Don't Blame the Music

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Ashley added another log to the fire.

  I glanced at the reassuring leaping flames, and the log seemed very oddly shaped, and very shiny, and I squinted, trying to identify it.

  My mother and my father and I stared.

  Ashley chuckled softly.

  It was the plaque last year’s victorious football team gave Dad in appreciation of all he’d done for them. The finish had caught instantly. It was burning like a torch within a fire.

  “Doesn’t it smell evil?” said Ash dreamily, her waiflike eyes fixed on the fire. “I remember it smelled like that when I burned all my records. Maybe that was the shrink-wrap.”

  And I had a terrible sense that Ashley had power of which we knew nothing. Power to remove our comfort and strip us of happiness.

  Power to bring us into hell.

  Seven

  IT WAS A FAIRLY warm day, but I put on a jacket anyhow. The more clothing I had, the more protected I felt.

  Crude Oil’s members looked as if they just came off an oil derrick after six weeks of beer, no showers, and lousy weather. They were hardly going to notice how I looked. Nevertheless, I brushed my hair carefully, put on new lipstick and straightened the collar on my jacket. I looked rather sweet and innocent. Preppy. I had of course dressed for my crush on Anthony. Now I wished for faded jeans and an old sweatshirt. I’d be less visible. Safer.

  Anthony hadn’t said much to me today. Shepherd was standing a little too close for him to do anything but sneak a breath now and then.

  My crush remained intact, smothering me without any encouragement from Anthony.

  I headed for the music room, where Crude Oil practices most afternoons. The band director is very loose about letting kids hang around. Some years the music room attracts classical types and the room is full of cellos and rings with Beethoven and Bach. This is not that kind of year. The cellists are all afraid of Crude Oil and they practice at home.

  The long halls were hung with artwork. Watercolors had obviously been assigned, and seascapes and flower bouquets were everywhere. Oh, to be art editor of the yearbook instead, and have the simple task of reproducing artwork.

  Reproducing.

  The thought tickled my mind.

  Reproducing.

  In the band room, Crude Oil was exchanging some very crude jokes. They did not break off when I entered. They just grinned, delivering the truly disgusting punch line just as I came up to them. If it was staged to make me uncomfortable, it worked real well.

  Whit Moroso never speaks quickly. He stares without blinking. You can never tell if he sees into your soul … or has had too many drugs to focus his eyes. Sort of like Ashley.

  “Hi, Beethoven,” he said at last. “Slumming?”

  Crude Oil laughed.

  I blushed.

  “She’s auditioning for us,” said Carmine.

  “Lookit her notebook,” said Tommy. “She’s doing research.” Tommy is a hulking blonde, very noisy, very pushy. I hardly know Tommy. I don’t want to know Tommy either.

  Whit continued staring at me.

  He had a hardened look to him, as of someone who works outdoors ten hours a day. His hands were calloused. He wore a logger’s clothing: old wool shirts, their mismatched collars sticking up around his neck. Dark thick springy hair fell over all the collars. “So what do you want?” said Whit. Hard to remember he had twice in one week stood up for me.

  I swallowed. “Well. See, Shepherd Grenville—”

  I got no further. Utter disgust crossed Whit’s face. He turned away and continued playing his guitar. It sounded as if it was hooked up to every amplifier in the state. It was nice, however, to find someone who didn’t regard Shepherd Grenville with awe.

  Over the din I shouted, “Actually, Susan Hall. Me.”

  Whit paused. Silence rocked the room instead. “Yeah?”

  “I’ll be doing a feature on the school rock groups for the yearbook and I wanted to talk to you about Crude Oil.”

  Luce, the fourth member of Crude Oil, laughed. “Yearbooks are for preppy types like you, Beethoven. Artsy-craftsy girls who write poetry. Boys who take the soccer team to victory.”

  “This yearbook will have sections on every kid who’s involved in any kind of music at all,” I said.

  Whit found that hard to believe. I found that hard to believe.

  “Like what, exactly?” he said.

  I looked around for inspiration. The wall was covered with posters of Michael Jackson, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Dolly Parton. What a combination. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Shepherd told me I had to be innovative and unusual. I haven’t thought of anything yet, though.”

  Whit smiled at me quite nicely. “You will. And when you do, be careful. Sheppie will try to take all the credit.”

  My mouth fell open. I’m not sure if it was the unexpected smile or his attitude toward Shepherd.

  Luce and Carmine laughed. “Innocent little number, isn’t she?” Luce drummed and Carmine strummed and Tommy began singing meaningless syllables and a meaningless melody.

  “I never see you hanging around down here, Beethoven,” said Whit, as if this were quite mysterious. I didn’t quite tell him he was one quarter of the reason. “Here. I’ll give you the grand tour,” he offered. “Then you’ll know what to include in your innovative and unusual feature.” He took my arm and escorted me out of the band room. Luce and Tommy made remarks that were drowned out by their own racket, but I flushed anyhow.

  We went into a small, ill-lit room, about as big as the average bathroom. The walls were wrapped in technology: dials, switches, synthesizers, dangling wires, speakers, and headphones.

  “Electronic music lab,” said Whit. “Ever been here?”

  I shook my head. I detest noise. Electronic music is nothing but squealing and pounding.

  “I’ll play my best tape for you,” he offered shyly. “I wrote it for Electronic Music II.”

  Oh, no. A course strictly on a par with cooking and business math. A free credit toward graduation. But Whit acting shy was more than I could pass up. “That would be nice,” I lied.

  He put on a reel-to-reel tape and dimmed the lights in the little room even more. So the lights, then, were for effect, so you could be swallowed by the music. Whit hunched forward, watching his tapes circle.

  It would not do to show Whit boredom. That would be like showing fear to a Doberman pinscher. I had to pretend interest.

  From the tape came vicious sounds. Not music, but sounds, unlike any I had heard before, and they had personality, and emotion. Sounds swooped and curled around the room. Words began: strangely warped words that changed pitch and volume. Slowly the words stretched into a poem and the music/sound slammed the words against what felt like stone walls. The stones were sounds, but I felt them, I saw them, they were so vivid.

  Crush, said the tape voice. Crush.

  It was about bones that break, spirits that collapse.

  There was a sense of being chased. Caught. Dashed against something brutally solid.

  Crushed, whispered the victorious enemy.

  When the tape ended, I ached. I had to run my tongue over my lips, as if I had done something strenuous.

  I too had written a poem about the word crush. How different my thoughts of the word were! My crush was joy and love and hope and boys.

  Whit’s crush was terrible. Physical. Final.

  Ashley, Ashley, I thought. Were you crushed like that?

  I saw her frail little body hurled around by all the people she had met, all the failures she had sustained. I saw her flung against the walls of every roach-ridden motel she had slummed in.

  “You thought it was good, didn’t you?” said Whit eagerly.

  To his horror and mine, I began to cry.

  The Whits of this world are comfortable with any kind of assault but tears. He literally went white. I fought back the tears. “I’m really sorry, Whit. It just brought back memories.”

  Whit was appalled. “You must
have some terrible memories.”

  I could not share my sister with Whit, of all people. I reached for a Kleenex and found one and covered my eyes along with my nose.

  “I don’t have any memories in that tape,” said Whit. “It was just an assignment. We had three choices. We could portray breaking icicles, or summertime, or being crushed. I chose crush.”

  I put the Kleenex in my jacket pocket. “I hope you got an A plus.” And I hoped I would stay under control.

  “Yes. I’m really good at this,” he confided. “I love it. Both the technology and the music. It’s kind of a game, really. You get to combine electronics and mechanics with character and music and rhythm and patterns and when you get the assignment, it’s kind of exciting, because you don’t know where to begin, you have to start from nothing, and—”

  He turned his head sideways, like an embarrassed child. So much enthusiasm in his voice! More, I am sure, than he expected. Our eyes met. His shrank back behind his thick falling hair. He wants my good opinion, I realized. He’s afraid of me. Afraid I’ll slap him down where it counts.

  I touched his knee with my fingertips, to offer something—reassurance, perhaps, that I was trustworthy in spite of being on the yearbook staff. “Show me how it works?” I asked him.

  He smiled again. Nothing sardonic, nothing halfway. A wide, delighted smile. “I like to start with an idea,” he said, leaning forward, putting his hand on my knee, so that we were doubly connected. “You got a line from a poem you like or something? You need a poem to get launched.”

  How weird to think of tough Whit Moroso searching for good lines from poems.

  “Maybe something you wrote yourself,” he suggested.

  Never once had I shown anyone my journal.

  I pulled out the notebook.

  I handed it to Whit.

  He opened the pages and read aloud, “They say you’re nothing but a quitter.”

  Whit read it beautifully, his voice wrapping around the syllables. “Wow. That’s powerful. But it’ll be hard. I don’t know what I can do with it. It needs melody, which I didn’t have in the crush tape. We want something painful in here. But we want love in it, too, or else it wouldn’t be painful. So it should be …” he drifted into thought, and began nodding and bobbing to himself, adjusting dials, moving plugs, creating noise that he molded into sounds, taping his voice, combining tapes, arching and stretching them. “Luce!” he bellowed suddenly.

  I was so startled I nearly fell off my chair.

  “Tommy! Carmine!”

  Oh, no. Crammed into this tiny room with all four of them?

  They came in a heartbeat, full of wisecracks. “She too much for you, Whit?” said Carmine.

  “Shut up and listen,” said Whit. He played what he had so far. “Isn’t that great? What’ll we do with it next?”

  “Needs melody,” said Carmine instantly. Carmine put both hands on my shoulders and shifted me like furniture to the only available corner and left me there. They proceeded to forget me. Nodding in the mesmerized way common to musicians, they began adding guitar, chords, finding notes, reaching for melodies. They especially liked the word marvelous, and they made it ricochet around inside the tape, like bullets in the combat zone of the final line. Tommy, who was to my mind the most frightening of them all, began working up a second verse. He might be failing English, but he knew how to write. They say you’ve never known success, he sang softly, well, honey, then I’d like to suggest …”

  To think that such good creative musicians were trapped behind such scary faces.

  I had to rethink all four of them.

  And then rethink myself.

  I don’t know how long we were in the electronic music lab. Time vanished along with nervousness. We were caught in composition.

  They threw out their first version. “Sounds like somebody slurping in a dentist’s chair,” Luce complained of Whit’s background noise.

  They threw out their second version. Whit thought it sounded like a leaky space vehicle.

  The third time they had what they wanted. Throbbing emotional intensity that sucked up your thoughts, made you ache for the quitter, and for the family she had come home to hurt.

  “All right!” exclaimed Whit, laughing with pride when we listened to the final version. “Fantastic.” He grinned at me, and without warning gave me a one-armed hug. His face was very near mine and I thought—He’s handsome. I never knew that. I he was scary and ominous. But the smile was as warm and good as Cindy’s and his teeth had been through as many years of braces as Swan’s. “Listen, Beethoven,” he said eagerly, “we got to do this again. You busy tomorrow? Let’s do another poem. I like your stuff.”

  I felt an incredible surge of pleasure. Four boys looking at me with respect and interest. Thinking, this girl knows what she’s doing. Whit, asking me to join them. It made me giddy. What would Cindy think—square dull Beethoven running around with Crude Oil. Although with a haircut and different clothes, Whit wasn’t Crude Oil: He could be competition for Anthony if he felt like it. I tried to imagine Whit in a suit.

  “This is going to be a hit, Beethoven,” said Tommy. “We’ll sell a million. We’ll be stars. They’ll put our names in lights.”

  Tommy could not know there was no more terrible thing he could have said to me. For those lights—for those million records—my sister had destroyed herself. The boys hadn’t understood my poem. But then, how could they? How could anybody outside the family?

  I was going to cry. Bad enough I had wept in front of Whit. He might even have forgotten already. But I could not cry with all of them staring. I got up blindly, stumbling over Tommy’s huge feet. “I guess not.” I reached for the door knob. “Thanks, Whit, that was fun.” I ran out of the room. Grabbing my books, I left the practice room by the back exit, rushing down the halls, out of the dim school, into the darkness that had fallen since we began recording. Down the sidewalk. And when the sidewalk petered out, down the strip of poorly mowed grass that was neither lawn nor road. My shoes were too loose for running and my feet began to blister. My side ached.

  I could not believe I had done that.

  Run away twice in a week.

  Ducking behind hemlocks when car headlights appeared for fear it might be one of the band, and they’d see me, and laugh at me.

  What am I, anyway? I thought.

  And who is Ashley, that she can invade me like this?

  I stopped running because I could not breathe anymore. I walked the rest of the way home. Two more miles. Much much longer than I cared to walk. Ashley is my sister, I thought, and I love her. She will always invade me. Because I will always wish her life had been different.

  I crossed an intersection.

  I stepped up a curb.

  And I had the idea I needed. We would have the finest yearbook in the nation. Thanks to me, Susan Anne Hall. I would have a game plan to present at the next general meeting of the staff, and everyone would be impressed—Cindy, Anthony, Jeffrey, Emily, Swan—and Shepherd Grenville. Maybe even Harvard would be impressed.

  We would reproduce music.

  We would cut a record, and bind the slip jacket into the yearbook.

  Eight

  THE NEXT DAY I awoke with my crush on Anthony. I dressed for it, and carried it around with me like a journal of its own. But Anthony kept his distance. Or had it kept for him by Shepherd. It was a good name for her. She had the crook of her staff around Anthony’s neck, and like a sheep he obeyed.

  Anthony Fielding was beautiful. True centerfold material. I understood him well. A rich preppy: articulate, handsome, athletic, and amusing. He disliked difficulties, having met so few. Shepherd made it difficult for him to be with me, so instead of working his way around this problem, he simply dropped the whole thing.

  It hurt.

  But what really hurt was that Whit Moroso treated me with the same expressionless silence as before. After that intensely emotional sharing in the lab, there was nothing at all. And I had
no one to blame but myself.

  He had extended an invitation. I had refused as ungraciously as I had ever done anything.

  What had the four said to each other after I fled? Had they laughed? Had they been upset? Had they teased Whit, and had he sneered back? Had they tried to analyze my behavior, or had they lost interest the moment the door slammed?

  I wanted to hear that tape again.

  I wanted to hear my poem as produced by Whit and Carmine, with Tommy and Luce. I wanted to try out some of the other poems. And watch Whit again, and see his eagerness under all that insolent casual facade.

  I wanted Whit Moroso to like me.

  For the first time in my seventeen years I found myself in the grip of two crushes.

  The first, on Anthony, was traditional. Every girl had a crush on him at one time or another. He flirted readily and touched easily, and there was always the slight sense that he was encouraging you because he really did intend to ask you out.

  But few had crushes on Whit. Or at least, few admitted it.

  Of course Cindy did but I was not even sure what I felt was a crush. I only knew that I thought about him enough to qualify. Between thinking of both boys, it was a miracle I even remembered to attend class, let alone concentrate on the work at hand.

  Only a week ago, I had worn borrowed eye shadow that made me feel mysterious. What a laugh. I was the least mysterious girl in high school. But to me Whit was mysterious. Or so different from my usual friends that he qualified.

  Cindy, carefully staying away from the dangerous topic of Ashley, did not know about the topics of Anthony or Whit. Since those three consumed my entire consciousness, it was hard talking to Cindy at all. My best friend! And all my turmoil was hidden from her.

  My kingdom’s the kingdom of lonesome,

  If you’re looking for heartache,

  My friend, I have known some.

  I was not sure if I had made that up or not. It had a sort of country and western feel, as if I had heard it once when I accidentally got off my usual rock station for a minute. I entered it in my journal anyhow.