This Song Is (Not) for You Read online

  After we’d skipped out on the dance, we drove to Lambert Airport and watched the planes taking off and landing. We sat on the hood of the car and leaned back against the windshield. It was cool out, even for fall, and we wore our regular jackets with our formal stuff. Ramona talked about our school and all the kids with messed-up priorities. And we talked about how people become the people that they are and whether any of us can ever escape that.

  Ramona said, “Sometimes the whole world seems like this big machine churning people out, making everyone into the sort of person they’re expected to be. It scares me.

  “I can feel it pulling at me sometimes, telling me to take the easier route, to stop trying so hard to be myself, to only try for the simple things in life. And it never stops. The machine can catch you at any age. No one is too old to sell out.” Then she turned to look at me, and she had this hopeful look on her face like maybe I could make her be less afraid.

  And I wanted to grab her and tell her that she was the most unique and interesting person I had ever met. That I thought she was brave and funny and was going to make amazing music that changed the world. And to kiss her. I wanted that most of all.

  And I almost did. I really did consider it.

  But what I said was, “I think that as long as you can still see the machine, then you stand a chance of outrunning it.”

  She smiled then. I think it was the right thing to say.

  Right thing to do.

  If she had wanted to kiss me, she would have done it herself.

  Tom

  “So here’s the plan,” I say.

  I am taking Ramona glitter bombing.

  “What we are about to do is technically illegal,” I say.

  To certain authority figures, everything we are about to do is completely illegal.

  “We’re going to walk through this parking lot like we’re just taking a shortcut. When we get to the fence, we’re going to glitter bomb. We aren’t going to talk about it. We’re going to do it quickly. Then we’re going to walk away.”

  I’m holding a greasy fast-food bag. We already ate the burgers.

  The bag has two pots of rubber cement and three bottles of glitter.

  Ramona is wearing a black turtleneck, like we are spies in a movie.

  Actually, her school uniform would have provided us the kind of cover we could use in this operation, but I didn’t mention it.

  We’re crossing the parking lot, just the two of us, on a Thursday. Band practice was canceled on account of Sam’s head cold, which Ramona described as “plague-esque.”

  We reach a broken chain-link fence leaning against a trash tree. We’re just outside downtown St. Louis in a neighborhood that used to have more money but now isn’t the kind of place you would want to be in at night.

  There was an elementary school here once. This used to be a hopeful place. Kids used to play here. The city school system has been trying to sell this building for a long time. This corner of the parking lot has been forgotten. The kind of people who would be walking past this fence might be up to no good, or they might just be down on their luck (down on their luck for a long time).

  I love going to these parts of the city. I love the old signs and the faded painted murals advertising businesses now long closed. I love the wildflowers that grow in cracks and gutters. I like thinking about the people who used to live and work here.

  People thought these buildings would always be busily populated, that this neighborhood would always be kept up. They lived their lives, spent their money, moved on, and died.

  For some crazy reason, people always think the world is never going to change. I like to imagine my school steps crumbling, someone wondering about me.

  October light is falling in the weeds around us. The concrete beneath our feet is cracked like rivers driving through continents. With the little paintbrush in the rubber cement bottle, I begin to coat the fence. I’m not trying to be neat; that’s not the point.

  • • •

  Last week, Ramona asked me about my car. She was lying on the floor of Sam’s garage, all sweaty from drumming. Sam had gone to help his mother with something.

  “We all spend so much time in our cars. I think it’s weird that more people don’t feel compelled to decorate their cars.”

  “I get that,” Ramona said. “If I had my own car, I would write lyrics all over it. Little drawings too. But doesn’t it make you feel weird to be driving a car covered in glitter all across the city?”

  “Why not?” I said. “Because you have to admit that you wouldn’t be asking me that if I were a girl. Why is it that one gender gets to own a certain sort of reflective plastic? I think glitter is badass, and I refuse to abide by other people’s irrational cultural assumptions.”

  When I was done talking, Ramona was looking at me strangely. Sara used to look at me like that.

  “Take me with you next time you go glitter bombing,” she said, just like Sara did.

  I was telling someone my real feelings, and they wanted to get to know me better instead of arguing with me.

  Terrifying. But just too tempting to resist.

  • • •

  Ramona takes out the light-blue glitter. It’s called something like “I’m Just a Dreamer,” but Ramona said it should be called something like “I’m Not Really a Stripper.” Her hands work behind mine. We don’t talk, just like I told her we wouldn’t. One slow car drives by us, its driver absorbed in a phone conversation. The windshield catches the sun and sends glare into my eyes.

  Ramona works quickly, and before long, we have covered a patch of fence roughly six feet in diameter. I motion to her. She drops the glitter in the bag and I crumple it closed. We take a step back and look.

  We’ve worked magic in this forgotten schoolyard. The clumps and lumps of glitter are catching that October light, and the fence has been transmuted into a shimmering border between this world scarred by drugs and poverty and another, perhaps better, place.

  “That is awesome,” Ramona says, “in the old-timey biblical meaning of the word.”

  I feel the corners of my mouth twitch.

  “Come on, kiddo,” I say. “We gotta go.”

  I pick up the paper sack, and we walk away.

  Ramona

  Should I have seen it coming that I have a thing for Tom?

  ’Cause I didn’t expect that.

  At all.

  He seemed so mopey when we first met.

  It was a few weeks before I even thought, “Huh, he’s kinda cute.”

  He thinks a little too highly of synthesized drums.

  He still doesn’t understand the full importance of progressive rock.

  But I guess I’m just a sucker for guys who are unapologetically themselves.

  Also, I gave Sam chicken soup today.

  While he’d been sick, I’d made the soup, and then I didn’t get a chance to give it to him before he got better, so today when he picked me up, I brought the soup with me. And when I told him that it was my mom’s recipe, he didn’t get all awkward or sentimental on me. He was just like, “So it’s like soup from your mom too. Cool.”

  Which is such a perfect, Sam thing to say.

  And he totally didn’t get that it was a weird thing to say.

  That seems to be the other thing I’m into.

  A guy who is super weird and doesn’t even know it.

  I’m still totally in love with Sam.

  And now I’ve got a killer crush on Tom.

  Shit.

  Maybe I’m just into guys who make music with me.

  Sam

  “IS THIS A NEW BAND? I LOVE YOU SO MUCH FOREVER!” said Nanami’s message. It was the Friday before Halloween, and we were on my laptop in the garage. Nanami had changed her avatar photo. In this one, she was making a weird fish face with anoth
er girl who had anime eyes drawn on her eyelids.

  “Huh,” Ramona said. “Are we a new band?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Suddenly it came to me. She and I are April and the Rain, but this is something new. Tom has made us something different. “We need a new name,” I said.

  “Well, you know what that means,” Ramona said.

  “Actually, I don’t,” Tom said.

  “Brainstorm party!” Ramona and I said together.

  • • •

  I had bags from the gas station in both hands, so I turned and pushed the front door closed with my foot.

  “Over the years Sam and I have determined the exact procedure of loafing that best serves creative brain function,” Ramona was saying to Tom in the family room. “Radiohead (obviously), chocolate, garlic popcorn, and here’s the curveball—orange soda.”

  “Surprising.”

  “But effective. The little nook between the TV and the corner of the couch is where I sit. I will protect that spot with physical force if necessary.”

  “She isn’t joking,” I said as I came into the room. “I had a drumstick-shaped bruise on my leg for weeks.” I couldn’t help the grin on my face. I love how seriously Ramona takes our brainstorm parties and I was enjoying Tom’s veneration for the rules.

  “I will respect the sanctity of your nook,” Tom said. “When do we start?”

  “Now,” Ramona said. I flopped down on the couch.

  Tom

  Here’s a list of the band names (listed from lame to almost awesome) that we debated at the brainstorm party:

  Interstellar Lunch Menu (Ramona)

  A Rose Is a Rhododendron (Me)

  The Hug Addicts (Ramona, shot down quickly by Sam)

  Autoerotic Annunciation (Sam, shot down quickly by Ramona)

  Brain Maze (Ramona)

  Homemade Atom Bomb (Me)

  Feng Shui or Die! (Sam)

  Here’s how we finally decided.

  • • •

  Sam is lying in the same position with his hands folded behind his head. Ramona is doing a halfway headstand up against the wall. (This is only the second time I have ever seen her without her school uniform. Her jeans are unfashionably baggy and I like that.) She drops sideways suddenly and lands with a thud that rattles the china on the fancy mantelpiece.

  “Careful,” Sam says. He doesn’t even turn his head, and I understood that Ramona making a ruckus in the house is a normal occurrence. He has a small smile too, and I feel like an idiot for not seeing before that he is way, way into her.

  I did feel like my brain was functioning better, but we couldn’t find a name that we all liked.

  “Sam?” Ramona says. She is lying on the floor in her nook now, splayed out like a victim of some violent trauma. “Do you remember when I was describing to you what it felt like when I went glitter bombing with Tom? That’s what I wish we could name the band after. That’s what making music with you two feels like.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  I know the feeling she was talking about.

  Earlier today, before we checked for Nanami’s comment, we had band practice. There’s a song we started two weeks ago that has never really clicked right. Ramona announced that if we didn’t get it together today, we needed to scrap the song, and Sam and I agreed.

  We started out the way we had before, with Sam leading on bass. A few bars in, I started the preset counter melody on the kaosolator, and Ramona started a slow military drumming.

  I lowered the tone and held it until it turned into a drone.

  I remembered the way the blue at the top of the fence blended with the sky (and shined).

  And then Sam started a melody on his acoustic guitar.

  It was like he’d plucked the blue-on-blue image from my brain and turned it into music.

  Ramona slowed time down, and I could see the car drive past the fence and the face of the driver, just a stranger I’ll never meet, frowning against his phone. From the corner of my eye, I could still see the blue sparkles in the October light. The sun caught the windshield and sent a glare into my eyes.

  And then I was back in the garage, and the song was coming to a close.

  “Vandalized by Glitter,” I say now. Sam and Ramona both sit up and look at me. “‘Vandalized by Glitter’ is what the cop said when I got arrested. And I don’t know, sometimes our songs sound like we’re going up to a person and throwing glitter in their face.”

  “I hated it until you said the thing about throwing glitter in their face,” Sam says. “But now I get it. And I like it.”

  “Vandalized by Glitter,” Ramona says. “Vandalized.”

  “By Glitter,” I say. I waggle my eyebrows at her. She laughs, and we have a name.

  And I have real friends who I think might actually understand me.

  Ramona

  The band is rocking. Last week we all received our letters from Artibus inviting us to apply to our majors. I’m still in love with Sam, and now I have an inconvenient avalanche of a crush on Tom, although I think I have it under control.

  Kind of.

  We’re two-thirds of the way through the semester.

  So of course it’s time for me to have a run-in with my nemesis.

  • • •

  All semester, Emmalyn has been on the verge of going too far. It’s not that I care what she says about me. It’s just that I’m sick of it. I tell myself that she’s probably unhappy, maybe jealous. But what right does she have to so actively and publicly dislike me? I’ve never done anything to her. Unless she did something first.

  Like today.

  It’s dumb, but I’m in a really good mood this morning. It’s all starting to seem real now. I would finally be allowed to leave this place. The world would finally start to take seriously my desire to devote my life to music. Also, I’d found a kick-ass pair of black studded leather boots that fall just short of being military boots and therefore just barely pass the school dress code.

  So I’m smiling when I walked into class.

  A show of genuine emotion to some people.

  A sign of weakness to Emmalyn Evans.

  “Are those corrective shoes to fix her posture?” she whispers loudly as I sit down. “They aren’t working.”

  I know that my boots are awesome no matter what the Emmalyns of the world say, but I happen to have great fucking posture. I really do.

  And that part of her comment pisses me off.

  “Good morning, Emmalyn,” I say aloud. “It seems that you once again failed to receive enough attention from your father over the weekend.”

  “Oh God, what is wrong with her?” she asks. And then I snap.

  “Talk to me!” I stand up and shout the words at her. “Stop talking about me and. Talk. To. Me.”

  At that point Dr. Harris has to own up to his sense of hearing, and Emmalyn and I are sent to the office.

  Together.

  At Saint Joseph’s Preparatory, students are expected to have the civility to walk quietly to the office next to their enemy without inflicting injury. As if shivs were more powerful than tongues.

  “Oh my God,” Emmalyn whispers over and over again. “This is so ridiculous.”

  “Who are you talking to?” I say. “Are you finally actually talking to me instead of about me?”

  “Why am I being sent to the office? I was just talking to Hanna. You were the one screaming at me.”

  “You were talking about me to the whole room,” I say. I have to stop myself before my voice rises again while I’m finally articulating in the heat of the moment what I’ve been wanting to say to her for years. “Your little guise of just being overheard while indulging in teenage gossip isn’t fooling anybody, not even Dr. Harris. You’re just a bully.”

  “I’m not a bully,” Emmalyn says. She actually
stops in the middle of the hallway and turns to me. “I just don’t like you, you or your kind.”

  “My kind?” I say. This is new. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “You just have to make sure everybody knows that you are so special and so weird.” She tilts her head higher. “Everything you do, your haircuts and your stupid boots, it’s all about proving that you’re just so fucking unusual. You say that you don’t care what people think, but you do. You probably spend more time on your appearance than I do. You act like you’re this tortured and misunderstood outcast, but you’re really not, okay? You’ve got friends, and your hair looks like something from a Teen Vogue ‘How to Get That Punk Rock Look’ column. So get over yourself, Ramona, ’cause we’re all sick of hearing about what a unique snowflake you are.”

  And what she says sounds just right enough that I can’t speak. (Am I a poseur?) I just stare at her like an idiot. And then the principal comes out into the hall and reminds us that we’re due in his office. And I get the old lecture about the expectations that Saint Joe’s has for students, but all I hear is Emmalyn’s taunting voice.

  We’re all tired

  Of hearing about

  What a unique

  And special

  Snowflake

  You are.

  (poseur)

  What if it’s true? What if

  I’ve already been caught by the machine?

  Sam

  Ramona’s dad grounded her after her latest tangle with Emmalyn Evans, so we’re not having band practice this week.

  I was surprised when Tom called me Thursday afternoon.

  I like Tom, but it never occurred to me to hang out with him without Ramona there.

  “Do you just wanna get something to eat?” he said. I nodded and then remembered that he couldn’t see me do that over the phone.