After the song ended, the crowd kept cheering and hollering for about six minutes straight. I just kept staring at Jane, still not able to believe she was standing next to me, having just sung my song.
Finally, she hushed the crowd.
“I need to tell you guys something,” she said into the microphone. “First of all, it’s great to be back here at Eastport Middle. This auditorium is where I got my start as a singer.”
The crowd went crazy.
(From now on, I’m not going to tell you every time the crowd went crazy. Just assume they did, pretty much after every sentence.)
“But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I made a deal with this girl right here. Katie.” As she put her arm around me, I noticed that three-quarters of the audience already had their cell phones out, recording everything. I wondered if Jane would say anything about that.
“I’m not a big fan of cell phones, and texting, and all that stuff,” she went on. “I know technology is amazing. I know it’s real useful and stuff. But it’s no good if it helps you hide from one another. It’s no good if it isolates you from one another. It’s no good if it makes you mean and insensitive to one another.” She smiled at all the people holding up their cell phones. “And it’s no good if it turns you from a doer to a watcher.”
She turned to me. “So when I met this girl, and she told me she wanted to write and sing songs, I told her, if she and ten friends gave up their cell phones for a week, I would play her song at my next concert.” She raised her arms to the crowd. “It just turned out that this was my next concert!”
At that point, the crowd did their best imitation of an insane asylum.
“Here’s the last thing I’ll say,” Jane said, talking into the mike but looking at me. “You’ve got two good friends in Eliza and Nareem. They sent me that letter you wrote, saying you didn’t live up to your end of the bargain. But they also wrote me a note of their own, telling me about how upset you were, and what a good person you are, and asking if maybe I wouldn’t mind coming here and singing with you.” Jane turned around and looked at the rest of the band. “And when these guys told me backstage that you’d actually finished your song, I knew that we were in business.”
I stared at Becca. “You met Jane backstage??? You knew?!”
She grinned. “When you were running around giving everybody their phones back,” she said.
“So finally,” Jane said. “If everyone whose name I call can come up onstage. From what I understand, you call yourselves Cavemen. Sounds like a good name for a band.”
Jane called out all our names. Eliza. Ricky. Tiffany. Amber. Hannah. Jake. Phil. Celia. Becca. Jackie. Katie.
And when all the Cavemen were up onstage, we took a bow.
“I had a great time,” Jane said, waving goodbye to the crowd. “See you on tour!”
As we headed off stage to one last deafening round of applause, Jane pulled me aside.
“Becca told me about last night,” she said. “How you heard them talking about not really wanting to be in the band anymore.”
“Yeah,” I said, embarrassed. “I guess I’m a little too intense for them.”
“You’re passionate!” Jane said. “That’s a good thing, never forget that.”
“I guess so. It just felt like they were talking about me behind my back, though, so I just left.”
Jane smiled. “That’s a drag for sure, but that kinda stuff helps us remember that secrets and lies and talking behind people’s backs are bad news, no matter whether they come from somebody’s phone, or somebody’s mouth.”
I thought about that for a second. She was absolutely right.
Jane put her guitar back in her case. “One last thing,” she said, heading for the door. “A lot of people write songs only when they’re upset. But that’s not a great way to be. If you want to be a songwriter, you gotta write ’em when you’re sad, happy, and everything in between.”
She took a long swig of water and gave me a hug that I will remember forever.
“Because music is great,” she said, “but happiness is better.”