Twelve months earlier: May
It is the trumpet player. The skinny kid with the wild hair. The one who has Shut Up across the front of every shirt he owns. He is the one who approaches Robot about jamming with the Jazz Kids. Robot is sure the invitation is based on a video he did for the Jordan’s Music YouTube channel, a tricky Tal Farlow tune on which he played chords exclusively.
The day after that video goes up, Trumpet Boy stops Robot as they pass each other in the hall.
“Do you know how to play quietly?” Trumpet Boy says.
They are headed in opposite directions outside a Bio lab. Robot can smell formaldehyde drifting out the lab door. “A girl fainted over her fetal pig,” someone in front of him says. And the reply from behind him: “LOL.”
Robot does not understand at first that Trumpet Boy is speaking to him. He keeps walking.
Trumpet Boy follows him. “Do you know how to play quietly?” he says again. The break between classes is short, and the hallways are crammed with people pushing their way through in both directions.
“What?” Robot says when it registers he is being addressed.
“Do you know how to play quietly?” says Trumpet Boy. It is the third time he’s uttered the phrase, but he has not varied his delivery at all. Same volume. Same deadpan tone.
“What is this?” Robot says. They are stopped at a T-intersection with a stairway to the side. Robot is set to go in one direction, Trumpet Boy in the other. People are swirling about them. “Are you talking about playing guitar?”
“Most guitar players do not know how to play quietly.”
Robot rolls his eyes. “There are two volume controls. One on the guitar, one on the amp. You turn one or both of those down. Boom! You’re playing quietly.”
“Have you played this way?”
“With the volume down?”
Trumpet Boy nods.
“I’ve tried it a few times. I didn’t really like it. I didn’t see the point.” Robot cracks a grin at Trumpet Boy that does not get returned.
“Could you do it consistently. Upon request. As required by context?”
Though nothing in Trumpet Boy’s demeanour indicates he is joking, Robot laughs out loud. “What is this?” he says.
“Here,” Trumpet Boy says. “Come to this address. Tonight at 7 p.m. Bring your guitar and a patch cord. We’ve got an amp you can use. We’ll be in the garage. Use the side door.”
Trumpet Boy hands Robot a piece of paper with an address on it. It is a perfect quarter of a sheet of looseleaf, torn with great care along an impossibly straight edge: 56 Wren Crescent.
When Robot looks up from the paper, Trumpet Boy is gone; he’s slipped off down the hallway in whatever direction he was headed to begin with. Robot folds the paper twice and shoves it down into his left jeans pocket. Before Robot has a chance to puzzle over his encounter with Trumpet Boy, he hears a voice that goes through him like an arrow.
“I guess you don’t mind people talking shit about you.” A stale smell of bargain cigarettes.
Lucas Shortt has a head of thick, wavy black hair, just long enough on top to comb sideways, trimmed short over his ears. He’s got a prominent jaw and a square mouth that, when he smiles his studied smile, reveals perfectly straight, white teeth.
Shortt’s voice is smooth, with an edge of insistence. It gets into Robot’s head like a wasp in a bottle, bumping angrily against the insides of his skull. Trying to ignore it is like trying to ignore a loaded pistol.
“I told you. I don’t care about fucking Gink,” Robot says. “Now get away from me.”
And it’s never only Shortt. He either comes seeking out Robot with an entourage already assembled, or else he attracts an instant grinning cadre whose faces reflect and encircle Shortt’s as he speaks, like a clown face in a kaleidoscope. The closest face to Shortt’s today is the sweaty, narrow face of the kid everyone calls Suitjon. His upper lip is dark with what he’s doubtless hoped would be a moustache, but that is mostly just a fuzzy, darkened lip. His hair is brown and shaggy, but even though he cannot be more than seventeen years old, it is already thinning quite noticeably on top.
“Gink is shit-talking you, Robot,” someone says. It is not Lucas Shortt. Robot is looking right at him. It does not appear to be Suitjon, either. Who are these assholes even?
Up comes Suitjon’s camera. It’s an old iPhone mounted to some sort of film-schooly rig. It’s got a black handle that extends a fist-width below it. An external mic that juts up a short distance over the top of the phone. Suitjon is not supposed to be using it on school property. He’s been warned. Everyone knows that. Robot looks around and realizes suddenly where they’ve managed to surround him. He’s just past the T-intersection that goes down to the cafeteria. There is a security camera blind spot right here.
“Is there a fight?” Robot hears a voice say. It’s what people think when they see Lucas Shortt and Suitjon with his camera.
Fuck. Please don’t let Gink be here, Robot thinks. His pulse is throbbing in his head. The crowd, almost exclusively boys, is jostling and restless. “Fight.” He hears several people saying the word in anticipation. “Are these the guys from Prank Fights?” someone asks in the crowd. If there’s an answer, Robot does not hear it. On top of the fear and anger, he’s got another layer: shame. As he scans the crowd for the face of Gink, the kid Lucas Shortt has been trying for weeks to goad him into fighting, he knows his panic must seem like fear to the kids watching him. It is fear.
Like a professional TV reporter, Lucas Shortt turns quickly so his back is to Robot. “Make sure you get us both in the shot,” he says to Suitjon. “Here we are in the hallway, and the tension building up between these two is rising. A fight seems inevitable. Smash that subscribe button. You do not want to miss this when it happens.”
When Robot gets home from school, his mother is far gone drunk. She’s in the kitchen with one of the gross men who come over almost every day with a bottle.
This guy is bald, the skin on the top of his head an unnatural white above the horseshoe of short brown hair that rings it. He’s wearing a dirty white T-shirt tucked into a pair of cheap-looking black dress pants. Whether the shirt and pants have ever fit him is unclear. His back is turned toward the living room when Robot comes in, and he is so skinny that he does not have a noticeable waistline or discernible buttocks beneath the bunched up folds of his clothing where the belt, high above his waist, cinches the fabric close to his skin. Robot does not want to think about what his mother is doing with these men, the shift-like rotation of them that turns up at their door. But as far as he knows, she’s got very little money and the forties of gin or vodka or rum they show up with are not cheap.
Both of the people in the kitchen are deeply intoxicated and they do not even seem to have registered that Robot has come home. They face each other across the filthy table. His mother’s head rests heavily against her own hand. Her elbow is held up by the table. The man was standing unsteadily when Robot came in. Wavering back and forth like a mirage. But he’s made his way to a seat now, his arms crossed low on his chest, his back curved forward, resting against the chairback. They are talking to each other. Drunkenly. Angrily. Robot has trained himself to block out his mother’s words when her voice descends that deeply into drunkenness.
He and his mother do not have their own Wi-Fi. That was one of the first things to go as his mother’s drinking ramped up. But there is some neighbour, he’s not even sure they’re in the same building, whose unfortunate password choice, “password,” has enabled Robot to access between two and three bars of Wi-Fi from just about anywhere in the apartment. He sits on his bed, with the door closed between himself and the drunks in the kitchen, and opens his shitty old Acer laptop. Because of the broken hinge, when he opens the screen, he has to keep one hand in place so the device does not slowly close on itself. There they are: three out of four Wi-Fi bands in the lower right corner of the screen.
The first thing he does is check the video he put up on the Jordan’s Music page the day before. Three hundred and fifty views. Pretty good for barely twenty-four hours. Down at the thumbs-up icon, where likes are registered, there are only four, and when he checks: sure enough, one of them is from The Shut Up Shirts, Trumpet Boy’s account. All the flashy fingerwork he’s posted before—Van Halen licks; Thunderstruck intro; the massive, lightning-fast arpeggios he’d done while demonstrating a wah-delay combination—the Jazz Kids were apparently unimpressed by that. But the very first time he makes a chord-based post, that’s what gets their attention.
He has to Google Maps the address. Wren Crescent is not in town, he’s sure of that. He’d have heard of it.
Shit. Fifty-minute walk from Lemon Street. Carrying his guitar. It’s across the tracks, across the river. Way over in what the map made look like a cluster of blossoms. Three circular central drives, each ringed with three or four petal-like crescents.
He closes the loose little bundle of the Acer and lies back on the bed. The more he thinks about his conversation with Trumpet Boy, the more the whole exchange angers him. The kid did not ask if he was interested in coming to jam. He just assumed he could snap his fingers and Robot would come running. Like a sucker. Even though none of these snobby Jazz Kids ever spoke to him. Even though… He sits up and silently gives the finger to the closed laptop. He holds his hand up like that for a good fifteen seconds, in futile and satisfying defiance.
He tries to imagine what it would feel like not to go. To let seven o’clock come rolling around and to be here still, holed up in this shitty room in this shitty apartment, two drunken adults on the other side of the wall, inching themselves closer by the minute to matching comas.
But it is unimaginable. Trumpet Boy knows there is no way he is going to pass up a chance to jam with the best players in the school.
He takes his phone out of his jeans pocket and thumbs it awake. His notifications have blown up. They roll down the screen in a frightening flash. You have 126 new messages.
Come out and play, motherfucker.
Gink says you’re a pussy.
Gink is talking shit about you.
You better do something about Gink.
You are a chickenshit.
You are such a pathetic piece of shit.
Fuck. Who gave his fucking number to these assholes?