Drum Roll, Please

by Lisa Jenn Bigelow

  We walked along a shady trail that must have been packed down by thousands of campers. After a while it spilled into a grassy clearing with six small, windowless cabins arranged in a hexagon. Muffled music escaped and blurred in the open air. Campers lined up outside. As we joined them, one of the doors opened, and a boy carrying a guitar case came out, looking happy. A counselor stuck his head out and called for the next camper.

  “Why does that cabin say Plymouth on the door?” Olivia said as it shut again.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Why does that one say Gibraltar?”

  “Plymouth is the rock where the Pilgrims landed, right?” Olivia frowned. “What do Pilgrims have to do with anything?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “Gibraltar’s somewhere in Europe. There’s a big rock there—oh!”

  Olivia got the joke at the same time I did. She rolled her eyes. “Plymouth Rock. Rock of Gibraltar. Somebody thinks they’re hilarious.”

  I read the signs on the other doors: Uluru, Zuma, Guatapé, and Trolltunga. Presumably they were other famous rocks around the world. Dad would be so bummed to have missed this! I’d have to tell him—assuming I ever felt like speaking to him again.

  “What do you want to bet Trolltunga means ‘troll tongue’?” Olivia said.

  “Can I bet you’re probably right?” I asked.

  The door to Uluru opened, and a counselor beckoned to Olivia. “Wish me luck!” she said.

  “Luck,” I said, as if she needed it. Me, on the other hand . . .

  It’s not like I was a terrible drummer. I wasn’t amazing, but considering I’d learned most of what I knew from online videos, I thought I did okay. But there was a huge difference between playing alone in my basement, or even with Olivia, and performing for a complete stranger. It didn’t matter that Poppy had promised it wasn’t a test. My hands felt like wilted lettuce.

  “Next!” a voice called sharply. A tall, thin woman with olive skin and jagged black hair was waiting for me at the door to one of the cabins—Trolltunga. Of course I got the cabin named after a piece of troll anatomy. It seemed like a bad omen. I hesitated, and the kid in line behind me poked me between my shoulder blades. I stumbled forward.

  The counselor closed the door behind me. “I’m Donna. Have a seat.” When I moved toward the folding chair by the door, she added with a smirk, “At the drums. You are a drummer, aren’t you?”

  I guess the stick bag gave me away. Embarrassed, I obeyed.

  “I’ll try to make this as painless as possible,” Donna said. “Name?” Just like Poppy, she had a clipboard and pen. Unlike Poppy’s blue Bic, Donna’s pen was decorated with skulls.

  “Melly—Melissa Goodwin.”

  “How long have you been playing?”

  I counted back in my head. “Almost three years. I mean, that’s when I started band at school. But I just played bass drum at first. And then in sixth grade I mostly played snare. I didn’t get my drum set until—”

  Donna waved her hand like she was shooing a fly. I wondered why she’d asked the question if she didn’t want to hear the answer. “What kind of music do you like to play? What are your favorite bands?”

  “Um. Anything,” I said. “I mean, usually other people choose. I just play along.”

  “Okay. But what would you choose if you were the leader of the band?”

  I squirmed. Leader of the band? That would never happen. Even when I played alone, I used songs from the playlists Olivia put together. “I don’t know,” I told Donna. “I guess I just like making noise.”

  It sounded silly, but it was true.

  It all started in the fall of fifth grade, when Olivia dragged me to Ms. Estrada’s instrument petting zoo. Ms. Estrada mostly taught middle school band, but she came to our school two afternoons a week to teach the fifth graders. The petting zoo was how she recruited new members. From flute to French horn, from tuba to tom-toms, she laid out every instrument around the music room for us to touch. If it didn’t involve saliva, we could even play it.

  “How about you on trumpet, me on trombone?” Olivia said. “Or me on oboe, you on clarinet?”

  I hadn’t told her I had no intention of joining band. My DNA didn’t include a single musical gene. I could barely creak out “Happy Birthday.” I edged my way around the room, letting the other kids wrestle over the tenor sax, which was quickly established as the coolest instrument, and the metallophone, which sounded good without even trying.

  Somehow I ended up alone with the bass drum. It hulked in the very back of the room, looking less like a musical instrument than an uncomfortable piece of furniture. Maybe that’s why it had been overlooked. Its wooden body must have gleamed once, but now it was scratched and scuffed. Its skins were dappled gray from being struck countless times. It was no tenor sax.

  It’s stupid, but I remember thinking, No one is watching. I can hit this drum, and no one will know it was me. My fingers curled around the mallet, a stick topped with rabbit-tail fluff. I lifted it high and swung it as hard as I could.

  As it made contact, vibrations sizzled up my arm and rattled my teeth. The drum released a WOGGA-WOGGA-WOGGA so loud and deep I felt it in my stomach. Of course, everyone immediately turned to stare. Ms. Estrada’s fingers were in her ears.

  I hated people looking at me, but I couldn’t help it: I got a wild smile on my face. That drum had sung louder and truer than I ever could myself. I was dazed. I was dazzled. I wrote my name in capital letters under “Percussion” on the sign-up sheet.

  Olivia was even more excited. “I’ll sign up to play guitar. We can start our own band!”

  “Oh,” I said, my stomach feeling weird for some reason. “I thought you were picking oboe or trombone. Is guitar even an option?”

  “It will be,” Olivia said breezily. “I’ll work it out with Ms. Estrada.”

  “But since when do you have a guitar?”

  She shrugged. “My birthday’s next month, and my grandfather told me to think about what I want. Well, I’ve decided I want a guitar! It’s okay with you, right?”

  “Sure!” I said. “Starting a band would be awesome, I guess. I just hadn’t thought that far ahead.” The truth was I hadn’t thought past playing that bass drum again.

  Olivia hugged me. “We’re going to be rock stars someday, Melly. You wait and see.”

  And I guess I caught her excitement, because suddenly I felt all right again.

  Still, you can’t play rock when your entire musical career consists of whacking a bass drum, no matter how good your time or your tone is. It took a couple of years of school band to convince my parents drums weren’t just a phase, and Olivia did more than her share of wheedling in the meantime. But one day they surprised me with an old drum set they’d bought on Craigslist. Who cared that the black veneer was covered with stickers from eighties hair bands? It was mine. I could make the house shake.

  We’d ride our bikes to my house after school, Olivia’s guitar strapped to her back. Sometimes our friends joined us, Todd on his own electric, Stella on vocals and synths. But mostly it was the two of us, playing hour after hour, everything from the Rolling Stones to Tegan and Sara—whatever Olivia had scrounged up.

  This past year, she added bass to her repertoire. “We don’t need two electric players,” she said. “What we do need is a rhythm section.” A rhythm section: bass and drums, holding down the beat, keeping the band on track—together.

  And now we were at Camp Rockaway.

  “Tell you what,” Donna said, and maybe it was paranoia, but I thought I heard her give a little sigh. “I’m going to play something on guitar”—she leaned over and grabbed an acoustic from where it was propped against the wall—“and you jump in and play along. Okay?”

  I pulled a pair of sticks from my bag. As Donna began to strum in four-four time, a song that could have been any song, I joined in with a simple rock beat. My right foot worked the bass drum pedal on one and three. My left hand answered on the snare drum, with rim shots on
two and four. My right arm stretched across my body to the hi-hat: tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. . . .

  “Keep going.”

  My playing was so stiff I sounded like a robot. I forced myself to play a little louder, as if increasing the volume would pump up the energy. It sort of worked, but my hands still shook. I reached up for my cymbals, hoping a good, solid crash would cover my nerves.

  “Give me a fill.”

  Hesitantly I rolled my sticks across the toms from high to low and back again. When I played back home, all of me—my body, my head, my heart—belonged to the music. The music filled me to the brim. There was no room for anything else. But here, playing for a scowling stranger with a skull pen and clipboard, I was so full of worry there was hardly any room for the music. My sticks caught on the drum heads, ruining the rhythm. Only my foot on the bass drum pedal was steady.

  But thinking about my foot was a mistake. It fumbled. I tried to find the beat again, but I’d lost it. I bit my lip. The only way this moment could be worse was if I started to cry.

  “You can stop,” Donna said, scribbling on the clipboard. “I’ve got what I need.”

  I sat frozen. Could that really be it? I tried to read Donna’s face, but she didn’t look up. I stood and walked past her to the door.

  Outside Trolltunga, Olivia grabbed me. “How’d it go, Melly? Easy-peasy, right? I can’t wait until tomorrow, when we actually get to play in a band. They should’ve auditioned us together, so they’d know what kind of a rhythm section they’re really getting.”

  I tried to match her enthusiasm, but my stomach knotted. If everyone made the cut at Camp Rockaway, why did I feel like such a failure?

  Three

  Treble Cliff lived up to its name. As we climbed the steep, pine-needled path, I was huffing and puffing. Olivia’s forehead shone. She shook out her hair and scooped it into a fresh ponytail. I wished I could do the same, but last week the stylist had cut mine exactly the wrong length: long enough to make my neck hot but too short to pull back.

  “At least I didn’t have to carry my bass all the way up here,” Olivia said. After leaving our auditions, we’d followed the map to the lodge, where she’d picked out a locker.

  “Cardio’s good for you,” I said, panting.

  “Not dying of a heart attack is good for me,” Olivia said, and stopped, because waiting for us at the top of the hill was yet another counselor with yet another clipboard.

  “Oh,” I said, at the same time as Olivia said, “Nice.”

  The counselor had spiky blue hair. Rings went up the sides of both her ears, and she had more rings in her eyebrow and her nose. I wondered if she was hidden way back here in the woods so she didn’t scare off the touchier parents. But her round face was friendly. “Hey,” she said, “I’m Blair. Whom do I have the pleasure—”

  “Olivia and Melly,” Olivia said.

  “Let me guess.” Blair chewed her pen. “Drummer, obviously,” she said, pointing at my stick bag, “and I’m gonna say lead guitar.” She jerked her chin at Olivia.

  Olivia beamed. “Bass, actually, for camp purposes. But believe me, I am all about leading from behind.”

  “I’ll just bet,” Blair said. “Tents are starting to fill up, but you should still have your pick. Any of the yellow ones. Blue’s for staff. The ranger’ll be by with his truck any minute. He’ll drop your stuff at the bottom of the hill.”

  I couldn’t help it. I groaned.

  Blair’s lips twitched. “It’s the price we pay for this primo real estate. Everyone knows this is the best site at Camp Rockaway. Take a sec and look around.”

  We did. We were surrounded by towering pines. The treetops framed a circle of brilliant turquoise sky. I got dizzy staring up—a good kind of dizzy.

  “At night,” Blair said, “that break in the trees is a tunnel to the freaking stars.” She let that sink in before adding with a wink, “Plus if it storms, all the water runs downhill to Carole Kingdom. Go on, now. Pick out your tent.”

  When I first heard we were going to stay in tents, I’d imagined flimsy pup tents staked to the ground, roots and rocks poking up through our sleeping bags. Olivia had shown me photos on Camp Rockaway’s website proving otherwise, but they hadn’t prepared me for the real thing. They were big and made of bulky canvas, rigged on wooden frames off the ground. Through the open flaps, I could see four cots set up on each tent’s plank floor.

  “There’s people in that one, that one, that one . . .” Olivia ticked them off on her fingers.

  “In other words, there’s people in all of them,” I said.

  “How do we know which one to choose?”

  “What are you afraid of?” I teased. “That we’ll end up with someone who snores?”

  Olivia had a deviated septum. When she fell asleep, it sounded like someone was revving up a chainsaw. She threw me a dirty look. But when I crossed my eyes at her, she laughed.

  “End of the line,” Olivia said as we approached the final tent.

  Sitting on the front steps was a freckled girl with glasses and spirals of reddish brown hair, playing a harmonica. Her song chugged along cheerfully as her lips skated along the silver surface. She lowered it when she saw us. “Hey.”

  “Hey, sorry to interrupt. Do you have two empty beds?” Olivia asked.

  “I’ve got three.” The girl unfolded herself and stood up. I wasn’t short, but I barely came up to her shoulder. “I’m Shauna,” she said. “You two are first-timers, right?”

  “Olivia,” Olivia said, pointing to herself, “and Melly. It’s that obvious we’re new?”

  “There’s something in your faces. Your eyes are, like, extra big.” Shauna grinned.

  “You play harmonica?” I asked. As if what we’d seen and heard before was a hallucination. C-minus in conversational skills, Melly.

  Shauna said, “Yep. And guitar. I’m a country girl. Or I should say, country woman. Women in country music are infantilized enough without me doing it to myself.”

  “Infantilized?” Olivia asked.

  “Oh, you know. Men singing, ‘I wanna go down by the river with my sweet little girl and drink whiskey on the Fourth of July.’ That kind of thing. If they’re drinking whiskey with actual little girls, they’re pedophiles.”

  I had no idea what to make of Shauna, but I was pretty sure I liked her.

  “What about you two?” she asked. “Drums, of course.” She nodded at my stick bag.

  There it was again. At Camp Rockaway, everyone knew just by looking at me how I spent my free time. Back home, most people thought my stick bag was an ugly purse.

  “I play guitar and bass,” Olivia told her, “but I only brought my bass.”

  Shauna nodded. “Wise choice. There’s always an army of guitar players.”

  “Luggage!” Blair bellowed across the campsite. “Get your luggage, bottom of the hill.”

  “Oh boy.” Olivia sighed. “Do we actually need any of that stuff? Maybe we can leave it there for the next two weeks, and the ranger can pick it up again before we go home.”

  “Did you bring mosquito netting?” Shauna asked. “You’ll want that, for sure. My first time at camp, I made the mistake of going without. I had so many mosquito bites by the time I went home, my parents didn’t recognize me.”

  I had the feeling her mosquito bites would’ve blended right in with her freckles, but point taken. I had no interest in being a bunch of mosquitoes’ all-night buffet. “Come on,” I told Olivia. “Cardio, remember? When we get back to school, we’ll get A’s in PE for sure.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Shauna said. “There’s no use postponing the inevitable.”

  On our way down, we passed other girls coming up with their gear. The girl from the taxi was one of them. “Hello again,” she said as we brushed past each other on the path. I managed only a startled hi before she was gone, up the hill.

  “Who was that?” Olivia asked. “She acted like she knew you.”

  I shook my head. “How
could she? We just got here.”

  “Maybe you’ve got friends here you haven’t told me about,” Olivia joked.

  “Secret rock-and-roll friends in the middle of the woods?” I said. “No. Only you.”

  The ranger had left an enormous mound of luggage at the signpost for Treble Cliff. The three of us grabbed our stuff. If climbing the hill had been hard the first time, dragging our luggage with us could’ve been an Olympic event. I was dying to rinse off, and the hike to the shower house, wherever it was, would’ve been totally worth it.

  By the time we got back to our tent, we had our last bunkmate. This girl was tiny, her curly black hair cut super, super short. The only big things about her were her wide-set eyes and her smile, which flashed dazzling white against her dark brown skin. She threw her arms around Shauna’s waist, which was basically as high as she could reach, and Shauna returned the hug.

  “Hi,” the new girl said, turning to Olivia and me and sticking out her hand. “Toni Davis, at your service.” Her grip was knuckle crunching.

  “Toni and I have been camp friends for years,” Shauna said, her arm around Toni’s shoulders. “Get this: she’s a classically trained pianist . . . and rapper.”

  “Classically trained pianist and rapper,” Olivia echoed. “Is that a thing?”

  “As sure as a Jewish country singer is,” Toni said. She and Shauna slapped hands.

  “What about you two?” Shauna asked. “What’s your jam?”

  “Oh, Melly and I are up for almost anything,” Olivia said. “We’ve been getting into the classics lately. You know, the Who, the Stones, that kind of thing. Anything, so long as it rocks.”

  The way she said it made us sound cooler than we were. At least at our school, it wasn’t enough to rock out in your basement. Until you’d played your first block party, you were just one more kind of nerd. If obsessing over music gave us any more cred than playing video games or competing in spelling bees, I had yet to notice. But it was fun.

  I think Shauna was waiting for me to say something, too. But since Olivia had already answered for both of us, I only shrugged in agreement.