by Ted Staunton
The next morning Mom’s already dressed for work when I come into the kitchen. She’s finishing her coffee. Her laptop is open on the table again. “Hey, video star,” she says, “Guess what? Nine hundred and thirty-eight thousand and twelve—no, fifteen hits. You’ve gone viral!”
I wonder if I can say I’m sick and then hide in the man cave all day. I know it’s not going to happen. Besides, I want to find Denny and yell at him.
I keep my earbuds in and the hood of my hoodie up all the way to school. It’s no use. Before I get to my locker, I get asked six times to do the bulging eyes and three times to “fall over like that.” A teacher tells me we are featured on badmusicvideos.com.
“Thanks,” I say, and I wish I could climb inside my locker and stay there till suppertime.
I can’t. I have to go to class. All morning I feel people looking at me, especially every time I want to do a quick nose dig or pick at a zit. All morning I hear the whispers and giggles. By lunch I’m way tired of being asked if I have a Doom Master sandwich today. And there’s still no Lisa and no Denny. Denny and I have gym together last period. He’d better be there.
I make sure to get to the change room almost too late for class. That way most of the guys are already out in the gym. A couple are left though.
“Hey, Pop Top!”
“Do the eyes!”
“No, fall on your butt!”
It turns out that I have a secret weapon against them when I open my backpack.
“Whoa, baby!”
“Something die in there, Ace?”
They hustle out. I pull on my shorts and T-shirt. By now they smell so disgusting, they’re grossing even me out. Maybe I’ll feed them to Denny after I finish yelling at him. I head into the gym. And there’s Denny. I start toward him. The gym teacher’s whistle blows. “All right, three gym laps to warm up, then pair up on the mats with your wrestling partner.”
Guess who my partner is going to be? Denny doesn’t look at me, but he must know I’m after him, because he runs way faster than usual. We’re both out of breath by the time the whistle blows.
“Oh, hi, Ace,’” he pants, as if he’s just noticed me. Then, “Wow, man, no offense, but it might be time to wash your gym stuff.”
“Yeah, well, you’d know all about stinking a place out, Den. What did you think you were do—”
“Denny, Ace, put a lid on it,” calls the gym teacher. Then he calls me out onto the mat so he can demonstrate a new takedown. I get down on my knees in defense position, and the teacher fake-gasps.
“Something die and you roll in it, Ace? Time to do a little laundry, huh?” he says. Everyone laughs but me. Then he grabs me like I’m a couple of dry twigs and tells the class, “Now, if I do this takedown right, Ace’s eyes are going to bulge out like they did on his video.” There’s another laugh, then he squashes me.
When I get back to Denny, I try squashing him. I’m not very good at it, but it must hurt a little, because after the third time, Denny says, with his face in the mat, “Okay, okay, take it easy.”
“Why should I?” I get off him. “You made us look like goofs.”
“Oh, come on. It’s just stuff from the blooper reel. I told you I made one.”
“That’s no blooper reel, Den. It was all put together and synced with the music.”
“No, but it was stuff from the blooper reel. We only put it together for fun. And I didn’t post it.”
“We? Who’s we? Who posted it?”
“The girls, I guess. Hey, it’s your turn to get down.”
I kneel on the gym mat. “What girls?”
Denny gets down beside me. “You know. Nadia and Alison, from video club. They helped me with some of the editing for the real video. After, we were goofing around with some of the other bits, and we shot a little bit more. It was pretty funny when Alison threw the cutlets in the air. I never would have guessed Lisa used cutlets, would you? I mean, if they were hers.”
“Nadia and Alison helped you?”
“Yeah, why? It’s no biggie.” Denny grabs my arms and dumps me to the mat.
“They both hate Lisa, you dork.”
“They do? Why?”
“I don’t know,” I say. It’s hard to breathe with Denny on top of me. “Get off.” I get back on my knees. “It’s something about boys is all I know. So take the stupid video down.”
“I can’t.” Denny grabs me again. “Anyway, it’s already gone viral. Besides, this isn’t just about you, Ace. Think about me. I’ve got my fans, my career. This is huge for me. I can’t take down my first big hit.”
“Fans? Career? What fa—”
Denny dumps me to the mat. “Hey, Ace, I know girls. Nobody meant anything bad by it. It’s like a collage. It’s supposed to be ironic. It’s part of my oeuvre.”
“Your what?” I say into the mat. “You don’t even know what those words mean.” Neither do I. I’ll have to look them up. “Get off me!”
Denny lets me up. I look at him. “Sorry.” He shrugs.
The thing is, he’s telling the truth. I’ve known Denny since grade two. He’s not a good liar. I glare at him. Denny says, “Look on the bright side. You wanted your music out there, right?”
Chapter Twelve
Denny is right. We did want our music out there. But it’s not the music everyone is paying attention to, is it? No, it’s the bulging eyes and flying cutlets.
I walk home after school. I’m pretty sure a couple of random people on the street stare at me. It’s a spooky feeling, knowing a million people have watched you acting like a goof. Is this what being famous is all about? If it is, I think it’s kind of sick.
And is this how girls fight with each other? If it is, I think that’s kind of sick too.
By now I’ve texted Lisa about a thousand times. There’s never an answer. I do the only thing I can think of. When Mom gets home, I ask her to drive me to Bargain Village after dinner. Lisa usually works Tuesday nights.
Mom says sure. As she answers a couple of emails at the kitchen table, I see the tag badmusicvideos.com in the text on her laptop screen. Mom knows. She doesn’t talk about the video once, which is pretty cool of her. When we get to Bargain Village, Mom waits in the car. I think she also knows I need to talk to Lisa, even though I don’t tell her.
The store is way too bright and way too crammed with stuff. The hum from the lights mixes with a lame classic rock station on the sound system. A big lady wearing a red vest stares at me from the cashier desk as if I’m a shoplifter.
It takes me a couple of minutes to find Lisa. The big lady gives me the hairy eyeball the whole time. Bargain Village is not exactly hopping with shoppers right now.
Lisa is stocking shelves near the back. She’s wearing a red vest too. As soon as she sees me, she turns her back. “Get lost.”
“But—” I begin, and before I can say anything else, she spins around. She’s got bags of tube socks in each hand. “My whole life is wrecked,” she hisses. “How did you ever get me to do this?”
“But—”
“I’m a joke, the music is a joke, everything is a joke, except it isn’t funny. Or maybe you think it is. You and Denny.” She spits Denny’s name out as if it’s a moldy potato chip.
“No, no! Not even Denny thinks so. And he didn’t do it. Alison and—”
“I know they did it! They sent me the link. But idiot Denny helped them.”
“He didn’t know what they were doing. He thought it was, um, ironic, like a collage or something.” While I say this, I’m asking myself, Why am I sticking up for Denny?
“Ironic? A collage?” Lisa rams the socks into a bin, then rips open a cardboard box. It’s full of packs of boxer shorts. “Don’t you get what this is all about? Alison and all of them hate me, so they made me look stupid in front of a million people. Don’t you know anything about girls?” She scoops out an armload of boxer shorts and almost throws them onto a shelf. Some fall on the floor.
I pick them up. “Why do they hate you?”
>
“Because Alison thinks I stole Rob.”
“Who’s Rob?”
“My boyfriend. Sorry, make that ex-boyfriend. He broke up with me by text and Facebook because he says he feels humiliated. He feels humiliated. Do you know what it feels like to have your boyfriend break up with you by text and then go online with it after a million people have watched you pop your cutlets in a video?”
All I can say is, “Uh, probably not.”
All I can think is, Boyfriend? Boyfriend? I stand there with the boxer shorts in my hands. I’m too stunned to do anything with them.
“No kidding.” Lisa is crying now. She grabs the boxers from me and throws them at the shelf. Most of them fall back on the floor. I say, “I didn’t, uh, know you had…”
“Why would you? He’s away at private school. We all met him last year when he went to our school, before you came. Rob never liked you and me doing music together, and now he’s dumped me. Online.”
Her shoulders are shaking, she’s crying so hard, and she’s got her hands over her face.
I still don’t know what to do. I pick up the boxers, to not look totally useless. “Oh, just leave them,” she sobs. I keep holding them anyway, because it seems even dumber to drop them again.
“Well,” I say before I even think about it, “he’s an idiot if he dumped you.” This does not seem to help. Lisa keeps right on crying, her hands still over her face. My own face feels all hot. I put the boxers on the shelf. A couple of packs fall right off again. “Sorry,” I say. I back away. Lisa is still crying.
The big lady is still giving me the evil eye as I walk to the door. As I pass the cash, she breaks into this big smile. “I thought it was you,” she says. “That video you did with Lisa was so funny.”
Chapter Thirteen
Mom drives us home. Chuck’s SUV is out front. As we go inside, I hear a toilet flush in the basement. It’s the soundtrack for my life.
I help Chuck for a while. He has me put primer paint on the bathroom walls while he does more mudding and taping on the other side. Chuck doesn’t say anything about the video either. Maybe Mom talked to him. I’m starting to wonder which is worse, people who bug me about it or people who know but don’t say a word. When they don’t say anything, I worry about what they’re thinking.
“Place is shaping up,” Chuck says on the other side of the wall. Until I saw this one get built, I never knew how little there is to a wall. I always thought they were solid stone or wood or something.
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Think you’re gonna like it?”
“Uh-huh.” Truthfully, I don’t know, and right now I don’t care. I kind of liked the place the way it was, when it was too grungy for adults to want to come down here.
“Good,” Chuck says. “And you know, if your mom ever decides to sell the place, it’ll raise the value.”
“Why would she do that?” I say. I don’t even care. I hear Chuck clear his throat.
“Oh. Well, ah, I don’t know. Just saying. But either way, you have a cool place to hang out.”
I roll on more primer paint. I guess so. It doesn’t feel like my place though. Maybe that doesn’t matter. I mean, what am I going to do here anyway? My music career is over. The way Lisa’s feeling, I’m guessing Two is down to one, so there’s no need to practice here. And Denny’s not rushing over to hang out either. I’m getting a man cave exactly when I don’t need one. Oh man, I wish I could go busking with Lisa again, even if I played the harmonica upside down and looked dumb every time.
I finish painting and tell Chuck I have to go do some homework. I go upstairs and lie on my bed. I stare at the ceiling. Then I get up and really do some homework. Don’t ask me why. To keep from thinking about other stuff, I guess.
When I get to school the next morning, it’s more of the same. I’m at my locker when someone yells, “Ace! Catch!” and what looks like a cutlet comes flying at me.
In homeroom, someone says “Doom Master” in this deep voice and then rips a big belch. In first period, biology class, the teacher says something about a Heimlich maneuver and digestion, and the whole class breaks up. Except for me.
By period two, I’m feeling totally alone. Denny is off being Denny somewhere. After last night, I’m not even going to look for Lisa. I’m walking to class when I feel my phone vibrate. It’s a message from Lisa: mus rm@ lunch k?
My insides do a nosedive. If you thought I was feeling bad before, try me now. I feel as if I’m about to do a faceplant from fifty stories. This is it. I know it. This is when she’s going to tell me officially what I already know. Two is over. I’ve totally blown it. Oh man, why did I go and see her last night? Why did I have to make it worse? Why did I ever listen to Denny?
I drag myself through period two, and then I make myself walk to the music room. I don’t think I’ve ever walked to the music room slowly before. The longer I take, the longer Lisa and I are still playing music together.
I hear voices before I even get to the door. One of them is Lisa’s. “It’ll be so great,” she is saying, “…perfect timing…change everything!” She sounds happy it’s over. Oh, no.
“Excellent,” says another voice. “That’ll be so cool.” It’s a guy’s voice.
“So tell everybody, okay?”
“Hey, for sure.” I know this voice. It’s a grade-eleven guy who’s a good bass player. I look in. Sure enough, he’s there, along with another guy who plays drums. It’s worse than I thought. Lisa has already started her next band. I’m backing away as she turns around. “Ace! Anyway, later,” she says to the guys.
Yeah, I think, you can talk more about your new band after I’m gone. I start backing out again.
Lisa runs over. “Where are you going? You just got here. Listen, I have to tell you something.” Now she’s all serious and intense.
“Sure.” My knees have turned to mashed potatoes. This must be a world record. I’m being dumped by a girl without ever having had her for my girlfriend.
She flips her hair back the way she does and bites her lip. Then she says quickly, “Listen, um, sorry about last night. I just lost it, you know? With everything?” Her face is pink.
“That’s okay.” I’m thinking, Let’s get to the “you’re history” part. That way I’ll have time to eat lunch, throw it all up, get teased some more and still be in time to get beaten up in gym. Now that it’s happening to me, I don’t see why face-to-face is supposed to be so great for getting dumped. A quick text would make it easier for me to crawl away and die.
But Lisa isn’t ready yet. She says, “Anyway, this morning I felt so rotten that I was going to ditch again, but then I got this message—”
“And Rob your boyfriend said he was sorry,” I blurt, sounding sarcastic. And you promised him you wouldn’t do music with me anymore. At least I stop myself from saying that part.
“What?” She tucks in her chin and gives me a look. “He’s never said he’s sorry in his life. Anyway, he doesn’t have anything to do with this.” She waves her hand. Her words are spilling on the floor, she’s talking so fast now.
“So, like I said, I got this message. It was a forward from Denny, and it was from this woman who’s a producer for Garden Avenue Kids.”
“Huh?”
“You know, the TV show.”
“Oh, yeah.” I do know. It’s a pretty good show, for one that doesn’t have galactic death rays. It’s about some kids at a school like ours.
Lisa is racing on, her voice getting higher. “And she saw the video and found out how to contact Denny in his channel details and asked him to send us a message that she liked the song! And she wants to pay us to use it on one of the episodes because it sounds like something two of the characters might record! Isn’t that fantastic? We did it!” Lisa grabs my arms and shakes me. “We did it, we did it!” She is jumping up and down. I think I am too. First, though, I have to ask.
“Are you sure it’s for real? This is from Denny, right?”
&nb
sp; “It is, it is! There was an email address in the message, and I emailed her right away and she got back to me. It’s the real thing. We’ve got to text the whole world,” Lisa says, “and then we’ve got to celebrate. What should we do?”
There are lots of answers for that, but for once I know the best one. “Let’s play some music.”
Chapter Fourteen
I can hardly wait. We meet at the liquor store after school. I open Chuck’s guitar case and prop up our cardboard sign that reads Broken String Fund. We sling on our guitars, I pull my harp rack on, and we tune up.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
We’re barely done the first song when someone tosses money in the case and says, “Are you the ones on YouTube?”
“Yup,” I say.
“Will you do that song?”
“Sure.” Lisa smiles. We play “Coming Apart at the Dreams” the best we ever have. I even get the harmonica part just right. By the end, there’s a small crowd. They clap.
Then someone says to Lisa, “How come you didn’t, you know, pop your…” Someone else calls to me, “Hey, aren’t you gonna fall into the guitar case and do the eyes?”
Lisa turns away as if she doesn’t hear. I say, “Can’t today. Doctor’s orders. It’s an insurance thing.” I don’t know what I’m talking about, but it seems to work. “Listen for our song on Garden Avenue Kids,” I call, and I start to strum.
Lisa picks up on it. “Here’s a Neil Young song.”
Lisa sings it great, but people drift away. Stuff like that happens twice more in the next half hour. I know that’s how busking works, but still. Are the dumb bits all anybody wants from us? Lisa doesn’t look any happier.
I say, “Remember at lunch today, when you said we did it?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Um, maybe it’s not we. Maybe it’s Denny, Nadia and Alison. We didn’t make us go viral.”
Lisa shakes her head. “No way. They didn’t do that for us, they did it to us. We wrote the song. We win. That’s what’s important. It serves them right.”
