After we leave Human Bean and Macy drops me off at home, I can’t get their suggestion out of my mind. I keep running through “Love Doesn’t Die” and “The Brightest Star in Space” in my head, trying to drop a new song into the center, something that will make the other two sound different the way “Pop Goes the Weasel” turns “Rock and Roar” into something unique.
Eventually, I just give up. It’s too hard to imagine introducing something to those two dramatic, powerful songs that will help make a new sound. By the time Dad calls me down to eat, I’ve pretty much decided that Keith, Macy and Davis were mistaken about my abilities.
“Go call your mother in from the garden, will you, Gerri?” Dad asks as he dishes up spaghetti.
I yell into the shadows at the back of the yard and grab a seat at the table. Mom comes in a few moments later, her hair a mess and her hands covered with dirt. She looks totally frustrated.
“What happened to you?” Dad asks as she washes up.
“Oh, it’s that stupid lilac stump near the shed,” she says. “I spent almost two hours hacking at it with an ax, digging as far down around the roots as I could, and it won’t come out.”
“Why don’t you just leave it in the ground?” asks Jack.
“I can’t leave it there,” she says, “because I want to plant a new perennial bed on that spot, and the stump is in the way. Nothing will be able to put down roots because there’s a big hunk of dead wood taking up all the space.”
“That’s it!” I exclaim. Everyone turns to look at me.
“What’s it, sweetheart?” asks Dad.
“Sorry,” I say. “I just got an answer for a homework question.”
I hurry through supper, then race up to my room and go online. The problem with the two songs Bernice chose, I’ve realized, is that they’re just too powerful together. For something else to fit in and change the sound, one of them has to be removed completely. I doubt Bernice will agree to it, but at least nobody can say I didn’t try, even if no one ever hears what I come up with. I almost want to do this more for my own satisfaction than to change Bernice’s composition.
I spend more than an hour watching videos and listening to songs online, closing my eyes and trying as hard as I can to imagine how each song could drop into “Love Doesn’t Die,” but nothing seems to work.
After I’ve unsuccessfully run through what seems like a hundred options, I groan and spin around in my chair, wondering if there’s any point at all. That’s when I glance across my room, and everything clicks into place.
I walk to Bernice’s house early the next evening, wondering how I’m going to bring up my idea. It turns out to be easier than I expected.
She opens the door before I even have a chance to knock.
“Come on in,” she says. “We need to get to work.” She waits impatiently as I take off my shoes, then bounds down the stairs to the rec room so fast that I can barely keep up. She drops onto her piano stool and looks at me frantically.
“What’s the matter, Bernice?” I ask. She’s acting bizarre.
“It just isn’t working!” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“My—I mean our—mashup,” she says. “I tried to do everything properly. I picked songs that have similar tempos and are in the same time signature, but it just doesn’t work!” She pauses and looks at me almost desperately. “You need to help me out—you’ve got a good ear. You need to help me make the harmonies more exciting or something.”
I’m so astonished at how stressed out she sounds that I barely register her compliment.
“Bernice, it isn’t that bad,” I say.
“Oh give me a break,” she says. “I know everyone hates it.”
“Bernice,” I say. “You’re being too hard on yourself. Your mashup is great, technically. It’s just that—”
“What?!” she asks, spinning around on her piano stool and leaning toward me.
“Well,” I say, “you could stand to loosen up a bit, let things come a bit more naturally.”
Her face pinches up and I expect her to snap at me, but instead she spins back around and drops her head onto the keyboard, filling the basement with a mournful, discordant drone. “I don’t know, maybe you’re right,” she says, her face smooshed into the keys. “It’s too late though. There’s no time to do anything different. There’s only one rehearsal between now and the show. We don’t have time to figure anything out.”
“Maybe you’re wrong about that,” I say.
She raises her head and looks at me. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I might have a solution,” I tell her. “But I think we should get Tyler over to help. He’s supposed to be part of our group, and I think he can contribute something.”
Tyler and I text back and forth for a few minutes. He’s understandably hesitant, but once I explain what’s going on, he agrees to come over and try to help.
At first Bernice doesn’t understand what I’m trying to do, but Tyler picks it up quickly, and once we start singing out the different pieces, she begins to come on board. It turns out that we’re a pretty good team. I have the tune in my head, but it’s not much more than a rough concept when we start. Once Bernice understands the idea, she applies some theory to it, and slowly it all starts to come together. Tyler is able to do the tenor parts and has several good ideas about how the two songs could relate to each other lyrically. By the time Mom comes to pick me up, near midnight, all three of us are feeling pretty good about what we’ve accomplished.
Ms. Kogawa is a harder sell. We stop at the music room to see her before classes begin the next morning, and at first she doesn’t like the idea of changing things this close to the performance at all.
“Guys,” she tells us, “the piece is going to go over very well.”
“Sorry, Ms. Kogawa, but I don’t think that’s true,” says Tyler. “It’s a total snoozefest.”
“That’s not very nice, Tyler,” she says. “Bernice put a lot of work into that piece, and it’s very technically accomplished.”
“No, he’s right,” says Bernice. “It’s super boring.”
“Even if I agreed with that, which I don’t,” she says, “we have four other people to think about here. We’ve been working on this piece for weeks. How do you expect people to take it when we tell them we want to go back to the drawing board after they’ve already put all this work in?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I tell her. “I’m pretty sure everyone else is willing to change things if it makes for a better show.”
“At least let us try to sing it for you,” says Bernice.
Ms. Kogawa sighs and looks at her watch. “Okay,” she says. “You’ll have to be quick though— the bell is going to ring in a few minutes.”
We’re prepared for this and quickly break into the piece, stopping just before the bell starts to ring. Ms. Kogawa waits for it to stop and then looks at us for a long moment.
“You’re right,” she says. “It’s much better. We’ll bring it to the group and see what they say. If they’re willing to put in the extra time, we can switch it.”