by Peter Hannan
I had entered the twilight zone. A good twilight zone.
“Please continue, Davis,” Danderbrook said, squinting and biting her lip. She seemed to be drifting into some sort of poetry trance. Miss Dolores Danderbrook, twenty-year veteran of the public school system, was trembling like a leaf. She was under my spell.
I almost choked up at the end, and realized I was thinking less about Danderbrook and Molly at that point, and more about Mom.
Miss Danderbrook was weeping. Did she know about my mother? Probably. Everyone probably knew. That kind of thing gets around. Danderbrook’s mouth had turned into such an intensely sad frown it seemed like she was exaggerating like a French mime, but she wasn’t. It was real.
Molly was sniffling, too. Cissy Seabrook cried so hard she started choking. Another girl walked around passing out Kleenex, like a funeral director or something. Noses were honking like car horns in traffic. Edwin and the other guys weren’t actually shedding tears, but they were definitely stunned. I had meant for the song to be funny and maybe angry, but I guess it was a whole lot sadder as a poem.
Turned out, Danderbrook loved sad. She said she would feature my poem in the next poetry club magazine, even though I wasn’t in poetry club. Until about five seconds earlier, I hadn’t even liked poetry.
I could only think that Danderbrook was so excited that someone put a tiny bit of work into the assignment that she sort of overreacted. If I had just spoken those kinds of things, she would have called me a whiny brat who didn’t appreciate all that life and English class had to offer. But throw in a little rhyme and rhythm and she got all blubbery. Of course, she didn’t notice that the poem was about her, that she was the “geezer.” I have to admit, the whole thing made me like her a little more. It’s hard not to appreciate someone who appreciates you.
When class was over, Molly touched my shoulder as she passed by, and whispered, “Wow.” I tried not to let it make my day, but it did.
Later that afternoon, the Butcher passed me in the hallway between classes and gave me the evil eye … with a larger-than-usual dose of evil. He must have gotten word of what went down in English. He pretended to accidentally bump into me, but it felt a lot more like getting hit by a truck.
My books went flying. It should have been embarrassing to scramble around on my hands and knees and gather them up during serious rush-hour foot traffic, but weirdly, it didn’t bother me at all.
“Watch the Melting Clock” had changed everything. All of a sudden I was on a roll in English — and my status had gone way up at Woodrow Wilson High.
Super news on the home front: leftover spaghetti for dinner. Whoopee. Now it was molded into the shape of the plastic storage container it had spent the past few days entombed in. Dad chopped it in half before he nuked it, and both portions were oddly brick-like. Square-ish pink brains. I couldn’t look at the dollops of sauce on top without thinking of blood. The outer noodles were hard, so I scraped out the soft inner noodles, like I was cleaning a fish.
“You didn’t happen to pick up some shaky cheese, did you?” I asked. Parmesan is even more essential with secondhand spaghetti.
“No, I got out of work late,” said Dad apologetically. “I’ll get it tomorrow.” He sounded very tired. “Anything new at school?”
“Nope,” I lied. I didn’t want to make him feel even worse about his day.
“Wow, you’d think in a school of that size, something would eventually happen.”
“Yeah, you’d think,” I said, getting up and feeding ninety percent of my dinner to the disposal monster. “Hey, Dad, I’m going over to a kid’s house to ask him about my homework.”
“What kid? Is he a friend?”
I shrugged. “Nah, just some kid who knows what the homework is.”
I grabbed my guitar and headed over to the barbershop. Edwin’s dad was working late, just finishing up his last haircut of the day: an old dude with nowhere near enough hair to even need to get it cut.
“Come on in,” Edwin’s dad said. “You must be Eddie’s friend.”
I blinked. “Eddie? Oh, right, Eddie.” Only Edwin would prefer being called Edwin. “Yes, sir. We started a band.”
“Believe me, I know,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “The whole neighborhood knows.”
I smiled nervously and nodded. If we got kicked out of the barbershop and had to practice unplugged in one of our crummy rooms or something, the band would fall apart. Fast.
“Oh, c’mon, Walter,” said the old dude. “Let ’em use the dang shop. I wanted to play the saxophone as a kid, but after one night of squeaking, my old man returned the thing and told me to forget about music right then and there.”
“Probably good advice, Furry,” said Mr. Martin.
Furry? Was that his first or last name? Either way, a funny name for a bald dude.
“Good advice if you don’t mind wasting your dang life bein’ miserable!” Furry spat. “I’m eighty-one years old, and I’ve thought about that saxophone every single day since. I held it in my hands for only ten minutes, seventy years ago. It’s too late for me, but for god’s sake, let the kids use the dang shop.”
“Calm down, Furry,” said Edwin’s dad. “I heard you the first time.”
“Calm down?” Furry was definitely not calm. “Do you know I never walk down Union Street? I go way out of my way. There’s a sax in the window of the pawnshop there that just sits and waits for me to pass by so it can laugh at me.”
“Who laughs at you?” said Edwin, walking through the door.
“A saxophone,” I said.
“Never mind,” Mr. Martin said. “You guys can play in here. Just turn down the volume.”
“Turn down the volume is not in the lexicon of rock,” said Edwin.
“Neither is barbershop, if you don’t watch it,” said his dad.
“No problem,” I put in quickly. “We can turn it down.”
Furry looked from Edwin to me and back again. “I’d like to hear you boys play sometime.”
“No you wouldn’t,” said Edwin, shaking his head.
Edwin was right. There was no way an old dude — even a cool old dude — would like the Dweebs. I mean, it would be tough to take for kids who actually liked the kind of three-chord-classic-homemade-thrashing-garage-band racket we were trying and failing to achieve.
Molly walked in as Edwin’s father and Furry walked out. She was wearing the same Mad Manny the Monkey shirt she wore the first time I saw her. It looked just as good.
“Dang,” said Furry, checking her out. “This band is suddenly lookin’ a whole lot better.”
Okay, that was gross. Furry went from hero to dirty old man in, like, two seconds.
But Molly didn’t care. She kissed him on the cheek and said, “Get your weekly cut, Furry?”
“Dang right.”
“Good,” she said. “I can’t have my boyfriend looking all shaggy.”
“Okay,” Edwin announced, “non–band members out. We gotta practice.”
Edwin’s dad reminded us to turn down the volume one more time and left to drive Furry home.
“Furry’s wife died earlier this year,” said Molly once they’d gone.
“RIP, Lady McFurry,” said Edwin.
I thought about my mom. There was an uncomfortable pause, and I wondered if Molly and Edwin were thinking about my mom, too. They probably were.
“So,” said Molly suddenly, slamming her books down on the counter, “quite an honor to be in the presence of genius.”
“Thanks,” said Edwin, slowly rotating in the barber chair. “I’m always in the presence of genius, even when I’m alone.”
“I refer, of course, to our young poetry prodigy,” Molly clarified, giving Edwin a hard twirl in the chair and giving me a look.
“Ahh, the new genius in town,” said Edwin, coming around again.
“Okay, okay,” I cut in, “are we practicing or what?”
“Does geniuses even needs to practice?” asked Molly in a dumb
er-than-dumb-guy voice.
“Well,” I said, noticing a hose and nozzle hooked up to the sink’s faucet, “you know what Edison said about genius, right? ‘It’s one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent water.’”
“It wasn’t water,” Edwin scoffed, slowly spinning to a stop. “It was perspiration.”
“No …” I said, turning the spigot, the hose bulging from the pressure. “I’m pretty sure it was water.”
I spun around and pointed the nozzle at Edwin, my finger ready on the trigger.
“Hey!” he cried, hopping to his feet.
Then I pointed it at Molly.
“You wouldn’t.”
Then Edwin.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
I turned back toward Molly.
“I dare you.” She laughed, holding her hands in front of her face.
Never say dare. I let ’er rip, blasting Molly right in the Mad Manny the Monkey. She screamed from the surprise and the cold, and we all laughed … until I realized her T-shirt had become pretty much see-through. I let go of the trigger.
Molly grabbed a bottle of shampoo instead and splooshed me in the eyes.
“AHHHHHHH!” It was like I’d been stung by a bee on my eyeball. I turned the nozzle on my face, but it felt less like rinsing and more like … more bees.
And then I heard it. A high-pitched shriek and a crack.
I turned around. My eyes were still stinging and swimming in soapy water, so I couldn’t see much, but I could tell that Molly was down. She had slipped and smacked her head on the marble floor.
“Molly!” I screamed.
“That’s what you get for messing around!” Edwin cried, running for his mom.
I dropped to my knees and lifted Molly’s head in my hands. “Wake up!” She was limp. Was she breathing? She looked so beautiful with beads of water on her lashes.
BAM! She socked me in the stomach.
I rolled over, gasping for air. “What was that?”
“You gotta admit, it was pretty funny,” she said, slapping her hands hard on the floor, duplicating the head-cracking sound. Her eyes twinkled.
“I will not admit that,” said Edwin’s mom, running in ahead of Edwin. She looked panicked. And mad.
“Sorry.” Molly smiled. “It wasn’t funny.”
“I agree,” said Edwin, smiling now. “Not funny. Not in the slightest. In fact, completely un-comical. Utterly devoid of humor. A guaranteed one hundred percent laugh-free zone is what you’ve got right here.”
Molly and I looked at each other. We were trying hard not to laugh. Edwin going on and on about how unfunny it was made it funny.
He held up a finger, like he was about to make a pronouncement. And he did, but in the voice of an incredibly nerdy professor: “Unquestionably, undeniably, indubitably un-amusing.”
That was it. We all broke down laughing.
Except Edwin’s mom.
“Okay, Molly,” she said, shaking her head and walking away. “No more hilarious jokes about cracking your skull on the floor, all right? And clean up this mess. Now.”
“Here,” I said to Molly, “borrow my sweatshirt. I have a T-shirt underneath.” I handed her the sweatshirt, and she left with Mrs. Martin to change inside the house.
Within minutes, Molly came back looking great. It means something when a girl and a guy start swapping shirts. In this case it didn’t mean very much, and it had better not, because I didn’t want anybody getting the wrong idea. Especially not the Butcher. Nobody would even recognize that plain gray sweatshirt as mine, anyway.
But it was cool.
We quickly cleaned up the shop, and I finally got around to figuring out some simple chords for “Watch the Melting Clock.” We tried it out, and even though it sounded pretty lousy, I was happy to hear it as a loud, crazy rock song instead of a tortured poem.
“Hey!” said Molly. “I almost forgot. We’ve been invited to play Rock Around the Dock this year.”
“Some invitation,” Edwin groaned. “Such a terrible name. I hate that thing.”
I had no idea what they were even talking about. “What is it?”
“An annual rock concert to kick off spring break,” Molly explained. “A benefit for the library. It’s a school thing, so the teachers run it with the student council.” She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “Your girlfriend Danderbrook is emceeing this year. It happens down at the canal.”
“The disgustingly polluted canal,” said Edwin. I felt a speech coming on. “If you swim in that crap, it’ll kill you. Your brain gets moldy, your private parts fall off, and you slowly bleed to death. If you swallow any of it, you die instantly. Word to the wise: If you happen to fall in, just drink up like there’s no tomorrow — and hopefully there won’t be.”
Molly rolled her eyes. “It’s not that bad,” she said. “The bands perform on a barge, and the audience listens from the dock. For the past couple years, the Butchers were the only band there, because the Butchers were literally the only band in school.”
“Ivan Brink got the Undead Fainting Goats together,” Edwin pointed out.
“The little vampire kid?” I said. “The one who faints on purpose all the time?”
“That’s him,” said Edwin. “Anyway, they formed in September and broke up in October. Basically, everyone’s too terrified of the Butcher to even have a band. But this year, the Dweebs will break that streak.”
“We’ll sort of be the warm-up band,” said Molly.
I rolled my eyes. “That sucks.”
“Yeah?” she said. “You got any better gigs lined up, rock star?”
“No.” She had a point. “But wait — how’d we even get invited?”
“Turns out Gerald’s good for something,” said Molly.
That hung in the air for a second.
What the heck? Why was the Butcher helping us? And, if Molly hated Gerald so much, why did she even hang around with him? I didn’t say anything, but Edwin could apparently read my mind.
“I think new kid is wondering something,” he said matter-of-factly to Molly. “Namely, if you hate the Butcher so much …”
“Tell new kid that Gerald’s not so bad, once you get to know him,” she said simply.
“New kid thinks that’s what they all say,” said Edwin. “But to his way of thinking, the Butcher gets worse and worse the more you get to know him.”
Edwin had read my mind again.
“Okay,” said Molly. “I’ve got to get going. I have to study. We can’t all be super-geniuses.”
So that was how it was: I liked Molly, and Molly liked to tease me. The more she teased, the more I liked her. The more I liked her, the more I pretended I didn’t. And the more I pretended, the more she teased. We were doing some kind of crazy, circular dance … and I was getting dizzy.
The reason the whole thing was so idiotic and complicated was, of course, the Butcher. He apparently had some mysterious redeeming quality that only Molly could detect. Meanwhile, he hated me and I hated him. He got us the gig, but he wanted to kill me. Nice.
“So, when is this whole dock thing, anyway?” I asked.
“April first, a Saturday. The first day of spring break,” said Molly, grabbing her soggy T-shirt from the counter.
“Makes sense — April Fool’s,” said Edwin. “We’re gonna need more than just a song or two.” He turned to me. “Better get writing, Henry Wadsworth Songfellow.”
Molly and I left the barbershop together.
“Where do you live, anyway?” she asked.
“Over near the Big M Market. Really close to school, actually.”
“My house is on the way,” she said.
We walked along, and she brought up English class again.
“I’ve never seen one ounce of humanity leak out of Danderbrook before,” she said. “You made her gush.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It was no big deal.”
“No big deal? You defrosted that woman.”
Molly went on and o
n about how incredible it was. The more she talked, the more I worried. What if the Butcher came strolling by? What if he found out what had happened today? The laughing, the teasing, the wet T-shirt. What if I wasn’t all that good at hiding my feelings for Molly? What if it was written all over my face? I was shivering a bit, and even though the sun was going down and I was a little cold without my sweatshirt, it was partly because I was just plain nervous walking down the street with Molly.
When we arrived at her house, she opened the door and asked me to come in.
I wanted to. “Nah, I can’t. I gotta go.”
“Come on, T. S. Smelliot,” she said. “We can do our homework together.” Somehow, I never thought I’d like being called T. S. Smelliot. But I did.
I really wanted to. “Maybe next time.”
“My parents are out, so they won’t be bugging us.”
Okay, this was torture. And it reminded me of something. The year before, I’d had to read The Odyssey. Well, part of it. I remembered the beautiful Sirens, whose songs lured sailors to their doom. Now I was one of those sailors getting trapped by a beautiful girl. Except I was the one who was attracting her with songs. Unintentionally. Okay, maybe intentionally.
I wanted Molly, and didn’t want her. The two ideas were battling in my brain. Winning equaled doom, at the hands of one Gerald “the Butcher” Boggs.
“Listen, Molly,” I said. I took a deep breath. “What’s the deal with you and Gerald, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. I thought I detected a flash of embarrassment on her face. “In seventh grade, everybody seemed to think we were the perfect couple, you know? And he’s exciting to watch on the football field. You kind of fall for those fairy tales.”
“You couldn’t possibly see the Butcher as a handsome prince,” I said, trying not to gag.
