Breakout (4 page)

Keenan and I have been trying to decide if she’s cute and I’m pretty sure I think she is, except I’m not totally sure because it’s like her cute is written in another language. She’s like when you’re flipping channels and you stumble on a movie with the overdubbed Spanish and even though you know the movie by heart it feels different, and you can’t be quite sure that it’s the same because you didn’t pay very good attention in Spanish class.

But then the drum playing starts.

Valerie walks up to the top level of the room and sits behind the five-piece cherry-red DW drum set. “Check it out,” she says as she redoes her ponytail. She gets her sticks out of her stick bag, Vater 5Bs with wood tips, and then smacks down the opening fill to “D’yer Mak’er” by Led Zeppelin, ending it with a vicious cymbal crash. She and Mr. Darren have been going through the Zeppelin catalog and working out all of Bonham’s sick drum fills.

“Nice,” says Mr. Darren with a big grin. Sometimes he is just like any other guy with how a tight drum fill makes him completely happy.

“Thanks,” says Valerie. She makes that half smile that she
has, the one that’s not extra wide and fake like so many girls. It seems honest. You feel like you believe it.

“Yeah, cool,” I say to Valerie, glancing at her for a nanosecond. Her smile widens, and that makes me look away fast.

She warms up some more, now playing the beginning of “Good Times Bad Times.” As she plays one of the rare cool cowbell parts in the universe, Keenan and I join in on the hits, and then Valerie rocks the tom fill and drops into the verse beat, you know the one, with the supercool triplet bass drum parts that she’s
almost
got right. Mr. Darren jumps in and together we play the lead, him nailing it, me almost there, and Keenan plays John Paul Jones’s completely underrated bass line.

While this is happening I find myself watching Valerie, playing with her eyes closed, face scrunched in concentration, arms and legs in the flow, and out of the corner of my eye I feel Keenan giving me a look like,
Ha ha!
I want to glare at him but I just put my head down and focus on the music instead.

Because he’s right. When Valerie plays you imagine things, like after rocking out at band practice you could grab burgers at Red Mill and then go to the movies together. And you could see something actually good with a girl like Valerie, something with guns and knives and guts but also with characters that aren’t just clichés and definitely even something futuristic too. Or you could meet up on, like, a Saturday afternoon in Capitol Hill and watch the kids skate at Cal Anderson, and get slices at Big Mario’s and then head over
to Everyday Music and flip through the vinyl and make fun of the covers from the eighties.

I deserve the smirk from Keenan.

After Skye, I spent two months swearing off girls. I would never like someone again. But now …

Keenan keeps nagging me to ask Valerie out, but I have no idea how to do that. Or more like no idea what she would say. So I tell him to shut up and that I’m working on it. Soon. Maybe.

After another minute, our Zeppelin groove falls apart. “Okay,” Mr. Darren says, “now we just need Sadie.” His face twists in concern as he checks the time on his phone. “Any idea where she might be?”

“No clue,” Keenan says.

“I know she’s here today,” says Valerie.

Sadie is our lead singer. She’s actually in seventh grade, and also sings for their band. She is pretty great, but now that she’s in two bands, sometimes she thinks she’s a diva more than she should.

To tell you the truth, I kinda wanted to try out for singer. There were no eighth graders who wanted to audition, and when I’m at home in my room just recording junk, I work on writing lyrics, and it’s kinda awesome. It’s a different feeling
to sing a song. To have it come out of you. Also it would be cool to be singing onstage and still rock the tricky guitar part.

Mr. Darren probably would have let me try out if I’d asked him. But I just didn’t feel quite … ready. Besides, I don’t exactly look the lead singer part.

And also, it could be weird, taking on two major roles in the band. I’m not sure how Keenan would feel about that. That’s the kind of thing that usually leads to bands breaking up. That and girls. And everybody knows it’s way better to be in a band. Solo artists always seem kinda lame and full of themselves, while bands always look really cool standing together like a team, a secret society, a band of brothers.

And Sadie is fine, except for thinking she’s the best. Plus, she’s missed a bunch of rehearsals because she’s always getting detention for pulling crazy stunts or not doing her work. I guess that goes along with the whole lead singer personality, and also with being a seventh grader and not really knowing how to be cool yet.

“Well, we can start without her,” Mr. Darren says, but then the door bursts opens and Sadie storms in like she always does. And even though it’s probably the same old drama with Sadie, you can’t totally ignore her because like any good pop star whose life gets told in embarrassing pictures online and in headlines in grocery store checkout lines, there is something about Sadie that makes you end up watching anyway.

Today she’s wearing the skinny jeans and a black hoodie with big sparkly angel wings on the back. She has blond hair with red streaks, but it’s messier than the usual Pocket look.
She slams the door and sighs heavily, like it’s the world’s biggest burden to have made it here at all today. So basically the usual. She heads straight for the couches and throws down her shoulder bag and then herself.

“Howdy, Ms. Harry,” says Mr. Darren.

Sadie just huffs like that’s such a stupid nickname, and sure it’s harder to find as many cool female singers in rock but still that huff makes Mr. Darren’s face fall just a little bit, and I hate seeing that. Nobody should give Mr. Darren any crap.

“We were just about to run Killer G,” he says. “Did you want to sing your melody over it or try out any new lyrics?”

“Nah.” Sadie is pulling like thirty things out of her bag, and then she picks up a glittery purple journal and a lime-green gel pen. “I’ve got some words that are almost ready, so I’ll just work on them for a bit while you guys warm up.” She says it like she’s expecting a roadie to bring her a warm towel and some mineral water and a salad of weird greens while she does this.

I look at Keenan and roll my eyes. Sadie doesn’t fool anyone. We all know she hasn’t worked on the lyrics like she was supposed to and I want to yell at her like, come
on
, if everybody else in the band is trying to get it right then you need to try too! The show is so soon and you haven’t even sung anything for the song yet!

But it was like this last spring too, and Sadie was totally writing lyrics right before we went onstage and then actually … she kinda pulled it off. Keenan and Liam and I had to
agree that she sounded pretty great. But now Sadie knows she can pull it off at the buzzer, and the problem with that is: not every buzzer-beater shot goes in.

“Okay,” says Mr. Darren. He spins back to us. “Let’s just run Killer G a bit and see how it goes. Valerie, count it off?”

“Sure.” Valerie closes her eyes for a second and knits her brow. She’s finding the tempo in her head like Mr. Darren tells us to do. Then she looks up and counts while clicking her sticks. She counts quiet compared to Mr. Darren, “One, two, three …,” then she slams four on the snare and we are in.

Sound overwhelms everything. We hear all the time these days that “loud” is bad and my mom would be all over me for not wearing my earplugs right now but she doesn’t get how volume
feels
when it’s all around you and you’re in it and you’re making it. The kick and snare attack like howitzers beneath the tinny machine-gun spray of eighth notes on the half-open hi-hat. Our chunky riff locks into the spaces in between and it is all our thoughts and I start to nod hard to the quarter notes. It’s sounding good. Mr. Darren is grinning.

We loop the part, over and over. It’s the best feeling ever, to just be playing, to just be in the music that is going from your brain to the muscles in your arm to the tiny pick to the
tense string into the pickup, down the cord, and back at you from the amp and into your brain, only more powerful now with the extra boost of your bandmates. It’s like you are building something that is getting bigger and more complete and, like, solid. Maybe it’s some kind of futuristic tower like you see in pictures of Singapore or Dubai. The whole day is gone and you are just in the music, which is the exact
now
, and there’s no more time or what happened before or whatever you have to do later or anything except the playing and the sound and it’s the best!

With each pass-through, the riff gets tighter, gaps and joints melt closed, the tower rising.…

But then something strange happens, something that I’m not really expecting and I don’t know if it’s ever happened before. It’s like my brain knows the Killer G part so well that I am rising out of it, out of the flow of the music, so that I am floating over it. Suddenly I am thinking back on my day, about the Fat Class comment, Mr. Scher and the phone call home, even Keenan and Skye, the duo that doesn’t include me, and suddenly, even though I’m here playing music and so everything should be great, I’m getting really frustrated again.

It’s like the energy of the music is connecting to my emotions, and saying,
Aren’t you mad? Don’t you want to change things?
And I do. I wish I could change everything that sucks.

And I’m even getting mad about being mad, because I am no longer enjoying this thing that is the best part of my day. That’s not fair! I want to be back in the flow of the song with Keenan and Valerie and Mr. Darren, but I’m not, I’m floating
over it like a ghost stuck outside the world of the living. Except I’m still hearing the tune …

Wait. No. Actually, I’m hearing something different. My ear doesn’t
want
to hear this part anymore. It wants to be somewhere else. Like, it wants to go in a different direction. And I am hearing some
where
else we could go. It’s kinda like in Level 14 of
Liberation Force
when you are running through the winery catacombs at Strasbourg trying to save the hidden French family and, after you’ve totally gotten bled out by the Nazis like ten times and you are so angry you want to smash your controller against the wall, you finally notice the door that’s hidden in one of the alcoves. You bust through it and
that’s
where the cache of fresh ammo and grenades is hidden, the one that you will need to win the level—

Outside my head the song crumbles to a halt.

“Anthony?” Mr. Darren says.

I look up and everybody has stopped playing. I realize now that I totally lost the groove and things got sloppy and fell apart. “Sorry,” I say. My heart is pounding. “I … think I hear another part.”

“Really,” says Mr. Darren. “Do tell.”

“Um …” I start sliding my fingers up the neck, tapping notes, and my fingers are twitching with nerves. I try to find the note I’m hearing, try to make the guitar match that tone. I press the E string down at A … close, is that it? Maybe not … up a fret to A-sharp … no, too far, back to A. Yeah, that’s what I was hearing, or close enough. I stretch my index finger over the strings and clamp down, making the A major
bar chord. The strings bite against my skin. I strum the chord. It sounds right. I start chunking eighth notes. “What if we went to here?”

“Ooh,” says Mr. Darren. “Yes. It could go to A.”

And now it’s like I’ve shot off down this new shadowy catacomb with the straps of fresh grenades crisscrossing my chest and I can hear the mumblings of the hidden French family somewhere ahead and I’m not done yet.

“And then …” I play the A for two bars, then drop down and hit a D chord for a bar, then slide to E for the last bar … and back to A. Relief spreads through me as I return home because A feels like home now. I start the progression over. “How about that?”

Mr. Darren nods like he is impressed. “Let’s try it,” he says. “Valerie, maybe try moving your hi-hat pattern to the floor tom for this part and mixing up the kick and snare a bit. Let’s do the G riff twice, then go into Anthony’s new part.”

Valerie counts off and we are back in, only now it feels like, instead of just going in circles, we are headed somewhere. Like we are standing on one of those moving walkways at the airport, heading toward the next part. It’s scary because I don’t know if it will work and I really want it to work and here it comes and we get to the end of the bar and now we all slide up to A …

And it feels great! It completely works! It’s like we were meant to go there and
bam!
we blow the back wall of the wine cellar and escape with the French family out into the shallow gully, away from the Nazis. And then the teenage daughter
with her fine video game physique is so grateful, and she says all this stuff in French and wraps her arms around you and gives you this big kiss and then it’s on to the next level only this is even better!

“That’s awesome!” Mr. Darren calls over the sound. He stops us and we tweak the progression, spicing up the rhythm a bit with a few syncopated upbeats.

While we’re stopped, Valerie says, “Nice, Anthony.” She is grinning, air-drumming the tom beat as Mr. Darren demonstrates a rhythm to Keenan.

“Thanks,” I say, smiling back.

That feels good too.

We start up again with the changes and now things really are sounding good and I am so psyched because that was songwriting and that was
me
! The same Anthony that Scher and Tiernan only see as a black-couch resident, and we are going to play this at Arts Night, this second part that I found, and the song will be great!

“Okay, Sadie, hop on in here!” Mr. Darren calls over the groove, and he sounds so excited and the sound is so good that even Sadie can’t resist.

She drags herself off the couch and walks up to a silver mic on a straight chrome stand. She adjusts the stand like a pro, strikes a pose with her hip cocked, and holds her journal out to read. We stop, then Valerie counts us back in to Killer G. Sadie mumble-sings, because of course she still doesn’t really have lyrics, but her pitch is pretty good and her melody is catchy and we suddenly sound like a complete band.