“It’s a knitting store,” Kylee explains.
Olivia rolls her eyes, but Tyler says, “Cool! If anyone knows about knitting, it’s you, Kylee.”
“I’m going to review the new Disney film,” Kaitlyn said. “The one that’s coming out this weekend.”
That sounds like an extremely ordinary idea to me, but Olivia, who has somehow become the official dispenser of approval or disapproval, gives a gracious nod.
Tyler says he’s going to review some video game I’ve never heard of. As he says it, he pantomimes his hands twitching on the controller.
“What about you, Cameron?” Olivia asks.
Cameron has been doodling the whole time, but he looks up to say, “Cosmic Eruption.” When everyone looks as mystified as when Kylee mentioned Knit Wits, he says, “It’s an indie band.”
“Autumn?” Olivia asks.
I have an idea cosmically erupting in my brain now, but there is no way I’m going to say it in front of Olivia or Cameron; I’ll save it to tell Kylee later when we’re completely alone.
“Probably just a book,” I mumble.
“Which book?” Olivia pursues.
I can just imagine the eye roll I’d get for saying Wuthering Heights.
“I haven’t decided anything yet,” I say.
“What about you?” Kaitlyn asks Olivia. “I bet you have the coolest idea of all.”
Kylee and I think that sort of thing about each other—I mean, we’re both each other’s biggest fans—but we don’t show it in front of other people to make them feel bad.
“I haven’t decided anything yet either,” Olivia says. Then she relents. “Well, there’s a new cupcake store on Ninth Street. It would be fun to have an excuse to taste all their cupcakes.”
“Oooh!” Kaitlyn squeals.
I have to admit that’s a review I’d like to read or, even more, a review I’d like to write. But I already have my own idea.
My own extremely terrific idea.
Guess who is going to go to a certain gig this weekend and write a review of a certain band named Paradox?
On a five-star scale, guess how many stars I’m going to give them? I wish I could give them zero, but on the rating sites for things, one star is the lowest you can give. But it’s what I’ll say about them that matters.
In class on the very first day of the new school year, Ms. Archer told us, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
And the published pen is mightier than anything.
What if Ms. Archer chooses my review to publish in the school paper? And what if the Broomville Banner publishes it next? Maybe the Associated Press will pick it up! And the terrible things I’ll say about Hunter’s band will be read by people all over the world.
Nothing is sweeter than a writer’s revenge.
* * *
“You have to come with me,” I plead with Kylee.
I’m at her house on Saturday afternoon, in her room, sitting cross-legged on her bed, next to a growing pile of finished dog sweaters, each one cuter than the last. She told me she feels guilty she’s only finished five so far, but five sounds like a lot to me. It’s five more dog sweaters than most people on this planet have to show for themselves.
“I need to finish seven more by a week from Wednesday,” she says.
“Why a week from Wednesday?”
“That’s the deadline.” Kylee’s fingers click along on the needles as fast as my fingers click along on a computer keyboard. I wonder if she knows how many stitches she can knit in a minute.
“What do you mean, the deadline? Don’t cold little dogs need sweaters just as much on Thursday? Or Friday? Besides, winter’s still two months away.”
“That’s the last day of the special knit-for-dogs drive,” Kylee answers.
“And why seven more sweaters? You act like you’re an oppressed worker in some sweatshop in China.”
She looks directly at me.
I shouldn’t have made a joke about China.
“In some sweatshop somewhere,” I correct myself. “Like if you don’t meet your quota, you’ll be fired and your family will starve to death.”
“Donating a dozen sweaters is my personal goal.” Kylee sounds like her usual placid self, to my relief after the unfortunate sweatshop-in-China comment. Yet her fingers look anything but placid as she keeps the needles click-click-clicking. “And dogs might freeze to death if I don’t make them.”
“The sweaters are for the shelter dogs,” I remind her. “They’re not going to round up all the stray dogs in Broomville so they can dress them up in sweaters.”
“You have goals,” Kylee says. Her tone has an un-placid edge to it now. “You want to publish your Cameron poems in The New Yorker.”
I haven’t told Kylee about the rejection yet. It’s the first time ever in our friendship that I haven’t told her something. I’m not quite sure why. I guess I feel not only heartbroken about it but also ashamed at how pitiful I was to dream so big and fail so badly.
“And you want to publish your review of the band in the Peaks Post, and the Broomville Banner, and someplace where everyone in the world will read it.” Of course, I told her that after school on Monday. “So this is my goal,” Kylee finishes.
I want Kylee to achieve her goal as much as she wants me to achieve mine. But how can I achieve mine if she doesn’t agree to go to the gig with me tonight? I could call Brianna or Isabelle. But no one else understands how I feel about Cameron, and there’s a good chance Cameron will be at the gig, since the band is playing one of his songs. I still don’t know which one is his because of being too distraught to listen to the practice that day, but I’m sure I’ll recognize it when I hear it. Writers show their soul in what they write.
“Please come?” I make my voice high and squeaky and irresistibly adorable. “Please, please, please, please?”
“It will be loud,” Kylee says.
True.
“It will be dark.”
Also probably true.
“I’ll hate every minute of it.”
I try to come up with some reason weighty enough to overcome her objections. “I think Cameron might be there, and … well … Just come with me. That’s all I ask. You can bring your knitting with you.”
Kylee tosses aside her knitting and flings herself down on her bedspread in a gesture of surrender. Face buried in dog sweaters, she says, “This is a one-time thing. I am not—I repeat not—going to be a Paradox groupie, no matter how many songs Cameron writes for them. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” I say.
I’m so relieved and grateful, there’s nothing I wouldn’t agree to right now.
Besides, given how scathing my review of Paradox is going to be, and how widely I plan for it to be published, this may well be the only gig the band ever has.
14
“You have got to be kidding,” Dad says when I ask him at dinner if he can drive Kylee and me to the gig. The Spotted Cow is bike-riding distance from our house, but I’m not allowed to ride after dark. “You hear them play all the time right here in your own home.”
Hunter isn’t eating with us. He’s off with the band doing a last-minute practice at Timber’s house.
“Kidding?” I ask, trying not to reveal my hidden agenda. “This is different. It’s Hunter’s first gig!”
“All right,” Dad says. “We can give you a ride. Call us when you’re ready for a ride home. Hunter is lucky to have a sister who is so devoted.”
His last words sting.
Hunter is unlucky to have a sister who is a very angry writer.
* * *
What do you wear to a gig? Kylee and I confer via text. We decide we can’t go wrong with jeans, boots, and dark tops with a little sparkly neckline (Kylee) and a plain silver necklace (me). I curl my hair for the occasion. Usually I let it hang straight because I can’t be bothered fussing with it.
My father doesn’t notice, but my mother does.
“You look nice, sweetie,” is a
ll she says. But I know she’s thinking: Is there more to this gig than you’re letting on?
She knows a little bit about Cameron, chiefly because of Hunter’s Cameron-themed insults in the car, but that’s really all. Some of my friends, like Isabelle, tell their moms about every boy they have a crush on. I think Kylee would tell her mom if she did have a crush on anyone, which she doesn’t. Her only crush is the one she has on her knitting needles. But I’m selective about the things I say in person to anyone but Kylee. I’m better at saying things to my notebook.
When Kylee and I arrive at the Spotted Cow, it’s bigger than Dad made it sound. There are a dozen tables and a good-sized performance space with a baby grand piano in it, plus room for amps, drums, and a band. Almost all the tables are full. It takes me a few moments to let my eyes sweep over them in the low light of the café. Cameron isn’t there. Neither are any of the members of Hunter’s band.
Kylee and I order steamers—vanilla for her, raspberry-chocolate-hazelnut for me (I love when a barista lets me mix flavors). Steamers aren’t a coffee drink; they’re just warm milk with Italian soda syrups mixed in—yum. We sit at the only empty table we can find. Unfortunately, it’s right next to the performance space. So much for hoping that Hunter might not even see me there. I don’t want him to know about the review until it’s too late to stop me.
The first band up is called the Electric Orangutans. Their five members are singing a song that sounds like a deafeningly loud chant by medieval monks wearing black jeans and black T-shirts. If it has words, rather than guttural hums, I can’t make out what they are.
I take a sip of my steamer. Kylee produces her knitting from her oversized purse. A thought pops into my overheated brain (it’s too warm in here, as well as too loud): Given that there are no empty tables right now, Cameron—if he comes—may need to sit at ours.
Is it okay if I join you? I imagine him saying or, rather, mouthing, since it’s too loud for any words to be heard.
Or maybe he’d pantomime, pointing to the one empty chair at our small table, and then to himself, with a questioning expression on his face: Do you mind?
Now I almost wish I hadn’t begged Kylee to come.
It would have been almost like a date for Cameron and me.
Except for all the ways it isn’t.
Ten minutes later, the Orangutans are apparently done performing. They’ve started putting their instruments back in the cases and dismantling their drums so that Paradox can set up.
But where is Paradox?
Then I see them, coming in from a door in the back, the stage door, probably.
Cameron is with them. He’s helping Hunter drag in the many components of his drum set: bass drum, snare drum, hi-hat cymbals. I can’t believe someone as wonderful as Cameron is a roadie for someone as awful as Hunter. Maybe he doesn’t think Hunter is as condolence-worthy as he led me to believe.
Kylee keeps on knitting, but her eyes meet mine. I’m definitely glad I made her come with me now. She’s the only reason I can survive being here at all.
It’s blissfully quiet in the Spotted Cow between sets. The barista who made my triple-flavored steamer comes to the mike to make an announcement.
“Thanks for coming out tonight, everyone,” he says, “to support live music. Our musicians aren’t getting paid for their time and talent, so remember to tip generously.”
He points to a large jar on top of the piano, about two feet away from Kylee and me, which has one twenty-dollar bill in it. I’m sure it was put there ahead of time to inspire customers to tip large-denomination bills rather than whatever spare change they find in their pockets.
“And now please join me in welcoming to the stage … Paradox!”
The audience gives a roar of applause. Kylee and I clap, too. I’m opening my Moleskine to a blank page and uncapping my pen when Cameron sits down next to me.
No mouthed request to join us, no humble chair-pointing gesture. He sits down, as if any empty chair is for the taking, including the one that happens to be at our table.
Then he smiles at me, not a huge toothy grin that lights up his face, but a sort of slow half smile, like: We meet again.
I might faint.
I’m still going to take notes on the concert. Maybe Cameron will think it’s cool that I’m willing to sit in public devoting myself to my art. Maybe it will look as if I don’t care what anybody else thinks, just the way he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks—even though I actually do care about what he thinks more than anything else in the world. But it’s hard to anticipate what he’ll think about anything.
As the band plays their first number—and I have to admit it sounds good, with a catchy melody and driving beat—I write down cleverly disparaging turns of phrase I can use in my review:
The real paradox is that anybody would ever voluntarily listen to this music.
If you want a way to kill live music, this is it.
If not dead before, the song was beaten to death by the mishandled drumsticks of incompetent drummer Hunter Granger.
The torn T-shirts, evidently purchased from some rockstar-wannabe website, were designed to give the false impression of having been ripped by adoring fans.
They make the error of confusing loud with good.
The original artists who first recorded these songs should sue.
Another number finishes, to whoops and hollers from the audience. Oh, well. Opinions can differ. That’s why reviews are interesting to read, because not everybody thinks the same way about everything.
David, at the mike, says something, and I hear Cameron’s name. He must have said either that the last song was by Cameron or that the next song would be by Cameron. Do people announce a song before or after it’s played?
I was hardly listening to the song they just played, too busy thinking up witty insults. But it didn’t sound as if it had come pouring out of Cameron’s soul.
It has to be the next song, I decide. Please let it be the next song.
The tempo changes. The song is slower, softer, not music for which you’d need earplugs. I wish I had a copy of the lyrics so I could read along as David and Timber sing, but I can make out at least some of the words.
“I tell myself that I don’t care …
But I do.
I tell myself that it’s just me …
But it’s you.”
I can’t tell if the boy in the song is trying to tell the girl he’s falling in love with her or out of love, only that he’s sad about whatever it is because it doesn’t fit with the person he thinks of himself as being. I wish I could download it on my phone and listen to it ten thousand times.
Maybe the boy in the song is falling in love.
Maybe the girl is me.
15
We do peer critiques of our reviews in class on Wednesday. When Ms. Archer stands up to read out the names of the people in each group it occurs to me to really, really hope I’m not with Cameron. He did give me condolences for having Hunter as a brother, but he never said anything snarky about Hunter’s band, the band about which I’ve written the most devastating review in the annals of journalism. His brother is in the band, too. The band performed one of his songs, producing the only line of praise in the entire review, which, now that I imagine Cameron reading it, is over-the-top gushing, and something I’d feel awkward if he read, sitting right there next to me. Of course, he’ll be able to read it if the review gets published. But it will feel different then.
If we’re in the same critique group, I’m going to have to get a pass for the health room.
We’re not.
I get Max Fruh, who’s an okay writer but not great; Tyler, who might appreciate the artful nastiness of my review; and Olivia, who would like my review a lot more, I’m sure, if she were the one who had written it.
“So who wants to go first?” I ask after I’ve led the way in dragging our chairs into a corner of the room as far away from Cameron’s group as possible. Olivia isn’t
the only one who can take a leadership role.
The others shrug.
“Okay, I’ll start,” I say, pretending I don’t care either way.
I pass out copies of the review for them to read. Ms. Archer has us bring four copies to class on peer-critique day.
As they start reading, Ms. Archer pulls up a chair to join us. She likes to circulate from group to group. She never says anything about the piece itself; she just listens to the critique to make sure we’re following her guidelines: Start with something positive. Ask questions of the author rather than making assumptions. Don’t try to rewrite someone else’s piece the way you would have written it. Stay constructive.
I hand Ms. Archer my copy of the review so she can read along.
Please, please, please let her think my review is good enough to be published in the Peaks Post!
I hear Tyler chuckle. I wonder which line he just read. Maybe it was “There’s bad, there’s horribly bad, and then there’s Paradox.” Or “It’s paradoxical how songs by artists as different as John Lennon, Prince, and Coldplay can all end up sounding exactly the same.”
Olivia takes the lead again once it’s clear everyone has finished reading. This time she’s not being bossy: by Ms. Archer’s rules, the person sitting to the right of the author facilitates that person’s critique.
“So?” Olivia says. “What does anyone like in Autumn’s review?”
“It’s hysterical,” Tyler says. “It’s piss-your-pants hilarious. Man, that band must capital S-U-C-K.”
“Yeah,” Max says. “I liked that part, too.” He’s the kind of kid who waits to hear what someone else says and then says he agrees with it.
I notice Olivia doesn’t say anything she likes about it. Instead she says, “I have a question for Autumn. What do you think the reader will learn about this band from your review?”
“Um—that they’re terrible?” I offer.
“But terrible how?” Olivia asks. “Is it their choice of music that’s terrible? Or their playing? What about their playing? Are they off-key? Is there something odd about their interpretations? We get that they’re loud, but all rock bands are loud. We get a lot of funny insults about the band, but I don’t think you really supported them with examples and details.”
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