by Ginger Rue
The song was hard enough to play anyway, but now that Tig had to concentrate on the lyrics as well, it was more than she could handle. The song sounded even worse than before.
When it was time for everyone to go, Tig was almost glad. She knew they needed more time, but she was mentally exhausted and overwhelmed.
Oh, she’d keep practicing, all right. But she wanted time to practice alone, with no one to look at her when she messed up.
“I can’t practice tomorrow,” Will said. “I’ve got to finish that project for science, and Mom says I can’t leave the house for any reason until it’s done.”
“No problem,” Tig said. “We’ve done all we can do at this point anyway. I’ll practice alone and see if I can improve on my end. Kyra, you’ll do the same.” It wasn’t a request; it was a command.
“Will, you’re sure you don’t know ‘Sweet Home Alabama’?” Robbie asked.
“I wish I did,” said Will.
“It’s fine,” Tig said. “We’ll make it work. One song. It’s not the end of the world.”
Tig stayed in the studio until supper, then returned and stayed until bedtime.
She still hadn’t started on her science project, but she was going to nail the chorus at least, even if it killed her.
Chapter Thirty
Friday morning Tig gave serious consideration to the idea of faking sick.
Not only was she exhausted, she still hadn’t perfected the song for the party. If she stayed home, she could work on it the whole day.
Plus, she could avoid having to tell Mr. Ellis that she didn’t have her science project. She might get lucky, and Mr. Ellis would be too busy to call her mom until the beginning of next week—after the party was over.
But one thing stopped her.
Tig knew that if she were too sick for school, her mom would say she was too sick for Kyra’s party, and although part of her desperately wished her mom would forbid her to go, she knew that if she didn’t show, Regan would never let her hear the end of how she’d chickened out.
Tig had to show up at the party that night, and she had to play drums.
Oh, and sing lead. Who could forget that?
Tig muttered curses upon the universe as she thought of it all.
She tried to make herself small in science class that day so that maybe Mr. Ellis wouldn’t notice her. As the class went in alphabetical order to present their projects, many of them took so long, Tig thought maybe they wouldn’t get to the Rs at all. Then on Monday she could quietly slip her display board onto the back lab tables with the others, and no one would be the wiser. She was so busy thinking about how great that would be, Mr. Ellis had to call her name twice before she heard him. “Ripley, you’re up!”
The class turned and looked at her.
Mr. Ellis looked at her. “Ripley?”
Tig said nothing, just shook her head.
“Really?” Mr. Ellis asked.
Tig nodded.
“Okay, then. Roberts.”
When the period was over, Tig tried to exit without Mr. Ellis’s catching her. “Not so fast, Ripley.”
She turned and walked back to him as though he were the executioner. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ellis.”
“Are you?” Mr. Ellis said. “I’m not sure you realize quite how sorry you need to be. Tig, this is a big deal. This is your nine-weeks’ project.”
“I know. Can I bring it in on Monday?”
“How far along are you?”
Tig wanted to lie. She wanted to say she was almost finished. But she liked Mr. Ellis; everyone did. “I’m ashamed to tell you.”
“Tig, this isn’t like you. Is everything okay?”
“No, sir.”
“How can I help?”
“You could not call my folks,” Tig said with a weak smile.
“Have we met?” Mr. Ellis said. “I’m Mr. Ellis. I’m the call-your-parents-when-I’m-concerned guy. Besides, if you’re having trouble, your parents and I want to work with you to help you.”
“I know,” Tig said. “I’ll turn it in Monday, I promise.”
“See that you do. If I don’t get your project Monday, your parents will be getting a call. Fair enough?”
“Thanks, Mr. Ellis.”
Tig promised herself she’d do something spectacular after the party and turn it in Monday. A late grade would be better than a zero.
But she couldn’t think about that now. One thing at a time. Her first order of business would be getting through the performance that night.
As she left Mr. Ellis’s room, she ran straight into the Bots.
“Well, if it isn’t Rihanna,” Regan said.
Tig didn’t even bother trying to tell her that she was a drummer, not a singer. Because really, there was no reason trying to clarify an insult, and oh yeah, Tig was having to sing after all. So Tig said nothing.
“What, no comeback? Where’s the smack talk you’re so famous for? Or are you less cocky now that the big day has come?”
“I’m tired,” Tig said. “Too tired to bother with you.”
“No big,” Regan said. “There’s nothing you can say anyway. Your performance at the party tonight will do all the talking for you, won’t it?”
“I guess so,” Tig said. She had no more fight left in her.
Chapter Thirty-One
Aunt Laurie didn’t like the idea of Pandora’s Box playing at Kyra’s party. Not one bit.
Finally something Tig and Aunt Laurie could agree on.
“Kyra, are you sure about this?” Aunt Laurie asked for the fifth time as the band set up their instruments before the party.
“We just need to get it over with,” Kyra said. Even Kyra couldn’t pretend any longer that everything was going to be okay.
“Want to run through?” Will asked.
“No,” Tig said. She was sick of the whole thing. She’d practiced nonstop for days now and didn’t want to be reminded of how bad they sounded all together. “Just give me some time to practice alone.” When everyone else went to the pavilion’s kitchen area to help Aunt Laurie check on the food, Tig gave it one last try. She was still rough on the chorus, but maybe if she just kept going instead of trying to go back and fix what she’d messed up, no one would notice.
Will came back into the party room alone. “It’s going to be all right, you know.”
“How?” Tig said. “How is any of this going to be all right?”
“It’s not like anyone’s going to die.”
“Death before dishonor?” Tig placed her sticks on the snare. “The crowd is going to eat us alive.”
“On the upside, I’m probably delicious,” Will said. “Nice and tender.”
Tig was too tired, too annoyed, and too worried to even think about laughing. Nothing was going to make her feel any better until this night was over. She almost didn’t care anymore if they crashed and burned. At least the agony of dreading it would end.
Olivia came in. “Tig, we’ve at least got to do a sound check before the party starts.”
Tig agreed. Olivia called Kyra in, and they played the song once through. “Kyra, have you been practicing at all?” Tig asked.
“Um, some of us had science projects to do!” Kyra threw back at her.
“You’re the one who started this whole thing in the first place!” Tig said. But deep down, Tig knew she had only herself to blame. Yes, it was Kyra’s stupid idea, but she had canceled the performance immediately after Tig had asked her to. Tig knew that, ultimately, it was her own pride—and her own big mouth—that had put her and the band in this position. “You know what?” Tig said. “Forget it.”
She walked off the stage.
“Tig, you want to try it once more?” Will called.
The heavy doors slammed shut behind her.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Aunt Laurie must’ve spent a fortune on the party. Tig wondered how she would top it when the time came for Kyra’s sweet sixteen. There was so much food—shrimp, roast beef, f
ruit, a chocolate fountain, and all manner of sweets. It seemed a shame to waste it on a bunch of middle-school kids who would’ve been perfectly happy with a few pizzas.
It seemed a bigger shame to waste so much of it on middle-school kids Kyra didn’t even know.
Amid Kyra’s friends from school and youth group, the club’s main room was also packed with County kids who Tig and Kyra had never met. Well, except for Edgy Abz.
Kyra was having a meltdown. “Why are all these random strangers at my party?”
Will handed Tig his iPhone. “This might clear things up.”
It was Regan’s Twitter feed. She’d hashtagged County Middle School and written, Big party! Everyone invited!
“And Regan’s probably intimidated almost everyone from school,” Tig told her. “A lot of people you invited won’t be showing.” In a way, she was glad. Maybe Regan had done her a favor without meaning to. At least fewer people from school would see them play. Tig handed Will’s phone to Kyra.
“Why would she do this?” Kyra said.
“Why do you think? Or have you forgotten they have it in for us?”
“Well, I didn’t do anything! You’re the one who told them off, not me! All I’ve ever tried to do is be nice to them!”
“No, you didn’t do anything, Kyra,” Tig said. “Except invite Haley to be our lead singer in the first place, thus forcing me to kick her out. And advertising that we’d play at your stupid party so we could look like idiots.”
“My party is not stupid!”
Before Tig could say anything back, Edgy Abz began shouting, “Where’s the band?” and several County boys whooped their agreement. Soon the crowd of strangers was shouting, “Band! Band! Band!”
“Looks like it’s do-or-die time,” Tig said to Will.
“I hope we do,” Will said.
The band took the stage and settled in with their instruments. Tig spoke into the mic. “Our guitarist is out of town and our lead singer is sick, so we’re just going to do one song tonight. Here goes.” She counted off with her sticks.
Tig didn’t fall apart all at once. She was able to keep it together for the first few seconds of the song. The thought crossed Tig’s mind that they might actually pull this thing off.
But when the chorus began, everything went crazy.
Tig and Kyra got way out of sync, and Tig couldn’t hear Will anymore. The fill going into the chorus tripped her up, and Tig started dragging on the rhythm. Kyra couldn’t stay in the pocket. Tig couldn’t stop singing the lyrics so that she could pick back up with the proper count.
The crowd began booing and heckling. Tig could see that several guys in the audience were holding up their arms and giving thumbs-down. She could also see that several others were holding up their phones, recording the car wreck that was happening before their eyes. Tig tried to recover a few times, but it was all a complete mess. Finally she was so scattered, she couldn’t even remember the words to the song anymore, so she just stopped. So did Kyra. Then Will and Olivia stopped too.
“Fail!” Edgy Abz yelled. “Play something! Play something now!”
Tig recalled how she’d insisted to Regan that Pandora’s Box would play at Kyra’s party. She had no choice; she had to play something. Panicked, Tig started pounding out the backbeat of “Sweet Home,” but Will didn’t know that song, and without a guitar, no one else knew what to do, so Tig stopped. Now, panicked even more, she started on “Plush,” but got through only the first couple of measures and the ruff before remembering that Will didn’t know that song either, and Kyra had never mastered it. Olivia was staring at her in complete confusion. What do you want me to do? Olivia’s eyes seemed to say.
Finally Tig threw her sticks onto the ground and walked off the stage and into the crowd, pushing past the cameras flashing in her face.
She knew it was wrong, as the leader, to leave her bandmates up onstage like that, with no hint of what to do. Like a captain going down with his sinking ship, she should have stood with her band and stoically endured the booing. She shouldn’t have walked away. But she didn’t care. She kept walking.
Just as she opened the doors, Edgy Abz shouted, “Pandora’s Box in the house!” to which the crowd laughed uproariously.
Before even ten minutes had passed, the entire debacle was posted on YouTube.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tig refused to get out of bed on Saturday.
She’d gone straight to her room when she’d gotten home from Kyra’s party. She’d turned her phone on silent, and although she could hear the frequent Errrrr of a text or call coming in, she refused to even look at the screen to see who it was.
Sleep had eluded her. It was as though she had forgotten how. Ever since the party, she’d felt her heart racing. She’d tried taking deep breaths but couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen. She desperately wished for sleep as a way of escaping herself and the miserable situation, at least for a while.
Uncle Nick had called Tig’s mom and told her everything, but Tig had refused her parents’ many offers of counsel, responding with a pointed “I don’t want to talk about it.” That evening, though, Tig heard a gentle shave-and-a-haircut knock at her door. She sat up in bed. “Come in, BD.” Her mom had called in the big guns.
“How’s my sweetie?” BD said, sitting down next to her on the bed.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Is it a boy? You tell BD. I’ll whoop him.” Tig was sure BD already knew what had happened, but he wanted her to tell him.
Tig settled into her grandfather’s arms. He had a way of making her feel safe, and before she knew it, she was spilling her guts about her humiliation, and sobbing into the sleeve of BD’s soft flannel shirt.
“Oh, is that all?” he asked.
“Is that all?” Tig asked incredulously. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Shoot. Reminds me of the time I tried to sing lead for the Orbits.”
Tig looked confused. “I thought you always said you couldn’t sing lead,” she said.
“I can’t,” he replied. “But how do you think I found that out? Trial and error. And, boy, was it an error!
“I guess it was about 1963. The Orbits got a gig at a dive called the Jungle Club down around Five Points—where that drugstore is now. I decided I wanted to sing ‘Party Doll.’ Jerry and the rest of the guys said that was fine. We rehearsed it, and the night of the gig, I started singing. It didn’t go well.”
“Did people boo you and tell you your band stunk?”
“No, it was worse than that. At least that would have been over quickly. No, they just started getting up, one by one, and leaving. At first I thought maybe a couple of people were just going to the bathroom. So I kept on singing. By the time I was done, not a living soul was in that club anymore!
“So I said to Jerry, ‘What happened?’ and he said, ‘You can’t sing lead.’ So I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you tell me that before I made a fool of myself?’ And Jerry said, ‘Because we were afraid you’d get mad and quit the band, and you’re the only one with a van big enough to fit our equipment into’!” BD laughed.
“No way!” Tig said. “What did you do?”
“I’ll tell you what I didn’t do. I didn’t sing ‘Party Doll’ . . . or lead on anything else . . . ever again!”
Tig smiled. She appreciated that BD sort of understood. But this was different. “At least you humiliated yourself in 1963 to a roomful of people. This is the Internet age, BD. My shame is worldwide, on the Web, forever.”
“You’re right,” BD said. “It is different. I know it’s a lot harder growing up now than it was when I was a boy. I wish I knew how to break the Internet for you.”
Tig laughed. BD couldn’t even figure out how to transfer his contacts to a new phone. But she knew that if he could, he really would break the Internet, just for her.
Tig thought of how much everyone loved BD. If he could make a fool of himself with his band and laugh about it years later, well, m
aybe she could too. Even if it was on the Internet. After all, there were worse things on the Web than one crummy band performance. There was so much new material every day that probably in a few weeks the video of her humiliation would be hiding in plain sight—still there, but abandoned and forgotten old news. One day maybe Tig would laugh about it like BD laughed about his “Party Doll” story. One day. But not yet.
After BD left, Tig wasn’t quite through wallowing in her misery, so she stayed in her room for the remainder of the night.
The next day, Tig was allowed to skip Sunday lunch at her grandparents’ house. The official reason was to continue to work on her science project, but the underlying one was that Tig still needed some time to collect herself.
With her parents and her younger sibs out of the house, Tig soaked in the absolute quiet. Here, walls surrounded her, protecting her from the looks, taunts, and snickers she would face at school on Monday. She was tempted to look at her phone or social media to know for certain what people were saying about her and the band, but she couldn’t face it. It might be worse than she imagined. Maybe they hadn’t sounded as bad as it seemed. Tig wished she could believe that, but she knew better.
On her bedside table lay one of her pairs of drumsticks.
She looked at them, then pressed them into her hands, running her fingers along their smooth surfaces. Part of her wanted to break them over her knee and throw them in the garbage. The drums had been the cause of all her misery at school. She thought back to how she’d wanted people to pay attention to her, to think she was special in some way . . . to think she was cool. She had hated being invisible. Now she wished she could return to invisibility.
She took the sticks and threw them against the wall. The pronounced bang and the clanging of wood against wood as they fell together to the floor startled her even though she’d expected the loud noise. She stared at the sticks as they rolled, one off the rug and under her bed and the other next to her backpack. I’ll leave them there and never pick them up again, she told herself. I’m through with the drums.