainly and least attractive I’d ever been in my life. I’d never realized just how everywhere music is. The radio at home. The grocery store. The car rolling down the street with its windows open even thought it was November. And even when you’re somewhere ostensibly quiet, like the library, everyone is still plugged in to their phones and computers, lost in their own world of music while you stare at them, terrified by the infinite possibilities of their silent listening. Every set of speakers was a ticking time bomb, ready to unleash the four-chord opening at a moment’s notice and wail to another unsuspecting group of people about how sexy and mysterious I was.
For almost two weeks, I woke up to the sound of the guitars and went to bed in the glow of my computer, watching their YouTube channel rack up more hits as they went from city to city in a little thread, spidering outward from Los Angeles up to Seattle and then cutting down into the heart of flyover country. And every day, there were more Pixstagram comments to obsess over.
sammysamsam
great, great show tonight. come back soon. i’ll be waiting x
dis_girl_on_fire
YOUNG LUNGS WOW I’M SERIOSLY DIGING IT
caelenorear
any chance u will ever come to Ireland????
_brighteyesbigdreams_
well, it’s official . . . i’m jealous of natalie, whoever she is!
And then there was Vivian Violet. Her site seemed to be obsessed with all things Young Lungs, and so I made it my first stop during each day’s stalker session. One evening, sitting at the kitchen counter, staring at all the purpleness of it on my laptop, I heard Sam Huang walk in. He was headed for the fridge, singing some a cappella–sounding das and bas, and a few measures in, the syllables started to form a melody, a familiar melody, even if all I was hearing was the tenor part. Cold terror clutched my heart.
“What is that?” I snapped my laptop shut. “Sam?”
Sam looked up from the sandwich he was making. “What?”
“That song you were singing just now. What was it?”
“Uh . . .” Sam shrugged. “Nothing? Just something for A Cappella. It’s secret. I . . . I’ve already said too much.”
He assembled his sandwich in record time and scampered out of the kitchen.
“Et tu, Sam Huang?” I yelled after him. He either hadn’t heard me or pretended not to. But if the song had penetrated as far as the Owen Wister Preparatory Academy a cappella group, things were bad.
Heart pounding, I took a deep breath, reopened my laptop, and stared at Vivian Violet’s latest #younglungs post. Maybe, as long as I absorbed every scrap of Young Lungs–related information floating out in the ether, I could somehow control it. Maybe.
What is it about a female first name that makes for such catchy songwriting? Dante had Beatrice, Orpheus had Eurydice, and practically every music act since the dawn of recorded music has had at least one single that singles out that one special girl.
So Vivian Violet thought I was in good company. Great.
“Michelle” by the Beatles—Allegedly inspired by students Paul McCartney saw at an art party, this is the song responsible for teaching a whole generation of kids how to fake-speak French.
I vaguely remembered hearing this once, probably accompanied by Dad’s commentary on how the Beatles are overrated. I clicked the MP3 link beneath the blurb and listened. The song was pleasant and strummy enough, but the French accents were pretty atrocious.
“Roxanne” by the Police—Leave it to Sting to record probably the most upbeat song ever recorded about unrequited love, and to give it a white-boy reggae beat.
This one sounded jumpy and unsettled, like a cross between a headache and a heart attack, where the singer strained his lyrics so much I couldn’t actually hear what he was saying.
“867-5309 (Jenny)” by Tommy Tutone—I can’t decide which would be worse, having that phone number, or being named “Jenny” around the time when this song was released.
Another one I kind of recognized. At least Sebastian hadn’t released my phone number.
“Hey There Delilah” by the Plain White T’s—Ugh, this again. If I never hear this nasal earworm tribute to pathetic love for the rest of my life, it will be too soon. Can you believe this went to number one?
Harsh. I clicked the link, and a few bars in, I sort of saw what she meant, but mostly I felt for poor Delilah. I wondered if the lead singer of this band was into sending cryptic text messages and writing songs instead of actually having conversations.
Anyway, this is all just to say congrats to VV faves the Young Lungs for selling out and cracking into the Billboard Alternative Songs 200. Whether fact or fiction, Sebastian Delacroix’s lost lady love “Natalie” is probably going to be the nation’s next mystery girlfriend. Don’t believe me? Come out in person to catch the YLs at their East Coast kickoff tour this Thanksgiving weekend at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn. And who knows? Maybe Natalie herself will show up.
Oh yeah, maybe she will, I thought grimly. Or maybe she’ll continue to lie low so that she can survive her junior year of high school.
“Hey, Nattie.”
I jumped, which in turn made Dad look a little alarmed. I was beginning to hate the sound of my own name.
“Hey,” I said. I tried for a perky, ordinary Nattie-sounding tone of voice, because I was pretty sure the only thing worse than skyrocketing to national fame for being a heartbreaker was having to explain that fact to your parents.
But Dad wasn’t so easily fooled.
“Something’s up,” he said.
“No,” I said quickly, locking my phone. “Nothing’s up.”
“I’m your father,” Dad said. “Or, more to the point, you’re my daughter. I know a worried Schwartz when I see one.”
I blew out a breath. There was no gett
ing by him. Maybe I could conjure a reasonable alternative concern to throw him off my trail.
“It’s all this . . . uh, college stuff,” I lied. “The SATs and stuff are really stressing me out.”
“You haven’t even taken them yet, Nattie.”
“Yeah, well, you know.” I gave a noncommittal grimace.
Dad crossed his arms over his Commander Cody T-shirt, a surefire indicator he was flipping into problem-solver mode, and gave me a sage nod.
“I think I do,” he said. “Because I know not just what you mean, but also what you need.”
“What?”
“You need a place to clear your head. A place where stress and negative thinking don’t exist. A place of emotional detachment.”
Oh no.
“Dad,” I started, but it was too late. Dad was grinning like a kid on Christmas morning, which didn’t seem very emotionally detached to me, and then he nodded toward the yard.
“C’mon, Gann. You need some time in the yurt.”
I glanced out the back door at the gray November evening that lay in chilly, foggy wait outside the warmth of the house.
“I think I’m okay,” I said.
“Nattie, I’m your father,” Dad said. “I know what’s good for you. And besides, I just put the canvas over it! You have to check it out.”
I heaved the most silent sigh possible and tugged up the zipper of my Wister Prep hoodie. Dad scrambled around to slip on his weekend Crocs and open the back door, letting in a gust of air that was as wet as it was cold.
The muddy ground of the backyard had frozen, the little pockets of dirt crystals splintering underneath my bare feet as I crossed the yard. Ahead of me, the newly covered yurt structure was a wilting dome of canvas, like a droopy tent for a miniature circus. Dad was taking tripping steps ahead of me, positioning himself right by the entrance so he could usher me in like some kind of yurt butler.
“See, the door is low, so that you can’t enter the yurt without bending down and humbling yourself.”
“So you’ve said,” I said, not pointing out that it didn’t get much humbler than muddy bare feet and an old sweatshirt. Dad pushed open the hobbit-sized door and ducked in, and I humbled myself after him into the yurt.
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