“Now this is the part of the song where I’m going to sing,” said Jared. “As soon as we write some goddamn lyrics.”
Next to him on the bed was a spiral notebook. He’d written the word “Songs” at the top in sloppy cursive. Then he’d drawn a picture of a skull and a pentagram. But there was nothing written beneath the drawings. He took up the pen and looked at me.
“What are we pissed off about?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure I am pissed off.”
“Yes you are!” he said. “You don’t have a house. Your grandma dogged you.”
“I know, but I’m more hurt by that,” I said. “I’m hurt and befuddled, not angry.”
“Well,” said Jared. “Punk songs are not about hurt, okay? That’s country. Punk is about anger and not taking any shit, and living how you want to, and catching an awesome buzz from some beers, and being a shit-head, but a great shit-head.”
“So what are you so angry about?” I asked. “Specifically?”
“That’s the problem,” he said. “I’m furious about everything. It’s hard to narrow it down.”
“Relevant thoughts,” I said. “You have to get to the precise ideas. What about that school your mom wants you to go to?”
“What about it? It sucks hard.”
“So why don’t we inform people about why it sucks . . . exactly.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Who cares?”
“That’s it,” I said. “Who cares. That’s the whole idea, right?”
Jared looked at me.
“I don’t like your mind games,” he said, but underneath the word “Songs” in his book he wrote the word “Topics.” Underneath that, he wrote the words “Stupid School.”
“That’s the title.”
“What is?” he said.
“ ‘Stupid School.’ That’s the perfect title.”
“How do you know what a good title is?”
“Before I left home, I was studying,” I said. “It’s similar to that song by the Replacements. ‘Fuck School.’ But we can’t . . . we can’t utter that word at your church.”
Jared looked down at the title again.
“I love the Replacements,” he said.
“They laughed in the middle of his speech,” I said, “that’s what the song was about, right? Getting back at all those fellow students who mocked the singer.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s small. That’s precise.”
Jared took a deep breath.
“Okay,” he said. “ ‘Stupid School.’ Let’s try it. Play that root note again.”
I clamped down the string with my middle finger and used the thumb on my other hand to play. The low-pitched thunder of the bass buzzed out of the tiny amplifier. Jared just listened for a while. Then he came in at the same rhythm I was playing with a fuller, crisper version of my note. After a few seconds, he just opened his mouth and sang.
“Mom’s taking me to stuuuupid school!”
I nearly stopped playing when it happened. I skipped a note, but when Jared looked at me, I got back in time right away. I tried not to look at him, afraid I would reveal something with just a glance. Afraid I would reveal the truth:
His voice was incredible.
It didn’t sound like his speaking voice at all. It was lower and cleaner. But not too clean. It sounded like it came from someone at least twice his age. And it appeared to emerge out of him effortlessly. I couldn’t believe it. I stopped watching my fingers on the bass and watched him play instead.
“Mom’s taking me to stuuuupid school, and I want to diiiiiiiiie.”
He switched chords to something different. Something higher. I tried frantically to find a corresponding note on the bass, and when I reached a note that matched, I saw his brow relax. He listened to the mix of our parts and somehow when he switched back to the original chord, I was right with him, back on the same fret of my E string. Jared played harder, and out came the voice again:
“Teacher, teacher, teacher, and I want to die! Teacher, teacher, teacher, and she teaches lies! Why, teacher, why!”
Jared stopped playing a moment, but he motioned for me to keep going.
“You should sing that part,” he said. “In the final version you’ll shout out that last part in, like, a scream. Okay? Backup vocals.”
“Sure,” I said.
He was in charge now, I could see. Something had been switched on. He didn’t play again for a while. He just let me keep going. But he wasn’t stopping. He was singing softly to himself, hashing things out. As he sang, he tried variations on his part. He made it even choppier. It sounded like the notes had been sliced with sharp knives. I was waiting to hear him sing again. And eventually he did. But he switched chords again first. Then he took a breath and belted out what he would tell me later was the chorus.
“Everybody goes to stupid school, then the stupid rule the world. No. No. No!”
He played a couple of shrill notes, faster than I’d ever seen him do anything. Then sang again.
“Everybody goes to stupid school, and the stupid rule the worrrrld. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah!”
At the end of the last line, he stopped playing abruptly. I had already stopped when he started in on the chorus. Not because I thought that was what he wanted me to do. But because I just wanted to see where he would go next. After he stopped, he looked at me, and his lip was curled funny. He looked sheepish.
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
Without saying anything, Jared walked to his bedroom door and kicked a wadded-up towel underneath it. Then he took a pack of cigarettes from a sweatshirt pocket and lit one. He cracked his bedroom window and aimed the smoke toward the small patch of screen. The wind stole the smoke right from his mouth when he exhaled. A frigid breeze blew back in. It gave me the chills, and reminded me that I was still sick.
“You actually know how to do this,” I said. “You know how to compose songs.”
I walked over, fighting a little dizziness, and punched him in the shoulder.
“I was in church choir,” he said, still facing the window. “And elementary band.”
“I thought your mom was exaggerating,” I said.
I punched him again.
“Don’t punch me,” he said. “It’s not a song yet.”
“It’s something resembling a song, though.”
He took a drag. “Yeah, but it’s not a real song. I’ll figure it out.”
Mrs. Whitcomb’s voice came suddenly up the stairwell and interrupted us.
“Jared!” she said. “Guitar practice is over. It’s time for lights-out!”
“Okay!” he yelled. “One minute!”
“And Sebastian has to come down here!” she said. “You shouldn’t be sleeping in a room with someone sick.”
We waited in silence and heard her footsteps retreat from the stairs. I watched the slivers of streetlight cut across Jared’s sweaty hair. He took another drag.
“I would always watch for my dad through this window,” he said. “It’s the one right above the driveway, so I could see the car come in when he was home from trips.”
He exhaled, and the smoke gathered by the screen before being sucked out by the night.
“When he came home, I would flick my lights twice. Then he would flick his headlights twice. It was our secret signal.”
He took one more drag, then stamped out his cigarette in a little metal jar.
“My mom was waiting downstairs, too. I wonder what she thought of those flickering headlights? I wonder if she ever asked him about it.”
He coughed out a laugh.
“When he stopped coming home, it was just the two of us awake, actually. Me and Janice. On separate floors. Two idiots waiting around for something we both knew wasn’t going to happen. Really pathetic when you think about it. I thought about going down there a few different times, just to let her know I was awake, too. But I never did.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Because I was pissed. She was driving him away with all her yelling and holy-rolling bullshit. The day after we found out I needed the surgery, she just woke up and didn’t laugh anymore. Maybe it didn’t happen that fast, but it felt like it. Everything became so fucking serious all of a sudden. And everything my dad did was wrong. He couldn’t keep all the details straight. We missed an appointment once and Janice kicked him out of the house for the night. And the longer I went without a transplant, the longer the trips he took. Then one day, he just didn’t come home.”
Jared turned his head around and looked at me.
“He’s come back after the surgery, but only now and then. He sticks around for a few days, sometimes as long as a week. Then the fighting starts again, and he’s gone.”
Jared slammed closed the window, and the walls vibrated.
“Now I don’t even hear from him,” he said. “She doesn’t allow him near the house.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“I’m not trying to be a whiny bastard here!” he interrupted. “This is how things are, Sebastian. And it’s her damn fault!”
He walked over to his bed and sat down. He took off his glasses and his eyes looked so small and beady.
“She’s worried about you,” I said.
“So what,” he said. “Great. She wins the worry award.”
He wiped his lenses with his band T-shirt. Then he slapped his glasses back on his face, and I watched his eyes enlarge in front of me.
“I didn’t go downstairs to talk to her,” he said, “because she didn’t deserve it. She doesn’t deserve to be my friend.”
He made a nasal breathing noise.
“You got anything else to say about it?” he asked.
“No.”
He lay down on his bed, one arm hanging off the side.
“Good,” he said.
He swung his skinny arm, his fingertips just grazing the dark carpet.
“I keep my promises,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll go make sure your grandma’s okay. But you should head downstairs now. I bet you’re infecting me with some kind of foul dome-scabies as we speak.”
I turned and started walking out of the room. Then I stopped.
“Jared,” I said.
“What?”
“You have an immense musical talent.”
He was quiet as I walked outside his door. But eventually, I heard him answer so softly I couldn’t tell if he wanted me to hear it.
“Thank you,” he said.
The light snapped off in his room.
I SLEPT ON THE COUCH THAT NIGHT, COVERED IN THE same old blanket. In the same strange living room. I slumbered in short bursts, never longer than an hour. And each time I woke up again, it was harder to get back to sleep. Finally, around four in the morning, I got off the couch and made my way into the Whitcombs’ kitchen. There was a telephone hanging on the wall, and I picked it up and listened to the soft whine of the dial tone. Then I punched in the numbers to our home telephone number at the dome. It rang easily seven or eight times. We had no answering service, so I could let it ring all night if I wanted to. But on the tenth ring, Nana picked up. If she’d just said hello, I might have poured my heart out to her. I might have broken down and begged her to allow me back.
Instead she rasped, “Leave me alone, you bloodsuckers! Stop calling here. You understand nothing of my project!”
Then she hung up. I set the phone delicately back in its cradle. I opened the fridge and searched around, half blind, for grape drink, but there was none to be found. I settled on something orange and sat down at the kitchen table. It had never occurred to me that there would be so much fallout from one insignificant article in the newspaper. But the more I reflected on it, the more it made sense. People had always thought we were strange. Maybe they were just waiting for permission to laugh at us. Now they had it. The paper told them they could mock. I felt a rush of anger, the exact kind Jared had been speaking about earlier. Only hours ago, the dome had still been my home, too. Those harassing phone calls were meant for me as much as Nana.
At least I was sure she was alive. That was the only thing that calmed me. It was no small revelation. Part of me had been convinced she would walk into the woods hours after I was gone and drink herself into a comatose state. I didn’t know what she was capable of anymore. And the sound of defeat in her voice was the scariest part of it all.
There had been a time when she would have fired back at any potential attackers without the slightest injury to her confidence. I remembered one instance vividly. A Halloween night, years ago, when a group of high schoolers from town thought it would be funny to shine their industrial-strength hunting spotlight onto our dome from a strategic spot in the woods. I was eight years old. Maybe seven. But I remember each moment in great detail.
First the beam cut through our home, refracting in the triangles into hundreds of mini-beams. It was quite a sight in retrospect, all those points of light shooting through the rooms like lasers. But it also frightened me to the point of bed-wetting. Yet only seconds after the light came in, I heard Nana’s voice. “Stay where you are!” she called up to me.
Then I heard our front door slam, and I watched out my wall while she sprinted through our backyard, a slight figure in pajamas. The silhouette of her hair was wild, and she carried a crowbar I didn’t even know she owned. As she got closer to the source of the light, I heard the laughter of the high school boys. But their guffaws died in a collective gasp when the crowbar connected with the searchlight. The sound of the impact, that hollow pop and shatter, rang over the hill like a gunshot. I saw a flare of sparks, some running boys, and then the woods were left in total darkness again. The only sounds that followed were high-pitched screams and the churning of jeep wheels in the mud. I also heard Nana’s voice over the din.
“It is my right to kill anyone on my property in self-defense! And by the power of the Greater Intellect, I will use that right! I will return you to your fundamental elements!”
After she came back into the house, we stayed up laughing about how frightened they were of a little old lady. We drank chamomile tea with lots of honey and Nana retold the story until I got sleepy. She put me back to bed. Then she made her own bed of blankets on the floor next to mine. She kept her crowbar in her palm, and told me not to worry. Everything was under control. Nobody was going to hurt me. I heard her say it in between long breaths. Nobody was ever going to hurt me as long as she was around.