Beauty and the Bully

by Andy Behrens

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Stew. “I’d totally forgotten.”

  “Back off, dude,” said Duncan, growing testy. “We’re in my garage. In the suburbs. With no one around. At all. Just us. She’s welcome to suck here—anyone’s welcome to suck here.”

  “Well have at it, then,” said Stew. “Suck away.”

  Duncan looked at his small protégée. She had the Twins cap on again, this time twisted to the side, and an oversize Trip Shakespeare shirt. Her tiny hands twitched on the guitar strings. She had a determined, don’t-F-with-me expression on her face. She glared at Stew, then looked toward Duncan as if for help.

  “We’ll try ‘Mousey, Mousey,’ Okay?” He glanced at Stew and Jessie. “It’s just basically ‘Louie, Louie’ with, um . . . well, with ‘Mousey,’ not ’Louie.’”

  “’Cuz TARTS,” said Stew.

  “Yes,” said Duncan. “That’s correct, Stew. ’Cuz TARTS. There are a few rodent-related lyrical twists, but not many.”

  Jessie laughed. Stew shook his head in disgust. Duncan looked into Syd’s eyes.

  “You can do this,” he said.

  You stink at this, he thought.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”

  No, really, he thought. You stink.

  “The chords are simple,” he said. “A, D, E-minor. Simple.”

  “Got it,” said Syd. “Let’s rock.”

  “All right,” said Duncan. “On my count.” He paused. “One, two . . . a-one, two—”

  “You might wanna plug that thing in,” said Stew, gesturing at Syd’s guitar.

  “Oh, right,” she said. “Heh.” She plugged into an amp, snorted again, then restruck the guitar pose. “Ready,” she said.

  The song lasted exactly thirteen seconds. In that time, Syd seemed to battle her guitar like it was a vicious reptile that had clamped onto her abdomen and wouldn’t let go. She sent a shriek of feedback into the air, followed by a sequence of atonal pwangs, and then she broke two strings. The band—and Syd—stopped playing.

  “Whoops,” she said, apparently unbowed. “Heh.” She touched the limp ends of the broken strings. “I’ve got more in the car. Be right back.”

  She leaned the guitar against a wooden shelf. It remained there briefly, then fell to the floor when Syd threw open the garage door. “Whoops,” she said again, then scampered out to her Monte Carlo.

  “Dude, how many gigs did we play before Freddie’s sister joined the band?” asked Stew, staring at Duncan.

  “None,” he answered. “I think we all know tha—”

  “And how many do you think we’re gonna play now that our rhythm guitarist is a ninety-pound piece of pure sucktastic suckiness?!”

  “Hey, Stew,” said Duncan. “She’s a total beginner, man. She’ll get bet—”

  “Oh, don’t tell me she’ll get better. I thought the idea was that this band—the three of us—would get better, write songs, get gigs, produce a couple of critically acclaimed indie releases, then sign with, like, Sony BMG for a zillion dollars and buy a plane.” He paused. “Well, wasn’t that the plan?”

  Jessie tried to calm him. “Syd’s cool, Stew. She just nee—”

  “I don’t care that she’s a cool chick! She’s not helping this band. All she’s doing is helping Duncan get some hot loony chick.” He gently put his bass down. “I can’t handle this. She’s seriously gotta go, Duncan.”

  “I can’t kick her out of the band, Stew. Not now.”

  “Then I’m gone,” he said. He hurriedly packed his bass and brushed past Duncan. “Done. As in, I quit.” He wiped his hands together slowly, as if scraping the crumbs of the Flaming Tarts from his fingers.

  “Stew,” said Jessie, “I drove you here, remember? You can’t just—”

  “I’ll walk home.”

  “That’s like seven miles, dude. And you have to cross two expressways.”

  “So drive me.”

  Syd skipped back into the garage. “What’s up?” she said cheerily. “We’re not done already, are we?”

  “Oh, we’re beyond done,” said Stew. “We’re history.” He walked outside.

  Jessie followed. “Sorry, dude,” she whispered to Syd.

  Duncan slumped forward, resting both hands on his dad’s car.

  “What just happened?” asked Syd.

  But Duncan remained silent. Unbelievable, he thought. No band, no Freddie. No Freddie, no Carly. No Carly . . . no point.

  “Seriously, Duncan, what just happened? Was there a fight? Did you get hit with stuff again? Are you wounded?”

  “Wounded,” he said quietly. “A little. There was a minor fight, yes. No instruments were thrown. I think we’re . . . um . . . not a band anymore.”

  Syd stood glumly for a moment, absently twisting the Twins hat around her head. “Guess the lessons are over.”

  Duncan couldn’t answer. He leaned on the car, his head buried in his arms.

  18

  Leaning back against his locker amid the pre-class morning buzz of students, Duncan yawned, then bent his knees and slid to the floor. His eyes drooped. His mouth drooped. He drooped. At most he’d slept two hours the night before. The breakup of the Flaming Tarts had crushed him. He thought about writing in his English journal, then realized that Mrs. Kindler had collected all the journals the previous Friday. Next he thought about writing melancholy song lyrics. But of course he no longer had a band. So what was the point?

  No point, he decided.

  The words repeated in his head: No band, no Freddie. No Freddie, no Carly. No Carly, no point. He sighed, then yawned again. A wadded-up piece of notebook paper hit him in the face.

  “Hey, rocker,” said Jessie. “Well, ex-rocker.”

  “Don’t joke,” said Duncan. “There is no humor here.”

  “Where’s your girl? Your honey? Your baby? Your pooh? Your swee—”

  “Another TARTS meeting.”

  Jessie snickered. “It sounds like that dorky card game. TARTS: The Gathering.”

  “The joking. Make it stop. Hurting.”

  “So you’re taking the band’s breakup well, I see.”

  He said nothing.

  “Duncan, if it’s really meant to be, then—”

  “—then I’ll find a way to mess it up. To kill it dead. To eviscerate it. I will find a way to single-handedly ruin it—whatever it is—if it’s meant to be.” He yawned again. “Is that what you were gonna say?”

  Jessie stared at him for a moment. He continued drooping.

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, I think we both know that I am not the kiss-it-make-it-better type of girl. So I’ll be going.” She walked away air-drumming.

  Duncan yawned again.

  Minutes passed. First bell neared. Carly returned. “Hey, Dunky,” she said. “You missed the meeting.”

  “Yeah, I . . .”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I realized you were probably posting signs for the rally like we’d talked about.” She patted his head as though he were a sheepdog. Carly fussed with the contents of her locker, withdrawing a few books. “I can’t believe things are coming together so well. Everything is just . . .”

  She searched.

  “. . . well, it’s perfect,” she finally said, then bounded off.

  Duncan sat, his legs now extended along the floor, his back pressed against the locker. More yawning. The bell rang. He kept sitting, only rising and walking to class when the halls were nearly empty.

  He trudged wearily through the day, saying little and doing less. He noted that he, Stew, and Jess all sat at different lunch tables. Duncan, of course, sat with the TARTS. Stew sat by himself. Jessie sat with Syd, and the two of them appeared to be engaged in a rather intense discussion.

  Bet she went straight home and told her brother about the band, Duncan thought. Damn, damn, damn.

  Freddie sat alone at his usual table, the one he’d pillaged from the conquered Goths. When would he attack? wondered Duncan. It was coming—that much was ce
rtain.

  Mrs. Kindler seemed to take a special interest in Duncan that afternoon, attempting at several points to rouse him to discuss plot points of Gatsby in class. This irritated him to no end. He felt he was emitting the strongest possible don’t-call-on -me-I’m-depressed vibe, and he wanted Mrs. Kindler to respect it. Honor the vibe, he thought. She didn’t.

  “Duncan,” she said, creeping toward his desk. “What do you think about the relationship in the novel between the illusory and the real?”

  No you didn’t, Mrs. K., he thought.

  “We want the illusion,” he said.

  She stared at him, raising her eyebrows in a not-so-subtle gesture that said “keep talking.” He did, but his heart certainly wasn’t invested in the response. And he resented having to answer any question at all, given his evident misery.

  “They do. In Gatsby, the characters. They’re after illusions, to the exclusion of whatever’s real. They’re all façade. The money, the affairs—which we mostly just hear about and rarely see, which stinks—” Muted laughter from the class. “—there isn’t much that’s real at all. At least nothing outward. ” He prattled on as Mrs. Kindler nodded.

  She had posed the last intellectual challenge of his school day. Duncan navigated the remainder of his schedule quietly. Having nothing better to do after school—what with no band practice and no guitar lesson to get home to—he attended Marissa’s TARTS committee meeting. Predictably, it sucked. He nearly slept, but was jarred awake when Marissa began making derisive, catty cracks about Carly. At this, he stood and left, his backpack slung over his sagging shoulder.

  Duncan walked slowly toward his car, alone. The late-afternoon October air was crisp and the sky a tinny gray. Leaves fell and drifted. With his head down and his eyes half-closed, he was fumbling with his keys at the door of his Reliant before he noticed Freddie seated on the trunk. And he sure looked pissed.

  “Duncan, Duncan, Duncan,” he said, shaking his head and punching a meaty hand against a meaty palm. For an instant, Duncan considered running. He felt an adrenaline surge, but gloom and inevitability beat it down. He merely sighed, and a confession came rushing out.

  “Look,” said Duncan flatly. “It’s not my fault. Well, okay, it’s partly my fault in a technical sense—if we’re attributing blame—but it’s not like I didn’t try. I did try, Freddie. I tried hard. I mean, you know how many guitar lessons I’ve given Sydney, right? A lot. More than I’d expected to when we struck this little accord, that’s for damn sure. I want her to be a great guitar player. I really do. Heck, I’d settle for Syd being just a bad-but-serviceable guitar player. But she isn’t, dude.” Duncan held up his hands. “She just isn’t. She stinks, man. She’s dangerously bad. The sounds she makes, they’re awful. Like big screechy science fiction noises. She cannot play guitar out loud for a band that wants to entertain people. She just sucks, dude. And it broke the Flaming Tarts apart.” Duncan sighed again. “You should’ve seen Stew last night. I really thought he was gonna go nuts, throw stuff and get all Freddie Wamba—”

  He paused.

  “Okay, bad choice of words there. Sorry. Anyway, Stew was pretty mad. The band is broken up, and I can’t just pull it back together. If I could, I would. But the way things ended . . . I just don’t know how to fix it, Freddie. I can’t make Sydney a virtuoso overnight—and even if I could, I don’t know if I could get Stew back. And without a bass guitar, we don’t really have a band, do we?”

  Freddie stared at him. His eyes had narrowed, as if he were trying to make out a distant object. After several seconds he spoke. “What the hell are you talking about, dipweed?”

  Duncan returned a perplexed expression. “I’m talking about the band breaking up, dude. Your sister coming home last night, probably pissed at me. No more Flaming Tarts . . . does that ring a bell?”

  “Nope,” said a plainly confused Freddie. “I was just gonna give you crap for getting me suspended.”

  “What?!” said Duncan. “Suspended? I didn’t get you suspended . I need you at school, bullying.”

  “Well, you’re not gonna get it. Not for the next five school days, anyway. I am officially suspended, effective immediately. Multiple violations of the district’s code of student conduct blah-blah-blah. I’m not supposed to be on school property at all, actually. So I’m risking further discipline by being here in the parking lot talking to you, doofus.”

  “But I didn’t complain to anyone! This is definitely not my fault, Freddie. You’re no good to me at home. You’ve gotta kick my ass, dude. We have a special dynamic. I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

  “Actually, it’s happening to me,” said Freddie. “Are you sure that you never complained to any faculty or staff member? You’re positive? You never mentioned me? Not to anyone?”

  “Hell, no. Why would I—?” He paused. “Oh.” Duncan leaned forward onto the roof of the car. “I suppose my mom might have had something to do with this.”

  “Bingo,” said Freddie. “In fact, the Assistant Dean of Students who sentenced me made a special point of telling me that the next time I single out a student to torture, I shouldn’t pick the child of a guidance counselor.” Freddie chuckled. “I told him that if Chambliss had a kid, that’s definitely who I’d torture.”

  “What if I go to Principal Donovan and explain everything —and I do mean everything, Freddie. I’ll do it. I feel lousy that you’re in this mess. A suspension is kind of a big deal.”

  “Look, dorkstick, if you do anything to screw up this suspension for me, I will kick your ass. They’ve handed me five vacation days, and I’m takin’ ’em. It’s not like my permanent record can get any uglier. This may be the first time I’ve been suspended by this school, but it’s not exactly the first time I’ve been suspended by a school. They still have wanted posters of me in Bemidji, I’m pretty sure.”

  “So is there anything I can do? Talk to your parents on your behalf? Bake you a cake with a file in it?”

  Freddie laughed an easy laugh. Suspension seemed to suit him. “My mom and dad are not disturbed by my rule-breaking. Don’t sweat it, dweeb. But there is something I need you to do.”

  “What is it? I’ll do it. No problem, man. Anything.”

  “I’d like a girl.”

  They looked at each other for a moment.

  “I don’t get it,” said Duncan. “You want what?”

  “What’s not to get? I’d like a girl.”

  “You mean like I should pretend to bully you for a while so that some girl will come to your defense and—”

  “No, dork. I mean like you set me up. With a girl.”

  “Hell, Freddie, you’ve got a job. You’ve got money. I’ve heard that for, like, fifty bucks you can go to North Avenue and there’s a whole bunch of girls in spandex dres—”

  “Dude!” said Freddie, clearly insulted. “What do I look like, a total scuzz?”

  Yes, thought Duncan. Like scuzziness personified.

  “No. I just . . . well, I’m not quite following you here. You want a girl? For what purpose?”

  “‘For what purpose?’” repeated Freddie. “For the same reason you wanna get with that beaver chick.”

  “Okay, why is it that everyone has to make the beaver cracks? It’s impolite. She’s protecting rodents—all rodents.”

  “Whatever, dweeb. I wanna meet a girl to, like, hang out with. To do stuff with. To converse with—like about my life, school, chasing dorks. Typical boy/girl stuff.”

  Don’t you get soft on me, thought Duncan. Don’t do it. Not you, Freddie.

  “You mean like you want a companion?”

  “If by ‘companion’ you mean ‘attractive female companion, ’ yeah. The assistant dean was telling me today that my suspension ended just in time for homecoming—and then the smug poopsniffer laughed. Can you believe that? He laughs at my romantic prospects. I’ll admit that I may not have traditional manners and good looks”—he scratched the folds of his beefy neck—“but I can tur
n up the charm. And I’d like a homecoming date.”

  “A homecoming date,” said Duncan. “Hmm.” I’d actually like one of those, too, he thought. “What made you come to me with this request, Freddie? Just out of curiosity. I mean, if I were any good at talking to girls, I would never have needed you.”

  “You’re a smart kid, dorkmonkey. I like the way you’ve played things with the rodent chick. Plus, let’s face it, I have all kinds of leverage with you.” Freddie did the punch-his-palm thing again. “Find me a girl. A date. For homecoming.” He cracked his neck. “Or you’ll get the ‘Freddie Special.’”

  That seemed bad.

  “Okay,” said Duncan. “I’ll try.”

  “Don’t try. Do it. You’ve got five days.”

  Freddie began to walk away. After several steps, he turned around. “Syd is really that bad? Seriously?”

  “It’s like listening to orangutans whack each other with live monkeys.”

  Freddie raised his eyebrows. “That’s a graphic description. ”

  “I’ve had a lot of time to consider Syd’s guitar playing.”

  19

  “I’ve hit a wall,” said Duncan, plopping himself down next to Jessie at lunch on Friday. “An impossibly large wall. Like with concrete and steel and razor wire.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Jessie said in a fairly hostile tone. “I didn’t realize I’d sat down at the Flakeballs Against Rat Test Stuff table. I’ll move.”

  Duncan laughed quietly.

  “I’m insulting you, Duncan,” she said.

  “Funny acronym. FARTS. Flakes Against da-da-da-da.”

  Jessie smiled. “Okay, so I’m amusing even when I’m trying to be bitter and spiteful. That’s when you know you’re an adorable person.” She bit into a celery stick. “What have I done to earn your lunchtime presence?”

  “You don’t eat celery. What are you doing?”

  “I’m watching calories. Keeping slim and fit.”

  “You what?”

  “The big dance is coming up. Homecoming. Our beloved Owls taking on . . . hmm, I believe it’s the Bulldogs.”

  “You don’t dance. You’re a drummer.”