Those Girls (3 page)

W
e didn’t have tennis practice on Wednesdays, so, that first Wednesday back, I found Drew’s white Pathfinder parked in my driveway when I got home from school.

“Hey, stalker,” I screamed into his passenger-side window, “what’re you doing here?”

He gestured for me to get in. “Smoke and drive?”

His car smelled of wet leaves, pot, and Polo Sport. “I have to be at that band tryout thing at seven.”

“I’ll drop you off. Can I watch?”

“No way.”

He palmed the back of the headrest and swiveled his long, sun-browned neck as he expertly backed out of my driveway. I knew he wasn’t intentionally putting his arm around me, but I liked to pretend that he was. I liked to think that if someone had seen us right then at that moment, they might have thought we were a couple.

“I’m probably about to make a huge ass of myself,” I said.

“Please, they should have to try out to play with you.”

Eyes on the road, one sturdy hand on the wheel, he reached into his pocket and handed me a CD. “I burned it for you.”

On the shiny silver disc, Drew had written
Holbrook-Worthy Jams
in his five-year-old chicken-scratch handwriting. Seeing your name written by a boy feels almost as good as hearing one say it.

We drove through the leafy streets to the back roads that Drew liked to drive, but I always got lost on. It was still warm but was starting to get dark earlier and smell colder. We wound through the green and stone neighborhoods, listening to some new wave–trip-hop group that Drew had just discovered, tapping our feet and breathing the wind through the cracked windows. We drove up into the developments in the hills.

“Do you ever wonder if your happy childhood will keep you from becoming a great musician?”

I rolled my eyes and took a Camel from the center console. “What?”

He asked if I wanted to park and smoke the joint he’d been keeping in his glove compartment. I did.

We strolled out to a creek—one of those too perfect man-made ones on someone’s private property, whose alarmingly loud trickling water sound was probably bought from the landscaper for an extra ten thousand dollars. We sat on a rock and stretched our legs out in the sun. Drew was still wearing his jacket and tie, but he’d untucked his Black Watch plaid shirt and traded the navy blazer for his signature yellow North Face vest.

“I wrote this short story yesterday,” he said. “It was total garbage—sentimental, self-indulgent, dripping with forced emotion and cliché—and I got to thinking…” He took the
joint to his lips and inhaled in a short staccato. “The best music, books, and movies are about struggle, pain, overcoming the odds. We want to be artists, but what is our pain? What’s our struggle? This morning, I struggled to find a parking spot for my luxury SUV, because I was late arriving to my thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year private school, because I was smoking weed that I paid for with my dad’s money. I’m not an artist, I’m a douche bag.”

“Being a douche bag doesn’t prevent you from being an artist, just the same as having money doesn’t prevent you from experiencing pain,” I said, touching my thumb and forefinger to his as he passed me the joint. I braced myself for another one of these conversations. These conversations that Drew and I always seemed to find ourselves in, about the self and the id and identity and confidence, which then always made me self-conscious and worried that one day Drew would see that I wasn’t nearly as bohemian or revolutionary or as confident in the vision of my inner artistic self as I wanted him to believe that I was.

“I know it doesn’t prevent me from creating art,” he said. “I just worry that it prevents me from creating good art.”

I passed him back the joint and I thought about it. He did have something of a point: when I sang, I didn’t want to sing like sixteen-year-old Alex Holbrook, Jewish girl from Greencliff, Pennsylvania—she wasn’t interesting. I wanted to sound like—and, in the privacy of my own living room, imagined myself sounding like—a three-hundred-pound black woman, possibly one who was alive during the Harlem Renaissance or
the Black Panther movement, one who had seen and felt real struggle and had had to really fight for things that I knew nothing about, like love and survival. I sat at my piano, closed my eyes, and belted out notes of suffering and heartache, and imagined my voice filled with experience and soul. Two things I worried I did not possess, and maybe never would. But I didn’t want to admit that to Drew. He loved starting these esoteric, self-loathing bourgeois conversations so he could sound smart and tortured. Only one of which he actually was.

“That’s absurd,” I said. “Plenty of wealthy people are successful and provocative artists, especially writers. Jane Austen? Edith Wharton? They wrote about the angst of life in high society.”

“Someone this century?”

“Bret Easton Ellis.”

“But he’s a douche bag.”

“Doesn’t mean he’s not successful. If anything, he owes his success to his douchebaggery.”

He laughed at my use of the word
douchebaggery
. “Fine. Touché. I guess I have no excuse to suck as much as I do, then. Damn it, Holbrook! Foiled again.”

He squeezed my knee until I flailed.

“You’re a writer; you’ve got it easy. It’s music that us suburban Jewish girls have no handle on.”

“Ah, yes, Judaism. That must be what Drake meant when he talked about ‘starting from the bottom.’ ”

We both laughed and stared into the creek.

I gazed at the back of Drew’s neck and watched the short,
soft hairs perk and pulsate on the smooth, freckled skin as he laughed. I changed the subject.

“So, will you be attending the soiree of the century at Veronica’s this weekend?”

The wind shook the trees, moving the shadows hovering over us. Drew scratched his fuzzy head and leaned back on his elbows. “Definitely. I think I convinced your brother to come, too.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because he’s a cool kid and I like hanging out with him.”

“You’re just jealous that I have a brother and you’re stuck with a house full of women. You can’t take mine!”

“You just don’t want fresh-faced little Josh around your cougar friends.”

“Is it possible to be a cougar at sixteen?”

“If anyone can do it, Veronica can.”

I laughed.

“She was looking pretty good the other day,” he said.

I closed my eyes and took the punch. “Well, that’s what she does, I guess.”

“Did you think she was flirting with me? I think she might have been flirting with me a little.”

Of course she was flirting with him; she flirted with everyone. After all these years of him making fun of “slutty ol’ Veronica,” all it took was one hair flip and a suggestive stretch, and he was a panting dog like the rest of them? Boys are the worst.

“Of course she was flirting with you. She flirts with
everyone. That’s how she, like, relates to males. I think she’s actually incapable of actual conversation.”

“You’re probably right.” He flicked the roach into the rolling water. But I could tell his wheels were turning.

Suddenly, I was stoned and acutely aware that my mind was not working as quickly as it should be, and I needed to diffuse this Drew/Veronica thing immediately. Carefully, and immediately.

“So, do you, like, like her or something?” I asked.

He couldn’t.

But maybe he did. Drew and I were just friends after all. Eventually, he was going to like someone. I’d always known that it was a matter of time before he had a girlfriend and I’d have to stop pretending that what we had was all I needed. Which it sort of was. As long as he didn’t have a girlfriend. But Veronica? Really? Veronica was so
obvious
. Such an unoriginal choice. So everything Drew always claimed he was against. I imagined he’d go for someone deep, with good taste in music, an irreverent sense of style. Someone tall. Someone who liked the same things he did, liked to sit by creeks and smoke joints and have long insightful talks about art and life. Someone who made him laugh. Someone… more like me.

“Honestly, I never really thought about it. I mean, obviously she’s smokin’ hot. She’s funny.”

Funny? Veronica was not funny. Veronica was oblivious, and that was occasionally entertaining. Veronica wasn’t witty or clever. Veronica loved Katy Perry for god’s sake. Like, not ironically. She had all of Katy Perry’s albums.
All of them.
Went
to her concert.
Both nights.
How could Drew like someone who liked Katy Perry? All pillars of truth I’d held until that point began to slowly crumble around me.

“I could put a word in. If you really need to get laid that badly…”

“Would that be weird?”

He’d probably been thinking about fucking Veronica since the moment she shoved her push-up bra in his face on the tennis court. I was going to be sick. Fucking Veronica. Goddamn, fucking Veronica.

“It makes sense. I mean, you’re two of my best friends. You could probably get her wasted and make a move at the party.”

If I smacked my head against the rock we were sitting on, maybe I’d die. Or get a concussion. If I died, or even just ended up in the hospital, would he be too distraught to pursue this?

“Let’s just see what happens. Don’t say anything, okay?” He wrapped his long arm around my shoulder. “You’re such a good wingman, Holbrook.”

THE BAND’S GARAGE LOOKED
like a real music studio. On the orange shag carpet lay an old gray amp, loose wires, and unstrung instruments. No sign of cars, old bicycles, toolboxes, or anything typically garagelike. Two redheaded boys—one in a Ramones T-shirt, the other in some shade of faded tie-dye—stood with a guitar and bass around their necks, respectively. I guessed these were the Farber boys. I felt deep pangs of regret and the urge to run home.

“Hello?” I probably should have changed out of my uniform; I must have looked like an asshole. Then again, they knew I went to Harwin; changing might have made me seem like I was trying to look cool for them.

The guy in the Ramones shirt smiled and came right over to me. The one in tie-dye and a Hispanic-looking one behind the drums just stared me up and down, which I suppose they were entitled to do. As I would have done if some private school bitch that I didn’t know waltzed into my band practice like she had a right to be there.

“You must be Alex.” Ramones extended a clammy palm and shook my hand.

“I am.” I stalled. “Hi…”

“I’m Ned Farber; I play guitar. This is my brother Pete; he plays bass”—he shook my hand, too—“and this is Fernando, our drummer.” I waved like an idiot to Fernando, who didn’t rise from behind his drums. “Thanks for coming, and please don’t think we’re huge losers and that our mom recruits all our bandmates. We had a last-minute keyboardist-fell-off-a-building-and-broke-his-arm type of emergency.”

I laughed. “Really? A building? How rock-and-roll…”

“What can I say, live free, rock hard.”

I laughed again, hoping—assuming—he was joking. “Well,” I said, putting some distance behind the awkward joke, “please don’t think I’m a huge loser and that I join the bands of all my piano teachers’ children.”

They laughed. Genuinely. I started to relax. They seemed nice. Kind of dorky even. Not scary at all.

“My mom said that you were
very cool
, but that you didn’t like music made by white people.”

I couldn’t believe she’d repeated that. I was joking. Sort of…

“I told her not to worry, because we have Fernando. He’s Salvadoran. Is that enough ethnic flavor for you?”

“Token Latin drummer at your service,” Fernando said with an easy smile. From behind the drum set, he extended his hand to me, and for some reason I blushed.

“What kind of music do you guys play?” I asked.

“We’re sort of a funk–soul–jam band fusion. We do covers, but we write most of our own songs. We’ll cover anything from Arcade Fire to Michael Jackson to the Stones, but we sound like us, not like them, ya know?” Ned said, showing me over to the keyboard. I didn’t really, but I hoped I would soon.

I ran my hands over the plastic keys and wished I’d practiced more.

“Right up my alley,” I said. “I have a pretty eclectic taste myself. Just no whiny white people music.”

Ned and Fernando laughed; Pete seemed to be somewhere else.

“We try to avoid being whiny white people whenever possible,” Ned said. “You wanna play something?”

“Anything?”

“Probably not Mozart,” Pete chimed in. “He’s pretty whiny and white.”

Finally, a real laugh instead of a nervous one; my cheeks started to relax.

I vacillated between new-school and old-school. I didn’t want to play anything too obscure, but I wanted to prove my musical street cred. Stick with a classic. The Cure or maybe Stevie Wonder. Bob Marley? I wondered what they liked, what they’d think was lame—if they were ironic or snobby or if they were the kind of musicians who loved all music or the kind who hated everything. I decided that everyone likes Stevie Wonder. Whether you’re into rock, pop, oldies, gangster rap, or new wave Afro-punk—everyone likes Stevie Wonder.

When I’m nervous, I hum the melody to “My Cherie Amour,” so I went with that. My dad always sang it to me, and I taught myself how to play it the day after he moved out. I always taught myself to play something new when I wanted to not think about something. He’d be so excited that I was in a band. Though he’d probably just tell me how much cooler his band was, how much better music was in the sixties, and how much harder he worked than I ever would.

Fernando hit the snare, and before I knew it, all the boys had joined in; I relaxed into the music, so much so that I didn’t even realize that I’d started to sing. Ned was clearly the talent. Once he strummed his Fender the whole room melted around us, and my little ditty became full-blown, chest-melting music. I watched him play and transform. He was all over my slightly nuanced melody, and the song grew in a way that no song of mine ever had before, because I’d always played alone. Fernando fell right in with the beat, and Pete, too. And the next thing I knew, the familiar song became something completely different and completely beautiful, and I was completely
in the middle of it. Holding it up, but being swallowed by it at the same time. They followed my changes through my key jump at the end, and I knew that these guys knew what they were doing. Hopefully I had fooled them into thinking that I did, too.