This Must Be the Place: A Novel (25 page)

“I was thinking,” he said, tightening the strings.
Fucking show-off,
Eugene thought, and the anger, the uncontrollable rage, flared in him like a gust of hot dry wind. “I was thinking the exact same thing, Dani: that just talking about the Beatles is too easy. So maybe it would be cool to play a Beatles song. You know, make it a little more interesting.”

Dreyer nodded appreciatively.

“They can’t be hard to learn. Especially the earlier stuff; those songs were all simple chord progressions.” He strummed a G chord that was out of tune sixteen different ways.
Doesn’t even know what he’s doing.
How could he? The guitar was brand new, had barely been played.

“Not to rain on your parade, Mr. Lu,” Dreyer said. “But where’s the group element?”

“Oh, we’d all play.” Andrew Lu was addressing the whole classroom now, lapping up the attention like a total whore. “You have a guitar, don’t you, Dani?”

Dani’s eyes darted back and forth, clearly confused that this was public knowledge, or, at least, knowledge to the likes of Andrew Lu. “Yeah. I’ve got a bass.”

“Oneida can take drums.” Andrew looked down at her for a second before tossing a glance at Eugene. “And Wendy can play tambourine or something.”

People laughed. Not loud. More like a ripple. Eugene knew they would (hell, it wasn’t
un
funny), and he didn’t blame the laughers. He’d been laughed at before—admittedly, never when the anger was rising and close to boiling, but it wasn’t the laughter that bothered him. It wasn’t the laughter that pushed him over.

It was Oneida.

As the ripple flattened to static chatter, Eugene looked over at Oneida. She was staring at Andrew Lu in shock. He was still talking with Dreyer; they were discussing the easiest Beatles songs to learn in time for the project deadline, and when Dreyer said, “Looking forward to it—great idea, Mr. Lu!” Oneida’s chin crumpled. It flattened out half a second later, but Eugene saw it, and in that half-second, whatever higher power guides and protects the would-be sex lives of horny teenage boys awarded him a flash of divine telepathy:
The band idea was Oneida’s
. For whatever reason, she’d told Andrew Lu, and Andrew Lu had taken all the credit.

Oneida, looking utterly dejected now, turned back to the center of their little circle of desks. And then she did something extraordinary: she looked at Eugene directly, without blinking or turning to break the gaze. Her eyes were tiny, defeated behind her glasses. She’d been betrayed and a part of her didn’t care that Eugene knew it. A part of her
wanted
Eugene to know it.

Eugene was instantly full, so happy and so angry he couldn’t keep still. He stood. Andrew Lu, still fussing with the gear heads, tightening when he should have been loosening, raised his head. He shrugged.

“Sorry, man, I didn’t mean anything by that.” He smiled. He had no
idea. How could he have no idea? Did he understand anything about honor among band mates, honor among history project groups? Honor, period?

“S’cool.” Eugene felt Oneida watching him and it made the anger feel less wrathful and more righteous. “I can play.” He held out his hand for the guitar. “C’mon, I won’t hurt it.”

Eugene and Andrew Lu faced each other from opposite shores on their island of desks.
He thinks this is a showdown
, Eugene thought, and smiled.
He thinks he can still beat me.

Andrew raised the guitar over his head, the strap catching for a moment on one of his ears. “Show me what you got,” he said.

Eugene slipped into the strap, adjusted the guitar so that it rested comfortably, and tuned the poor thing,
finally
. As he’d hoped, most of the class had noticed that something a thousand times more interesting than their particular history project was transpiring and had turned in their chairs to watch. Even Dreyer, on the other side of the room, was glancing in his direction.

He didn’t know too many songs. The only complete lick he could play relatively well was “Blister in the Sun.” He could remember Patricia teaching it to him, years ago, before Brooklyn—remembered how at first she’d hunched over him from behind, moving his fingers on the strings, then stood in front of him and sang and clapped and jumped up and down on her bed, more screaming than singing the lyrics.

He’d played it for hours, for days, for months; and now, in seventh-period U.S. history, muscle memory served him well. If he had to know only one lick, it was a great lick to know—the kind everyone recognizes even if they don’t know the song, and half the class joined in on the hand claps. Eugene could still feel Oneida watching him, her gaze warming the back of his neck like the sun. Andrew Lu was nodding, blinking, pretending he knew something about music or what he was hearing or how to treat people.

Or how to treat a guitar, Eugene thought sadly. It was a good guitar, he could tell; a little stiff, very new, but it had a nice warm sound. And Andrew Lu would screw with its soul until it was a sad, hollow, broken box. What Eugene had planned for the guitar, then, was really an act of pity.

What,
Eugene thought,
would Pete Townshend do?

As the class quick-clapped at the end of the phrase, he grabbed the guitar by the neck with both hands, lifted it, and swung it into the floor with all the force he could muster.

It rang, splintering with a sound like a dropped cartoon piano. Then Andrew Lu swung his fist into Eugene’s right eye and Eugene went down, into the heap of nylon and tinder from the first guitar mercy killing ever to take place at Ruby Falls High. There was some yelling, a lot of loud talking. He heard Dreyer’s major-general voice telling them all to pull themselves together, to
shut up
, while she called the front office. Eugene lifted his head—oh his
head
, his head felt like a bag of wet sand—and saw Oneida watching him, fingers curled over the edge of her desk, her eyes enormous. As he watched, a tiny smile spread across her lips.

“Hi,” he said to her. He raised one spindly arm in triumph.

I am Wendy,
he thought;
hear me roar
.

“Since when have I ever been grounded?” Eugene poked at the pile of green beans on his dinner plate. “Since when did you ever ground Patricia?”

“Patricia never pulled a Hendrix in her history class.” His mother cleared her throat. Maggie Wendell was having a hard time keeping a straight face.

“So what’s this kid’s deal? He some kind of douchebag?” Patricia, still wearing her McDonald’s uniform, stank of grease. Her hair was wound in two white-blond braids over her ears. She inhaled sharply. “Is he your competition?”

Eugene shrugged. How did his sister know this shit? Was it a girl thing, or was his sister uniquely psychic?

“Don’t tell me this is about a girl.” His mother put her utensils down with a click.

“What?” Eugene’s voice jumped an octave. “How do you—how do you know this shit?”

“I had a feeling.” Maggie resumed eating, and said through a full
mouth, “You’re a fifteen-year-old boy, Eugene. Everything is about girls. Am I right?”

Eugene felt his cheeks and forehead getting warm. Wendy wouldn’t get embarrassed so easily, he thought; but of course, at home, Wendy didn’t exist.

Astor came back from the kitchen with two bottles of beer and handed one to Maggie before sitting down. He had barely spoken since they showed up at the principal’s office. Eugene and Andrew Lu had waited side by side in those crappy plastic chairs outside Middleton’s door while both sets of parents discussed with the principal what, precisely, had happened and what, precisely, ought to be done about it. Eugene had stopped trying to figure out what they were saying and was staring instead at his reflection in the glass partition that separated them from the front hall. He adored his black eye. The nurse had given him an ice pack but he hated to obscure the amazing eggplant-colored bruise that was spreading from his brow to the side of his nose.

Andrew kept exhaling violently, like he wanted to say something but his anger, too great to verbalize, would only come out in gusts of air.

“Thanks for the shiner, Lu.” Eugene couldn’t help himself.

Andrew Lu hated him. Eugene could feel it, physically, and it amazed him; no one, to his knowledge, had ever felt this strongly about him for any reason, good or bad. He wanted to say to Andrew:
Dude, what are you so angry about? So I broke your guitar. You deserved it. Let’s remember who was a total dick in this situation first
. But Andrew Lu didn’t look like he was in any mood to discuss his crimes—and their punishments—rationally, so Eugene slumped in his crappy plastic chair and grinned at his reflection.

They weren’t called into the office until the terms of penance had been agreed upon, which seemed insanely undemocratic to Eugene. He would pay the Lus for the guitar, he would apologize to Dreyer for disrupting her class, and he would apologize to Andrew Lu, right then and there.

Andrew’s parents were both wearing suits and vaguely confused, angry expressions. Andrew’s mother, with her short spiky hair, looked a lot like her son.

“Make it good, Gene,” Eugene’s mother said, poking him gently in the ribs. He looked at Astor, whose eyes were narrowed. Next to the Lus, his parents—in their jeans and T-shirts, their sandals, his mother’s tattoo peeking under her shirtsleeve—looked like teenagers. Pride fluttered in Eugene’s chest.

“I’m sorry I smashed your guitar,” he said. He flicked his eyes up to meet Andrew’s on the last word and was surprised to feel a stab of true guilt in his heart. Well, it
had
been a nice guitar.

“But why?” Mr. Lu leaned forward and Eugene flinched. “Why did you smash his guitar? What did my son ever do to you?”

Eugene’s hands found their way into his pockets and he shrugged, staring at Middleton’s ugly ass carpet. “Nothing,” he said, and thought,
To me. He didn’t do anything to me.

“Nothing,” was Astor’s first word to Eugene on the entire subject. He sat down at the head of the dinner table across from his wife and took a long pull of beer. “Andrew Lu did nothing to you. You pulverized a three-hundred-dollar guitar over—and I quote—
nothing
.”

Eugene screwed up his face. The tone of his father’s voice had brought an instant pricking warmth to his eyes.

“No shit, kid,” Astor said.

“Dude,” said Patricia. “You are so dead.”

“Not necessarily,” Maggie said, and Eugene looked up to see a combative, fleeting look pass between his parents.

“You want to tell me why you really did it? Don’t think you’re not grounded. You’re not going to get out of jail free, but you might get parole for good behavior.” Astor stabbed at the beans on his plate with his fork. Eugene had never seen his father act quite so authoritatively. It was frightening, disturbing—since when had the Wendell household become a place where people were
so dead
?

“I—” Eugene coughed, his voice catching. “I smashed his guitar because it was clear that he didn’t know how to treat it with respect.”

Patricia laughed out loud.

“Can you believe this kid?” she said, addressing Astor. Astor gave her a short, withering glare and she turned back to her plate, raising her eyebrows.

“There’s more,” Eugene said. “He
betrayed
this . . . girl. The girl who
was here last Sunday. He stole her idea, told the teacher it was his, and then took all the credit. And she was really—I could tell she was really upset—so when the opportunity to knock this
douchebag
down a peg came—yeah, I took it. And I’m not sorry at all.” He crossed his arms and stared defiantly down at his mostly full plate.

“Oh my God,” said Patricia, and laughed again.

Eugene dared to look over at his mother first, who was struggling even harder to keep from laughing. Her dark eyes were shining. He followed her gaze when she focused from Eugene to Astor, and
thank God
, Astor was smiling too, smiling the large, toothy grin Eugene had inherited from him.

“Grounded until next weekend,” he said, and took another swig of beer. “And you owe me three hundred bucks.”

11
Real Boys and Girl Friends