Five Flavors of Dumb (30 page)

With the stakes so high, it was a no-brainer: Contractually, we’d get sued without him; musically, we’d be retaining one scene-stealing lead singer instead of an air-guitarist with limited acting skills. It was such an easy call that I waited to see which of us would fold first, swallow our pride and accept Josh’s terms for the greater good of the band. I just couldn’t bring myself to be that person.

The problem was, neither could Ed, or Kallie, or Tash, or even Will. And Josh didn’t wait for us to reconsider.

The second he walked out the door, I expected someone to run after him and drag him back, kicking and screaming if necessary. I even had half a mind to do it myself, only the other half was stronger. So instead of tracking down our dysfunctional lead singer, we looked at each other like developing Plan B was top priority.

For once, I knew exactly what it should be.

I pulled out my cell phone and speed-dialed Mom, then thrust the phone at Ed. “Who’s answering?” I asked.

Ed raised an eyebrow. “How the heck would—Oh, hi there, Mrs. Vaughan!” He turned an adorable shade of scarlet as he realized he’d just sort of sworn at my mother. “Actually, I’m not sure what I want,” he said, visibly deflating.

“Ask her if Finn has Dad’s cell.”

Ed relayed the question, then nodded vigorously. “Oh, good. In that case—”

I snatched the phone from him and hung up. There wasn’t time for polite good-byes, although I made a mental note to tell Mom it wasn’t Ed’s fault he’d hung up on her. I dialed Dad’s number and shoved it back at Ed. “Tell Finn we need him here right now.”

Ed was still bright red, and had begun pacing around the room in tiny circles. I got the feeling I was killing him softly, but it was already 7:55, and although I knew all rock shows started late, I figured that wasn’t really our call to make.

“Finn? Finn?” cried Ed. “Hi. It’s Ed.”

Ed grimaced as he tried to make out Finn’s reply. Eventually he gave up and held the phone away from his ear. “It’s really hard to hear him,” he complained.

I rolled my eyes. “Welcome to my world.”

“Oh, right. I see what you mean.” Ed brought the phone back to his ear. “Look Finn, we need you here right now. Josh has bailed and we need a fifth member. . . . Oh, I see. Well, never mind.”

“What?” I exploded. “What’s going on?”

“Finn’s hanging out with Grace in Pacific Place Mall. He says it’d take at least ten minutes to get here.”

“Then tell him to leave now!”

“She says you need to leave now. . . . What’s that? A poop. Right now? Oh.” Ed frowned. “Finn says make that fifteen minutes.”

“Tell him forget the poop. Mom and Dad can deal with it when he gets here.”

Finn obviously heard me well enough, because Ed immediately shook his head. “He says no go. This is his chance to show that he’s a responsible babysitter.”

I ripped the phone away from Ed and gave it to Tash, who took over seamlessly: “Hi Finn, it’s . . . You are? . . . Great!” She hung up. “He’s on his way,” she said triumphantly.

While Ed struggled to work out what had happened, Kallie appeared before me, tugging her sleeves anxiously. “What’s Finn going to play?” she asked.

I sighed, but there was no use in lying at this stage. “He’s going to play guitar.”

“So who’ll be singing?”

“You know who’ll be singing, Kallie.”

Her eyes grew wide and she shook her head. “I can’t. I couldn’t. I’m just . . . not like Josh.”

“Which is exactly why you’re still here and he’s not.” I could feel her pulling away, taking refuge in her pessimism. “You can do this, Kallie, I know you can. I’ve seen you mouthing the words to the songs. Josh has pushed you around for too long. It’s time to push back.”

Before Kallie could respond, Mike poked his head through the door. “You’re on in three,” he shouted. When I pretended not to understand, he held up three fingers helpfully.

Then the games really began.

“Okay, Ed,” I said. “Mike doesn’t know I can understand him, so from now on I need you to act like you’re interpreting for me. I’ll watch his lips carefully, so don’t worry about signing correctly, just drag it out as long as you can.”

Ed twirled his drumsticks and raised his thumbs in agreement.

Next I sent Kallie to the ladies’ room so she wouldn’t be around when Mike came to find out why we hadn’t gone onstage. After Ed and I had spent thirty seconds going back and forth with meaningless signs, Ed informed Mike that Kallie had stage fright and was barfing in the bathroom. (Coincidentally, this turned out to be true.)

A couple minutes later, Mike reappeared, and this time Will was fixing a new string to his guitar. Mike threw his hands up in disgust, but he left without saying a word.

After three more minutes he loomed in the doorway and I knew we wouldn’t be able to fob him off again. I don’t think he really cared when we started, but by now he had an inkling that something was wrong, and he wasn’t about to make it easy for us.

“You’ve got two minutes. No excuses. I don’t care if you’re missing strings or heaving all over the stage, you get your asses up there. Hear me?”

Ed tried calling Finn again, but there was no answer. I knew he’d be racing over, but we’d exhausted our quota of delaying tactics, and there could be no more excuses. I left Dumb warming up, and ran into the auditorium to search for Finn.

It was crammed full, everyone facing the empty stage in readiness for something magical to occur. I couldn’t see over them to the entrance, so I began looking for a pathway through them, which is when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun around.

“Where’s your fifth?” shouted Mike, wiggling his hands and fingers in a poor approximation of sign language. I pulled away, hurried back to the greenroom, but he stayed right behind me, trailing me like a bloodhound.

“Where’s your fifth?” he bellowed as we entered the room.

“There are just four now,” said Ed calmly.

“The contract says five. And I’m going to hold you to it.”

“Then we won’t perform,” Tash sneered.

Mike’s nostrils flared. “If you bail now, you’re finished, and you know it. You’ll be blacklisted on every TV and radio station across the country. This is an adult business. It’s time you kids understood that.”

Kallie stepped into the fray, thrust her guitar into my hands. “There. Now we’ve got five.”

“What?” muttered Mike.

“Piper is our new guitarist.”

“Her? But she’s deaf. She can’t even—”

Mike’s appraisal of my qualifications came to an abrupt halt as Tash’s guitar caught him squarely in the gut. “That’s discrimination, and if you don’t pay us, we’ll let everyone know what you just said.”

Mike wasn’t impressed. “Don’t screw with me. Discrimination or not, she’s deaf. In case you’ve forgotten, I negotiated with her, and she can’t even speak.”

I’d heard enough. “Yes, I can. And I can read your lips too.” Mike staggered back like he’d been Tasered. “So before you say anything else that will make me hate you even more, listen very carefully. I can feel music just as well as you can hear it. And if you want to debate that, go ahead—my mom’s a lawyer.”

Mike stared at me, weighing up his options. He wanted to win this showdown—he
had
to—but he also knew his head would be on the chopping block if we bailed. After all, he was the one who’d signed us up. Finally he shook his head and waved his arm toward the door. “Go ahead, then. The stage is through there. Have a great set.”

No one moved. We’d never actually gotten around to discussing details like who should go on first, but even if we had, it would have been irrelevant. Because what Mike had realized—and we’d somehow overlooked in our quest to outwit him—was that we were about to face a manic crowd of over a thousand people with a guitarist who’d never touched a guitar in her life, and a lead singer who’d grown afraid of her own voice. I could already imagine Mike snapping souvenir photos as the crowd lynched us midway through our first song.

There was no other choice but to walk through that door, past Mike’s self-congratulatory grin, away from the safety of the greenroom. And that was when panic truly set in. I couldn’t move my feet—could barely
feel
them—and I was hyperventilating. I was sure I was about to hurl, but then Ed was next to me, holding my hand. Step by laborious step he guided me from the greenroom and along the corridor leading to the stage.

“I can’t do it, Ed. Oh God Oh God Oh God I can’t do it.”

Ed squeezed my hand just once and looked at me, his eyes so wise and reassuring. “I’m going to unplug your amp. Just make sure you can see me. Watch my sticks.”

“No, I can’t.”

“You
can
. You can do this. You can do anything. You’re amazing.”

Ed wrapped his hand behind my head and pulled me toward him, kissed me with a passion that bordered on madness. I kissed him back with interest, and it wasn’t until I was standing beside his drum set onstage that I was again fully conscious of what was going on.

My heart was busting out of my chest. I felt like there wasn’t enough air left in the building. And worst of all there was a guitar in my hands, and I couldn’t even remember how it had gotten there.

In my borderline hallucinatory state, I even thought I saw Josh leap onto the stage and wrestle the microphone stand from Kallie.

The crowd continued to cheer like this was part of the show—a reenactment of Tuesday’s meltdown, perhaps—but everyone onstage had frozen. Kallie stared longingly at the microphone.

Josh turned toward us, careful to cover the microphone with his hand. Spotlights gave him a demonic silhouette, and when he opened his mouth I struggled to lip-read because his face was in shadow. “Didn’t really . . . gone . . . right?” I worked out the gist of what he was saying, but no one responded. “Wait . . . what’s Kallie . . . vocals . . . kidding!”

Will stepped forward, and I just knew he was going to tell Kallie to leave the stage, or to retrieve her guitar from me. I hated feeling so completely unable to stop what was happening. But in the glare of the spotlights I read his lips perfectly: “Leave the stage, Josh. You’re done.”

Josh was undeterred. “I
am
. . . band.”

As he pulled back his hair, the look on Will’s face was one I’d never seen before. It was the look of someone beginning to discover his own power. “No, Josh. You
were
the band. And if you don’t give Kallie that microphone, we’ll tell the bouncers to remove you from the stage.”

Josh just laughed. He removed his hand from the microphone, filling the air with the whine of feedback, then turned to the crowd. “Kallie . . . joke . . . unplugged . . . amp . . . useless,” I heard over the loudspeakers, but it was even harder to follow him now than before. He paused to glance behind him, like he expected us to be applauding. And then he spotted me. “
Piper?
” He did a double take, whipped around to share the joke with the audience: “. . . manager . . . guitar . . . deaf!”

I felt the weight of a thousand pairs of eyes. I didn’t need to hear his words to know what he’d just said. He was Josh, and I was an obstacle—there were no other variables in this equation.

I could have left the stage then and never looked back—no one would have blamed me—but I didn’t. And it wasn’t because I belonged there, or because I had pink hair. It was because I no longer carried the gene necessary to back down. In two months I’d faced more crap than Josh Cooke could begin to imagine, and someone as worthless as him was simply incapable of bringing me down. And because I needed him to know that, I told him in the only way I knew how.

I pity you,
I signed, hoping that even if only two people understood me, the message would spread like wildfire.

Josh snorted contemptuously, but he was forcing it. He hated not knowing what I’d said, being out of the loop like that. He hadn’t looked at the audience in ages, and it dawned on me this had nothing to do with reclaiming his former role anymore, or even stating his case to the crowd. It was about bringing us all down with him.

The crowd was booing now. I could feel the persistent hum growing more intense by the second. And I saw with frightening clarity the angry looks of a thousand-strong mob exposed to too many childish antics for one night.

“See!” Josh shouted at me with evident satisfaction. “No one . . . understands . . . saying!”

A stick flew across my field of vision and hit Josh squarely in the chest. The hum died down. I spun around and saw Ed towering over his drum set, a look of pure hatred in his eyes.

“She said she pities you!” he screamed. He shifted his attention to me, wanting to be sure I was okay with him standing up for me. But all I could think was that he had understood me when I needed it most.

I was on the verge of tears when I saw the stick making its return flight, but it crashed against a cymbal and clattered to the ground harmlessly. Ed picked it up and taunted Josh by spinning it around in his fingers.

The Showbox bouncers began sweeping toward the stage. They obviously knew about Dumb’s reputation for in-group violence, and didn’t seem eager to have our party piece reprised for the musically literate patrons of their historic venue. A burly guy in a black T-shirt almost knocked over a middle-aged couple clinging to each other for dear life—my parents. As our eyes met, I saw in their expressions the sad realization that their faith in me and in Dumb had yet again been misplaced. It was utterly soul-destroying, as crushing as the sight of Kallie and Josh wrestling for control of the microphone, or the bouncers launching themselves onto the stage at the very moment an ear-splitting shriek filled the air.

At first I assumed it was more feedback from the microphone, or maybe an alarm. It was high-pitched and piercing, and even though I didn’t know where it was coming from, my immediate response was to press my hands against my ears to make it stop. Everyone else on stage was doing the same thing too—all except Kallie, whose body resembled a coiled spring, face twisted in anger. In her hand she clutched the microphone, shoved so far into her mouth it looked like she was making up for skipping dinner.