Ms. Lewiston interrupts him again, but gently this time. “That’s totally fine. Tell us more. Who are some of your favorite artists?”
Jax leans forward, uncrossing his arms. “Okay, so this is controversial, I know, but I’m always going to defend Wu-Tang Clan, because of the sheer volume of amazing artists in that group. And while I like Kendrick Lamar okay, and I won’t say anything negative against Kanye, I don’t think he’s even close to proving himself the way Wu Tang has.”
He goes on, like someone turned a faucet. “And I know there’s a lot of stereotyping of rap for being violent and misogynist and stuff—”
He pauses again. “That means sexist against women,” he says, looking around.
Molly gets her Everything Is a Total Outrage face on. “I know what it means! And rap has that reputation because it’s TRUE!”
Ms. Lewiston holds up a hand. “Hold up, Molly. Jax, thank you for defining the word. It’s an important one, and not everyone knows it.” She looks around.
Erik shrugs and nods. “Yeah, dude. No idea. Would have thought it was some kind of scientist. You know, biologist, misogynist…?”
We all kind of snort-laugh at that, even Molly, who mutters, “Well, if so, there are a whole bunch of schools giving out that degree.”
Ms. Lewiston goes on. “But we’ll save that conversation for now. Jax, go on. You were saying you think rap gets stereotyped.”
Jax nods. “It does. I mean, yeah, there are a bunch of cra— I mean, bad songs, but come on. Check out some others. Listen to T.I. or Common or K’naan. These brothers are speaking truth.”
He looks around like he’s daring us to disagree, but no one says anything.
“And you know, it suc— I mean, it really makes me mad when people judge it without even knowing. And then judge me for liking it.”
I consider this. I guess I did probably think most rap was all about bling and expensive cars and partying. Would I have an opinion of someone who listens only to hip-hop? If I’m being honest, probably. Judging people is pretty much my favorite in-school pastime.
I remember Jax sneering at us for ogling his lunch and wonder, for the first time, what it’s like being black in Shipton. I guess most people at school listen to Top Forty, or the kind of indie rock that my dad used to call happy-mopey-camping music. I look at Jax and get a crash of sympathy. I mean, food-chain-wise, he’s not like me or Andre, or even Alice. He’s got friends and plays a bunch of sports and is pretty popular. He’s predator, not prey.
But still.
“Anyway,” he winds down. “That’s something I care about.”
“Thanks, Jax,” Ms. Lewiston says. “I’m glad to know that.”
She looks around. “Anyone want to comment?”
Continuing the trend of shocking me with unexpected behaviors, Andre raises his hand. “Yeah. I’m curious. Do your friends and family like the same music you do?”
Ms. Lewiston smiles at Andre like he just told her they’re long-lost cousins. “That’s a great question. Jax?”
Jax leans back again and kicks his high-tops out in front of him. “My friends do. That’s probably most of what we have in common and pretty much what we talk about.” He gives a short not-funny laugh. “But my family…yeah. Have you met my family?”
We all do the kind of nod/head-shake/shrug thing that is as noncommittal as humanly possible without imitating a corpse. Jax is adopted, and has a bunch of brothers and two white dads. I remember them from Family Nights in elementary school, when they were always the loudest people there. But…in a good way. One of his dads always wore awesome T-shirts, like “You’re Entitled to Your Own Opinion, But Not Your Own Facts” or “Kill Your Television.”
Jax does his not-funny laugh again. “They know nothing. My parents try to read up and stuff, but it’s embarrassing.”
He goes on. “Kwame’s dad…he’s, like, an expert. He grew up with Grandmaster Flash and LL Cool J, and he’s like…like a professor of rap, practically.” He shrugs. “But not in my family.”
Ms. Lewiston nods. “That can be hard sometimes,” she says.
Jax doesn’t answer, but his expression seems to agree.
There’s a moment of silence; then Andre speaks again. My eyebrows shoot up. Two unsolicited statements from Andre! Unusual things are afoot.
“Yeah, I…uh…I don’t really listen to rap, but my older brother and sister do, and they think my music is weak. So I know what you mean, I guess.”
Jax looks over at him, skeptical. “What kind of stuff do you listen to? Like, classical or jazz or something?”
“Naw. I kind of…well, I play drums. In a death metal group. We’re…we actually play gigs and stuff.”
It should be noted that if I had five hundred guesses as to what Andre does with his spare time, death metal drumming would have been number one billion. Maybe two billion.
We all stare at him. Andre stares determinedly at his desk like there’s a secret code there needed to unlock the bomb shelter before we all blow up.
Finally Jax speaks, and I think it’s fair to say he pretty much says what the rest of us are thinking. Well, except Alice, who hasn’t seemed to notice the conversation but is slowly drawing an intricate spiderweb on her hand in black Sharpie.
“You’re kidding. Right? You’re messing with us? Death metal? Like big-haired white dudes thrashing away in leather pants?” He shakes his head, looking baffled. “That’s angry white boy music.”
Andre looks up. “Actually, no. That’s not all it is. At all.”
Molly asks, “What do you mean you play gigs? Like, people pay you?”
Andre nods. “Our band is…um…getting pretty well-known.”
Molly looks impatient. “What band? And what do you mean? Do you play around here?”
“Our band is Skeleton Curse, and we play. Um. Well, Boston. And New York, this past summer. We have a…uh…YouTube channel. With a bunch of followers. Like, fifty thousand. Ish.” Andre looks down.
He mumbles this last thing, so we all lean forward trying to hear him. When I compute what he’s saying, I lean back.
Flummoxed was a vocab word last month, meaning totally taken by surprise or caught off guard. And I guess I’d say we’re all looking pretty flummoxed by Andre’s revelation.
Molly looks at me, and I shrug; then she looks at Alice. Erik looks at Jax, who looks at Ms. Lewiston, who is not looking surprised. Which is even more flummoxing, if that’s possible.
“Did you know about Andre’s band?” I ask her.
“Sure. He’s something of a celebrity. Not my kind of music, but it’s pretty amazing, what he can do on those drums,” she says.
Andre goes back to code breaking his desk.
Erik shakes his head slowly. “I had no idea,” he says, his voice as baffled as the kid who just found out there’s no Easter Bunny. “You’d never know it from…well, you know.”
While I hate to agree with Erik “I might force you to eat your gym sock” Estrale, I do know. Andre is phytoplankton, remember? How can you go to school with someone for years and not know this giant thing about him?
Andre shrugs. “Anyway, I mean…I just wanted to say I know what it’s like when family and friends don’t always get your music,” he says to Jax.
Jax nods slowly. “Yeah, I guess,” he says. “Yo, what’s your band’s name again? I’ll look you up when I get home.”
“Me too!” This is from Alice, who’s looked up from her doodling, her eyes flicking back and forth from Jax to Andre. “Maybe I can use some of your music in one of my films! With full credit, obvs.”
Andre actually smiles at her, a big, real smile, that shows his braces. “Horror movies are totally dope,” he says. “It’d be sick to be in one.”
Alice’s eyes go huge and wide. “We could totally make a slash
er movie where the band’s being hunted! Oh! It would be so good!” She shakes her head so that the nail wobbles, and she smiles, a rather frightening smile, honestly. “I can picture the blood splattering the white drum set.”
We respectfully stay silent for a moment, allowing them their vision, but then Molly breaks it.
“You guys are so weird,” she says, but her voice is more Isn’t This Interesting than Get Me a Hazmat Suit, so I think she means it nicely. Maybe.
“That’s a great idea,” Ms. Lewiston says. “And I hope you’ll keep us all posted about the film. But to circle back, let’s think about what we’ve heard. Jax loves rap and doesn’t always feel like his family understands or respects it. Andre plays death metal, and his family doesn’t really get why that’s his choice of music. He loves horror movies and would love to be a part of Alice’s next filmmaking project.” She pauses. “Did any of you know any of this before?”
We all shake our heads.
“How long have you known each other?”
Alice starts counting out loud, starting with kindergarten and then trying to remember if we were all in the same class in fifth grade.
“Approximately, Alice,” Ms. Lewiston says.
I think. Six years? Seven?
“We’re going to take a stretch break, but I want you all to think about that for a minute.” She looks around at each of us. “Do you remember what I wrote on the board the first day?” She points back at the whiteboard.
Be kind, for everyone is fighting unseen battles.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about each other. Keep that in mind.” With that, she pushes back her chair and heads toward the door.
I stay in my seat, listening to the buzz of voices all around me. Erik is regaling Jax with some story about a guy on the basketball team who writes raps and performs them at spoken-word-poetry jams in Boston. Alice and Andre have their heads together, peeping at Alice’s notebook, where she’s madly scribbling. I look at Molly, who looks as flummoxed as I feel.
“I wasn’t expecting that,” I say, then brace myself for a classic Molly Why Do You Even Exist response.
But she shakes her head a little, looking far away. “Yeah. Me neither. My…I used to know someone who loved death metal, and I’ve actually heard of Andre’s band. They’re a big deal.”
Her face has gone into that The Curse Has Come Upon Me look again, and I wonder. I wonder lots of things:
Who listens to death metal in Molly Claremont’s world?
Why does she have that Lady of Shalott look?
What else don’t I know about Molly, or, for that matter, everyone else in this school?
I blame it on the fact this whole thing is so weird, but I blurt out: “Why do you look so sad?”
As soon as I say it, I mentally punch myself in the face a few times. Nothing good is going to come from this. Either she’ll tell me and I’ll be embroiled in whatever drama Molly has, thereby breaking that time-honored and oh-so-vital-to-my-survival “stay out of everyone’s business” rule. Or she won’t, and she’ll huff off in a grand flounce, and it will be even more awkward in this room than it already is.
But she turns to me, and her face is so pale her freckles look like someone drew them on.
“My brother died this summer. He was seventeen. He has…had…um…”
She stops talking.
Holy. Crap.
It should be noted that if I thought I felt bad before, I now know that I felt like unicorns and baby pandas compared with how I feel now.
What I want to say is something kind and thoughtful and careful.
What my brain is saying is HOLY CRAP DEAD DEAD DEAD BROTHER DEAD.
What comes out of my mouth is glargbebaggasucksbargle.
It would be spectacular if Alice’s zombies wanted to show up Right. About. Now.
But Molly doesn’t notice, or is nice enough to pretend not to. So I fake sneeze (which I can do quite well, so that was okay). Then I try again.
“That’s awful. I mean, I’m so sorry.” I wince. This is better, but barely. “I don’t mean sorry because I did it. Obviously, I didn’t have anything to do with it. But I—”
Molly is nicer than I ever gave her credit for. Because instead of shooting me with a How Did You Stay Alive This Long if You’re This Stupid look, which I definitely deserve, she smiles, though it’s kind of exhausted-looking.
“It’s fine. I know what you mean. There’s no good thing to say.”
I shrug-nod because she’s right, but still. Just because there’s nothing good to say doesn’t mean I have to say something quite so painfully stupid. “Still, it’s not fine. I mean, it must be really awful,” I goat-bleat.
Wonderful, Theo. Remind her how terrible her life is. I give myself another mental punch, this time somewhere more painful than my face.
But she nods. “Yeah. It is really awful. He was sick since he was born, so my parents knew he wouldn’t grow, uh”—her voice breaks a little, and she coughs—“up. But, you know.”
“Knowing it doesn’t make it easier, I don’t think,” I say. “There’s knowing something and there’s really getting your brain to believe it.”
I think about my dad packing up his stuff. I think about him explaining that he’s leaving, that he’s moving to Guatemala, that he’ll call and Skype and we’ll still talk all the time. I understood it at the time: him looking me in the eye and telling me again and again how much he loves me. I nodded to all of this, because I understood each word and concept. But I didn’t really understand what it would feel like to look at the empty bookshelves, the pale spot on the floor where his armchair had been, the huge space in the living room where his desk used to sit. “Even when you know something is coming, it doesn’t make it any less awful when it happens. You still have to live with it every single day.”
Molly looks at me. “Yeah,” she says. And though her eyes and the tip of her nose are pink and cry-y, she sounds okay. “Exactly. That’s exactly it.”
That’s all she says, but it should be noted that something about her voice makes up for my earlier nuclear meltdown of conversational skills, and I don’t need to mentally punch myself anywhere for the rest of the day. And that day, when we wrap up, I think that maybe I won’t have to gnaw my leg off after all.
The next morning I’m weirdly nervous. Like, almost excited nervous, but the very idea of being excited to go back to Interrogation Room 201 is so unacceptable that I’m annoyed with myself. I wonder if it’s possible to get Stockholm syndrome, where captives start to feel all warm and fuzzy toward their jailers, in two days. I yo-yo back and forth between being kind of psyched to see everyone and being annoyed that I even care, and by the time my mom drops me off, I’m sullen and rude to her, and honestly I want to slap myself across the face repeatedly. Possibly with a dead fish or one of Erik’s sweat socks or something else unspeakable. I’m a mess.
“Well. I can understand that this whole thing is taking its toll on you,” my mom says when she pulls up at the school. “But try to remember I’m on your side.”
I don’t answer right away and don’t open the car door. I realize my mom’s going to be late if I don’t move. But I stay put. It’s like there’s Velcro on my butt, holding it to the seat.
My mom rustles for something in her purse, then looks up. Whatever she sees makes her face change.
“Is it really bad?” she asks, her voice quiet in the car.
I shake my head. On the list of things I try not to do, sending my mom into worried-about-Theo mode is right up there at the top, along with pooping at school and getting stuck talking to Mr. “History Is All Around You” Monterro between classes, which always results in a tardy slip, no matter how you explain that it wasn’t exactly your choice.
Anyway. It’s not that my mom’s that over-the-top on
the parental fussing scale, because she’s not. But I guess I never realized, until my dad was gone, that having two parents around was somehow half the stress of having one. The math doesn’t make sense, I know, but whatever. Now that it’s only me and my mom, I don’t want to go there unless I really need to. And this…this stupid photography fiasco is hardly worth the drama.
She’s still looking at me, so I answer. “It’s not that it’s awful. I just…Why?” I pause. “I mean, I still figure it was Erik Estrale, since his friends are total jerks. How many times has he stood there laughing while his turd-button friends torture some poor nerdlet? But the past two days…he’s, I don’t know. Not that bad. He seems decent. And if he’s decent…I just don’t get why he would do something like this.” To my total horror, my voice cracks a little on the last words.
“Are you crying?” Her voice has gone to mama-grizzly-on-attack.
“No.” And I’m not. But my face feels hot and stupid. I try to snort in the snot and blink hard.
“You ARE! Sweetie, you are! Oh, Theo. My sweet boy.”
Oh. My. God. She’s in a full-blown mom hurricane, and I need to get out of here.
“I’m fine. Mom, I swear. I have to go. Loveyoubye.” I throw myself out of the car and close the door fast behind me.
The window rolls down immediately.
“You’re sure. You’re sure you want to do this?” she asks. “Because I’ll tell you right now, if you don’t, we—”
I pretend I don’t hear her and wave goodbye. Alice’s gold Lexus has pulled up behind our car, and Alice is climbing out of the passenger side. She appears to be wearing a bathrobe, but a kind of chic, dressy one. Or maybe it’s a dress meant to look like a robe. Who knows? I look back at my mom.
“Mom. I’m fine. All good, I swear.” I wave one last time and turn away.
She starts to answer, but whoever’s driving Alice’s car taps the horn once, then leans on it. As I glance back, I see my mom waving wildly out the window before driving off.
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