Californium (17 page)

After dinner, Mrs. D gives us fig bars for dessert and we go back to the Two-Car Studio. Treat's munching away but I wait until Keith takes a bite of his. “What's it taste like?”

He looks at it. “It doesn't taste like a Fig Newton.”

“It's a fig bar,” Treat says.

Keith shrugs. “I thought that meant it was a big Fig Newton.”

“Do they play country music in Soviet Georgia?”

“I don't know what that means,” Keith says. He holds the fig bar out to Treat. “But whatever this is, I don't want it.”

Treat snatches it from Keith like a manager taking the ball from a pitcher who just blew a two-run lead. He stuffs the whole thing in his mouth and asks me about the new song.

“There isn't one.” I toss the pad onto a folding chair.

Treat picks it up and looks everything over. He taps one of my doodles. “What's this? The ‘Terrorize Your Neighbor Tour'?”

“Nothing.”

“It's like a concert poster.” Treat holds it up for Keith to see and adds, “‘Coming Soon to a Backyard Near You.'” He nods and looks at me. “This is what we'll do. A backyard party. Right here.”

“Like Ted Three?” Keith says.

“No,” Treat says. “Not like anything else. It can't be a secret. DikNixon is coming to your block. What could be scarier than that?”

“No one showing up,” I say.

“Everybody will show up,” Treat says. “Petrakis will bring his ‘boys'—”

“And you can invite Astrid,” Keith says. “If she comes, everyone will.”

If I had stupid friends, I could say something like
I don't see how one person can make such a difference.
But everybody knows that if the captain of varsity cheer says she's going to your party, everyone who matters goes to your party. “Why do
I
have to invite her?”

Keith is pacing and grinning. “You talk to her all the time. You told me you said hi to her today and she smiled at you.”

Treat slaps me on the shoulder. “It has to be you.”

“It's not that easy.”

Mr. D comes out to the studio, apologizing because he has to grab one of the boxes from our sound wall and take it inside.

Treat holds up the notepad. “We're having a party.”

Instead of picking up the box, Mr. D lets his hands rest on it and looks at Treat. “Here? What kind of a party?”

Treat throws his hands out real wide. “A huge party in the backyard.”

“People from your classes?”

“People from the whole school,” Keith says.

Mr. D nods. “Uh-huh. And how can three freshmen throw a party and have the whole school actually show up?”

“The band,” Treat says. “They'll come to hear our band.”

Mr. D looks up at the rafters, really going over it in his mind,
undoing and redoing his ponytail. “I really want this to happen for you, son.” His face is all concentration, like he's trying to get the ponytail just right. “But I don't see it working out that easy.”

Treat throws his arms up this time. “Jesus, Lyle. You're such a fascist.”

“I didn't say no, Treat. I just want to make sure it works.”

“It'll work.”

“Your dad might be right,” I say.

“You know what, guys?” Mr. D smacks one of the boxes like,
Here it is:
“Free beer. If you've got beer, it's a party. Even people who don't like beer, people who have never even drank beer, will come because they know if there's beer, there's a party. All those seniors will know that, and they'll come. And once you get the seniors, it's a chain reaction.”

“We can put it on the flyer,” Keith says.

“No, you don't,” Mr. D says. “You tell people there's going to be free beer. But you don't write it down.”

“Can we do that?” I say.

“I'll take care of it,” Mr. D says. “I'll buy enough so everybody gets one.”

Keith's smiling and even Treat's starting to. But not me. “No. I mean, can't you get in trouble for that?”

Mr. D picks up a box and shakes his head. “Oh, not if it's nonalcoholic.”

“Won't people know it's fake?”

Mr. D walks to the door of the house and opens it. “Only if they can read German.”

“I thought you drank real beer,” Treat says.

“I used to,” Mr. D says, stepping into the house. “Not anymore.” He nods a
See ya later
and the door closes.

Instead of going back to work on our music, we make a flyer. We put the DikNixon logo across the top with a picture of Treat pasted below. It looks real fierce the way his Mohawk stands as tall as the band name. At the bottom, we paste on letters we've ripped out of Mr. Dumovitch's
Rolling Stone
magazines:
Terrorize Your Neighbor Tour. Saturday, Nov 6, 8
PM
. At the very bottom, Treat puts his address and a map, and we give it to Mr. D to make copies for us.

It's almost ten at night by the time we're done with the flyer, and Keith's ready to go home, probably so he can call Edie and tell her everything.

“We really need to practice more,” I say and Keith groans. “We've only got two weeks.”

Treat nods. “Every spare second.”

“Wait,” Keith says. “What about Halloween? It's next week.”

Treat picks up the bass and pushes it at Keith. “What are you, five? You're not going trick-or-treating.”

Keith looks at me. “I just meant parties and stuff.”

“We're getting ready for a better party,” I say. “Our own party.”

Keith sighs and puts the strap over his head, mumbling something about still being here at midnight.

Treat picks up the bullhorn. “You can call your girlfriend tomorrow.”

“He doesn't have a girlfriend.” I look at Keith. “Do you?”

“No,” Keith says. “But Edie's our publicity person. We should tell her.”

“Tomorrow,” Treat says. “It's not like she's more important than Astrid.”

“What?” I say. “We've got beer now. That'll suck in the best people.”

Treat looks relaxed and understanding. “Look, Reece, we still need her. Even if she says no, she's going to find out you're in a band. Then you won't be the little boy next door. You'll be the guy next door. The guy in a band.”

Keith's nodding. “I wish Astrid knew my name. I'm just the cute friend of the guy next door who's in the cool band.”

My head's trying to go along with all this great stuff that happens
after,
but my stomach is already churning. Now I have to be the nobody freshman who says,
Happy Monday—here's a flyer for my band's gig.
“Fine,” I say, “as long as we keep practicing. I don't want people saying they were let down by DikNixon.”

S
aturday morning my dad's working an early shift and my mom's got Colleen with her at Brendan's football game. I get the sewing kit out of the upstairs hall closet and sit down right there on the floor. I've seen my mom thread a needle tons of times with my baseball uniforms in her lap, and that part goes smooth. The problem is getting the needle through a patch and then through the jacket. Pushing hard only makes the back end of the needle stab my thumb, the front end just standing there, the GBH patch repelling it like a shield.

Two bent needles and a throbbing thumb later, Colleen comes tromping up the stairs and stops, her red hair in pigtails on top of her head, making her look like a little alien. “What are you doing, Reece?”

“You guys are back?”

She nods. “Mom says you need to get Brendan's mouth thing for me.”

“His mouthpiece?” I say, and she nods. “It's in the bathroom.”

She runs past me down the hall.

“Reece?” My mom's in the hallway now. Her hair is pulled back and braided the way she always does on the weekend or when she's cleaning house. You know, all business but kind of relaxed too. “What's the matter?”

There's no way to hide the jacket, or even the patch. “Nothing.”

She looks at the GBH patch and waits.

“GBH is a band,” I say and stand up. “Guitar, Bass, and Harmony.”

She takes the patch and rubs it with her thumb. “These are hard to sew. I'll do it tonight.”

“That's okay. Just tell me what the trick is.”

Colleen comes out of the bathroom with the mouthpiece and stands next to me. “How about this?” my mom says. “I'll let Brendan go to the pizza party after the game with his team, and we'll come back here and have a sewing lesson.”

Colleen's whole head turns into a smile. “Hooray!” she yells, and what can I say? How do you tell your little sister not to be happy and your mom
no thanks
for being nice?

.

As soon as she gets back, my mom sets everything up in the living room. Me and Colleen are on the couch with a couple pieces of practice cloth. My mom's on the easy chair with my jacket and the GBH and TSOL patches. I knew the pope and JFK would be watching over us from the dining room, so I stashed the Dead Kennedys patch in my room before my mom got back. I'll do that one later, on my own.

All the Saturday noise of people mowing their lawns or working on their cars gets hushed out as me and Colleen each sew a piece of red cloth onto a piece of white cloth. We're real serious, paying total attention to everything Mom says. It's amazing how a tiny little string loops through a piece of cloth, over to the other, then back again, getting stronger at each loop until it's holding the two pieces together so tight they're pretty much one.

Mom holds up my jacket. “I'm about done with Guitar, Bass, and . . . ?”

“Harmony.”

“Harmony.” She nods. “Do you want to try True Sounds of—”

“Liberty,” I say, and she smiles. “Sure.”

Mom starts unhooking the TSOL patch from the shoulder. “Where did you get all these safety pins?”

“They're not yours. Treat gave them to me.”

“But why do you need so many?”

There's like twenty for each patch because it looks more punk that way, but she's not getting me to say that. “Emergencies,” I say.

“Emergencies,” she says like she should have known. “I see.”

My dad comes rattling through the front door just then, stone-faced until he sees all the cloth and thread. “What's this?”

“A little sewing lesson,” Mom says.

He walks over and kisses her on the cheek; then he picks up the Packy jacket like he's never seen it before. He stares at the TSOL patch with its Statue of Liberty head and it's like somebody asked him the square root of 1776.

“True Sounds of Liberty,” Mom says.

“True Sons of Liberty?” he says.

I want to sound tough, be punk rock and defiant, except there's a needle and a spool of thread in my lap. “Sounds,” I say.

“Look at mine,” Colleen says, holding up her cloth, the threads loose and way too far apart.

“Oh, that's good, Colleen,” Mom says. “Isn't it, Pat?”

He nods the way he does when Brendan gets a 71 on a math test and brings it home like a dog with a dead squirrel. “That's lovely, sweetheart.” He looks back at me. “Where's your Yankees jacket?”

I tell him upstairs but he keeps looking at me until I say, “It's fine.”

Mom stands up. “Are you hungry, Pat?”

He keeps his eyes on the jacket. “What's with all the safety pins?”

“For emergencies,” Mom says all matter-of-fact. She pulls the jacket from him, tossing it to me on her way to the kitchen. “Come on. I'll fry you up some tomatoes before I get lunch started.”

.

On the way to the stairs after Algebra on Monday, Edie says she's already bragged to five people about our show in San Diego and how we got out of there before the cops could arrest us. Just thinking how the rumor will be bouncing around at the speed of light—van Doren and Petrakis and Astrid all connecting us to DikNixon—makes me want to give Edie a big hug, my arms wrapping around her, my breath blowing across the back of her neck because her hair is short and there'd be nothing between her skin and my mouth.

I'm staring, saying nothing, just enjoying the niceness, when Edie's head goes a little sideways and her eyes narrow a little. “What?” she says, like she knows what I'm thinking.

“Nothing, except thanks, you know, for seeing us play Friday.” I lean in close and whisper, “How many songs did we play?”

Her eyes go big and round and she whispers back, “Five.” Then she puts on this fake voice. “Oh, and thanks again for letting us hitch a ride with you to San Diego. I don't know if we could have gotten there otherwise.”

We laugh and Edie says she and Cherise will help us pass out party flyers.

“How do you know about the party?”

She says Keith told her, then looks me up and down, sort of squinting. “Is that okay?”

We get to the stairs and stop. “Yeah,” I say without looking at her. “There's nothing to be mad about.”

Edie laughs. “‘Mad' means ‘crazy.' But I'm glad you're not crazy.”

I laugh. “Well, I'd be mad to be angry. Keith's your friend too.”

“Good.” She pulls a note out of her folder and hands it to me. “Then can you give this to him? Cherise and I are going to eat in the cafeteria today so we can keep talking you guys up.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

“Don't read it.”

I put it in my pocket and pop my hand up like a magician who's just made a scarf disappear.

“Good,” she says. She backs up a few steps to the stream of
people headed up the stairs, slips in with a turn, and just like that, disappears.

.

Before English, Treat is crouched down in front of Mrs. Reisdorf's desk scribbling
>I<
on the front with a pencil. It's no bigger than a radio station bumper sticker, but it's the teacher's desk. Mrs. Reisdorf isn't in the room and everyone floating in looks at Treat for a second, then sits down like they don't see a thing. It's weird, you know, how a guy that big can be doing something this obvious and thirty people are looking around at each other or talking in pairs and doing everything they can not to see him.

Treat stands up when he's done and gives it a good look. “Hey, Reece,” he says without looking back at me. “Is it dark enough?”

“Yeah, it's fine.”

“Is it straight?”

I glance at the doorway for Mrs. Reisdorf. “Are you mad?”

Treat laughs and walks to his seat. “Could've gone bigger, huh?”

“You could've got caught.”

The Mohawk shakes me off. “We've got a sub.”

“It doesn't matter who catches you.”

“He asked me where the bathroom was, and I said by the staircase.”

“But there's one right here in the breezeway.”

He looks at me, like,
Do I need to explain this?

“Oh,” I say and relax a little. “Did he say where Mrs. Reisdorf is?”

“Divorce court,” Penny Martin says. She's in the desk in front of Treat and turns sideways. “Her husband's totally gay. Everybody knows.”

It's weird how you never think of your teachers existing outside of school. How they have real lives and all. Even when me and Keith saw Mr. Krueger in the staff parking lot getting into this little MG convertible, I never thought about him actually pulling up next to me at a stoplight or cruising around on a Friday night with his wife next to him.

I try to imagine what Mrs. Reisdorf looked like when she first got married, before her eyes were red and puffy like they are a lot of the time now and instead of her hair being short and flat, maybe in a beehive or flipping around like Jackie Kennedy's. “Why would a gay guy get married in the first place?” I say.

“He probably didn't know he was gay,” Penny says. “Happens all the time. He's in total denial and she just thinks he doesn't touch her because he's a gentleman.”

“What about their honeymoon?” Treat says. “She'd know then.”

“He probably faked it,” Penny says.

I give that a “ha” and look at Treat. “Guys can't fake it.”

Treat leans back in his seat. “People fake stuff all the time. Especially if they think it's what they're supposed to do.”

Our sub comes rushing in, saying sorry he's late, and we start a read-around. Since I'm in a middle row, I've got a few pages before my turn, which makes it hard to follow along and not think
about Mrs. Reisdorf being in love with some guy who hardly notices her. At least, not in the right ways.

After class, Treat reminds me to ask Astrid to the party, but instead of looking for her on the way to Spanish, I'm still thinking about Mrs. Reisdorf. What happens when she's not Mrs. Reisdorf anymore? I mean, not what do we call her, but who does she become when she's not the person she thought she was? It tickles my brain until I see Astrid, her white stockings clinging tight to her legs and disappearing into her Catholic schoolgirl skirt. She squints at me a little; then this half smile creeps out and she says, “Happy Monday.”

My cheeks pull at my mouth, trying to stretch it to a smile, but I'm fighting it, keeping it tight and closed so I don't look stupid or say something stupid. She keeps staring and my hand shoots up on its own and it's all I can do to stop myself from waving like a kid seeing Mickey Mouse for the first time. I do this little pulse, forward and back, like the pope or something, like I'm blessing her somehow, and keep walking.

It's so dumb, so not what I'd wanted to do, that I'm too embarrassed to mention it until after lunch, after PE, when it's just me and Keith in the locker room.

“She talked to you first?” He grabs my wrist and stops me from stuffing my gym clothes into the locker. “She's not supposed to do that.”

“Yeah, but the hand thing—”

“That's nothing. You didn't say anything, right?”

I snap my lock shut. “No. Nothing.”

Keith shuts his locker. “You played it perfect.”

“Doing nothing doesn't work,” I say. “I've already done plenty of that.”

“Nothing can be something.” Keith pulls a note out of his back pocket, unfolds it, and puts it on the bench between us. “Look.”

“You want me to read this?”

Keith shakes his head. “You're not supposed to, but if I drop it and don't realize for a minute—” He starts down the row of lockers to the bathroom. “I'll be right back. I'm going to check my hair.”

Even without reading the note, you can tell a girl wrote it. It's in blue ink and swirly and neat, though a lot shorter than you might expect:

Keith,

Even if Reece doesn't ask Astrid to the party, you guys still have to play. Cherise thinks that if she drinks a beer and Treat is real happy like he was after you guys played Friday, she'll be able to talk to him.

Your friend,

Edie

P.S. Find out what Treat is going to wear because Cherise wants to try and wear something like it.

I pick the note up and look harder at
Your friend.

A second later, Keith comes around the corner of the lockers. “See?”

“Cherise likes Treat?”

Keith takes the note, folds it up, and stuffs it in his back pocket. “Yep. He pretty much ignores her and acts weird and she thinks he's a fox. Makes about as much sense as algebra.”

Normally, we're at the door by now, waiting for the bell to ring, but today we keep standing there. “What about you? Doesn't Edie like you?”

“What's it look like?” Keith says.

“Sorry.”

“It's okay. I bet you if I'd been like Treat, she'd like me.” He picks up his backpack. “That's why Astrid talked to you. How many guys
don't
notice Astrid? You're like Fonzie.”

The bell rings and we walk out onto the quad, people zooming by everywhere, and it's like me and Keith are invisible because we can talk about anything and no one is going to notice us.

“There's one other possibility,” Keith says. “Maybe Astrid knows you're in DikNixon and just thinks she should be nice to you.”

“Gee, thanks,” I say.

“It's not a bad thing,” he says. “And as soon as she sees us play, she'll be all Twinkie for you.”

I'm trying to figure out if Keith knows something cool that I don't or if he's made this up on the spot. “Artificial colors and ingredients?”

Keith shakes his head. “Soft on the outside. Creamy on the inside.” He grins and heads off to sixth period.

It's weird. Keith's pretty happy for a guy who keeps getting notes from the girl he likes that pretty much ignore him to talk about his friend and his band that isn't exactly real. I guess I'd have to be mad not to feel good about everything too, even if all the artificial colors and ingredients are starting to make me nervous.