Read This Song Is (Not) for You Online

Authors: Laura Nowlin

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Love & Romance, #Social Issues, #Emotions & Feelings, #Dating & Sex

This Song Is (Not) for You (6 page)

BOOK: This Song Is (Not) for You
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Ramona

The band is rocking. Last week we all received our letters from Artibus inviting us to apply to our majors. I’m still in love with Sam, and now I have an inconvenient avalanche of a crush on Tom, although I think I have it under control.

Kind of.

We’re two-thirds of the way through the semester.

So of course it’s time for me to have a run-in with my nemesis.

• • •

All semester, Emmalyn has been on the verge of going too far. It’s not that I care what she says about me. It’s just that I’m sick of it. I tell myself that she’s probably unhappy, maybe jealous. But what right does she have to so actively and publicly dislike me? I’ve never done anything to her. Unless she did something first.

Like today.

It’s dumb, but I’m in a really good mood this morning. It’s all starting to seem real now. I would finally be allowed to leave this place. The world would finally start to take seriously my desire to devote my life to music. Also, I’d found a kick-ass pair of black studded leather boots that fall just short of being military boots and therefore just barely pass the school dress code.

So I’m smiling when I walked into class.

A show of genuine emotion to some people.

A sign of weakness to Emmalyn Evans.

“Are those corrective shoes to fix her posture?” she whispers loudly as I sit down. “They aren’t working.”

I know that my boots are awesome no matter what the Emmalyns of the world say, but I happen to have great fucking posture. I really do.

And that part of her comment pisses me off.

“Good morning, Emmalyn,” I say aloud. “It seems that you once again failed to receive enough attention from your father over the weekend.”

“Oh God, what is wrong with her?” she asks. And then I snap.

“Talk to me!” I stand up and shout the words at her. “Stop talking about me and. Talk. To. Me.”

At that point Dr. Harris has to own up to his sense of hearing, and Emmalyn and I are sent to the office.

Together.

At Saint Joseph’s Preparatory, students are expected to have the civility to walk quietly to the office next to their enemy without inflicting injury. As if shivs were more powerful than tongues.

“Oh my God,” Emmalyn whispers over and over again. “This is so ridiculous.”

“Who are you talking to?” I say. “Are you finally actually talking to me instead of about me?”

“Why am I being sent to the office? I was just talking to Hanna. You were the one screaming at me.”

“You were talking about me to the whole room,” I say. I have to stop myself before my voice rises again while I’m finally articulating in the heat of the moment what I’ve been wanting to say to her for years. “Your little guise of just being overheard while indulging in teenage gossip isn’t fooling anybody, not even Dr. Harris. You’re just a bully.”

“I’m not a bully,” Emmalyn says. She actually stops in the middle of the hallway and turns to me. “I just don’t like you, you or your kind.”

“My kind?” I say. This is new. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“You just have to make sure everybody knows that you are
so
special and
so
weird.” She tilts her head higher. “Everything you do, your haircuts and your stupid boots, it’s all about proving that you’re just so fucking unusual. You say that you don’t care what people think, but you do. You probably spend more time on your appearance than I do. You act like you’re this tortured and misunderstood outcast, but you’re really not, okay? You’ve got friends, and your hair looks like something from a
Teen Vogue
‘How to Get That Punk Rock Look’ column. So get over yourself, Ramona, ’cause we’re all sick of hearing about what a unique snowflake you are.”

And what she says sounds just right enough that I can’t speak. (Am I a poseur?) I just stare at her like an idiot. And then the principal comes out into the hall and reminds us that we’re due in his office. And I get the old lecture about the expectations that Saint Joe’s has for students, but all I hear is Emmalyn’s taunting voice.

We’re all tired

Of hearing about

What a unique

And special

Snowflake

You     are.

(poseur)

What if it’s true? What if

I’ve already been caught by the machine?

Sam

Ramona’s dad grounded her after her latest tangle with Emmalyn Evans, so we’re not having band practice this week.

I was surprised when Tom called me Thursday afternoon.

I like Tom, but it never occurred to me to hang out with him without Ramona there.

“Do you just wanna get something to eat?” he said. I nodded and then remembered that he couldn’t see me do that over the phone.

“Yeah, cool,” I said.

• • •

We were waiting in the drive-through when it happened; we saw the poster.

“I hate shit like that,” Tom said. He pointed at the side of the building where an ad for the fast-food place hung. The picture was supposed to be of a woman eating the new Snack Big burger they’re pushing, but it didn’t even look like she was eating.

It looked like she’s trying to make out with the sandwich.

“I guess a female having sex with a burger will make males buy it,” I said.

“I hate society,” Tom said. “I really, really, really do. All of this misogynistic bullshit should have been fixed long before we were even born.”

“I guess it falls to us to fix it then.” I was talking about society when I said that, but I guess Tom thought I meant the poster.

“Sam, you are so, so right,” he said. And then he climbed out of my car, went up to the poster frame, and removed the girl and her burger lover.

“What is happening?” I said as he got back in the car.

“We’re gonna fix the poster, like you said,” Tom said. “Now just pay for our food and act normal. Do you have art supplies at your house?”

I did not have art supplies.

Grift Craft is in Soulard, a gentrified neighborhood on the edge of the city, and Tom told me not to judge the store too harshly based on that.

“They still have to turn a profit after all,” he reasoned as I parallel parked. I nodded, but inwardly I was laughing that Tom thought I might hold it against him that his favorite craft store is in a yuppie neighborhood.

Outside of the car, Tom stood back and swept his arm dramatically against the skyline of redbrick buildings.

“People have been living in this neighborhood since the late seventeen hundreds, and that is the kind of thing that is always cool.” Tom said.

I nodded again, this time in perfect agreement.

The inside of Grift Craft looked like an urban witch’s garden. Things were hung from fishing wire from the ceiling and crowd along shelves. “Things” is as specific as I can get. Mirrors caught the light. Metal objects clanged and chimed against each other in the air currents. Art projects perched on every surface, and the walls were covered in frames and shelves. There were a thousand things to look at, and a thousand painted or sketched, plastic or Styrofoam eyes looking back at me.

“Ramona told me about this place,” I said.

“Yeah, she loved it,” Tom said. The store is an odd shape, and the aisles make it even stranger, but he led me with ease to the stencils at the back of the store.

“So what’s our message? I mean, maybe some woman out there would want to have sex with a hamburger (and that’s totally fine), but people need to realize that they are being manipulated. How do we show that, Sam?”

We stood in front of the stencils and he looked at me imploringly. He genuinely wanted to know what I thought, and he was going to stand there staring at me until I told him.

“Most people are actually pretty smart when they remember to actually stop and think about things,” I said.

• • •

CONSUME

CONSUME

CONSUME

AND DIE WITHOUT THINKING

ABOUT IT

said the poster we placed in the frame outside the restaurant very late on Friday night. Tom insisted that the words be outlined in red glitter. Alongside the words the woman still pressed the burger into her face. We didn’t change anything on her image, but now it looked more like she was being smothered by the burger.

The next day we went through the drive-through in the late afternoon, and the employees still hadn’t taken it down.

“This is the greatest compliment we could ever receive,” Tom said. “No one’s told the manager yet. It means they like it. You’ve taught me a lesson, Sam. I must never forget that most people are actually pretty smart and actually pretty cool.”

And I finally understood what Ramona knew all along.

Tom was meant to meet us in same way a meteor is destined to crash into whatever is along its trajectory.

Tom

Here’s how Sara broke up with me.

She called me late in the afternoon and said she was coming by. She’d finally saved enough money to buy her own car. She’d quit her job at the mall so that she could do an internship at her dad’s company over the summer.

School wasn’t even out yet, but I hardly ever saw her anymore.

(And, yeah, it’s all obvious to me now.)

So I waited for her out on the front porch, and after she parked, I walked down the steps. I met her on the sidewalk and kissed her cheek. She started crying.

“Tom, just don’t,” she said. “Don’t even try.”

“Try what?” I asked. I felt like the baffled boyfriend on a sitcom. She just stood there crying, and I just stood there doing nothing.

“You don’t feel that way about me. I know that you don’t,” she finally said.

“What way?” I said.

“You don’t want to have sex with me,” Sara said, standing on the sidewalk outside my parents’ house. “God, not that I’m ready. But you—you—” There were tears studding her eyelashes. Her ponytail was slipping down, and the setting sun made a halo out of her loosened hair.

She was so beautiful.

She was right.

“You get bored kissing me,” Sara said. “You hold me and never try anything else. You know it’s true.”

“I love you, Sara,” I said. I knew that it was true.

“I know you do,” she said. “But you’re gay, Tom. And that’s okay, but—”

“I’m not—”

“We need to break up.”

“I’m not gay,” I said. I put my hands on her shoulders to steady both of us. “I just don’t feel that way about anybody.”

There.

I’d said it.

I’d told Sara what I had never said aloud to anyone ever before.

“You don’t…” She frowned and shook her head.

“I’m not gay. I’m not straight. I just don’t really care about sex.”

“You don’t care. About sex.” She said it like I’d said I didn’t care about curing cancer.

“I don’t know why,” I said. I tried to gather together my years of puzzling over this and lay it all before her. “I just never developed this obsession with sex that everyone else has. It’s never interested me, and it just seems to cause everyone else a lot of trouble. But I love you, Sara. I think you’re so smart and beautiful, and I love being with you. I just don’t want to have sex with you.”

I looked at her, and she looked at me, and I hoped that she could accept me.

“No, Tom,” she said. “That’s not possible.”

“It’s true. I—”

“You need to do some thinking, Tom,” she said. It was starting to annoy me how often she was saying my name. “Everybody’s sexual. You’re in denial about something, and it’s not fair to either of us to keep up with this charade of a relationship.”

She turned away from me and got into her car.

And I let her go.

Because to me it had never been a charade,

To me our relationship had been everything I had ever wanted,

But to her, it had been missing the most basic human need.

There was nothing to do but let her go.

After that I was alone.

Until Ramona found me.

And she introduced me to Sam.

(And I started to think that maybe it was
safe to get close to someone again.)

Ramona

It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to play the piano for fun.

This past week and a half, I’ve spent every afternoon alone with the piano in Dad’s condo.

Playing without practicing.

I’d forgotten what that felt like.

Bach is my favorite. He is the rock-star king of baroque music.

I’ve also been indulging in the Tori and Fiona songs I used to obsessively play at thirteen.

It feels so good to take the empty condo and fill it with a song that I love.

I adore this long stand of black and white,

the vibration and rumbles

of this instrument,

the pedals under my feet.

When I was little, this was how I spent most of my time.

It made Dad happy, and I didn’t have any close friends back then. Back then, playing the piano felt like my purpose.

Beavers build dams.

Bees make honey.

Ramona plays piano.

My whole world was structured around the piano. It was my joy and my passion, and every adult I knew praised me for my dedication.

And then something changed, in the way that things always change.

• • •

I went to junior high at McKinley, a magnet school in the city. All through sixth and seventh grade, I looked with longing at the musicians in eighth grade. If they passed the audition, they got to take advanced music with Mrs. Trundle, my favorite teacher. The advanced music students played in an ensemble, and they were invited to play with the St. Louis Symphony at Powell Hall in the spring, where the best student would also play a solo.

In my early-adolescent mind, playing that spring concert solo was the objective of my being.

In the weeks before the audition, I slaved over the piano, and I wept with joy when I was accepted into the class. On the first day of eighth grade, my leg jiggled nervously under my desk in each class, impatient to reach the goal of the last line on my schedule.

Finally, last period came.

I burst into the music room and found that Mrs. Trundle was not there.

Mr. Jones was there. He had red hair, a bizarre tie that looked like a lightning bolt, and new ideas. He stood in front of the classroom and shattered me to the very core.

“You are here because you are gifted and therefore worthy of being challenged. And that means going out of your comfort zone. The instrument you auditioned with is not the instrument you will be playing with the symphony this spring.”

We were told that over the next few months we would all be trying out new instruments, and by the end of the semester, we would select the instrument we would then focus on for the spring concert.

I hated Mr. Jones.

I hated his tie and his words and his face.

I hated him with a fiery passion you cannot imagine.

Just cut to a scene of me sullenly scratching on a violin in the corner of the music room, my icy eyes focused on Mr. Jones as he joyously instructs a student at the piano.

Then, Friday came.

And we were told that as a special treat we would have a drum circle.

I hated Mr. Jones and his stupid hippie ways.

But the rhythm got to me.

I’d grimly grabbed the bongo without thought, but I found myself fascinated by the varying texture of sound. The drums weren’t the simple instrument that I’d thought.

I hated Mr. Jones, but on Monday I went to the corner where he kept the percussion instruments.

In the spring concert, I played the xylophone, a percussion instrument that uses chimes laid out like a keyboard. It was familiar enough that the solo I coveted had gone to me by a landslide. Afterward, I hugged Mr. Jones with tears in my eyes.

And told my dad that I absolutely had to use my birthday money on a drum kit.

• • •

I still play piano, but I play the drums too.

Loving the drums hasn’t made me love piano less.

Just as Sam has stayed in my heart even after I fell for Tom.

Some things, it seems, are always the same even after things change.

BOOK: This Song Is (Not) for You
10.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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