by A. E. Kaplan
She smoothed out the napkins that lay in a basket in the middle of the table. “Of course you can, Tommy. You can call whenever you’d like.”
I pushed my chair back and got up. “Okay, Mrs. DeLuca. Thanks for helping me out today.”
I let myself out and mowed her lawn, listening to the whirring sounds of the blades while I thought of my mother, who had married her soldier, and wondered if she’d ever had any regrets. Or if my father wished he’d married someone a little less evanescent.
And I thought about the man Mrs. DeLuca wished she’d married, and the one she actually had married, and I wondered how you could get so much from so little time with someone and, on the other hand, get so little after so much.
As the sun went down, Ed and I split a frozen casserole (courtesy of Mrs. Coffey) while through the window we watched the Rothgars gearing up for yet another party.
“So,” Ed said. “How exactly do you expect this to go down?”
There was loud cursing outside as someone dropped something heavy. I suspected it was either a keg or a speaker. “Well,” I said, spearing a mushy carrot, “if this works, everybody’ll leave and go party someplace else. All we have to do is disrupt things enough so that someplace else becomes the it venue. Once Rex’s has been declared over, that’s it. He’s done.”
“And you think screwing up his party one night will do that?”
“If it doesn’t, we’ll just do it again tomorrow.”
“Unless he figures out it’s you and kills you.”
“How would he figure that out? He’s a meathead. He has the brainpower of a really clever fruit fly.”
Ed rolled his eyes. “Come on, man. He’s as dumb as a sack of hammers, but he knows that you live next door and you’ve already complained about the parties once. Who else could it possibly be?”
To be honest, I almost didn’t care. In some part of my brain, I wanted Rex to know it was me. I wanted him to know that I was the one who’d shut him down, embarrassed him in front of his friends, and in general seen my enemies driven before me, etc.
“Just forget it,” I said. “Help me get this stuff outside, would you?”
We dragged the box of electronic junk out to the woods behind my house, hoping it was too dark for anyone to see us.
“Where?” Ed asked.
I motioned toward an area near the lake. “It’s flat there, and there’s a clear shot to Rex’s speakers up the hill.”
We dumped the box. “Are you sure this is going to work?” he asked.
“It should. I found this article online giving advice about dealing with barking dogs. Seems like it should work for annoying music, too.”
I pulled the dish out and set the microphone in front of it. “The basic idea is to make a parabolic microphone. It’ll take the music from the party and blast it back like three times louder.”
“Won’t they be able to hear where it’s coming from?”
I shrugged. “It’s so loud coming out of the speakers already, I doubt it. If anyone comes over here, we’ll just throw everything in the bushes and run.”
“That sounds like a better deal for me than for you. I’ve seen you run.”
I plugged the microphone into the extension cord. “You sure about that? All the guys who ran at States are there.”
He laughed. “I don’t have to be faster than them. I only have to be faster than you.”
I finished the last plug. “We’re ready.”
“Well then,” he said. “Let’s go.”
I flipped the switch.
It was an inferno of sound.
Ed and I were flung back by the blaring of radio-ready vanilla hip-hop blasting from the satellite dish, which was throwing the sound back to the party. We clapped our hands over our ears while we peered over the bushes toward the Rothgars’ yard.
People had stopped talking and were looking out toward the woods. Some had their hands over their ears, and others were looking confusedly at Rex’s speakers, trying to figure out where the additional sound was coming from.
“Job well done,” I mouthed at Ed.
And then…nothing.
Everyone stopped looking out toward the woods and went back to talking, half dancing, and drinking beer out of plastic cups.
“They’re ignoring it,” Ed shouted.
The song ended and another one started. No one seemed to notice.
“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it!” I pulled the plug on the microphone and threw it down on the ground. “That was pointless!”
Ed rubbed his chin and walked a half circle around the dish. “Maybe if we put it in a different spot?”
I shook my head. “It did exactly what it was supposed to do. They just didn’t care.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I can’t believe it didn’t work.”
I went home and tried every white-noise solution I could think of—the radio, the TV turned to static, the exhaust fan in the bathroom—but nothing was enough to drown out the din. As soon as I’d drift off, a new song would start or someone would shout “Woo!” and then I’d be up again.
When the music finally cut out around four, I was so tired I fell asleep sitting up with my face against my knees.
I had to drag myself off the couch after breakfast the next morning, because Ed’s car was having its tires rotated and I’d told him I’d pick him up after track practice and drop him off at the garage.
Track season officially ended back in May, but they run some kind of a summer clinic in July, which frankly seems like a mistake to me. There’s no shade on the track, like at all, and in the sun it’s got to be close to a hundred and ten. Once in a while, someone keels over and has to be carried off to someplace air-conditioned, and then the coach yells at everyone to drink more water.
I ended up getting to the track before practice finished, so I found a spot on the bleachers to wait while Ed ran around in a circle with a bunch of other sweaty people. I saw Adrienne and Lauren stretching on the other side of the track with the rest of the girls, and I hoped they didn’t see me. But of course they did, because I was the only person stupid enough to be sitting on the metal bleachers in the direct sun on the hottest day of the year.
They jogged over to the fence near where I was sitting.
“Hey,” Adrienne said.
“Hey.”
They exchanged a glance. It occurred to me that Adrienne probably thought I was there to talk to her. I moved down a few rows so that I was on the lowest bench, and she came through the gate and sat next to me.
“Lauren said you were at Rex Rothgar’s party the other night,” she said.
I nodded without looking at her, which was easy to do since the sun was blinding me anyway. “I was there for a minute.”
“You left without saying goodbye.”
“My dad was waiting for me,” I said. “I couldn’t stay.”
“Oh.”
The guys were slumping into the pavement at the end of their cooldown run. Someone gave up altogether and flopped down on the ground like a dying fish. Ed saw me and waved, then saw Adrienne and visibly winced before turning his back on me to hunt down his water bottle.
After the world’s most awkward silence, Adrienne said, “Um, did you come here to see me?”
I wanted to say, We barely know each other. But that was mean and also unfair. It’s not that I thought I was too good for her, because I wasn’t. It’s just that I didn’t feel any kind of cosmic pull toward her, and whatever pull she felt had nothing to do with me at all. Ed said we just didn’t have any chemistry, and I guess maybe he was right.
“I’m actually here to pick up Ed,” I said. “His car’s in the shop and we were going to hang after. Um. So. How’s your summer going?”
She wiped her hair off her forehead. Probably she should have been hydrating or whatever they call it. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m going to get some water now.”
“Sure,” I sai
d. “Stay cool!” I called to her back, which was so pathetic she didn’t even acknowledge it. Thank God.
Ed came through the gate a minute later and took Adrienne’s spot next to me on the bench. “Wow,” he said, handing me a paper cup of water from the team’s cooler. He was rubbing the back of his left leg, which probably meant that he’d strained something again, which he wouldn’t admit to anyone. This was because Ed was a much better swimmer than a runner, but he doggedly stuck to track rather than swimming because swimming had been his brother’s sport. “That was awkward even from fifty feet away.”
I shrugged and got up from the bleachers, which by now were adhering to the backs of my legs. “Did you guys just, like, break up again?” he asked.
“We were never really together,” I said. “At least, I don’t think we were.” I finished my water. “Wait, we weren’t, were we? Damn. I would know, right?”
He laughed and hiked his duffel bag higher on his shoulder. “Don’t cry, emo boy.”
I threw my empty cup in the nearest trash can. “Oh, shut up.”
We got in my car and blasted the air conditioner. Ed flapped his shirt in front of the vent for a minute before he stopped and smacked the dashboard. “I had another idea,” he said. “While I was running.”
“Mixing bad wine with 7UP doesn’t turn it into good wine,” I said. “We already tried that.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “Again. And it’s not a wine idea. It’s a Rothgar idea.”
“Hope it’s better than mine,” I said.
“It’s a corollary of yours. I can’t take full credit.”
“Ed,” I said. “The idea.”
“Right. The idea. So: remember when Ian pranked my parents by playing ‘Hot in Herre’ through the speakers at their anniversary party?”
I snorted. “I don’t think I was there for that.”
“Yeah, it was the big one they had for their twenty-fifth last year. Anyway, he used a CB radio to hack the speakers.”
I stopped at a red light. “It’s too bad Ian’s not home this summer.”
Ed grumbled to himself.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just meant it would be helpful if he was here to tell us how he did that.”
“Point the first: He already did tell me, back when he did it. Point the second— Are you listening?”
This was because I’d had to swerve halfway off the road to avoid hitting a deer. Ed, being totally absorbed in his idea, hadn’t noticed.
“I’m listening,” I said through gritted teeth as I pulled back off the gravel. “Point the second?”
“Point the second: I still have the radio in the basement.”
A few hours later, we went looking for the CB radio in a pile of Ian’s ancient electronic junk in the Parks’ basement. “Are you guys ever going to clear this out?” I asked. “This is disgusting.”
“Well, you know. Ian is the golden child.” It was true. When he’d left for Brown last fall, his parents had both cried for a week. “Nothing he ever touched is allowed to be thrown out, ever.”
“You know,” I said, “it’s not like he died.”
“I know that, and you know that.”
Then I noticed the vague aroma of yeast, which I had a sinking feeling meant Ed had gone back to trying to make basement wine in an old barrel. The last batch had been absolutely shudder-inducing.
“What is that smell?” I asked. “Please tell me you aren’t vintnering down here again.”
“My pastime,” he said, “is far more enjoyable and productive than yours. So shut up.”
“I’m not drinking it this time.”
“The last time was a fluke! This is way better. I got the lady at Greenmont to sell me ten pounds of merlot grapes. It’ll be awesome.”
“Can’t she lose her job for that? Don’t they need those grapes?”
“These were, like, seconds. They weren’t going to use them.”
“So you’re making wine out of throwaway grapes. That you paid for.”
“Meh. Their standards are different because their stuff gets fermented longer.”
I closed my eyes. “That makes no sense whatsoever.”
“Sure it does,” he said. “They’re worried about bacteria overgrowth.”
I opened them again. “And you aren’t worried about bacteria overgrowth?”
He made a rude gesture that utterly failed to answer the question.
“I’m still not drinking it.”
“Your loss,” he said. “But I’ll remember this when I own half of Napa and you’re interviewing people for the census or whatever.”
I went back to looking for the radio under a pile of Ian’s old school projects. A middle-school-era poster about the history of D-day slid off the stack in front of me, revealing an old cardboard box, which I opened.
“Okay, is this it?” I held up a dust-encrusted radio.
“That’s it. Now we just have to wait for it to get dark.”
“And then,” I said, miming an explosion with my hands, “guile.”
“Does guile involve jazz hands?”
“Those were not jazz hands. That was an explosion.”
“Those were totally jazz hands.”
“Let’s just find lunch, okay?”
He gave me full-on jazz hands and a little tap dance. “Lunch.”
“Ed.”
“Okay, fine.”
Back in the woods, once it was dark, we hooked the radio up to the extension cord, and then we stopped and stared at each other. “I have no idea what song to play,” I said.
“Okay. What’s the most annoying song ever written?”
I drummed my fingers against my leg. “I don’t know. ‘Baby Got Back’?”
“That’s good, but these people are drunk. We need worse.”
“Hmm. ‘MMMBop’? Anything by Miley Cyrus?” I smacked my leg. “Oh God. The Paul McCartney Christmas song.”
Shuddering, Ed pulled out his phone and typed Wonderful Christmastime in the browser. “And we have a winner. God, the man wrote some of the best songs of all time. Where the hell did that come from?”
“Maybe he needed to pay off his jet. I don’t know. It makes me feel better, though. If a bona fide musical genius can come up with the flaming turd that is that song, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.”
“Like you’re a genius stuck in your ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ period?”
“Exactly. Are you ready?”
“All set, let’s plug it in and see if we did it right.”
The music at Rex’s went dead. Everyone looked around; it was the kind of quiet that exists after a concert, when all you can hear is your ears ringing. “Okay,” I said. “Doitdoitdoit.”
He touched the screen, and the sound of synthesizers and insipid jingling bells blared out of Rex’s speakers.
People booed. I saw someone dump a beer on Rex’s head. I punched Ed in the shoulder. “Ed,” I said. “This is the most spectacularly awesome moment of my life.”
“Savor it, buddy. Because Rex Rothgar is totally looking at your house.”
Damn, he totally was. “We need to hide this setup to keep it going until everyone leaves.”
“I am not leaving my phone out here, Grendel.”
“If we turn it off now, it’ll have all been for nothing! Anyway, it’s not like they can trace the sound; it’s coming from their own speakers.”
He sighed. “All right, look. We’ll hide it. But in half an hour, I’m coming back for my phone.”
Ed’s a bit compulsive about checking his phone, a problem I’ve avoided because my dad thinks iPhones are a waste of money, so I have a ten-dollar-a-month dumb phone that I pay for by the minute. It drastically limits my ability to communicate digitally.
We shoved the CB setup into a bush, covered it with leaves and a few stray branches, and kicked leaves over the extension cord that led to the house. Then we beat a hasty retreat inside and sat, looking bored, at the kitchen table in full view
of the window. We did this last part because Rex and a few of his assorted flying monkeys were walking up my driveway. They banged on the door.
“Holy crapweasels,” I said as “Wonderful Christmastime” ended and then immediately started over again. “Should I answer that? He’s going to kill me.”
“It might be worse if you ignore it. I say answer it, but leave the chain on the door.”
I scoffed. “That chain’s worthless. Zipora had to kick it in one time when she was locked out.”
Ed pondered this. “But Rex doesn’t know that.”
“That does not make me feel better, should he decide he wants in.” I got up, because the knocking was getting worse.
“Dude,” I said through the closed door, eyeing Rex through the peephole. “It’s the middle of the night. If you’re out of beer, I suggest the Harris Teeter in Tolerville. They’re open twenty-four.”
“Listen to me, you little turd,” he said. “I don’t know how the hell you’re messing with my speakers—”
“What?” I said. “Your beakers? I have no beer, dude.”
“Not BEAKERS. SPEAKERS. You are messing with my music, and whatever cute trick you’re playing, it isn’t going to fly, because at some point you are going to have to leave your sorry house.”
“If your music’s not working out, you could try Spotify,” I said. “They probably have some different stuff.”
“Shut up! Just turn off whatever hack you have going on, right now. Or the next time you come out of this house, I’ll break your damn nose.”
I pressed my face against the window next to the door, praying that he wasn’t drunk enough to try breaking the glass. “My hand to God,” I said, “I have not hacked your speakers.” Which was technically true, because Ed had done the hack, not me. “I wouldn’t know anything about hacking anything. I got a D on my programming final last year.” Okay, that part was a lie. But sometimes lying is good, like when it keeps you alive.
He leaned toward the window so that the only thing between us was two panes of glass. “If you are lying to me,” he said, “so help me, I will find out, and you will suffer. I will make you bleed out of your freaking gallbladder.”