There was a long, astonished silence as the news sunk in. And then Todd Spolin, he of the stringy hair and squinty eyes, leaped up out of his seat, pumped both fists in the air as if he had just won a marathon, and hollered, “Yesssssss!”
What followed was five solid minutes of total chaos. Suddenly half the class was out of its seat, and everyone was shouting. Natasha kicked her leg out and played an air-guitar riff on her folder. Violet Kelp and Bessie Stringer held hands and jumped up and down, both repeating, “Oh my god oh my god oh my god,” like two little girls who just got ponies for Christmas. Shelly Schwartz shared an excited hug with Lindsey Deming. Braxton Lashey, who since the beginning of the period had been trying to fix a pen that had exploded while he was chewing on it earlier, looked up and shouted, “Wicked,” ink smeared all over his face. Even Kevin McKelvey in his navy blue blazer nodded enthusiastically, adjusted his tie, and grinned.
“This is so wicked!” proclaimed Rory Daas.
“You know what it’s gonna be like?” Chester Hu said to Victor Glebe. “Like that movie? About that school? Where the kids rock? ”
“School of Rock,” answered Victor.
“No,” said Chester. “That’s not it.”
Ms. Finkleman tapped on her music stand, trying to reclaim the room’s attention, but it was no use. Every time it seemed like the excitement was dying down, someone would yell out, “This is so cool! ” and it would all start again.
Throughout this extended period of gleeful chaos, people were constantly smiling grateful smiles and shooting enthusiastic thumbs-up at Bethesda Fielding. It wasn’t entirely clear how one thing was connected to the other, but obviously it was no coincidence: This change of plan was all thanks to Bethesda. If she hadn’t discovered the hidden truth about Ms. Finkleman, they would be singing “Greensleeves” at that very moment.
No one, however, paid any particular attention to Tenny Boyer. No one remembered, amid the general celebration, that there was among them a kid who was obsessed with rock and roll, who knew every member of every band, who could quote any lyric and play any guitar solo you could name. No one noticed that Tenny didn’t seem surprised by Ms. Finkleman’s announcement.
And no one, except for Bethesda and Ms. Finkleman herself, knew the truth: Tenny Boyer would secretly be planning the whole thing.
A show?
A rock-and-roll show?
As the class cheered Ms. Finkleman’s dramatic announcement, Pamela Preston sat perfectly still, contemplating the ever-growing imbalance of the universe.
No, no, no!
Pamela’s hands tightened around her water bottle, causing an unpleasant crunkling noise. She was a featured soloist in two of the six folk ballads planned for the Choral Corral. How exactly would her clear, bell-like soprano be appropriately featured in a rock-and-roll song?
As her classmates clamored joyfully, Pamela sat with her nose ever so slightly wrinkled, her head of golden curls titled ever so slightly to the left, her eyes ever so slightly narrowed. She surveyed her fellow students as if they were a doctor’s eye chart that wouldn’t quite come into focus. This questioning gaze finally came to rest on Ms. Finkleman—who, still standing at the front of the room and calling for attention, did not notice Pamela and her wrinkled nose and her displeased squint.
If she had noticed, Ms. Finkleman might have thought to herself: Now there is a girl who smells something rotten.
At last Ms. Finkleman managed to quiet the class enough to present the full plans for the rock show, the plans she and Tenny had made at the food court the night before. The twenty-four students of Music Fundamentals were divided into three eight-piece rock bands, and each assigned an instrument based on what they could already play or might learn quickly. Thus cellists like Victor Glebe were assigned to the electric bass, pianists (like Kevin McKelvey, obviously) were designated keyboardists, and so on. Kids who didn’t play instruments would either be singers or assigned “supplemental percussion,” meaning tambourines and maracas. Each of the three bands would perform one song, representing a different decade—sixties rock, eighties rock, and nineties rock. (“What about seventies rock?” Bethesda had asked at the food court last night, as Tenny sketched this all out on a Cinnabon napkin. He just shook his head and muttered, “Don’t ask.”)
The kids listened raptly as Ms. Finkleman explained all this, scribbling down their instrument assignments and trading excited looks and high-fives with their new bandmates. They managed to keep themselves relatively calm until the end, when Ms. Finkleman added one final piece of news: She herself, Ms. Ida Finkleman, aka Little Miss Mystery, would be performing right alongside them, singing along with every band, on every number, for the whole rock show.
Not only would they be putting on a rock concert, they’d be sharing the stage with a real rock star.
“Oh my god!” Chester Hu called out. “This is so awesome!”
Right, thought Ms. Finkleman. Awesome.
(In fact, this particular element, the idea of standing up there singing rock songs alongside her student population, was Ms. Finkleman’s least favorite part of the whole awful affair. But Principal Van Vreeland had been unyielding. “But that is the whole point, Ida dear,” she’d cooed in her sweetly poisonous tone. “You’re Mary Todd Lincoln’s prize possession, after all. Our homegrown musical sensation. We must show you off now, mustn’t we?”)
“Okay, so I think that’s everything, folks,” Ms. Finkleman concluded. “Let’s uh, let’s get star—uh, yes? Ezra?”
Ezra McClellan was a short boy with perfectly straight blond hair and very pale skin. According to the band assignments Ms. Finkleman had just made, he was to play drums in Band Three, the one doing nineties rock.
“Oh,” said Ezra. “Yeah. So, what are the bands called? ”
“Hey, yeah,” echoed the girl sitting next to Ezra, Hayley Eisenstein, speaking thickly through her retainer. “Real rock bands aren’t just called Band Number One or Band Number Two.”
There was a murmur of general approval.
“Excellent question,” answered Ms. Finkleman, and looked quickly at Tenny, who nodded slightly. “Very well. Each band will decide upon its own name. We have very little time to waste, so please divide into your bands and let’s take …” She glanced at her watch. “We’ll take thirty seconds to name the bands.”
It took the rest of the period to name the bands. Band Number One, who would be playing sixties rock, swiftly devolved into discord when tambourinist Natasha Belinsky dismissed the first suggestion from drummer Chester Hu, which was Barf Hammer.
“Ew! ” Natasha protested. “No way.”
“Okey-doke,” replied Chester cheerfully. “How about Barf Machine?”
“Ew!”
“But we’re all agreed it should have the word ‘barf’ in it?” “No! Ew!”
Band Number Two, the eighties rock band, was equally deadlocked over a suggestion from rhythm guitarist Carmine Lopez that it would be cool to name the band Floccinaucinihilipilification, because it’s the longest word in the English language. Rory Daas (lead vocals) protested that, first of all, Floccinaucinihilipilification would never fit on a T-shirt, and secondly, it isn’t the longest word in the English language—the longest word is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
Hayley thought those were both dumb, and she lobbied to name the band after her dog, who had recently been hit by a bus. Unfortunately, the late pet’s name was Ms. Pinkbottom, and nobody thought that sounded right. Carmine then suggested they name the band after the bus (“The M43! C’mon, that’s a great name!”), but Hayley didn’t think that was very funny.
Only for Band Three, who would be doing nineties rock, did the naming conversation go smoothly, and only after its members remembered that they had an expert in their midst.
“Um, so, Tenny—it’s Tenny, right?” said Suzie Schwartz.
“What? Yeah.” Tenny was so rarely the center of attention that he was kind of startled to find the other sev
en kids in his assigned band staring at him.
“Do you have any thoughts on a band name?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said, with a little smile. “I mean, the name is, like, super key, you know what I mean? ”
The other members of Band Number Three did not really know what he meant, and they looked at each other quizzically—except Pamela Preston, who exhaled heavily and looked at her watch.
Like anyone who is really into rock, Tenny Boyer spent a lot of time coming up with cool band names. Some people like names that sort of feel like the music the band does, like Metallica or Devo or Soundgarden. Some band names are more like little stories, like the Grateful Dead, or Minor Threat, or They Might Be Giants. Some are just nonsense, like one of Tenny’s favorites, Pearl Jam. What’s a Pearl Jam?
But Tenny had a special affection for band names that are the Somethings: like the Modern Lovers, or the B-52s, or the Replacements, or the Talking Heads.
“Tenny? ” He looked up—whoops. He had totally drifted off into his own thoughts.
“So, what do you think?” It was Bethesda Fielding, this intense girl with the glasses and the pigtails, who since yesterday was suddenly this big part of his life. She smiled at him encouragingly. “Do you have any suggestions? ”
Tenny smiled. “The Careless Errors,” he said. “How about the Careless Errors?”
Everyone in Band Three looked over at Bethesda, who had made this whole rock thing happen. (Except for Pamela, who looked at her watch again and got up to go to the bathroom.)
“What do you think? ” said Lisa Deckter, rhythm guitar.
“The Careless Errors,” Bethesda repeated, and then, after a pause: “Huh. That’s, like—that’s perfect.” The Careless Errors it was.
At last the other bands had their names as well. The members of Band Number Two agreed that Hayley would reach into her backpack, and they would name themselves for whatever she pulled out—and so Half-Eaten Almond Joy was born.
Band Number One gave up and decided to just call themselves Band Number One.
When the bell rang, the students of Ms. Finkleman’s sixth-period Music Fundamentals streamed out, happily chattering about band names and rock songs and who was playing what and how totally, ridiculously fun this whole thing was going to be. “Tomorrow, children,” Ms. Finkleman called after them. “Tomorrow our preparations for this performance shall begin in earnest.”
Tenny was the last one at the door. “Hey, maybe don’t say stuff like ‘shall begin in earnest,’” he said quietly. “It doesn’t sound very, you know, very rock.”
She gave a little nod, and he shut the door behind him. Ms. Finkleman’s gaze fell to her desk and her teacher’s edition of Greensleeves and Other Traditional English Folk Ballads. She looked sadly at the tattered green volume for a second, sighed, and slipped it into the top drawer.
13
GOPHERS
In the cafeteria on Wednesday, Todd Spolin reached across Natasha Belinsky to get to Pamela Preston’s half-eaten lunch, which consisted of homemade chicken salad on sprouted grain bread, four carrots, Greek yogurt, and a fun pack of M&M’s for a treat.
“Pammers? You gonna eat this?”
“What? No. You can have it.”
“Sweetness.”
Todd happily tore open the bag of M&M’s and smooshed them into the yogurt. Pamela wasn’t hungry. Not after this morning, and her Special Project, which had been significantly less than perfect. She spoke for four and a half minutes about the mysterious rock formations ringing the school’s athletic field, showed numerous close-up photographs neatly displayed on pink poster board, and paused dramatically before revealing her conclusion about the alien invasion force.
It wasn’t until she was halfway through her first bow that she noticed no one was clapping. And that Mr. Melville, instead of beaming and pronouncing hers a Special Project of extreme ingenuity and penetrating insight, was … laughing! He was laughing a low, throaty laugh that caused his sizable gut to slowly roll up and down beneath his crossed arms. And when a teacher begins to laugh, especially a teacher as serious and self-contained and unsmiling as Mr. Melville, his students naturally begin to laugh as well.
Laughing.
At her!
“What? ” Pamela demanded, her note cards trembling in her hand.
“Alas, Ms. Preston, if you had checked the recent archives of our local newspaper, you might have discovered the truth, which is a tad more … picayune.”
“Picayune?” Pamela didn’t know what the word meant, but she didn’t like where this was heading.
“Gophers, my dear. The rock rings were caused by gophers, and I believe they’ve already been taken care of. Not so much a mystery of the unknown as an inconvenient rodent infestation.”
“But—I—Mr. Melville—”
“All right. Who’s the next victim?”
“Stupid gophers,” Pamela grumbled now, furiously drumming her fingers on the cafeteria table.
“You never could have known, Pammy,” Natasha offered.
“That’s true,” Pamela said, tilting her head reflectively.
“Acphhhly—” Todd interjected, talking through a thick mouthful of Pamela’s chicken salad.
“What?”
“I said, actually—I knew. That it was gophers.” “What?”
“My dad is an exterminator, remember? He was the one they called in to smoke out the little buggers.”
Pamela narrowed her eyes at Todd and grabbed her lunch back. “For god’s sake, Todd, why didn’t you tell me that yesterday? I stood up there and announced that the rock rings were caused by aliens from outer space! ”
“Yeah, no, I know.” He shrugged. “I thought you were going to say that the gophers were aliens. I was like, wait, is there a planet of gophers somewhere? Because that would be awesome!”
“Oh my god, Todd, you are such a moron.”
Natasha leaned over with outstretched arms and gave Pamela a hug. “You know what, Pamela? It’s not such a big deal. This one time, you didn’t have the best Special Project. I mean, Bethesda—”
At the mention of Bethesda Fielding’s name, Pamela interrupted her friend with a sharp “Ick!” and pried Natasha’s fingers off her arm like leeches. “You know what? Don’t even talk to me about Bethesda and this rock-show nonsense! In fact …” Pamela leaned forward slightly. “I have a strong suspicion that there is something fishy about that whole situation.”
“Fishy? ” Natasha said, her eyes wide. “What do you mean? ”
Todd looked up from the table; he had been absently scooping bits of spilled yogurt off the cafeteria table and licking them from his fingers. “I’m so down with the rock show. I was practicing my guitar until one o’clock last night. Then I was like—wait! I gotta put strings on this thing! And then I was like—wait! Maybe if I—”
“Todd! Listen!” Pamela said, and stood in a huff. “So Ms. Finkleman used to be a rock star. Great. Very interesting—but why keep it hidden so long? And how come now she’s suddenly fine with it becoming public knowledge? Not only that, but putting on a big concert? ”
She looked coolly at Natasha and Todd, who looked at each other, and then said, in perfect unison, “I dunno.”
“There is dirt to be dug up on this,” Pamela said, “And I am going to do the digging! Like a—like a …”
“A gopher? ”
Pamela glared at Natasha, threw up her hands, and stalked out of the lunchroom.
“What? ” said Natasha to Todd, who shrugged and got back to work on Pamela’s lunch. “What did I say?”
14
AWKWARD POPCORN
Bethesda Fielding sat at her kitchen table directly across from Tenny Boyer, her tannish reddish hair serious and unpigtailed, her glasses high on her nose, her right hand holding a sharpened number two pencil. In front of Bethesda were the following things: a well-thumbed copy of A More Perfect Union: United States History from Plymouth Rock to the Constitution; a pencil case containing sever
al backup pencils, two blue pens, four fresh erasers, and a fancy highlighter that was either pink or yellow, depending on how you clicked it; and a new spiral notebook, labeled PROJECT: STUDYING WITH TENNY (SWT), opened to the first page, labeled THINGS TO GO OVER (T-GO).
In front of Tenny Boyer was a red bowl filled with microwave popcorn, from which he was grabbing big handfuls and shoveling them into his face, and a can of cream soda, from which he was loudly drinking with a straw.
Bethesda looked at Tenny. He looked back at her, smiled blankly, and then kind of looked around the room. Bethesda took a breath to start talking, but wasn’t sure what to say. Tenny slurped his soda.
“So,” Bethesda said finally.
“So,” Tenny answered.
“You excited?”
“What?”
“You know, for the rock show? ” “Oh, yeah. Totally.”
The clock ticked. Tenny shifted in his chair. Finally Bethesda said, “Hey, do you need a pencil?”
“What?”
“A pencil? To write things down? ”
“Oh,” he said vacantly. “Yup. Totally.”
As she dug around for a pencil she wouldn’t mind losing (or getting back coated with earwax), Bethesda thought for the millionth time that having Tenny Boyer in her house was approximately the weirdest thing ever.
She had promised Ms. Finkleman she would do this, had agreed to the deal, and she had no intention of backing out. But it was so weird.
Bethesda and Tenny hadn’t even had a conversation since the fourth grade, when everyone in Mrs. Kleindienst’s class had been assigned partners for their reports on the regions of Canada. They had worked together fine, Bethesda recalled, but only because she had done the whole project. Their presentation on Nova Scotia consisted of a poem Bethesda wrote about Nova Scotia, a drawing by Bethesda of a traditional Nova Scotian schoolhouse, and a list Bethesda made of Nova Scotia’s primary imports (steel, cotton) and exports (wool, herring). Tenny’s only contribution was a thirty-five-second, Nova Scotia-inspired “musical interlude,” played with two pencils against the side of a milk carton.
The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman Page 6