Five Flavors of Dumb

by Antony John

  So you want me to thank you more often, is that it?

  Finn shook his head. I don’t know. . . . I guess I just want to feel like I have my own identity . . . that when we get home Mom and Dad will stop telling me I’m a shadow of you, that if I had one percent of your work ethic maybe I’d amount to something.

  It was hard to believe this was my brother speaking. Gone was the bravado and the don’t-give-a-crap, replaced by a shell in search of reassurance. It occurred to me that a good sister would have known exactly what to say in that moment, to reassure him he was just plain wrong—that he had an identity and that we all loved him for who he was. But something told me that even in his weakened state, Finn’s bullshit detector would be functioning perfectly.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s see if the car still drives.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Halfway through dinner Finn still hadn’t confessed, and I sure as heck wasn’t about to put my head on the chopping block. Neither Mom nor Dad had noticed the damage, but they would in the morning, and we couldn’t drive around forever with a front bumper that was liable to fall off at any moment.

  Mom waved at me, stirring me from my reverie. “How is the band these days?” she asked.

  I tried to ignore the look Finn gave me. “Good,” I said.

  “What about the interview last night?”

  “It went great. We got some good press.”

  “That’s terrific. What kind of press?”

  It was the first time anyone at home had shown genuine interest, and I have to admit, I really liked it. “Well, there are some bloggers saying that—”

  Suddenly Mom whipped around and gazed at Grace, then at Dad. Before I could catch up, Mom had jumped out of her seat and was showering Grace with kisses.

  “Did you hear that?” Mom grinned, her hands cradling her face in wonderment. I shook my head. “Grace said ‘Mama’!” Mom kissed her again for good measure. “She said her first word. My beautiful, perfect little Gracie said her first word.”

  Dad was already out of his seat and hugging Mom, while Grace beamed to the delight of her parents.

  “Say it again, Gracie,” shouted Dad, practically begging her to repeat her death-defying feat of pure awesomeness. “Say it again, you amazing little—”

  “I crashed the car today!” The words tumbled out of my mouth so quickly they caught even me by surprise. Mom and Dad turned away from Grace and gave me their full attention. “I left it in gear. I don’t know how it happened. I’ve never done it before.”

  Dad sat down again, so slow and controlled. “Is it damaged?”

  “It still drives.”

  “That’s not what your father asked,” snapped Mom, carefully signing every word to be sure I didn’t miss anything. “Is it damaged?”

  “I think it needs a new front bumper,” I said quietly.

  Dad slammed his fist on the table. “Well, that’s just god-damned wonderful.”

  Mom touched his arm gently. “Language, Ryan.” She feigned a smile, pointed at Grace. “Little ears, you know.”

  “But I’m insured, right?” I asked hurriedly. “That’s what insurance is for.”

  “You’re eighteen, Piper. The best insurance your mom and I could get for you has a five-hundred-dollar deductible. No matter what happens, we come out of this five hundred dollars down.”

  “I—I’m sorry. It was an accident.”

  Dad shoved his chair back, threw his napkin on the table.

  Mom grabbed his hand before he could leave. “Grace said Mama, honey. She said her first word.”

  Dad forced a smile and nodded curtly, but when he walked out of the room he didn’t look back—not even at Grace.

  I stared at my plate, but I couldn’t eat. In my peripheral vision I saw Mom glaring at me, like she’d just seen a terrible side of me she hadn’t known existed.

  Why did you do that? she signed.

  I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

  We’ve been waiting for this ever since Grace was born, wondering if it could really happen.

  I shook my head, and a moment later Mom clattered her cutlery onto her plate and left the table. When I glanced up again, Grace’s lower lip was quivering—she’d obviously sensed the sudden change in mood, and feared she was the cause of it.

  When the inevitable flood of baby tears came a few seconds later, Grace wasn’t the only one crying. Caught between his inconsolable sisters, Finn reached over and lifted Grace out of her high chair, held her tight against him. I didn’t even blame him for choosing her side.

  But then he came over and squeezed me too. And I swear, I bawled like a baby.

  CHAPTER 25

  I had to get out of the house. I didn’t care where I went as long as I couldn’t be found by anyone with the last name Vaughan, so I just threw myself into USS Immovable and started driving. It occurred to me that if Kallie were with me, she’d have been amused to see how quickly my bad karma had come back to haunt me.

  I tried to calm myself by remembering that fall semester at Gallaudet began in ten months, but then I remembered The Case of the Amazing Disappearing College Fund. I might not be going to Gallaudet in the next ten years, let alone ten months. And it was looking increasingly unlikely that Dumb was going to be able to change that at all.

  I wasn’t really conscious of where I was heading, but when I found myself pulling up outside Coffee Crew, I wasn’t completely surprised either. Unfortunately, Ed was just turning off the neon OPEN sign as I got out of the car, and he locked the door as I approached. I would have taken it personally, only then he saw me and hurried back to the door, unlocking it and holding it open for me.

  “You’re closed,” I said.

  “Closing,” he corrected.

  “There’s a difference?”

  Ed swept his arm across his body in a gesture of welcome. “For my manager, yes.” It took me a moment to realize he was talking about me.

  In light of recent events the thought of being Dumb’s manager was enough to make my stomach churn, but he said it with such exaggerated servitude that I ended up smiling instead. A moment later, I was leaning against a counter and Ed was concocting something inappropriately caffeinated for eight o’clock in the evening.

  I couldn’t see his face clearly as he worked the espresso machine, so I didn’t speak. I just watched him go through the motions, banging out filters and grinding coffee and steaming milk and the other fifty-three steps needed to make a simple cup of coffee. I’d seen gourmet steaks cooked in less time.

  While the golden-brown espresso oozed into a glass, Ed steamed a pitcher of milk. It said “whole milk” on the handle, but I had the feeling that objecting to this would be sacrilege to a barista, so I kept my mouth shut and watched him touch the side of the metal pitcher with his fingertips, waiting for it to reach the desired temperature. With the same precise timing that characterized his playing, the espresso stopped flowing at the same moment he shut off the steam, and he placed the glass before me with all the care of someone showing off a delicate antique. I was sure I was about to crack up laughing, but then he began pouring the milk, a steady flow at first, then a gentle shake of the wrist that traced a perfect white flower across the surface of the coffee. Suddenly I didn’t feel like laughing anymore.

  “It’s . . . beautiful,” I said, not even bothering to disguise my admiration.

  “Try it. It’s all about the flavor. The flower is just for show.”

  I took a sip, the coffee mingling with foam so rich I would have sworn it was whipped cream. I met his eyes. “That’s amazing. Seriously. That’s the most amazing cup of coffee I’ve ever tasted. What did you do differently?”

  Ed smiled. “Well, first off, I used whole milk. And yes, I saw you twitch when you read the handle of the pitcher. You’re not the only one whose peripheral vision works overtime.” Okay, now I was really impressed. “I also did not use any kind of flavoring—it’s coffee, not dessert. The other thing I did was to make su
re the pour-time was a steady twenty-four seconds—”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “Oh. Yeah, maybe that’s more information than you need,” he said, his mouth crinkling at the corners.

  “What’s it called, anyway?”

  “It’s a cappuccino.”

  “Hmm. Well, aren’t you a man of many talents, Ed Chen.” I have to admit the words felt deliciously flirty as I said them.

  Ed turned slightly red, touched his thick hair nervously. I almost wanted to prolong the silence just to see how flustered I could make him, but that seemed unnecessarily cruel.

  “How long have you been working here?”

  “Since junior year,” he answered, relieved at the change of topic. “I’ve always been addicted to coffee, and I wanted to learn how to make it properly, so I asked the owner if she’d teach me to use the espresso machine in return for a few hours of dishwashing.”

  “Seriously? What did she say?”

  “She said sure, then paid me for my time and asked if I wanted to come back the next week. Now I close the shop and cash up on Thursdays.”

  “Except when your boss stops by.”

  “She never does.”

  “I mean me,” I said with mock seriousness.

  “Oh yeah, right.” Ed blushed again, a response so endearingly earnest that I wanted to hug him.

  “Thanks for this, Ed. I really needed a pick-me-up.”

  Suddenly he looked concerned. “Why? What’s up?”

  I took another sip, then another. I wasn’t sure I wanted to rehash everything with him, but since he’d asked . . .

  “Kallie wasn’t very pleased when I told her she had to stay in the band.”

  Ed waited like there was more to come, then realized there wasn’t. “That’s not surprising, though, right?”

  “I guess not. I just don’t know where the band is going right now.”

  “I can understand that.”

  I puffed out my cheeks, blew a steady stream of air in an attempt to purge my frustration. It didn’t work. “What am I missing, Ed?”

  “Honestly?”

  I nodded, which was stupid because “honest” is just a code word for “critical,” and I should have realized I wasn’t ready for that—especially not from Ed.

  “Here’s the thing,” he began, an opening gambit that assured me the list was about to be alarmingly long. “Dumb is a hard rock band. Josh and Tash and Will don’t get soft rock at all. Meanwhile, we’ve got an extra guitarist we don’t need who can’t really play. But because she’s hot she’s become the face of the band, and now we can’t get rid of her, even though she wants to quit. This isn’t rocket science, Piper. You need to decide what kind of band Dumb is going to be, and you need to decide quick, because I don’t think we’ll survive many more occasions like last night.”

  He’d finished his analysis, but I couldn’t speak. I felt the seconds passing and the crushing emptiness of the shop as Ed waited for some kind of acknowledgment that I’d heard a single word. I knew he’d wanted to help, and that under other circumstances I’d have wanted his advice. But at that moment his words stung more deeply than those of Kallie and my mom combined. I didn’t think about what that meant—or why it bothered me so much that he’d described Kallie as “hot”—I just nodded like I was strong enough to accept responsibility for everything that was going wrong.

  Then I turned away, leaving half a cup of coffee and the remaining shreds of my self-confidence behind.

  CHAPTER 26

  I needed to distract myself, but none of my homework assignments engaged me at all. And I couldn’t shake that look Mom had given me. She hadn’t looked angry; she’d looked hurt, like I’d just told her she was fat, or that Grace was an ugly baby. It was the kind of look that left no room for quick retractions. I felt guilty. I hated feeling guilty.

  Without thinking it through, I e-mailed Marissa, told her the whole story. I knew it was too late to IM—it was eleven o’clock—but I needed to tell my side of the story to the one person who’d understand. A moment after I’d sent it, Marissa IM’d me:

  MARI55A: that sucks

  P1P3R: YES. everything sucks at the moment

  MARI55A: everything?

  I hesitated. Dumb wasn’t Marissa’s favorite topic—I knew that—but we’d never kept information from each other before. Besides, I needed to vent.

  P1P3R: yes. tash and kallie had a blowup after Dumb’s interview last night

  MARI55A: kallie sims is in dumb?

  P1P3R: didn’t i tell u?

  MARI55A: no

  P1P3R: oh. anyway, i had an argument with her about staying in the band, and then i went to see ed and he was kind of mean too

  MARI55A: no way

  P1P3R: yes. told me i needed to work out what Dumb was all about

  MARI55A: seems fair

  P1P3R: i guess so, but i got the feeling he blamed me somehow

  MARI55A: ur the manager. who else should he blame?

  She may as well have stabbed me in the heart. I reread the line, tried to inflect it with a positive spin, but it was a million miles from the unconditional support I’d always counted on.

  P1P3R: i thought u’d understand

  MARI55A: i do. look, i gotta go. hang in there, okay? xoxo

  I would have written back, but she’d already logged off.

  I turned off the light and crawled into bed. I wanted to fall asleep, to escape the thoughts clawing at my consciousness, but instead the evening just replayed in my mind, a crappy movie on endless loop. Even Josh made a cameo appearance, smirking as if to confirm that my promotion to manager was no coincidence at all, that he’d planned Kallie’s arrival in Dumb as carefully as a military offensive. Unwittingly I’d played my role to perfection. It was enough to make me want to quit, but what if he’d planned for that too? I couldn’t bear to give him the satisfaction of being proved right yet again.

  Once the clock had yawned all the way to midnight, I resigned myself to not sleeping. I dragged myself out of bed and turned the light back on, then stuffed my pillow at the bottom of the door so Dad wouldn’t see the strip of light when he eventually went to bed (even rebels need to pick their battles). Firing up my laptop, I pasted two new reviews of Dumb on our MySpace page, and linked to some bloggers who had discovered the band and thought it was promising. There were also several new messages of the generic “You’re an inspiration, Kallie” variety, and even more of the “Oh my! Now I see why Dumb needed Kallie” type from people who had evidently followed the link to Dumb’s Battle of the Bands performance on YouTube and suffered emotional trauma as a result. And there was one message from someone called ZARKINFIB that didn’t fit any category at all: get educated u money-grabber. go see kurt at 171 lk wash blvd e It was like getting a threatening letter—you know you should ignore it, or tell your parents, but instead you read it over and over, like secretly you knew you had it coming all along. And although I was pretty sure ZARKINFIB wasn’t likely to bust through the window brandishing a machete anytime soon, I still felt pretty shaken up.

  I closed the messages and struggled to focus on the rest of the MySpace page. The main change since Sunday was the number of profile views: 6,259. I couldn’t actually remember what the number had been before the radio interview, but I knew it was triple digits only, which meant that all those bloggers had directed some serious traffic our way. And even if people were only there to check out extra photos of Kallie, it was still an astounding number. More importantly, it was the ammunition I needed to keep fighting.

  I launched the word processor and without pausing to think, I began to type:

  Piper’s Manifesto:

  Problem: Josh is an asshole. Solution: Suck it up as long as the band makes money.

  Problem: Tash is bad for morale. Solution: (gulp) Stand up to her.

  Problem: It’s not entirely clear that Will even has a pulse. Solution: That’s a problem?

  Problem: Kallie can’t play guitar for cr
ap. Solution: Get Finn to help her—he owes you.

  Problem: Ed doesn’t think I know what I’m doing. Solution: Prove him wrong.

  Problem: Dumb can’t do soft. Solution: Make them hard again.

  Problem: Mom and Dad suck. Solution: Wait until next summer, then join a commune.

  Apart from the last line (which I deleted) the manifesto sort of made sense. And somewhere in the few minutes it took me to write it, I’d even begun to formulate a plan.

  I Googled “Dumb Kallie Sims” and found links to twenty-three bloggers who had written about Dumb’s resident goddess-muse. I figured they’d be mostly guy blogs, the kind with close-ups of Kallie’s barely visible boobs and a copy of her birth certificate proving she’d be fair game once she turned eighteen the following March. Instead, almost all of the blogs were written by women, linked to each other like the tentacles of a Kallie Sims fan club that Kallie herself probably didn’t know existed. And there were other common links too, to the websites of KSFT-FM, the Christian Family Beacon, Seattle Today . . .

  I’d heard of Seattle Today—one of those breathtakingly dull talk shows that air in the late morning when the coffee has worn off and viewers are trapped in a pre-lunch stupor so disabling they can’t even summon the energy to switch channels. The website informed me that the host, Donna Stevens, had been “guiding” the show with her “effortless blend of gentle humor and homespun wisdom” for eighteen years, and in all that time had never once missed a show, even turning up for work promptly the day after undergoing gallbladder surgery (“!”). (Comparing the almost identical photos of Donna from her first and most recent shows made me suspect that her gallbladder wasn’t the only part of her that had undergone surgery.) The show, it turned out, still aired live, “a decision favored by Donna for the spontaneity of the results and not, as many have suggested, because it puts her in a different category at the annual Seattle TV awards, where Seattle Today has won uncontested for the past six years.”