Sing Like Nobody's Listening

by Allison Gutknecht

  For the Loop, the group who has always marched together, if never quite in step

  The last time I rolled my eyes this high, I’m pretty sure I caught a glimpse of Mars.

  Mom always tells me that if I keep rolling my eyes like this, they’re going to get stuck in the corners of my sockets. But sometimes, a solid eye roll is the only way to respond to something so ridiculous that words could never suffice.

  Something like Jada’s current all-out, drop-down battle with Mason Swenson, her self-declared personal nemesis.

  “I know you did that on purpose!” she yells at him, smack in the middle of the seventh-grade wing.

  “Of course I did it on purpose,” Mason counters, looking pleased with himself. “Do you think anyone has ever tied a locker closed with dental floss by accident?”

  I twist my own combination and throw open the door with a flourish, letting the metal bang triumphantly. I unzip my bag and retrieve my latest clipping of Colby Cash—this one from an advertisement for his new show, Non-Instrumental—and I add it to the collage of his head shots decorating the interior of my locker. We’re forbidden to use Scotch tape for such trimmings, but no one in administration has said anything about star stickers, which is what I affix to the four corners of Colby’s picture. The stickers are more fitting anyway, since Colby Cash is the biggest star in the universe.

  Or at least, he’s the biggest star in my universe.

  I run my finger along the seam of the photo, smoothing it with a smile, and trying my best to block out the feud going on beside me. But Jada has worked herself into such a frenzy—one dramatic even by her standards—that there’s no escaping her screeches. “You’re so rude!” she scoffs, pulling at the strings of floss that Mason has methodically tied from the lever of her locker to the hook inside his own. This means that whenever Jada tries to open hers, the strands tighten into a taut line, nearly impossible to break bare-handed.

  “Why don’t you ask Mrs. Nieska for a pair of scissors and cut it open?” I suggest. “So that we can all move on with our lives.”

  “No, you know what? ‘Rude’ isn’t good enough a word for you,” Jada continues her rant toward Mason, ignoring me. “You are vile.” She nearly spits the word at him, which only seems to give Mason more satisfaction. While they continue their tiff, I walk down the hall to Mrs. Nieska’s room and head straight to her desk.

  “Good afternoon, Wylie,” Mrs. Nieska says, glancing up. Her glasses sit at their usual perch on the very tip of her nose, and it is a wonder of physics that they don’t constantly slip onto her chin.

  “Good afternoon,” I echo. “May I please borrow your scissors?” Mrs. Nieska begins rustling in her desk drawer until she locates a pair, and she hands them to me without asking a single why?

  And this is exactly the reason Mrs. Nieska is the Willow Oak Middle School teacher from whom to request such favors. She’s not one to ask questions when she doesn’t care about the answers.

  “Thanks, be right back!” I chirp, skipping out the door and back to Jada, gripping the blades firmly. As I approach, I discover that not only has Jada still not managed to pry open her locker, but she also hasn’t taken the advice that I am constantly giving her: Just ignore Mason.

  “Yeah, well, you have two ‘sons’ in your name,” I hear her retaliate, and though I am her best friend, even I have to admit that this is not her greatest comeback.

  “MaSON SwenSON,” Jada continues, insistent that she’s going to make this into a good point. “It’s redundant.”

  “Even for you, that’s lame,” Mason says, smirking as he crosses his arms, casually leaning against the offending locker, his baseball cap—which he’s not supposed to be wearing in school, I might add—cocked at a backward angle on his head. I step in between them, and in a single snip, free Jada’s locker.

  “There. Now can we please go to lunch before I faint from hunger?” I turn on my heel and head back to Mrs. Nieska’s room, placing the scissors on her desk. “Thank you!” I call, and Mrs. Nieska gives me a thumbs-up, not taking her eyes off grading the latest round of pre-algebra quizzes.

  I sweep my eyes back and forth across the hallway, searching for Jada, but she and Mason have both (finally) abandoned our locker bank, and I assume she has headed to the cafeteria. I walk toward the large wooden doors and open them with my hip, then I head to the third table on the left, all the way against the wall. Sure enough, she’s stationed in our designated spot, poking at her phone with her eyebrows pointed down. Two faint lines are in the center of her brow—the ones that appear when she is at her most frustrated—and they look especially deep at the moment.

  I plop my bagged lunch on the table and step over the bench to sit. “Can we please not spend the entire period discussing Mason?” I decide to cut off her tirade before it can begin.

  “He is the worst,” she proclaims like there’s an exclamation point after each word, her dark eyes shiny with fury.

  “Yes, yes, I know. So let’s not waste any more time on him,” I say. “Not when Colby’s premiere is right around the corner and we can talk about that.”

  Jada examines her phone screen like it’s offending her before tossing it in her bag. “Which night is this show on again?” she asks.

  “Monday. Come over at least fifteen minutes early so we can get our snacks assembled. I don’t want any distractions during the show itself.”

  “That’s why a nifty thing called the pause button was invented,” Jada teases me, beginning to pile potato chips in between the layers of her sandwich.

  “No, we have to watch him live,” I explain. “That’s the whole point. So we can follow along with his online posts at the same time.”

  “Whatever you say, Mrs. Cash,” Jada says as a chip crumb flies from her mouth.

  “Thanks for that,” I say, wiping my cheek. “Aren’t you excited to see Colby back on TV? It will be like old times.”

  “I guess,” Jada says distractedly, half her face now hidden behind her hair, which is even darker than her eyes and falls in long waves like black licorice. “But it hasn’t been the same since Marquis Machine broke up. I still have trouble seeing him as a stand-alone singer.”

  “Bite your tongue. He’s awesome. And plus, he’s hosting this show, not singing. Though I hope they let him sing once in a while. Like every single week. For the whole hour.”

  “You should be his publicist,” Jada tells me, and I give her a serious nod. Jada and I had become fans of Colby Cash in elementary school, when he played keyboard in the boy group Marquis Machine. Our love of the band, even then, bordered on over-the-top, though Colby was always our favorite member. We even created our own Colby Cash scrapbook, where we preserved our acquired Colby-related memorabilia, along with our personal poetic tributes to his amber-hued eyes and thick crop of auburn hair. But nearly a year ago, soon after we started middle school, Marquis Machine broke up, and Colby struck out as a solo performer. For the past few months he’s been relatively out of the limelight, until he was named host of the latest season of Non-Instrumental: a TV competition show featuring a cappella groups. And I couldn’t wait to have Colby in my living room every week, no matter what the context.

  “Remind me to add more pages to the back of our scrapbook,” I tell Jada. “I’m sure we’ll have new stuff to include.”

  “So you’re really going to fall down the Colby Cash rabbit hole again?” she asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  Jada shrugs. “I don’t know. I feel like we left our love of Colby behind in fifth grade.”

  “Um, have you seen my locker?”

  “Wylie. Everyone has seen your locker. People in space can see your locker,” Jada says with a
smirk, and I mime throwing a carrot stick at her. “But we’re in seventh grade now. Don’t you think we should be doing different things than we did when we were younger? This is our middle school experience!” She gestures wildly around the room like she’s the star of a junior high infomercial.

  I run my fingers through my chestnut-brown bangs, which tickle the tops of my eyelashes, and I push them back into my hair while considering this. “You haven’t given up fighting with Mason,” I point out. “And you’ve been doing that forever.”

  “I would if he would stop torturing me,” Jada insists. “But seriously, it’s the start of a brand-new year—maybe it’s time we tried something else.”

  “Something like what?” I ask. But before Jada can answer, the room suddenly erupts in a chorus of whoops and cheers, originating at the table where the soccer teams sit. Every day, the boys try to build a skyscraper out of trash, and today’s has managed to tower above the heads of even the tallest on the squad. The players high-five and congratulate themselves before an aide forces them to disassemble their structure, resulting in many boos.

  I glance around at the other tables watching them—there are the sports teams: the runners, the baseball and softball players, the tennis players, the bowlers (yes, we have a bowling team); the robotics team sits with the math Olympiad and the debate team eats next to the science troop; there are two tables of band members, a separate one for the orchestra, and a whole corner dedicated to the theatre people. The day we started sixth grade, these factions seemed to form automatically, leaving the rest of us behind. And sometimes I wonder what it’s like to sit at one of those tables, to have a seemingly endless supply of friends, of people to fill your lunch conversation, or to gather around your locker in the morning, so many deep that they block half the hallway.

  “Break?” Jada asks, halting my thoughts. She holds a large chocolate chip cookie across the table, waiting for me to reach out and snap it in half so we can share. Once I do so, we “clink” the two sides together, as if raising a silent toast, and then we each take a bite.

  And as curious as I am about those other tables, I’m still okay at mine. After all, if there are only two of you, you’re always guaranteed at least half the cookie.

  Jada and I trudge home after school through the same development we’ve lived in our whole lives, the sights as familiar as the walls of our own bedrooms.

  “I need to get him back,” Jada announces. This afternoon, Mason topped his dental floss stunt with a bouquet of confetti, which he dumped through the slits of Jada’s locker, leaving a heap of hole-punched dots scattered over her belongings.

  “I don’t know why you let him get to you,” I say, stepping to the side to crunch on an especially inviting leaf. “If you would ignore him, like I always—”

  “There’s no ignoring Mason,” Jada interrupts me. “It’s like his personal goal in life is to annoy me.”

  “Because you let him! You react too strongly. It only eggs him on.”

  “I wish my parents would move. I can’t take knowing he’s next door spying on me.”

  “So you’d move away from me in order to avoid Mason?” I ask, placing my hand near my heart with exaggerated hurt.

  “Not out of Willow Oak entirely, but to another part of town,” Jada explains. “Or actually, he should move. He’s the one who started this.”

  I roll my eyes, but Jada is too busy grimacing to notice. The most absurd part of this feud is that it started way back in preschool—before I even knew Jada—when Jada’s mom sent her to Mason’s house to play. Mason’s family had a giant seesaw in their backyard—a wooden one with animal faces that you held on to as you rose up and down.

  Or didn’t rise up and down, as this particular case may be.

  It seems that at this playdate, Mason, who was quite an expert at his seesaw, convinced Jada to board the other side, and once she was high in the air, he sat stubbornly on the ground, refusing to lower her down. Jada swears this lasted at least fifteen minutes, though considering we didn’t know how to tell time yet, it was probably much less. Once Jada was good and upset—“Tears and everything!”—Mason finally pushed his way up in the air, sending Jada crashing onto the mulch below. The force caused her to roll off her seat, and though she was essentially fine—“I got a splinter!”—she’s never been able to let it go.

  And Mason has presumably never been able to let go of the part where Jada marched in the back door of his house and immediately—and theatrically—tattled on him to his mom.

  I’ve never known Jada and Mason to get along, and it’s not like I expected them to make peace. But at this point, it seems crazy that they’re continuing to argue like tantruming toddlers—one would think they could at least be civil.

  “What are you guys doing later?” I ask, attempting to change the subject. “The usual Friday pizza and game night?”

  “Ugh, yes,” Jada answers. “I guarantee that by six thirty, the boys will be wrestling on the floor over who gets to be the green marker on the Sorry! board.”

  I laugh. Jada’s house, with her two younger brothers barreling around, is always ten times noisier than mine. “I think it’s fun. More exciting than playing games with two people.”

  “Like I always tell you, you’re welcome to join us.”

  “I know, but then I’d be leaving my mom,” I say with a shrug. “And since I have to go to my dad’s tomorrow . . .” I trail off.

  “She could come too,” Jada says as we approach the fork in the sidewalk where we part. “You know that, right?”

  “I do. Thanks.”

  “Have fun at your dad’s,” she calls in a singsong voice.

  “Yeah, right,” I snort as she walks away. “Text me for entertainment, please.”

  “Wish me luck making it home without running into Mason!”

  “If you see him, turn around and come to my house,” I tell her. “Or better yet—just ignore him.”

  “Yeah, yeah. See you,” Jada says, waving good-bye. As I round the corner, a harsh wind hits me head-on, raising chilled goose bumps up and down my arms.

  “Smells like snow, don’t you think?” I hear behind me.

  “You’re back al—?” I turn, expecting to find Jada. Instead, I see Libby running to catch me, the blond tail of her braid bouncing on her back.

  “That would be amazing if it did,” I say. “But it seems like wishful thinking.”

  “A girl can dream.” Libby falls in stride beside me.

  “Whoa, your hair,” I say, stopping so I can admire her creation. “You did it inside out.” Libby wears a French braid every single day, which seems a little babyish now that she’s in sixth grade, but she’s too sweet for me to ever tell her that.

  “Yep. Variety is the spice of life, as my grandmother would say,” she remarks. “It’s not that hard—you just tuck the hair under instead of over.”

  “I can barely make a regular braid, let alone a French one.”

  “It was either learn or let my dad do it,” Libby says. “And he still hasn’t mastered a ponytail. For most of first grade, I looked like the Bride of Frankenstein.”

  I smile. “You’re not going to your grandmother’s today?” Libby’s mom passed away when she was very young, so she spends almost as much time at her grandmother’s house as she does at her own. Between her visits there and my trips to Dad’s, I hardly see her, despite the fact that she lives next door.

  Libby shakes her head. “I convinced my dad to let me come home on my own a few days a week. In fact, I convinced him of this by pointing out that you started coming home alone when you were in sixth grade. So thanks—that definitely sweetened the pot.”

  “You’re welcome.” We turn down our respective driveways, which are separated by a slim sliver of grass. “What are you up to this weekend?”

  She hops from one foot to the other, energy evaporating through her pores. “I have a mosaic to finish. I’m redoing my grandmother’s mailbox.”

  “A mo
saic?” Libby has always been artistic, evidenced by the weekly rotation of homemade wreaths and wind catchers framing her front stoop, but I had never seen her create something as complicated as a mosaic.

  “Yep. Dad buys me cheap plates at the discount store, and I shatter them in the basement and then glue the pieces together in different designs,” she explains. “It’s superfun, if you ever need to get some frustrations out.”

  I laugh. “I’ll keep that in mind. And if you need a rest from hurling plates, I’m sure my mom is cooking something odd for dinner tonight.”

  “Awesome!” Libby chirps. “But we’re supposed to be heading to my grandmother’s. That’s why I need to finish her mailbox in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  “Good luck,” I call after her as she skips toward her porch. Sometimes I wonder if Libby and I would be better friends if she weren’t a year behind me in school, if seeing each other on a regular basis would translate to a deeper connection. But no matter what, as far as next-door neighbors go, I had definitely won the lottery compared to Jada. After all, Libby Soleil has never knocked me off a seesaw.

  * * *

  When I walk in, Mom is banging through the kitchen in her typical day-off outfit: sweatpants that look twenty years old, a slightly grimy T-shirt, and a mismatched floral scarf.

  “What are you making?” I ask as she kisses me on the cheek in greeting.

  “I found a new chili recipe,” she answers. “I thought I’d give it a whirl.” Mom loves to cook, and she’s always making something new. Last Friday, it was stuffed peppers, the week prior was grilled tofu, and before that, her take on beef Wellington. (I call it “her take” because no one who has ever worked in a kitchen would consider it anything resembling “Wellington.”) Even if they’re a little “off,” most of Mom’s creations taste good. But sometimes, I long for the traditions of a house like Jada’s, where every Friday night means pizza and board games instead of a grab-bag production from the crisper drawer.

  I deposit my bag on the floor and pull myself onto a counter stool. “How was school?” Mom asks as she stirs the steaming pot on the stove.