This Song Is (Not) for You Read online

This girl needs pixie ears.

  I like her hair, which I’m pretty sure she cut herself. It sticks out of her head in tufts and bursts that no one could have planned.

  “They’re gonna have me play some chords on the piano,” I tell her. “Sight-read some music. Have me do some vocals. Just prove that I’m generally competent with music, I guess.”

  Ramona

  Do you know those boys who spend all their time trying to cultivate this sad-kid look? You know, floppy hair and lots of sighing? They’re all trying to look like this guy. But this guy isn’t faking anything. This guy is genuinely, pathetically depressed. It radiates off him. I’m going to get him to smile at least once. I move another seat over so that I’m right next to him.

  “But what do you really play?” I ask. “And why are you applying here if they don’t have a program for you?” The guy shrugs and mumbles something. “What?” I say.

  “I do noise,” he says.

  “Noise?” This guy is more hardcore than I’d expected.

  “Yeah. You’ve probably heard of a band called Sonic Youth,” he says. “They’re a rock band that—”

  “I know what noise is,” I say. I’m annoyed and I let it show in my voice. “Prurient. Merzbow. I was just surprised.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” the guy says. I decide to shrug it off. I’d underestimated him too.

  “So that’s cool,” I say. “Do you have a band?” The guy shakes his head and then shrugs.

  “You’re actually the first person I’ve ever met who already knew about Merzbow.”

  “My school sucks too,” I say. “Sam is the only guy at Saint Joe’s who knows anything real about music.”

  “You go to Saint Joseph’s Prep?” His expression changes. It’s definitely not a smile.

  “Not willingly. I’m Ramona, by the way.”

  “Tom. Sam’s your boyfriend?”

  “No,” I say. “We’re friends. Bandmates.”

  “But that’s him that just went in?” Tom motions with his head toward the door.

  “Yeah. He plays guitar.”

  “What kind?”

  “Every.”

  “Every?” And finally Tom kinda smiles. Kinda. I decide it doesn’t count. And suddenly I really, really, really want to see this guy smile. Really smile.

  “Every,” I say. “He plays bass and twelve-string acoustic, and he even owns a sitar.”

  “Huh. That’s cool.”

  “And a resonator. Anyway, our band’s called April and the Rain.”

  “Is one of you April and the other the Rain?”

  I’m surprised that he’s the one to make me laugh.

  “The name is about springtime, new beginnings and stuff. The rain has to come first.”

  He nods. “I can dig that,” he says.

  I feel myself smile again.

  Sam

  I went into a trance again while I was playing. “Trance” sounds too serious. It’s more like I kept playing but I also forgot that I was playing, and I was just listening to the music and not really thinking about anything. And then I remembered that the music was my guitar that I was playing, but luckily it was near the end of the piece.

  There were five adults behind this big table. They’d taken some time to make sure they looked official and cold. After I finished, I looked up at them and they nodded.

  “Thank you, Mr. Peterson,” one woman said in this clipped and crisp voice.

  I nodded back and opened my guitar case. They were done making notes now. They were just watching me. It was a little unnerving. I wasn’t sure how I did.

  “So I’m done? I can go?” I motioned toward the door with my head.

  “Yes. Thank you, Mr. Peterson,” the woman said again.

  As I approached the closed door I heard Ramona’s voice on the other side.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” she was saying. “Prog rock is not dead!”

  When I opened the door, Ramona and that sad guy were smiling at each other. It took a moment for her to look up at me.

  “Sam!” she said. “I found him!” That seemed to confuse this guy as much as it did me. “Wait,” she added. “How was your audition? Did you kill? You totally killed, didn’t you?”

  “Thomas Cogsworthy?” One of the blank faces was standing in the doorway. The other guy stood up and shuffled past me. Ramona was still grinning. I heard the door close behind me.

  “I think I did all right,” I said. She jumped up and hugged me.

  “This is so awesome!” Ramona said in my ear. “We’ve found our third bandmate, and we’re all going to Artibus!”

  She smelled nice, but I let her go and took a step back.

  “That guy you were just talking to?”

  “Yeah, he’s totally hardcore. And he does all this experimental stuff, and he can do some vocals for us! You’re gonna love him.”

  “Does he even want to be in our band?”

  “Of course he does! I mean, of course he will after we ask him.”

  I shrugged. Ramona’s hard to resist when she’s excited. We could talk to the guy. It probably wouldn’t work out. Ramona would forget about him by tomorrow.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s wait for him.” We sat back down. Ramona swung her legs back and forth, singing under her breath.

  Really, Ramona is always hard to resist.

  Tom

  And somehow I’m sitting at a booth in a greasy diner across from two kids who go to the same smarmy private school as Sara. Ramona, the hyperactive spiky-haired girl, is kinda fun. Right now she’s drumming on the table with two straws. The guy is probably okay, but he hasn’t said much. They were waiting for me after I finished my audition. Apparently this diner is their special place or something.

  “Hello again, Janet!” Ramona stops drumming and smiles at the waitress. They order a platter of chili cheese fries to share. I just have a soda, which annoys the waitress, but I don’t care.

  “So, Tom,” Ramona says after Janet leaves us. “Sam and I would like to discuss the prospect of you joining April and the Rain.” She’s doing this official voice now, kinda like the Artibus people but more friendly, and I can tell it’s a bit of a joke. “April and the Rain hasn’t quite found its sound yet,” she continues.

  “We love to experiment. We love tempo changes and polyrhythms. We need someone to do vocals and help us round out our sound. Your extensive knowledge of real music proves that you’re not a poseur. Noise could give us the avant-garde edge for which we’ve been searching. What do you say?” She folds her hands on the table and cocks her head to the side.

  “Why don’t you go to our website?” Sam says. His voice is so quiet that I barely hear it over the clatter of the diner. “And if you wanna jam sometime, you can let us know.”

  “Yeah. Cool,” I say. The waitress sets my drink and their chili fries down on the table. “So you guys both go to Saint Joseph’s Prep?”

  “Don’t remind us,” Ramona says. Sam nods.

  “Do you guys know a girl named Sara Miller?”

  “Yeah. But not really. She’s the class president,” Ramona says. Sam kinda nods.

  “I used to date her,” I say. They both look surprised.

  “Oh. She’s nice,” Ramona says. I can tell by her voice that this is all she has to say about Sara.

  “Yeah. I mean, we broke up a few months ago,” I say, but I’ve clearly killed the conversation for now. They eat their chili cheese fries off the same plate without any sort of awkwardness. Their elbows don’t bump, they don’t get in each other’s way, and they don’t seem concerned about one person getting more than their share. She said that they weren’t a couple. I realize that I’m staring. I take a sip of my soda.

  “So what’s your website?” I ask. As I expected, they’ve bought a domain, and it’s gonna be so easy to remember
that I’m not even going to write it down. But then the Ramona girl pulls out her phone and asks for my number.

  “I’ll just send you the link right now,” she says. Sam keeps eating the fries without looking at us. This girl really wants to me join their band for some reason.

  “Yeah, okay,” I say.

  Ramona

  “He called,” I say. I imagine Sam shrugging and switching his phone to his other ear. It’s late. He’s probably in his room like me, stretched out on his bed.

  “Okay, he called,” Sam says. “But we don’t know if he’s any good.”

  “He’s good,” I say. “I can tell.” And I just know it. Tom is what our band has been missing.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Sam says.

  “Yeah. Tomorrow,” I say. “I gave him directions to your place already.”

  “We don’t practice on Tuesdays.”

  “We do when we’re auditioning a new band member.”

  Sam laughs and probably rolls his eyes.

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “How could I forget that?”

  • • •

  April and the Rain practices in Sam’s mother’s garage. Their house has a three-car garage, but since Sam’s dad left, there are only two cars, so we have lots of room. Griselda lives there. Griselda is my kit. Sam keeps all of his guitars in his room, and he just brings down whichever one or two he thinks he might want to play that day. His dad is the one who keeps buying the guitars.

  I bought Griselda from this girl at school who got it for her birthday and then lost interest in drumming. Griselda is six pieces of awesome in rainbow sparkles. Each drum is a different color, but like, the purple tom has a bunch of different splotches of purple glitter, and the blue bass is a bunch of different blues. It took so many bottles of glitter nail polish, but the result is worth it.

  Anyway.

  I’m practicing fills when Sam comes into the garage. He’s got the neck of his old Fender electric in one hand and his amp in the other. I hit the high hat dramatically.

  “I was thinking we should do something in five-four. Or maybe seven-eight.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Sam says. “What time did he say he was gonna get here?”

  “Afternoon,” I say.

  “That’s not a time.”

  “I know. But that’s what he said. Let’s just play.”

  I tap out a starting tempo and Sam plugs in his amp.

  • • •

  If it wasn’t for Sam and the band, I would have gone crazy years ago.

  I’ve made it clear that high school is an abysmal den of idiocy, right?

  The summer before my freshman year, they filmed some scenes for a horror movie on our campus. The movie was about Catholic schoolgirls who conjure up a demon. Bloody hijinks ensue. Dad took me to the set on the day that they were filming a chase scene down the long hallway in the English department. They had all these screens up so that it would look like night, and this twentysomething woman ran down the shadowy hall in a really short plaid skirt. And everybody acted like this was really important stuff that they were doing, like her fake screams actually mattered.

  It turned out that real high school was about the same: a little bit dark and scary, but mostly just stupid, with fake emotions and everybody taking it all way too seriously.

  And I really do have to wear a plaid skirt.

  Part of the way through sophomore year, I started wearing Sam’s extra blue tie to classes, and there was a big fuss about it. I won that one because the school board got scared that I would come out of the closet as a something or other and they would get sued for discrimination. And then all the other girls started wearing their boyfriend’s ties like it was this cool, rebellious thing to do, but they never got called to the principal’s office for it.

  I don’t wear ties to school anymore. Tom’s ex-girlfriend, Sara Miller, doesn’t either. She’s not the type to go for pseudo-rebellion. She’s more of the actually-fits-in-without-trying type, the rare sort of person who genuinely likes what’s popular and never gets annoyed when other people like the same stuff. She’s nice, I guess. She’s always pushing some kind of charity through school government, so that’s cool.

  Anyway.

  Tom looks uncomfortable when he finally shows up to band practice. I’m sitting behind Griselda when he comes in with Sam’s mom. Sam’s mom is weird. She brings us ginger-glazed edamame, which means she’s still in her ethnic food phase. Hippie Sam’s mom brought us homemade hummus-and-vegetable platters. When she was artsy Sam’s mom, she ignored us and played opera really loud.

  “Your friend Tom is here,” she says.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Sam says. He takes the tray from her, and she flashes a smile at all of us before leaving.

  “So, hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” Tom says. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other and sets the giant amp he’s carrying down on the floor. “I like your kit. Glitter is underrated.” I knew he would appreciate Griselda. The guy has the most hideous and wonderful car I’ve ever seen.

  “What’s that?” I point at the thing in his left hand, this black box with buttons. Tom mumbles something that sounds like “chaos maker” and I say, “Oh cool.” Sam turns his back to us and sets the edamame down on the built-in workbench that no one has ever used.

  “Is there a place I can plug this in?” Tom says. Sam shows Tom the surge protector his own amp is plugged into. Tom kneels down and starts to get set up. Sam and I meet eyes. He’s still doubtful.

  “So, Tom,” I say, “what were you thinking we should do?”

  Sam

  Tom was plugging in what looked like a set of guitar pedals without a guitar. He looked up at Ramona and then at me.

  “You know that video you guys posted last week?” he said. “I came up with something that I think would sound cool with that, if you wanna mess around with it.”

  I shrugged.

  “Sure,” Ramona said. She played a drumroll and I headed over to my guitar and put it back on. I turned my back to them and strummed the high E string. Behind me I heard Ramona start to swing into the song’s tempo.

  I try as hard as I can to not watch Ramona when she’s playing. I mean, it’s not possible to never look at her, because so much of playing together is about communicating without talking. But I try to look at Ramona as little as I can.

  Ramona is really talented. And determined.

  She doesn’t care when playing makes her sweaty and messes up her hair.

  And she makes these faces.

  I was saved from remembering some specific times I’ve seen Ramona during practice by a noise behind me. It was like wind chimes. Alien wind chimes from a robot planet. I looked over my shoulder. Tom was bent over the pedals and the chaos something. He was making this haunting electronic sound. I could hear where my guitar would fit in. I started the opening chords for the song. I closed my eyes and focused on Ramona’s drumming. My body began to move with the time she set. The sound of her stick striking the tom hit my back again and again.

  Ramona.

  • • •

  Whenever Ramona eats candy, she arranges it by color first. It’s not like an obsessive-compulsive thing. She just thinks it’s fun. She usually doesn’t like anything orange, so she often gives those to me. Greens are her favorites.

  Her sneeze is really weird. She scrunches up her face and makes a noise like a tiny snort. It’s like she’s trying to stop the sneeze from getting away.

  Ramona’s mother started giving her piano lessons when she was four. She died when Ramona was nine, and her father hired someone from the academy to give her lessons after that. She still has private lessons, and she never talks about her mother.

  We like to watch really bad shows together so we can make fun of the dialogue. Shows about psychics solving crimes are the most fun. Ramona is
really good at predicting what the psychics will say next.

  Ramona can’t stand people who put up a false front. “Poseur” is her darkest insult.

  She’s fun, and she’s real.

  Ramona’s an assertive girl, and if she was into me as more than a friend, she would have just said so a long time ago. She’s trusted me with her friendship, and I’m not going to ever put that at risk.

  • • •

  I turned around.

  From over her kit, Ramona met my eyes. She grinned and bit her lip. We sounded good. Tom filled out the song without drowning either of us out. I could tell the guy knows what he’s doing. Ramona played a fill, closed her eyes, and threw her head back.

  I turned away again.

  • • •

  After we ran through the song a second time, we all sat down on the garage floor and ate the stuff Mom brought. Ramona hadn’t stopped talking since she got out from behind her drums.

  “We need to consider doing something with that song we were working on sophomore year. Do you remember? You played like a da-da-dum de-da?”

  I nodded. Tom looked amused, which was a good sign. Some people find Ramona overwhelming, and after our first practice, she’s going to be even more adamant that he join the band.

  We had a really awesome jam with him. Toward the end Tom had started musing about and humming some lyrics, and it sounded like he has an okay voice. I didn’t have any expectations for Tom. I had no idea if he would be any good at all. Ramona claimed she could tell just from their conversation in the basement hall that he was a real musician and that he was destined to be our third band member.

  She was right about him being a real musician.

  “You should come to our Saturday practice,” I said to Tom. Ramona grinned at me.

  Tom

  I’m feeling better than I’ve felt in weeks. I’m not saying I feel great; I just feel better. My car needs Freon, but the evening is cool and it’s nice driving home with the windows down. The glitter on my hood is red, and I remember Ramona hitting her high hat and bouncing in her seat.