The Friendship Song

by Nancy Springer

  He’d promised he was going to forget that. But I didn’t remind him, because there was something more important to say.

  I looked straight at him and I told him, “Mr. Kuchwald, that boy grabbed my breast.”

  “What!” His face turned red, and his voice went squeaky. He seemed madder than ever. It looked to me like I was just getting myself into deeper trouble, but too bad. I wasn’t sorry for anything.

  “He grabbed her breast,” Rawnie said. “That’s what Brent did to her too.”

  “And if anybody does it again, I am going to hit him again,” I said. Not loud or hard. I just said it.

  “You are not,” Mr. Kuchwald snapped. “You are going to come straight here and tell me, and I will hit him myself.” He paced fast twice around the room like he was going a little crazy. “Why doesn’t anybody tell me these things are going on?” he burst out. “Once garbage like this gets started, it’s hard to stop. If somebody would tell me what’s happening, I could do something.”

  He didn’t seem to really be talking to Rawnie or me, so we didn’t say anything. But I was thinking, why should it be right for him to hit a kid and not right for me? If a boy touched me in the wrong place, I sure wasn’t going to just say, Stop it, I’m telling. I was going to at least shove him away. Hard.

  Mr. Kuchwald was mad, all right. He was boiling. But I could see now it wasn’t exactly at Rawnie and me. He circled around once more, then sat down behind his desk, which was a good sign. He looked at us.

  “I am going to give you two detention,” he said. “But I want to tell you this, a certain boy is going to get more than just detention. In fact I can think of a couple of boys with whom I am going to have a couple of long and heartfelt talks.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Good,” Rawnie said.

  “Do you two have anything else you need to tell me?”

  “I don’t think so,” Rawnie said.

  But I was looking at Mr. Kuchwald’s desk. Something familiar was lying on top of it. Two things. “Mr. Kuchwald,” I said, “that’s my necklace, and the other one is Rawnie’s.”

  He looked at them as though he’d never seen them before. “Where did those come from? I can’t remember where I picked them up. Did I take them away from you for something?”

  We just looked at him and smiled.

  He rolled his eyes. “You girls do not want me to have a very good day, do you?” he complained. “Okay, have them back.” He handed our friendship necklaces to us. “And stay out of my office, you hear? No more hitting.”

  “Not unless I have to,” I told him, and he stared hard at me but he didn’t say anything.

  “Bye,” Rawnie told him, all sunshine.

  When we got back out in the hall we looked at each other and grinned like lions, because we had won. Then we put our necklaces on.

  When we finally walked home that day we were so tired it was like we were floating on a river of air. My Walkman wouldn’t work, and that kind of sent us over the edge. We got silly. Our feet moved, but our heads didn’t seem connected to them in any way. We trickled down the sidewalks like water. Sometimes we stopped for a few minutes before we remembered who we were and where we were and started moving again.

  Gus was out on the porch waiting, and when she saw us waver into sight she got up and walked to meet us. Really, she didn’t just walk. She hurried, she almost ran. It was about the fastest I’d ever seen her move except maybe the time she jumped over the U-Haul hood to kiss my dad.

  “You coming to prop us up?” Rawnie called. She wasn’t a bit scared of Gus anymore.

  “Sure, I’ll do that.” She put an arm around each of us and steered us down the street. “But what I really want is to tell you what I just heard on the radio.”

  Even before she said it we both knew, and we both started jumping like we weren’t dead tired after all, and we both screamed, “Nico!”

  It was true. Nico Torres was conscious. Out of danger. Off the critical list. Asking for a pencil and a piece of paper so he could write down an idea for a song.

  A week passed. It took most of it for Rawnie and me to stop feeling tired.

  Gus found the exact right thing to go with her flagpole eagle and license plate and smashed Pepsi can, which was a silver belt buckle shaped like a lonesome cowboy with a guitar on his back. She found it just lying on the ground, out near the red drum riser—I mean, the red Cadillac.

  Dad took me shopping for new shoes, and he nailed the old ones up on a big tree in the backyard to start a “shoe tree.” He nailed up his oldest pair too, and a pair of Gus’s. From now on all our old shoes would go up there together, because we were a family.

  Rawnie didn’t tear up her pictures of Ty Shaney, but she did put them all away in the back of her closet.

  I didn’t have any more trouble in school. Aly Bowman was trying to make some, she went around telling everybody I was an overgrown butch, but who cared? Nobody who mattered listened to Aly. Anyway, I didn’t mind anymore that I’m big. If a person is going to try to be a rock guitarist, it’s a good idea to be big and tall.

  The most important thing that happened was, by the end of the week Nico Torres was moved out of intensive care into a regular hospital room.

  Saturday we went to visit him. It was Gus’s idea. Rawnie and I would never have tried it ourselves. How could we expect to get in, past all the security and stuff? But Gus told us, “No problem.” And sure enough, when she said her name to the guard at the hospital elevator, the man got on his walkie-talkie and word came back from someplace to let us come on up.

  Nico was sitting in bed with a big pillow behind his head when we came into the room. He looked pale. Being so near to him made my heart ache, and I couldn’t stop staring at him, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t looking at me or Rawnie, just at Gus.

  “Uh, Gus McCogg?”

  “Yeppers. That’s me.”

  “Um, jeez, I’ve got it all wrong. I was expecting a guy. Uh—you’re really him? I mean, uh, her? You’re the Gus McCogg who wrote ‘The Friendship Song’?”

  The answer was yes. I don’t remember the words exactly because my mouth had dropped open so far my jaw tripped some sort of circuit breaker in my brain and I wasn’t functioning. All I could do was babble. “Ba-ba-bu-but—”

  “You?” Rawnie managed. She looked about as shorted out as I felt.

  Gus glanced around at both of us and smiled. “Sure.”

  So that was how she could get along without a regular job. And that was why she had a Mellotron and a Dobro and stuff in her junk sheds. And that was how she could get rock concert tickets when they were sold out. But—

  “But Gus,” I blurted out, “who’s your friend?”

  She knew exactly what I meant, right away: that the person who wrote “The Friendship Song” should have some sort of special friend for life. Her smile widened and her nose got extra pink. “It was always just sort of a dream before,” she said. “Now it’s your father.”

  Rawnie’s face lit up and she grinned like Miss America. She looked the way I felt. “Radical,” she said.

  “All riiiight!” I agreed. Then I shut up, because of the look in Nico’s eyes. He was trying to smile, but his voice was wistful and faraway when he said to Gus, “That’s the way it’s been for me. A dream.”

  Everybody in the room except him had something she’d always wanted and never gotten, and we all knew it. Gus walked over to his bed and touched his hand. “Don’t give up on it,” she said.

  “I won’t.” Nico gazed up at her. “I did almost blow it, though. After Ty let me down.”

  “You were entitled to feel betrayed.”

  “I guess. But I was stupid. You know, it wasn’t even so much that I really liked him. I just wanted somebody to hang my heart on, and I did it to him.”

  “Oh.” Gus nodded at him. “I see. You gotta wait for the right person, kiddo.”

  “Yeah, I know. It wasn’t even really Ty’s fault. He was just being who
he really is, and I had these ideas of him—us—and he shot them full of holes.”

  “Listen, keep some of those ideas. Keep the faith.”

  “I will. I am. I’ve got my act back together now.”

  “Okay.” She blinked and seemed to realize that she barely knew him, so she backed off a little. “I don’t mean to tell you what to do. We just came by to see if we could help.”

  “I think you already did.” Nico turned his head, looking at Rawnie and me like somebody had just played a joke on him, the good kind, and he hadn’t quite figured it out yet, but he knew it meant somebody liked him. There was a smile just starting at the corners of his mouth. “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I know you two. I dreamed about you.”

  I guess he could see we weren’t surprised, but we didn’t say much. He wasn’t real strong yet, and we didn’t want to wear him out with talking. We just said hi, and we told him our names, and Rawnie said, “I hope it was a good dream.”

  “The best. There was the most incredible band, and you were fronting it, and Harper was playing the hottest ax I’ve ever heard. And you both sang, and every word was for me. You were doing it for me.”

  This didn’t make much sense, yet it sort of did. I said, “‘The Friendship Song.’”

  “Yes. And all through it I felt like I just wanted to die, you know? Because something I believed in was shot down in flames. But then after you were done I finally started to see, I understood. I could still believe. ‘The Friendship Song’ was still alive. It was just not in me right now. It was in you. In you two.”

  I looked at Rawnie and Rawnie looked at me, and I knew that for that moment we were standing right on the center of the circle that was eternity. Right on the hub of yang and yin, with lifetime after lifetime of black and white spinning through us. And then Rawnie opened her mouth and started to sing, and she hip-hopped and started to dance, she just had to, because outside in the street somebody was walking by with a boom box that was playing,

  Hey, I remember when

  We were desperadoes

  You had a guitar on your back

  And I had a gun in my hand

  And when it came down to the end

  You took the bullet they meant for me

  And smiled ’cause you could see

  I was gonna be okay

  Friend.…

  About the Author

  Nancy Springer has passed the fifty-book milestone with novels for adults, young adults, and children, in genres including mythic fantasy, contemporary fiction, magic realism, horror, and mystery—although she did not realize she wrote mystery until she won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America two years in succession. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Springer moved with her family to Gettysburg, of Civil War fame, when she was thirteen. She spent the next forty-six years in Pennsylvania, raising two children (Jonathan and Nora), writing, horseback riding, fishing, and bird-watching. In 2007 she surprised her friends and herself by moving with her second husband to an isolated area of the Florida Panhandle where the bird-watching is spectacular, and where, when fishing, she occasionally catches an alligator.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1992 by Nancy Springer

  Cover design by Drew Padrutt

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-8874-2

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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