Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Lilly stand and pick up her bag. I jiggle my own with frustration. For sure the bell will go and I’ll lose the moment. There won’t be another time, because I won’t find the courage again. “Look,” I burst out, “it’s only a mailbox for God’s sake. No one was hurt, were they?”
Jackson looks at me strangely. “No.” He starts to speak again, very slowly, as if explaining something to a very dim and not very nice kindergartner. “Esmerelda, for you or me, having our mailbox blown up might be just annoying, but for him, well, you know what he’s been through. I’ve told him we’re going to get whoever did it, but all he says is forget it, don’t make trouble, ‘is nothing compared to what life was like before.’ And then he goes on about all the ‘wonderful’ things there are in Australia, but he’s bawling and his hands are all trembly. That bastard—I’m just not going to let him get away with it!”
A sinking feeling is spreading in my stomach like sour milk. “Yeah well, nothing we can do right now, anyway,” I say briskly, not liking myself or him. “We’ll talk about it at recess, okay?”
“Yeah, whatever.”
Jackson turns on his heel and stalks off. I look at his hurt back and grind my teeth. Nothing I can do about him now, either. I walk quickly toward the lunch tables. As I wave at Lilly, she runs toward me.
“Hey, Ez, guess what! Double, triple guess what!”
The tone of her voice reminds me of her knock knock jokes in second grade. I had to say “who’s there?” fifty times a day or she’d stop being my friend.
“Guess what, I said!”
“What?”
She takes my hands and flaps them up and down with excitement. “We were chosen for the concert!”
Lilly’s face is almost fluorescent with triumph. The sour milk feeling clumps in my guts.
“Only three groups got in and we’re going to be first. Imagine, I’ll be so nervous!”
I look down at my hands in hers and remember the dead weight in my dream.
“Oh, don’t be scared, Lilly, you’ll be a star,” says Catrina, coming up and patting her shoulder. “You could wear your new halter top.”
“Well, actually my mom—”
“Lilly, could I talk to you a moment?” I try to pull her away.
She looks sideways at Catrina and rolls her eyes.
“It’s okay,” says Catrina, grinning. “You stars must have a lot to talk about.”
We walk a little way along the path toward the classroom. I’m trying to begin but I feel like there’s something stuck in my throat again.
“Well, what?” says Lilly. “Aren’t you glad? You’ve got a face like Mom’s when she’s about to ground me. Geez you’re weird, Marx. I’ll never figure you out, as long as I live.”
This wasn’t a promising start. “Well, look,” I began, “I really wanted to talk to you about this.”
“This what?”
“You know, the concert. It’s just, well, the thing is I don’t think I’ll be able to sing ‘Oops! … I Did It Again.’”
“Are you kidding me? You do that song in your sleep. What are you talking about?”
I take a deep breath. Lilly’s eyes are wide and innocent, like perfect blue plates before you put anything on them. “No, see, I really do find ‘Oops’ hard to sing. It’s just that song, Lilly, I think it’s kind of creepy—”
“Creepy?”
“Yeah.”
Lilly hasn’t taken another breath. She’s going red in the face. I wonder if I should remind her to breathe. I start to babble.
“See, I go dead inside when that music starts. I don’t know why. I guess I just don’t like it—for me it’s like eating too many doughnuts with fake cream, sort of makes me sick. It means so much to me to really like the song I’m singing. You know?”
She hasn’t breathed yet. Then, with a clutch of horror, I see her eyes filling.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Lilly, look I’ll do anything else, even another one of Britney’s maybe. Something we both like. It’s just, see, the sick business is getting worse. I’m even having nightmares about it. We could try harmonizing, like Valerie says.”
“Oh, Valerie this, Valerie that. What’s she got to do with this? It’s her that changed your mind, I bet!”
“No, she’s got nothing to do with it. She’s just helped me see what I do like—”
“Ever since you met Jackson, you’ve been different. No one sees you anymore. I don’t see you anymore. Girls should never drop their best friends just because they get a boyfriend. You should read what YM says about girls like that. You’ll be very lonely one day.”
A mass of protests crowd into my mind—isn’t it all the other way around?—but a foggy heat is gathering behind my eyes. I stare, dumb, at my shoes.
“Never mind.” She looks at me kindly now. “Everything will be all right. It’s settled. We were chosen, us, and everyone thinks we’re great!” She throws down her bag and lifts her arms in the air like a singer accepting applause. A shower of dust flies up into our faces. I rub my eyes and wish I could rub myself away, like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp.
I mumble something and start to walk away but suddenly she grabs my arm. Her eyes are hard again. “I mean it, everything is settled. Say it is, and I’ll forgive you.”
I stare down at my shoes again. The hot, cloudy feeling in my head blurs the ground.
“Oh, Ez, why do you have to be so weird? Why do you always have to change things, upset everyone!” She lets go of my arm as if it burned her. “My mom has even made us costumes—we’ve got these pink skirts with black sequins and a pink bikini top, oh, you should see them. I was going to bring them to your house as a surprise!” She stamps her foot, kicking her bag so her math book falls out.
Oh no, math is first thing. My stomach drops like an elevator.
“Lilly, please let’s forget this now, we better get to class.”
“I’m not moving until you say sorry. Till you say you’ll do it, just like we planned and rehearsed so many times. And that you’ll wear the outfits.”
I look at the set of her jaw, the pout of her lip. I’ve seen that expression so many times. It means I won’t be your friend if you do that, no one will like you anymore, you’re so weird, Marx. I think of all the things over the years that I’ve done because of that look.
A spark of pure rage clears my head for a moment, like clouds parting. “God almighty, Lilly, I’ve obeyed your orders since we were five. Have you ever thought maybe I don’t want to do everything you do? Maybe I’ve got my own … things, like…”
“Like what?”
“Like … oh, I don’t know.” A fog seems to have taken over my brain, drowning my thoughts. I’ve gone blank, stupid as a stone. All I can think about is this video clip of Little Richard that Valerie showed me—his band was called The Upsetters and their hair was piled high as Marge Simpson’s beehive.
“Well, what are you talking about then?”
I stare at Lilly’s socks, pink instead of the regulation white. A thin gold anklet is looped around one ankle. “It’s just…” I can feel her waiting. The words I’m looking for are nowhere under the fog.
“All right then, let’s get to class. I’ll just forget you ever said this, okay?” Lilly picks up her bag and gives a little skip. “Wait till you see the costumes. You’ll love them.”
Math is even worse than I’d imagined. And that’s saying something. People always tell you the thing you’re dreading “won’t be as bad as you think.” And they’re usually right. But some days, the minutes keep on unraveling like a crazy ball of string until all you’re left with is a tangled mess at your feet that you can never wind back.
First thing, Norton asks to see my homework. Why me? I’m starting to think he’s afraid of my mother. As soon as he sees my blank page, before I can explain about my allergy to reciprocal fractions, Norton gives me detention and ten extra questions. And then he hovers behind my chair watching me do them. “Esmerel
da, you should know that,” he says every time I hesitate, “why DON’T you?”
The fog hasn’t cleared from my head. I feel as if a wall of tears is banking up behind it. Norton is shouting now at someone else, throwing up his hands in despair like some doomed soul pleading for mercy. That’s just how I feel. I’m dying to cry, let the tears come like a river flooding, washing away Lilly and that dream and evil Mr. Norton. But I can only cry like that on my bed, facedown, with the door closed. I’ll just have to hang on till then.
Catrina stretches across the aisle and passes me a note. “From Lilly,” she whispers. It’s folded up in tight little squares. I open it under my exercise book. See our costumes, it says, and underneath is a drawing of a model as thin as a nail file wearing a short flared skirt and bikini top. There’s an arrow pointing to the skirt saying pink. I loathe pink. It’s my worst color. If Lilly had ever heard anything I’d ever said over the last seven years, she’d know that.
As we file out of class, I catch Jackson’s arm. He’s in the middle of a coughing fit. “Are you okay?” I ask him.
“Yeah,” he chokes. “What about you?”
“Oh, great, couldn’t be better.” I shrug. “Norton really lost it today, didn’t he?”
Jackson nods. “But you know what? Just five minutes of anger like that and your immune system is disabled for six hours.”
“That’ll teach him.”
Jackson and I decide to walk around the track during recess. Both of us feel too restless to sit down, and I don’t want to have another conversation with Lilly right now. We talk about Asim, and Jackson tells me the possum house is finished. I can see he’s really excited about it and he waves his hands around as he describes how it looks and the tools they used to make it. He might be a carpenter one day, he thinks, maybe go into business with Asim. I guess they’d wear those leather belts around their hips with little pockets for nails and bolts and all. Daniel used to have a toy tool belt like that with a plastic hammer and wrench. He’d try to hammer the salt and pepper shakers into the table. It used to annoy the hell out of Dad. I’d like to see Jackson in a real tradesman’s belt. He’d look so cool.
“Well, maybe I could be your secretary or something,” I suggest. “I’m never going to be a singer at the rate I’m going.”
“I don’t think carpenters need secretaries. Anyway, if ever I saw a singer waiting to happen, it’s you.”
I shrug. “You have to be strong to make it out there. You need to have artistic integrity. That’s what Valerie says. And I’m a wimp when it comes to standing up for myself.”
“What are you talking about?”
So I tell him about my stupid conversation with Lilly. I bring out the drawing of the skinny model in the pink outfit.
Jackson looks at it and laughs. “Poor girl looks like a stick insect. Did you know some spiders are so thin they have to keep their organs in their legs?”
“It’s not funny!”
“No, it’s not. Imagine a bunch of huntsmen sitting around going, ‘Hey, watch out, you hairy twit, you just stepped on my kidney!’”
I smile weakly.
“Look, I don’t know Lilly anywhere near as well as you, but I do know one thing. No matter how loud you talk, Lilly won’t hear you if it’s something she doesn’t like.”
“Yeah, just like my mom.”
“Sometimes you just have to go it alone. Trust your guts about what’s right. That’s what Mom says, especially about music. Because the songs you sing are like the guts of you—you can’t do it well if you’re faking it.”
“Like the gospel truth, right?”
“Yeah. And she says you’ve really got it, girl. She thinks she hasn’t seen so much talent in years.”
A glow spreads out in my stomach. It warms the chill of the whole morning. “Really? She said that?”
“Yeah. She thinks you put your secret self into it, and that’s what real artists do. Says you lean toward hard rock, though. Gritty music with strong base lines, that’s your thing. Bit of a rebel you are, she says.”
“That’s me! A hard-rock tragic! She’s right. I’ve been listening to a lot of the stuff she’s given me—you know, there’s this amazing singer, Patti Smith—”
“Oh God, not Patti Smith. Mom puts that on when she comes home mad from work. She dances around the living room and shakes her head so much I’m sure it’s going to fall off.”
I grin. “Patti Smith does that to you.”
Jackson shrugs.
A small flame of excitement is fanning its way through my chest. “You know, Jackson, what my dream is? I want to sing with a live rock band, or just to start, with an electric guitar. You know, be a rock singer, let myself go. I know what you say about Badman, but if you could just hear him play ‘Smoke on the Water,’ or Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway,’ imagine if we did that at the concert, it’d blow them out of the water—”
Jackson’s face closes over. He looks as if he’s tasting something bad at the back of his throat.
I feel hot all over, and not in a good way. How stupid can you get? I can’t believe I told him that. He’s gone down deep into that place where you can’t get him. And we were so close; he gave me that comment of Valerie’s like a present. And I just gave him a slap in the face. Oh, this is such a miserable damn day. It’s an “eat crap and die” day, just like old Badman says.
“Listen, Jackson, I’m not saying I like him or anything,” I begin, but my voice trails away like a tap when the main is turned off. I try again, searching for the right words. “I don’t understand all this myself. But somehow I don’t believe that the real Badman is the one everyone sees. He can’t be, to play like that. His real song, you know, his true story is in his music. He just wears all that bad behavior like a coat. I wish he’d take it off.”
Jackson makes a disgusted face. “A naked Badman is a frightening idea.”
He puts his apple core in his paper bag and scrunches it up tight. “Listen, I don’t even want to talk about that guy. Just thinking about him gives me a stomachache.” And he starts to walk so quickly back to class that I give up trying to catch him. I sit down on the grass right where I am and put my head in my hands, just like old Norton.
After recess there’s art; we lay down stripes of colored pastels on dark blue cardboard. It’s like watching the sun come up; pale yellow dissolves into orange and red, deepening into the blue above. You rub the stripes into each other, smudging them so that lines disappear and there’s just the soft, gradual colors of the sky. Everyone’s drawings look beautiful—it’s hard to make a mistake with this method, and we’re feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. The colors glow like jewels against the dark. We’re all instant artists.
As we’re hanging the drawings up on the wire, I see Lilly’s. It’s pretty much total pink. “That’s great,” I say. But she just rolls her eyes and looks away. I suppose I should have come looking for her at recess. Groveled a bit more.
“The ice queen giving you a hard time?” says a voice at my back. I swing around to see Badman, standing there holding his drawing. His sky is very dark, with jagged black lightning raking through it. I’ve never seen black lightning. It looks like a CD cover for a heavy metal band.
“Just wanted to say congratulations for the concert tryouts.” He’s grinning and his voice doesn’t sound sarcastic.
“Oh, thanks.” I reach for the pegs and give him some. “I’m not sure about the song, though.” I say it low, under my hair.
“Yeah. But you’ve got a great voice—you can go deep, loud. You ever tried rock?”
I glance in Lilly’s direction, but she’s busy admiring Mitch’s drawing. My heart is starting to pound.
Badman sees me looking. “She wouldn’t know a good rock song if it leaped up and bit her on the butt. But you, you could be really wild.”
“I heard you playing the other day, Led Zeppelin. You were really something. Did your dad teach you to play?”
“Yeah.” He rubs his f
orehead and the pastel on his fingers leaves a streak of black lightning across his eyebrows. He looks fierce, like a thunderstorm about to break.
“Is he still away?”
“Yeah, he’s got gigs in New Zealand and some other place. Don’t know for how long. You should hear him play.”
“Your dad plays lead guitar?”
“Yeah, like heavy metal falling from the sky.” Badman’s face looks different. “That’s what some guy wrote about Jimmy Page, the first time he heard Led Zeppelin.”
“Jimmy Page?”
“The lead guitarist, dumb ass.” Badman’s eyes are full of light. “Led Zeppelin was the heaviest blues-rock band back then. But Jimmy didn’t want to be labeled, you know? He was really into Indian and Arabic music, too. Gave him ideas. He did the most amazing licks, sometimes his lead breaks would go for half an hour. But he always caught himself in time. He used to say, “That’s what it’s all about, catching yourself.”
I stared at Badman. This was the longest conversation I’d ever had with him. Maybe the longest anyone had ever had with him.
“What did the singer do during these long lead breaks?”
Badman’s eyes light up. “Robert Plant—that’s the singer—he just got into it. See, his singing was real intense, he did the whole rock god thing, and he used his voice and his body like another instrument. The band all worked together, you know, like a single living thing, it was wild.”
“How great would that be?” I was having trouble keeping the excitement out of my voice. “It’s amazing, Valerie said something like that about soul music—you can use your voice like the chords of a guitar. You know Valerie? Jackson’s mother? She’s a singer. She’s cool, sings soul, blues, she’s a professional.”
Badman turns away from me and throws his pegs hard into the basket. “Yeah, a professional working at the pub. What does she do, sing her way through sausages and mash, chicken and fries?” He wipes his hands on his pants.
Ruined it again. I just should never have gotten up this morning. Quickly I check Jackson’s location. He’s over at the other side of the room. At least that’s something. If he’d heard Badman, he’d be over here as fast as that black lightning hanging on the wire.
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