Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  This is Judy Galley, Steven’s counselor from the middle school, calling. I hope Jeffrey is feeling better. Steven, I was very proud of you tonight. When I first started working with you this year, you were so angry that I worried about you a lot, and you felt that you couldn’t control your own life. Now you have accepted control of your own path and are doing a wonderful job of helping those around you, too. Just remember: Instead of agonizing about the things you can’t change…

  I hit fast forward—I absolutely knew the rest by heart.

  Mr. Stoll here. I hope the little guy is OK. Steven, don’t worry about leaving the concert. Max asked me to sit in and cover your parts, and I did. The band sounded great—it wasn’t what it would have been with you there, but we all got by. OK, good night, dude. Will I see you at your lesson tomorrow?

  Max? Oh, yeah—Mr. Watras.

  This is Renee Albert. Hi, Steven. I hope your brother is OK. Hi, Mr. Alper. Hi, Mrs. Alper. Good news! We just finished totaling up the proceeds from the concert: TWENTY-THREE THOUSAND, FOUR HUNDRED EIGHTY-NINE DOLLARS AND SEVENTEEN CENTS!!! Steven, Mr. Watras is going to bring the check over later this week. I hope you let him in…just kidding!

  This is Annette. I hope everything is all right there. Steven, call me when you can about…what happened, OK? You know, when you were leaving? I really…ummm…I really meant it. I just wanted you to know.

  It was interesting, hearing Renee and Annette right in a row like that. Somehow, overnight, I had figured something out: Renee was beautiful, but she was my friend now. On the other hand, Annette was my friend, but now she was beautiful.

  Makes about as much sense as anything ever does when you’re talking about girls, right?

  The day started. I ate and showered. My father drove me to the hospital. I got to have my first ambulance ride—Jeffrey squeezed my hand with all his might for about forty miles. Good thing my drum lesson was canceled, because I wasn’t sure I’d regain the feeling in my hand for a few days. Still, that was okay; I knew if I hadn’t been there he’d have had nothing to squeeze.

  We got to Philly. My mom met us. Jeffrey got installed in a room. His IV bags got hung. I stayed with him until he fell asleep for a nap. Then I tiptoed out and went down the hall to say hi to Samantha and tell her how I had followed through on my promise to her. But when I got to her room, it was empty, and the bed was stripped.

  The next few minutes are a blur. I grabbed the little cord that calls the nurse and buzzed and buzzed nonstop until a lady came charging in.

  She said in that semi-scary nurse voice, What’s wrong?

  My voice came out all quiet and wobbly. Ummm, there was a patient here. Her name is Samantha. She’s my friend. Now she’s not here, but she said she’s always in this room. Did she get sent home?

  The nurse looked uncomfortable. Well…

  And then I knew.

  She’s dead? She died? ANSWER ME!

  Yes, she…passed away early yesterday morning.

  She wasn’t alone, was she? Was her mother with her?

  Yes, as far as I know, her mother was with her…at the end.

  Was her sister with her?

  The nurse looked puzzled. Sister?

  That’s when I lost it. I sat down, started crying and shouting and pounding on the floor, and refused to get up. Somewhere in there, the nurse called for a social worker. Somewhere in there, my mom came running. Somewhere in there, another nurse came in with a wrapped package about a foot and a half long, addressed from Samantha to me. My mom opened it in front of me. Samantha had returned my Pro-Mark 5A’s with a note: “Thank you for the company, and for the loan. Please think of me when you use these, OK? Love, Sam.”

  Oh, God. Now I would always have two pairs of Special Sticks.

  EPILOGUE

  Annette is sitting to the left of me; Renee is on my right. It’s two months later, and I’m on the outdoor stage at my eighth-grade graduation ceremony. We’re in those special seats for kids who win the big awards. It’s about nine hundred degrees out, and my giant poofy brown gown is sticking to my arms like plastic wrap. But even though the baking sun is slowly laminating me, I am happy. I’ve been thinking over this whole year in one gigantic rush, so I’m sure I’ve missed some key moments in the principal’s speech. Suddenly, there’s an awfully sharp elbow slamming into my ribs.

  “Clap, Steven!”

  Annette has that my-boyfriend-is-from-space look that I’ve been coming to know pretty well lately. I snap back to reality and realize that Renee is standing to get her certificate.

  “This year’s Outstanding Achievement in Mathematics Award goes to…Renee Albert!”

  As Renee swishes back into her seat—and I must admit she can still swish in a world-champion kind of way—Annette jabs me again, right in the same spot. I’m up.

  “The Outstanding Musical Achievement Award goes to…Steven Alper!”

  I walk toward the podium for my big handshake moment as Annette and Renee applaud wildly. I don’t swish like Renee, but at least I don’t trip over my gown and go tumbling off the stage into the front row. As I sit back down, I have to laugh a little. I may be the only kid in America who ever clinched the Musical Achievement Award by skipping out on his big concert. I guess maybe my biggest achievement was learning that there’s more to life than taking the big drum solo.

  One more elbow jab, and I’m clapping again.

  “I am especially honored to bestow our first-ever Human Service Award to…Annette Watson!”

  Renee stands up; she’s still clapping at top speed. Annette stops after her handshake and looks around. Just as Renee bends down to elbow me on the other side of my rib cage, I realize that I’m virtually the only person on the entire football field whose butt is still touching a chair. Annette has gotten a standing ovation. I jump up, too, and the standing O is unanimous. Annette starts walking back toward us, and call me crazy, but I think I’m detecting some swishing going on. When she gets back to her seat, she reaches out to hold my hand. We’re both totally sweaty, but I kinda like it.

  Before I know it, I’m getting a tremendous double-sided elbow attack. I jump up as I realize it’s time for that hat-throwing thing you always see in the movies. For some reason, I look out into the audience to where my family is sitting, about thirty-three rows back. Jeffrey has jumped up, too, and is holding the brim of his baseball cap. At the instant I throw my cap up, he tosses his. There’s this amazing moment when both are hovering maybe twenty feet in the air. I look at Jeffrey, and even though he’s so far away, I know he’s looking at me, too. From here, I can barely make out the inch or two of new blond hair on his head, but I know it’s there.

  Just as our caps start to tumble back down, a huge cloud of balloons goes up. We’re all cheering. Annette is hugging me, Renee is pounding on my back, my ‘rents are on their feet, too. The recessional music begins, and we all start the shuffling-out-up-the-aisle thing. When I finally reach row 33, I want to stop and bask in the view of my mom and dad, Jeffrey, and my grandparents all standing together for me.

  But I also know that if I stopped, I’d get trampled by the two hundred pairs of feet that are trudging along behind me, so I only pause for a moment. Jeffrey runs over to the aisle to slap me five, and our eyes lock. He starts to speak—I can’t hear the words over the shouts, the clapping, and the roar of the band, but I’m a good lip-reader.

  “I love you, Steven.”

  Suddenly, I’m blinking furiously, like there’s something caught in my eye. Before I have this mysterious vision issue under control, I’m about twenty rows past Jeffrey, so I’ve missed the moment for a quick reply.

  That’s OK. I know Jeffrey knows how I feel. I know that, in the middle of everything else that’s gone swirling around us this year, I’ve been his play buddy, dropped everything for him, held his hand whenever he’s asked. As I walk out of the stadium to the grass where my classmates are milling about, wondering which way to start the next big walk into our futures, I think about
Samantha. She died without a sister by her side—but she also made sure that Jeffrey would live with a brother by his. And, of course, she showed me a thing or two.

  It’s funny. I used to think that having a brother was the worst thing in the world. But now I know that not having him would be worse. He comes running out of the stadium behind me, ahead of my parents, and slams into my legs like a 3-foot-tall express train.

  I turn to him and start to tell him the words I will now, thankfully, have time to say. “Jeffrey, I…”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  You don’t hear enough good things about the New York City public schools. The following New York City teachers were all crucial to my development as a writer: Mrs. Gross, my first-grade teacher at P.S. 35, who started me out right; Miss Tuff, my fourth-grade teacher at P.S. 54, who let me be creative; Mrs. Palma, my seventh-grade English teacher at I.S. 61, who made me write in a journal every day; Dr. Bindman, my tenth-grade English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, who taught me how to analyze the structure of a novel; and Frank McCourt, who told me I was a born writer and somehow made me believe it.

  Three other New York teachers, through their own authorship, passed writing down to me as a legacy: my aunt, Ida Meltzer; my grandfather, Sol Feldman; and my mother, Dr. Carol Sonnenblick. I thank them for leading the way.

  Special mention goes to my best friend’s mom, Joan Gattullo, who was the very first person who told me I would write a book someday.

  During the actual writing of this book, several people lifted me up and carried me along. I owe endless thanks to my wife and eternal first reader, Melissa; my children, Ross and Emma, who had to share Daddy with a computer screen; my cancer-research guru, Dr. Benjamin Purow; the authors Paula Cohen and David Lubar, who lent a hand to a new guy; my teaching colleague Marlene Sharpe, who was never too busy to listen; and the best early readers a writer could wish for: the Hornungs; the Winchels; my father, Dr. Harvey Sonnenblick; Adam Pines; Mark Chou; Matt Lambiase; Samantha Cattaneo; Karen Skalitzky; and the brave members of the Phillipsburg Middle School Literary Society, who stayed after school to read the first draft of this book.

  Finally, thanks to everyone at DayBue Publishing for giving a new writer a wonderful opportunity; to my excellent agent, Rich Barber, for leaping into the breach; and to the great people at Scholastic for taking my dream to a whole new level.

  About the Author

  Jordan Sonnenblick attended amazing schools in New York City. Then he went to an incredible Ivy League university and studied very, very hard. However, due to his careful and well-planned course selection strategies, he emerged in 1991 with a fancy-looking diploma and a breathtaking lack of real-world skills or employability.

  Thank goodness for Teach for America, a program that takes new college graduates, puts them through “teacher boot camp,” and places them at schools with teacher shortages around the country. Through TFA, Mr. Sonnenblick found his place in the grown-up world, teaching adolescents about the wonders and joys—the truth and beauty—of literature.

  Mr. Sonnenblick always wanted to be a writer, too, so one day in 2003, he started the book that became Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie. This book was inspired by several aspects of the author’s real life: Like the novel’s main character, Steven, he really plays the drums, he really went through an incredibly awkward year in eighth grade, and he really was completely spastic around girls until right around his twenty-first birthday. The made-up parts of the book are all reflections of the author’s basic philosophy, which is that the world is a tough place, so you’d better be kind and laugh a lot.

  Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie was published by Scholastic Press in 2005 to great acclaim and was named to several Best of 2005 lists, including the American Library Association’s Teens’ Top Ten.

  In October 2006, Scholastic will release Mr. Sonnenblick’s second young adult novel, Notes from the Midnight Driver, which is about drunk driving, lawn gnomes, divorced parents, a unique old man, and a beautiful girl with deadly hobbies.

  Mr. Sonnenblick lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with the most supportive wife and lovable children he could ever imagine. Plus a lot of drums and guitars in the basement.

  Q&A with Jordan Sonnenblick

  Q: Where did you grow up? What was your family like?

  A: I was born in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where my dad was stationed as an Army doctor during the Vietnam War. When I was a year old, we moved to Staten Island, New York, where I grew up, and where my mom and sister still live. I am the only member of my family who wasn’t born in the five boroughs of New York City. You wouldn’t think that would make a difference, but once when I was a teenager traveling in Canada with my sister and parents, a hotel clerk asked why I didn’t have an accent like the rest of my family! There are two secret ways to unlock my dormant New York accent, though: just get me really, really mad, or put me on the phone with my best friend Jeremy, from middle school.

  My parents were both highly educated: Dad was a psychiatrist, and Mom is a dean at the City University of New York and holds a doctoral degree. My sister has a master’s degree in social work. So I, with my college degree in English, am technically the least well-educated member of the family. On the other hand, I could always beat everyone except my mom at the New York Times crossword. In that sense, I got a lot of my English education sitting across the kitchen table from my mother, wrestling through the Sunday Times puzzle together.

  Q: What were you like when you were Steven’s age? Were any of his band experiences or girlfriend dilemmas based on your own?

  A: Steven is totally the thirteen-year-old me, in about seventeen different ways. There’s the drum thing, the really close female friends, the youngest-guy-in-the-band issue, and the sarcasm, for starters. Especially the sarcasm. Sadly, though, I was less cool than Steven, in some hard-to-define way. So, as a middle-schooler, I never figured out that any girl might be interested in me until far too late.

  Sigh.

  By the way, I love to read, so I spent a lot of my free time with books and comics in middle school. I didn’t write that particular habit into Steven, for some reason. That might be the most major difference between us.

  Q: Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer? Was there a particular moment in your life that you were sure of it?

  A: I was always one of those annoying guys who say at parties, “Some day I’m going to write a novel.” What finally motivated me to write Drums was that I met a teenage girl who I thought needed to read this particular story. Since the story only existed in my head, I finally had no choice but to get off my butt and write a book.

  Q: You spent the first part of your teaching career with Teach for America in Houston, Texas. What was that like?

  A: I loved Teach for America, and I loved Houston. My wife and I would have stayed there forever, but we wanted our children to be raised closer to their grandparents in New York City and Pennsylvania. Probably the best moment of my teaching career occurred in my fifth-grade classroom in Houston. It rarely snows there, but one day it did. All of a sudden, Maria, the quietest girl in the class, jumped over my huge desk to get to the window. I was right in the middle of teaching spelling, and I said, “Maria, sit down! Haven’t you ever seen snow before?” She said, “No, I haven’t.” So we cancelled the rest of the lesson and ran outside. Everyone in the class was running around, catching snowflakes on their tongues, touching the snow on each other’s hair, and just generally being totally amazed by this magical moment.

  W-a-y more fun than spelling, right?

  Q: What inspired you to write Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie?

  A: As I noted above, I really wrote this book for one amazing girl. Her little brother had been battling cancer for years, and I wanted to find a book that she could relate to. When I couldn’t find a novel that I felt was a good fit for her situation, I wrote one.

  Q: In the dedication you credit your son for coining “dangerous pie.” What was it and how did you later link
it to the story of Steven and Jeffrey?

  A: Yes, my son, Ross, gets all the credit for that one. When he was maybe three years old, he went through a cooking phase. He had this big plastic container full of toy food. One day, I was home alone with him and I heard this tremendously loud clanking from the kitchen. Running in there, I found Ross sitting on the floor, stirring a huge pot filled to the brim with all of the plastic food, about twenty Matchbox cars, a screwdriver, a wrench or two, and an entire box of penny nails—with an upside-down hammer. I asked what he was making, and he said, “Dangerous pie.” How could I not put that in a book?

  Q: Did you have a hard time telling Jeffrey’s story? What were some-of the challenges and how were you able to tackle them?

  A: This story was both easy and hard for me. It was easy because the whole thing took me twelve weeks from start to finish, including research, while I was teaching full-time. So the writing was unbelievably fast. The hard part was that, if you do the math, clearly I wasn’t sleeping for that quarter of a year! Also, of course, an author lives, breathes, eats, and sleeps the lives of his characters, so the sorrows of this story haunted me. Writing the book was almost an act of exorcism for me: I needed to get these people out of my head so I could rest again.

  Q: Your book is funny and also very sad, which surprises a lot of readers because we don’t expect a book about cancer to be humorous as well as sad. Does it come naturally to you to see humor in all things, or did you intentionally set out to write a humorous book about cancer?