THEY WERE ALL WAITING FOR ME. And I could tell that my edict hadn’t made Danny real happy. “So we’re doing this straight now?” he said. “Because you say so?”
Josh waited for me to speak.
“Look,” I said, “it’s not like I’m telling you what to do on your time. Just ours.”
“Gee,” Danny said, “that’s big of you. You’re just a part-time sponsor, huh?”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t know what else you’ve got going on, but I’m tanking French, I don’t have a girl, and I got a fucking Nazi who reams me every day while my own teammates are trying to kill me and then stays on my ass in the dorm.” No reply. “So I’m gonna ride the music as far as I can. But it’d be cool if we could all ride it to the top. We’re good enough. You know we are.”
Danny loosened up with a smile. “I feel your pain. I’m pulling a D in chem, I got two demerits for turning in a fake phone. And my girl back home just dropped me by Twitter.”
Simon was rocking back and forth with his hands in his pockets, waiting to see where this was going to go, enjoying every second of it: these silly humans.
“Look,” I said, “you seem to be pretty good on that bass, and I’m guessing you didn’t get there snorting Ritalin while you learned it. Or smoking weed every time you picked up your axe. It’s like juicing in football. It’s fake, it’s a crutch.”
Finally, Josh joined in. “I mean, everybody’s got a band. But how many of them ever make it out of the garage?”
“Vanilla icing from the can tastes great if you’re stoned,” Simon said, nodding, to back me up, “but you don’t see it on restaurant menus. You write a riff on weed, or Stoli, or coke? Of course it’s going to sound good. But not to a label.”
“A label? Dude,” said Danny, “we don’t even have a name.”
Everyone was quiet.
“The Others,” said Josh. “That’s what we are. We’re not the class officers, or the captains, or the scholars. We’re Oakhurst Hall’s Others. We’ll probably be the other kids in college too. So let’s own it.”
I liked it. Danny and Simon slapped hands. Josh flashed me a peace sign. All was cool again.
And this time our new song, or mini symphony, or soundtrack, or whatever the hell it was, began to sound as if it had been written by someone with at least a clue. It had two movements. It needed a third. Other than that, I thought, as I listened to Josh noodle a less-frantic-than-usual lead, it was coolly unclassifiable.
We stopped to rework a few sections and changed a few chords, and, for the first time, it felt like we were actually rehearsing. Finally, we were doing the work.
When we left the building, Josh and Simon split off. I think they wanted me and Danny to smooth things over. We walked back toward the quad.
“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t mean to put you down. I don’t take well to authority, you know? Never played nice with the other kids in the sandbox.”
We bumped fists. “So how’d you end up here?”
“I wish I knew,” he said. “My dad’s business was going down, and we had to move to this really grotty part of Philly. He wanted me out of there. Somehow he got me in on a full ride because I was a science freak. I loved chem. Like a puzzle that, if you solved it, you could get to the next level and then cure cancer or something. Turns out I get here and all the teachers care about is hammering the curriculum into you so that when you get to the next level, you don’t fuck up and make them look bad. So mostly I sat in my room with the lights off and the amp on.”
Playing the cards they deal you. We walked in silence for a few minutes. Then I asked, “So you’re going to stick it out?”
“It’s this or somewhere in South Philly where I get my geek ass kicked every day. The band makes it easier. Maybe you’re the kick in the ass we all needed.”
• • •
The next night after dinner I decided to wander over to Caroline’s dorm: Thompson-Aaron. Or T&A, to the football team. I felt like celebrating: the band had turned a corner, even if I didn’t know what we were heading for, and I wanted to tell her about my catch on Saturday. In front of her dorm, I sat down with my back to a big maple, crunching the leaves. Maybe I’d luck out and catch her coming in.
Or maybe I’d just meditate. How did you meditate, anyway? Simon did it. He told me the whole point was to stop thinking. So I tried to picture blankness. At first all I could see was Caroline’s little half smile. But after a few minutes, I actually heard the sound of leaves falling, one by one, every few seconds, scraping through the other leaves in the trees. It was sort of musical.
Then I heard footsteps and looked up to see a girl wearing a funky bright blue jacket with a bowling team name stitched on the front, a hippie skirt, and earphones.
“Hi, I’m Jack,” I said.
“I’m Chloe,” she said, pulling out the phones. I heard the echoes of Regina Spektor. Chloe was short and had a pretty, pixieish round face and cool-dorky glasses. I asked her if she knew Caroline.
“Yeah. She’s, like, the coolest. Why?”
“What’s her room number?”
She looked at me like I was out of my mind. “Four fourteen. But it’s Booth’s floor, you know. And you’re not supposed to—”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
She shrugged and stuck the earphones back in her ears. “Good luck,” she said.
I was feeling too good not to try it. Time to seize the day.
I bounced up the carpeted stairs two at a time, reached the fourth floor, opened the door, and peeked down the corridor: Booth’s door was closed.
Room 414 had a poster on it of that painting with three people in a diner in the middle of the night. I knocked. She was wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants, her hair pulled into a ponytail. “What are you doing here?” she said. “This is stupid, Jack. Booth’s a bitch. If she catches you . . .” She pulled me in by my sweatshirt and closed the door. “So whatever you have to say couldn’t have waited?”
What did I have to say? Wait, that was easy. “I just wanted to know if . . . if we, you know, are . . . I don’t know . . .”
“You’re going to have to learn how to finish a sentence, Lefferts, if Jarvis is going to give you an A.”
We stood there, stupidly. Then she reached out both her hands, with her palms up. So I put my hands in hers. And maybe then there was some sort of current. It was definitely electric. For me, anyway. She was just totally cool and relaxed.
“We’re something,” she said. “Why do you have to label it? Now, get out of here. All we need is Booth busting me. Or you.”
I bounced down the stairs. It was good. Another corner turned—and this one might lead to a really cool horizon. If I didn’t mess it up. If I just kept being the me that was starting to wake up.
• • •
Back in Screwville, I grabbed the Gershwin prelude sheet music, walked over to the arts building, sat down at Hopper’s piano and worked on the allegro with its five goddamned sharps. And now, instead of the music challenging me, I was challenging the music. These three little songs were the first music I’d ever played where I could actually feel the emotion while I was playing the stuff. I’d played a million old songs without having a clue what the guys in the wigs had been thinking when they wrote them, but now I was channeling some dude from less than a century ago. An American dude. I nailed the allegro. Nailed it. Then I sat still, listening to the after tones in the room. Like adrenaline sweetly calming down after a good football play.
The more I thought about auditioning for the concert, the more I knew I didn’t want to. This was music I kind of wanted to keep for myself. For nights like this. Except maybe with someone else listening. This flute player I knew.
I didn’t want to leave yet. I didn’t want this high to end. I started playing the band’s song, with the Schubert and the birdsong . . . and then the hard-rock song we’d come up with on Jack Daniel’s night . . .
And then, out of the blue, I bopped some keys, randomly, with my right hand, bouncing around, throwing in a sharp here and there where you wouldn’t expect it—and I found the beginnings of a new melody, in the same key as the other things we’d written, for the final movement.
I don’t know where it came from, except maybe room 414 in T&A. I do know that it sounded like it was written by someone who had finished the journey as a different person than when he’d started it.
It was simple, the melody, and it was sort of sad and happy at the same time. I closed my eyes and played it again and again and again, letting my hands do the thinking as my brain went over the images of the last few days: the killer blocks that sprang the winning touchdown against St. Keelen’s. Me getting in Ward’s face. In Hopper’s face.
Me knowing that things like Ward and weed were stupid back roads, as in looking back. That somewhere down the road, there was a calm.
I was smiling when I finished it. And if sounded a little corny, well, sue me.