The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (12 page)

Matthew Holler’s fascinating and educational project involved a lot of noise at very loud levels. Guitar noise, drum noise, and some noise that sounded like a tractor running over half a dozen metal trash cans. “It’s industrial,” he explained to Kate, and Kate had nodded as though she halfway knew what he was talking about. She didn’t, but she didn’t care. All she cared about was that Matthew Holler wanted her to hear his music.

“It’s really cool that you’re into music and everything,” he’d said to her as they listened to screeching brakes whining over a battalion of guitars. “I think you’re the first girl I ever met who played guitar.”

She almost said, “Flannery does too,” but she stopped herself. She didn’t know if Matthew Holler and Flannery knew each other, but it
occurred to her that they might be each other’s type. Kate suspected that if Matthew found her interesting, he’d find Flannery very interesting.

“I don’t know many people at all who play guitar,” Kate said. “I’ve sort of been hoping I’d meet some other guitar players one of these days.”

That sounded stupid. That sounded so dumb Kate thought she might cry. But Matthew Holler just said, “Yeah, it makes a big difference in life when you find your tribe. I don’t have one friend who’s not completely obsessed with music.”

Kate didn’t know if she was completely obsessed with music or not. At home her parents mostly played the classical radio station, so when she was downstairs that’s what she listened to. She had a boom box in her room, which she kept tuned to
KISS
101.5, which claimed to play “the biggest hits to hit your eardrums,” with commercial-free Mondays and Top-40 Tuesdays. But ever since she’d started playing guitar and writing songs, she found
herself getting irritated with the songs on
KISS
101.5. Most of the words were dumb, and it seemed like every song they played was either about falling in love or falling out of love or getting your heart broken.

“What radio station do you listen to?” she’d asked Matthew after they left the media lab and were walking down the hall to their fifth-period classes. “Because I wish there was a station that played something good all the time.”

“I listen to
K-DUCK
,” he told her. “It’s a college station, 88.9. There’s always something different on it. Like, one afternoon you’ll turn it on and there’s punk, and the next day you turn it on at the same time and there’s classic rock, or maybe bluegrass. I hate it when it’s bluegrass, but I listen to it anyway. You never know what you might learn.”

So another thing Matthew Holler had given Kate was a new radio station to listen to. At first she hadn’t liked
K-DUCK
very much. She’d sit on her bed and listen, but a lot of times she didn’t know what she was listening to, and there was something about the songs
that didn’t exactly belong in her room. It was weird to listen to the pounding drums and screeching guitars and the singers going on about things Kate could hardly understand, and then glance over at her bookshelf and see her complete set of the Little House on the Prairie books and her My Little Pony collection, which she’d had since kindergarten. Kate’s bedroom and
K-DUCK
were not a good mix-and-match combination, that much was clear.

But she kept listening. She figured out the
K-DUCK
system. All the announcers were college students, and there were different announcers every day. Their shows were two hours long, so if you tuned in at four and didn’t like what you were hearing, you might as well turn off the radio until six.

Without realizing it, Kate started to like almost everything she heard, even the stuff that at first had sounded too fast and loud. You just had to get used to some music before you could appreciate it. It was hard to explain, but some of the loudest, fastest songs made her feel
stronger, the way her boots did, the way playing guitar did. It was like the music got into your blood or something, she thought.

But her favorite
K-DUCK
show was on Thursday nights. The announcer was a girl named Lindsey, and her show was called
Girls with Guitars Unplugged.
Kate loved almost every song she heard. They were the kind of songs she was trying to write, songs that were about people doing things or thinking about things or just living their lives and sometimes being happy, sometimes sad.

One night Kate’s mom walked into her bedroom while Kate was listening to
Girls with Guitars Unplugged
and doing her pre-algebra homework. Mrs. Faber opened her mouth to say something, but suddenly closed it again. She tilted her head toward Kate’s boom box and listened for a few seconds. She sat down on Kate’s bed and listened some more. When the song was over, she said, “I love Joni Mitchell. She’s a genius.”

“You know who that was singing that song?” Kate was amazed. She had no idea her mom
had any musical knowledge whatsoever. She’d thought music was just background noise to her mom, something to keep a room from feeling too quiet.

“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Faber replied. “I listened to
Blue
every day when I was in high school. It was the soundtrack to my life.”

“Is
Blue
a Joni Mitchell CD?”

Mrs. Faber laughed. “Well, at the time it was a Joni Mitchell record,” she said. “But yes, it’s probably the greatest Joni Mitchell CD ever.” Then Mrs. Faber paused and looked sad for a minute. “It just occurred to me that I really miss it.”

The next day when Kate got home, her mom was in the kitchen frosting a cake in the shape of a duck. There was music on the CD player, but it wasn’t Bach or Beethoven or any of those classical guys her mom usually listened to. After a minute, Kate recognized the voice.

“You got that Joni Mitchell CD, didn’t you?” she asked her mom, who was humming under her breath as she painted an orange bill onto the duck cake.

“Yep,” her mom answered. “This is the fifteenth time I’ve listened to it today.”

“You must be very happy,” said Kate, reaching into the mixing bowl to snag a glob of frosting with her finger.

Mrs. Faber grinned wildly. “Ecstatic,” she said. “I’d forgotten how music makes you feel. I mean, music that really gets inside of you.”

So that was another thing from Matthew Holler, Kate figured. He’d given Kate K-DUCK, which in turn had given her mom Joni Mitchell back.

Kate knew she should really show Matthew her notebook. She knew it was her turn to share something. But her notebook was so new. It was still as fragile as a tiny bird in its newness. Almost anything could break its wings: a swift fall to the ground, the wrong word.

Kate would find something else to give Matthew. But not the notebook. Not yet.

The first thing Kate gave Matthew Holler was a rock.

It wasn’t just any rock. It was the blue rock
she’d found on the beach when she was seven. It was round and mostly smooth and for a long time Kate had slept with it under her pillow for good luck.

She knew it was a good thing to give to Matthew, because in the three weeks that they had been friends she had learned that he was the sort of person who liked arrowheads and bird feathers and interesting-shaped sticks. She had learned that he liked old things better than new things and that what he wanted for Christmas this year was a wooden box he had seen on eBay. It reminded him of a box his grandfather had that had originally been his great-grandfather’s.

“You should write a poem about that,” Kate had told him, and Matthew said he might, seeming interested in the idea.

So when Kate was looking through her jewelry box for an old bracelet she’d forgotten about that she’d just remembered and found the blue rock, she knew immediately it was the sort of thing that Matthew would appreciate.
She gave it to him the next day before his Spanish test.

“For good luck,” Kate told him, handing him the rock and feeling the tiniest twinge of regret that she was giving it away and it would never be hers again.

The twinge turned into a note of alarm when a girl Kate had never seen before walked by and said, “Hey, Mattie! Come talk to me at lunch!” The girl was pretty, much prettier than she was, Kate thought, and Matthew’s eyes followed her as she walked down the hall.

“Who was that?” Kate asked, even as she insisted to herself that she shouldn’t even care. It wasn’t like she owned Matthew Holler. It wasn’t like he couldn’t be friends with other people.

Matthew shrugged. “Emily,” he said. “Just somebody I know.”

Then he held the rock up and examined it. “I can’t believe you found this,” he said. “I never find good rocks.” Slipping it into his pocket, he slammed closed his locker door. “Are you sure you want to give it to me?”

Kate nodded. “Yeah. I just wanted you to have something that was, I don’t know, good.”

Matthew grinned. “I like getting stuff that’s good. Mostly what people give me are T-shirts and socks. It’s pretty depressing.”

“Yeah, whatever happened to toys?” Kate said. “Even if we are too old for them, I guess.”

They walked down the hall together. When Kate reached her classroom, she said good-bye and hurried to her desk, pulling her new notebook and pen out of her backpack.

Roca,
she wrote, and then,
azul.

Bella,
she wrote, saying it softly under her breath.
“Bella.”

“La roca azul esta bella,”
Matthew had said right before they’d reached her class.
“Gracias.”

The blue rock is beautiful, he’d said.

Thank you.

Sometimes it seemed to Kate that her life was all about being friends with Matthew Holler, but it really wasn’t. For instance, she was also becoming friends with Lorna, who Kate liked because Lorna was an intellectual and a writer
and didn’t like to talk about boys and who had a crush on who. Kate did not want to talk about boys or about being friends with Matthew Holler. She thought that too many words might ruin things. So in that regard, Lorna was the perfect person for her right now.

What Lorna liked to talk about most of all was food. Food was to Lorna what music was to Matthew Holler. She brought interesting lunches to school and shared them with Kate: burritos and chimichangas, curry and naan bread, Greek salads with black olives and feta cheese. Lorna made her lunches herself. “My mom hates to cook,” she told Kate. “I do all the cooking in my family. My mom pays me twenty-five dollars a week to make dinner.”

“You get paid to make dinner?” Kate asked.

Lorna shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a great cook. If things don’t work out for me as a writer, I’ll probably end up being a chef.”

Kate and Lorna had started eating lunch together almost every day. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they read. Sometimes Lorna
read to Kate from the novel she was writing. It was a story told from the point of view of a cat who was actually a ghost cat and had helped out on the Underground Railroad during the 1800s. Kate thought it was a pretty good story so far, though secretly she wondered how much help a cat could have been transporting slaves from the South to Canada. She’d known a few cats in her life, and they’d never struck her as the do-gooder types.

One day Lorna showed up in the cafeteria looking serious. This was unusual. Lorna normally looked like she found everything in the world particularly hilarious and couldn’t wait to let you in on the joke. But now she wore a slight frown. She looked a little confused to Kate, like she wasn’t sure about something.

“What’s wrong?” Kate asked her. “Do you feel okay?”

Lorna sat down without saying anything. She didn’t pull her lunch bag out of her backpack the way she typically did the second she sat down, making a big show out of unpacking it, explaining what each item was and how it
was made. It worried Kate that Lorna was just sitting there, not unpacking, not talking.

“Did something bad happen?” Kate asked. “Because if it did, you could tell me.”

Lorna let out her breath in a big rush. “Okay, I’m just going to say it. On my way here, I saw Matthew waiting outside the principal’s office, and he looked upset, like something bad was going on.”

“Maybe he’s sick,” Kate said, a stream of nervous energy suddenly rushing through her. What if something horrible had happened? What if Matthew needed her to be there with him right now? Should she go? She didn’t have a hall pass, but she didn’t care if she got in trouble, not if Matthew needed her help.