Drum Roll, Please

by Lisa Jenn Bigelow

  Just as I’m waking up

  You tell me you’re breaking up

  You’ve made up your mind, clear as day

  Then you send me away

  You wave good-bye and say

  When I come back home, I’ll be okay

  But you can’t tell me, you can’t tell me, you can’t tell me how to feel

  You can’t tell me, you can’t tell me, you can’t tell me how to feel

  At the chorus, we switched from our happy dance vibe to—well, there’s really no other way to put it: we screamed. We screamed, all of us together, and our instruments screamed with us. In front of the stage, kids leaped to their feet, jumping around and knocking into each other. It was a little scary, and for a second I thought the grown-ups would wade in and pull them apart, or the sound system would cut off and Damon would haul us off the stage.

  But just when it seemed the scene might boil over, we got to the second verse. Everything was sunshine again.

  You tell me don’t be upset

  But there’s no way I’ll forget

  You broke two halves from our whole

  You’ve made a big mistake

  Fine, it’s your choice to make

  Still there’s one thing you can’t control

  You can’t tell me, you can’t tell me, you can’t tell me how to feel

  You can’t tell me, you can’t tell me, you can’t tell me how to feel

  Out in the johnboat, I hadn’t been sure how to end the song. Continue until our voices were hoarse whispers? Groove our way out? But Adeline had said, “Why not something completely different?” So we muted our instruments, and I sang the last two lines a cappella.

  I’ve had two weeks to sing and play

  But in case you wondered, I’m still not okay

  Then it was over. The Leftovers made our final bow as the houselights came up. I followed my bandmates offstage as Damon came on to announce the intermission, and my friends piled on me with congratulations and hugs. Adeline took my hands, and we twirled in a triumphant circle. My heart bounced off the beams in the ceiling.

  Donna slapped our hands. “Well done,” she told us. “Very well done.”

  We’d played a good set, she meant. I wondered if she knew it was so much more for me.

  She caught my eye and gave me a quick nod. Yep. She definitely knows.

  I didn’t look for my parents. I’d taken a tube of emotional toothpaste and given it a hard squeeze with both fists. There was no way any of that stuff was ever going back inside. I wanted to take a minute and enjoy how good I felt.

  I didn’t look for my parents, but I thought they’d come looking for me.

  They didn’t.

  And they didn’t.

  And when I finally turned around and searched the room, they were nowhere to be seen.

  Twenty-Seven

  “What’s wrong?” Olivia asked as I craned my neck.

  “My parents. I don’t know where they are.”

  “Oh no. Do you think they heard your song and . . .” She shook her head as if she didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

  I didn’t either. I’d been so desperate to tell Mom and Dad how I felt. I’d barely thought about how they’d feel hearing it, about what they’d say or do. Now that I stopped to consider it, nothing good came to mind. What had I been thinking? I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

  “Come on,” Olivia said. “Let’s split up. I’ll go by the bathrooms. You go by the snacks.”

  The two of us set off in different directions, so much like the week before when we’d searched for Noel at the end of the dance. Our search was just as futile. We pushed through families of all sizes and configurations, but my parents were nowhere in the lodge. My throat squeezed. They wouldn’t have left me at Camp Rockaway; they couldn’t have. But where had they gone?

  “I’m going to check outside,” I told Olivia.

  “Want me to come with?”

  “No. Thanks. They’ve got to be close by.”

  Olivia nodded. “I’ll save your seat.”

  I pushed out the door of the lodge and blinked in the sun. There were a few sets of parents taking a breather out on the lawn. One father guiltily stubbed out his cigarette when he saw me. But none of them was my mom or dad. I scuffed through the grass, not knowing where to go, rounding one corner of the building and then another. Then there they were.

  They sat in the grass, their backs to me. Dad’s arm was wrapped around Mom’s shoulders. And I admit it: I had a flash of hope that they’d woken from whatever awful spell they’d been under. They’d realized they were still in love after all, or something close enough to it not to throw it away. My song had reversed the curse. They were together.

  Then I saw how under Dad’s arm, Mom’s shoulders were hunched and shaking. Mom, who’d delivered the news of the divorce without a single tear, who’d written me one perky letter after another. Today I was the one who’d broken something. I was the one with terrible timing.

  They’d driven all the way from Kalamazoo, together, because they were my parents. They’d come to see my show, together, because it was supposed to be my special day. They’d come to pick me up, together, because in spite of everything, I was both of theirs.

  Together.

  I’d taken that togetherness and torn it into pieces. I’d trashed that togetherness like a rock star’s hotel room, and it didn’t feel one bit freeing anymore. It felt irresponsible. It felt like crap.

  I trudged over. My hands flexed into fists, then released, flexed and released, as I tried to think what to say. But when I made it all the way over, all I could croak was, “Hi.”

  I expected Dad to glare at me. I expected Mom to cry all the harder. Instead, as they turned to look up at me, she was the first to smile. A watery, shaky smile, but a smile just the same. “Melly. Sunshine.”

  She fumbled in her handbag for a tissue and blew her nose. Dad stood and helped Mom up beside him. They hugged me—first Mom, then Dad. Their embraces had none of the fierce affection from earlier. This time they held me gingerly, as if they were afraid they’d break me. Or they were afraid I’d break them.

  I didn’t understand. Weren’t they angry? Weren’t they absolutely furious?

  Or were they once again going to pretend everything was fine?

  “We don’t have to talk about this now,” Mom said, as if she’d read my mind. “This is your day, sweetie.”

  I thought about it for the time it takes an acorn to fall. It was too late not to talk about it. The sky had already fallen. “When will we talk about it?” I said. “What if we always say we’ll talk later, but we never do?”

  “We will, Melly,” Dad said.

  “How can you say that?” I said. “If we’d talked a long time ago, maybe all of us could’ve fixed things before it was too late. Instead you waited until you’d already made up your minds.” Suddenly I was the one who was crying.

  “How many times have we told you?” Mom said. “It wasn’t your fault. Not in the least.”

  I pushed them away. “Like I need to be reminded I have absolutely no control.”

  For a moment I thought about stalking away. I’d figure out where when I got there. Instead I turned and slumped in the grass, hugging my shins. My parents shuffled behind me. I pictured them speaking with their eyes, deciding what to do—twenty years’ worth of silent language they’d invented together. So I wasn’t surprised when, as one, they moved closer and sat, one on either side of me, not touching me. They waited.

  The indistinct roar of conversation from the lodge grew frenzied as Damon announced the next act. Wailing guitars, thumping drums, and bass so low it sent vibrations through the hill soon emanated from the windows.

  I said, “Before you sent me here, you couldn’t wait to talk about the divorce. Now you don’t want to. Which is it?”

  “That was our mistake,” Mom said, at the same time as Dad said, “That was selfish.”

  “I believed everything I sai
d two weeks ago,” Mom said. “That it was better to get the truth out in the open so we could all begin healing. You know me, Melly. I hate letting things hang. I really did hope camp would take the sting off the news. But sending you off to cope with something this big on your own—that was completely unfair.”

  “She’s right,” said Dad. “Telling you was hard, but it was also a relief. At first I thought that meant it had been the right call. It took a while to realize that if my burden seemed lighter, it was because you were here, alone, carrying it. And then I felt terrible. I’m sorry, Melly.”

  They didn’t say anything else. Were they waiting for me to forgive them? I wondered how often this happened, that parents actually apologized for the messed-up things they did. I supposed I should count myself lucky. Except I didn’t feel lucky. Or forgiving.

  “So are you happy now that you’re apart?” I said harshly.

  Dad rubbed his hand across his jaw. Two weeks without shaving, and the beard looked like it had always been there. “Happy isn’t the right word,” he said.

  “Then why don’t you come back?” I begged. “It’s not too late.”

  “Doing what’s necessary doesn’t always make you feel better,” Mom said, touching my arm. “Not right away.”

  “I think that’s one difference between needing and wanting,” Dad said. “Doing what you want feels good, at least in the short term. Telling you the news the way we did—we thought we needed to. We told ourselves we needed to. But we didn’t. We just wanted to get it off our chests so we could start thinking about other things. We put our wants ahead of your needs. That’s something parents should never do.”

  I had to hand it to him. He’d doubled down on his apology, and his watery blue eyes said he meant every word. But what good did that do?

  I stared into the trees, avoiding my parents’ anxious gazes. When I’d left a crying Olivia alone on field trip day? That had been me putting my wants ahead of her needs, and I’d been a rotten friend for doing it. And when I’d denied my feelings for Adeline because I didn’t want Olivia to be jealous? That had been me putting Olivia’s wants ahead of my own needs, and it was a disaster, too. How was anyone supposed to figure out this stuff? It was depressing to think I could live another twenty-five years and still be clueless. I felt sorry for my hypothetical kids.

  I looked at my mother, sunken into the ground, her round face blotchy. I looked at my father, who would’ve been quivering at the edge of his seat, if we’d been sitting in chairs instead of on a tickly grass slope. They were so obviously miserable, so obviously eager for me to relieve them of that misery, yet part of me didn’t feel sorry for them one bit. I wanted to drag the whole thing into a long, tearful argument that looped around and around but never went anywhere because no matter what I said, things would never go back to the way they were before. That’s what I wanted to do.

  But I could also see they needed me to accept their apology. To finish out camp. To know they loved me. To trust things really would get better in time. And maybe, if I was being honest—maybe that’s what I needed, too.

  I took a deep breath and stood. “We should go back in so we can catch the end of the show.”

  “Melly, wait,” Mom said. “We don’t have to if you don’t want to. We can stay out here and talk as long as you need.”

  “At least until they kick us out or demand another two weeks’ tuition,” Dad said.

  “No, it’s like you said,” I said. “Talking can’t fix things. Only time will help.”

  “Talking can help, too,” Mom said.

  “Later,” I said firmly and began walking back to the lodge.

  “Melly,” Mom called, her voice breaking. I turned. She and Dad stood just feet apart, but I felt their distance like a chasm. Dad stepped toward me with open arms. Mom followed.

  They wanted another hug? Seriously? I went back and let them squeeze me to a pulp. Maybe they didn’t have each other anymore, not in the same way. But they still had me.

  We stood in the back of the lodge through the rest of the show. When the last band finished, Damon and a bunch of other counselors took the stage for one last song. “Thanks for making the past two weeks so awesome, everyone,” he said. “You’re all true rock stars today. You’ve earned the title. And it may be time to say good-bye, but I hope it’s only until next summer.”

  They began playing “Old Time Rock & Roll,” a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. The whole audience got to their feet and started clapping in time. Well, sort of. On either side of me, my musically challenged parents faltered between clapping on two-four and one-three. I clapped louder, hoping they’d pick up the beat from me but knowing they’d lose it again five seconds later. And smiling, because for a moment my family felt like my family again.

  I’d come to camp feeling so broken. I didn’t feel that way anymore. It was as if all the pieces of me had been unfastened, scattered on the ground, and put back together in a slightly different way. There were a few cogs and springs left over. Yet here I was, still keeping time. No matter what I lost, there’d always be enough of me left to carry on.

  One part of my song had been dead wrong. My family hadn’t been broken in half, not really. We were three wholes. We always had been.

  The houselights came up. The applause petered out. “Well,” said Dad, “I guess that’s it, huh?”

  “I guess it is,” I said. Around us, families reconnected and started heading toward the doors. The conversations were already turning away from the show that had just finished and toward everybody’s long drive home. Just like that, camp was over.

  “Melly!” It was Adeline. I spun to see her hurrying through the crowd toward me. “You weren’t seriously going to leave without saying good-bye, were you?”

  “Only if I wanted to regret it for the rest of my life,” I said.

  She threw her arms around me and squeezed so hard I could barely breathe. Or maybe it was the lump that suddenly materialized in my throat. “I don’t know if I could’ve made it through the past two weeks without you,” I said, so quietly only she could hear. “Thank you.”

  “No, thank you,” she said, “for making this, hands down, my best summer ever.”

  “Do we really have to wait three hundred and fifty days to see each other again?” I asked. “It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “It isn’t,” Adeline said, “but you’ve got a phone, and I’ve got a phone, and when we’re back in civilization and can actually get a signal . . .”

  “I already can’t wait,” I said.

  We hugged one more time, extra long and extra tight. “I don’t want to let go,” Adeline whispered.

  “Me neither,” I said, choking up. “On the count of three?”

  “On the count of three,” Adeline said, “and no crying. Promise?”

  We counted to three and let go. Even though Adeline was wearing her trademark smile as she stepped away, her eyes were bright and wet. “See you next summer, Melly,” she said. She turned and ran back to her family.

  Five minutes later, Mom and Dad and I were pulling out of the Camp Rockaway parking lot, dust billowing around the car windows. As we whizzed along the roller coaster hills back to the highway, Mom said, “So, this friend of yours. Adeline.”

  “Yes,” Dad said, “tell us about Adeline.”

  I leaned back in my seat and stretched out my legs, browner than they’d been two weeks ago and dotted with mosquito bites. I scratched an especially itchy one. “I have a better idea,” I said. “Why don’t I start at the beginning?”

  Acknowledgments

  A standing ovation for those instrumental in bringing Melly to the stage:

  My parents, Gary and Sheila Bigelow, who have been part of this piece da capo al coda—from sponsoring the childhood music lessons and summer camps that inspired Melly’s adventures, to last-minute fact-checking.

  My talented friends—writers, musicians, and in several cases both—Eliza Butler, Joe Chellman, Rebecca Dudley, Carey Farrell, Carol
Coven Grannick, Lis Harvey, and Michelle Sussman, who rehearsed Melly for auditions submissions.

  My agent, Steven Chudney, who saw Melly’s potential long before she learned to drum and worked doggedly to make her voice heard.

  My editor, Jocelyn Davies, and her dizzyingly detail-oriented team, who heard the truth of Melly’s song beyond the false notes and pushed her performance to the next level.

  Everyone who requested an encore to Starting from Here. It means the world to me.

  About the Author

  PHOTO CREDIT REBECCA DUDLEY

  LISA JENN BIGELOW grew up in Kalamazoo and still considers the Mitten State home. She loves plunking around on the piano and guitar, but her true musical talent is having a camp song for every occasion. Lisa’s young adult novel, Starting from Here, was named a Rainbow List Top Ten Book by the American Library Association. When she isn’t writing, she serves as a youth librarian in the Chicago suburbs.

  Visit her online at

  www.lisajennbigelow.com.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Copyright

  DRUM ROLL, PLEASE. Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Bigelow. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  COVER ART BY NATALIE ANDREWSON

  COVER DESIGN BY MICHELLE CUNNINGHAM

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933338