or be drowned in blissful confusion, part 4
< part three
Master Post
Thanksgiving went more or less the way it always did; Kris woke up to the sounds of his mom putting the turkey into the oven while the sun was barely up and quickly fell back to sleep. When he woke up again later, the Thanksgiving Day parade was playing on the TV, even though no one was really watching it. Kris was semi-responsible for the vegetable side dishes, which mostly meant eating the mini marshmallows and little crispy onion things as he put them on top of the sweet potato and green bean casseroles. They'd been doing Thanksgiving at their house for a few years, and Kris liked this part, when it was still just the four of them getting everything ready. His mom let him have some of the apple pie filling before it went into the pie shell, he talked football with his dad while they swept leaves off the driveway, he set the table with Daniel and tried to decide if they were going to let their little cousins have the wishbone again this year. Kris went back into the kitchen to ask his mom if they needed soup spoons at the place settings, and found her standing in front of a cutting board of halved onions with her eyes squinched shut.
"I was just going to call for you," she said. "Can you chop these onions for me? I can already feel them making my eyes water, and I just put on my makeup."
"Sure," Kris said.
"You're a lifesaver," she said, kissing Kris on the cheek.
"Could you go tell Daniel if we need soup spoons for everyone or not? He thinks we need soup spoons for some reason."
"I don't think we do," his mom said, heading out to the dining room. Kris chopped onions (he'd never really chopped anything before and they ended up in really uneven pieces, he hoped it didn't matter) and thought about Adam, about whether he was trying to avoid chopping onions today to keep from ruining his makeup, too. Or maybe he wasn't wearing makeup today. He wondered what Adam was doing for Thanksgiving, if he was staying home or going to a relative's house, what kind of pie he was eating.
When Kris's uncle asked him during dinner what he was up to, Kris said he was thinking of starting a band, which was technically true. He was definitely thinking about it. Just saying it out loud was almost like having champagne bubbles inside his head, crisp and sweet.
Kris and Katy met to swap pie slices on Friday after dinner. They'd been planning to meet at a little playground that was roughly halfway between their two houses where they hung out a lot during the summer, but it seemed too cold and dark for that, so Kris went over to Katy's and they ate at her kitchen table as they waited for their ride to the movies to come pick them up.
"How's Marie?" he asked, stealing a sliver of apple off of Katy's plate. He'd been thinking about her yesterday after dinner while his grandfather teased Kris and Daniel about having a girlfriend and not having a girlfriend, respectively.
"I haven't talked to her since the meeting on Wednesday," Katy said. "Why?"
"I don't know." Kris pushed some Boston Cream Pie crumbs into a little circle on his plate. "She was so upset about her mom saying that, that she and Alexandra is just a phase."
"I think she's all right," Katy said. "She said her mom apologized to her about it."
But that wasn't the point, Kris wanted to say. Her mom apologizing didn't fix it, didn't change the fact that she hadn't taken it seriously; that this was a huge, important thing that had taken Marie a lot of courage to even talk about, that it was part of who she was and her mom assumed (or hoped) that she'd get over it someday. It made him feel hurt, almost betrayed, just thinking about it, but he didn't know how to put that into words, how it would sound coming out of his mouth, if it would make sense.
"Okay," he said, and got up to put their plates in the sink.
They met up with a bunch of people at the movie theater to see Unbreakable, which ended up kind of sucking. Kris's favourite part was when Katy, who had been up since 5 AM to go shopping, actually fell asleep on his shoulder. She was breathing heavily, almost snoring, all funny and adorable, and Kris let her keep sleeping until the pins and needles in his arm got to be too much to handle.
"Was I just asleep? What did I miss?" she said, rubbing her eyes with one hand and reaching for Kris's box of Sno-Caps with the other. Kris thought about making up a whole fake plot for the stuff she'd slept through, but he'd hardly been paying attention to what actually had happened, so he didn't.
"Nothing," he said, smoothing her hair down where it was scrunched up from being pressed against his shoulder.
____________
The Monday they got back from Thanksgiving break, Kris wandered into the choir room before homeroom, telling himself he was just going to say hi to Adam and Megan and it wasn't a big deal. Even though he went to the music wing every day, the idea of actually loitering around rather than just dropping off or picking up his viola and leaving had a strange kind of mystique in his head. He almost believed that if he stayed there long enough, he'd be transported into a scene from a high school movie version of the world where everyone was artistic and kind of nuts but also much cooler than him, wore a lot of black, and walked around constantly doing vocal warm-up exercises and talking about foreign films. The actuality of it was stuff like Becky pressing her milk carton into Kris's hands and saying "There's something weird about this milk. Here, taste it."
"Don't make him taste that if there's something wrong with it," Adam said, without looking up from the copy of The Heart of Darkness he'd told Kris he had to finish reading by third period.
"I'm not trying to poison him, I just want a second opinion," Becky said, avidly watching Kris take a sip.
"It tastes fine to me," Kris said, and handed the carton back to her.
So the music wing was crazy, but in a different way than he'd expected. It was a kind of crazy he felt at home in, and on Wednesday he took Katy along with him and they played "Chopsticks" together on the choir room's piano, with Megan accompanying them (sort of) on bongos. Making music---even the most ridiculous piano-lessons-for-kindergartners music---with Katy was so amazing that he wanted to pick her up and swing her around in delighted circles. The next day he didn't even make it into the choir room because he lost track of time standing around in the hall talking to Matt about the jazz band, and he spent the rest of the day completely convinced that he was going to buy a regular electric guitar and join the jazz band next semester. (He was much less sure when he woke up the next morning that this was a good idea, but it was a fun few hours. His imaginary electric guitar had been the flat, semi-glossy red and white of a 50s Chevy.)
It made him feel a little more awake, being there first thing in the morning. There were always tons of separate conversations going on, usually someone playing the piano, and while Kris had yet to hear any vocal warm-ups of the kind he'd imagined, there was a lot of singing. On Friday, Adam and Megan and two girls Kris didn't know were practicing a quartet they were considering for an upcoming vocal competition, and the sound of their voices intertwined in harmony carried Kris around for hours like he was floating a few inches above the ground. There were moments when all the layers of sound verged on giving him a headache, but mostly trying to keep up with all of it and sort out what he actually wanted to listen to was fun. The chaos of the room felt warm and musical and good, and in a way, hanging out in the music wing was a little like Adam's mixtape notes, something small and interesting about him that seemed significant somehow. Adam read and sang and helped Alicia untangle her earrings from the sleeve of her fishnet shirt, and Kris felt like he understood something about Adam better just by being there, even if he couldn't quite articulate what that something was.
____________
There were a lot of tall, dark-haired guys at their high school, but Adam managed to be completely distinct from the rest of them. His eyeliner was probably what made him seem that way---physically, anyway---to everyone else, but for Kris that was only part of it. Despite the fact that Kris was a little nearsighted (he had glasses he was supposed to wear to read the blackboard, but he didn't usually bother with them), he could pick Adam out from pretty far away, whether his eyeliner was visible or not. It was just the way he stood, or walked, or moved his head; Kris would see him from way down the hall and know. He was on his way to a review session for a math test after school when he happened to glance down the wing where the seniors' lockers were and saw Adam, standing at his open locker, bent forward slightly so that his head was resting up against the locker next to his. He was the only person in the hallway, and his posture looked so defeated that before Kris could even think about it, he was standing at Adam's locker.
"Hey," he said. "Are you okay?" Adam had his eyes closed, and for a second Kris was terrified that he was crying or something, and he had no idea how he'd react to that, what he could say or do, but when Adam turned to look at him, his eyes were dry. He looked sad and tired and angry all at once, but he wasn't crying.
"Yeah," he said. "Just...bad day." He stood up straight and stared blankly into his locker for a moment before slamming it shut and adjusting his bag on his shoulder. Kris watched him, waiting for him to elaborate, but he didn't.
"Mondays suck," Kris said, just to say something. Adam nodded at him, distracted, and Kris was hit with a sudden, sharp realization about the way Adam usually looked at him, the way he usually lit up the space he was in. He wanted to get Adam to smile at him, tell him a ridiculous story. He wanted to find out what was wrong and fix it, but he had no idea how. Adam looked so cool and closed-off that he sort of felt farther away than usual, like Kris was still watching him from down the hall. Kris was almost scared by that, that sudden distance, and he was tempted to just say he had somewhere to be and he hoped Adam would have a better day tomorrow and leave, but what ended up coming out of his mouth was "Can I maybe get a ride home?"
He wanted to take it back the moment he said it, because what the hell, that was his subconscious idea of how to cheer someone up? You're having a bad day, maybe driving me around would make you feel better? "Uh, if you're even leaving now, if not it's fine, I was supposed to go to this math review but I don't really want to and I already missed my bus..."
"Sure, okay," Adam said, mercifully cutting Kris off before he started describing his upcoming math test or his bus driver or something to fill the silence. "But I have to go find Nina for a second before we leave."
"And I have to go get my viola," Kris said, almost light-headed with relief.
"Just meet me at my car," Adam said. "It's sort of on the left side of the parking lot, toward the back..." He was sketching out a diagram in the air with his hands.
"I'll find it," Kris said. He went to get his viola (and his jacket, which he almost forgot about), and considered going out to Adam's car and saying nevermind, he'd just take the after school bus, but he thought that maybe some part of his idea---even if it hadn't been so much an idea as a connection failure between his mouth and his brain---wasn't a terrible one. When he was in a bad mood, being left to his own devices generally put him in an ultimately worse mood because he had the time to mope around and turn everything over and over in his head, so it wasn't completely crazy to assume maybe it was the same for Adam. That by keeping him company for a little while, Kris might help him shake off whatever had ruined his day. That was what he was going to tell himself, anyway.
When Kris walked out into the parking lot, Adam was leaning up against the hood of his car with his legs all stretched out and a stony, impatient look on his face. He looked like he'd been cast in a sitcom episode as the alluring, leather-jacketed bad-news boyfriend. He would have seemed unapproachable if he hadn't been twirling his keyring around idly, which broke the spell for some reason. He gave Kris a half smile as they climbed into the car. Kris put his viola on the floor between his feet and his backpack on his lap. Adam turned the key in the ignition and Kris recognized Radiohead's "Creep" coming out of the speakers at top volume for a few seconds before Adam snarled "Oh, of course," stabbed the eject button, and tossed the cassette over his shoulder. Kris heard it bounce off of something in the backseat.
"Hey," Kris said again, resting his hand on Adam's shoulder, lightly and just for a second, hoping Adam wouldn't hate him for repeating himself. "Seriously, are you okay?"
"I'm okay," Adam said, darting his eyes over at Kris without turning to look at him straight on. He shut the car's engine off again and rested his head against the steering wheel briefly. "No one died or anything. I'm just having one of those days where every time you walk into another room, something else annoying happens, and it just starts piling up until you want to start throwing things."
"Like cassettes."
Adam did turn to look at Kris this time. He was almost smiling. "Exactly," he said.
"As long as you're not throwing them at me," Kris said. "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye."
Adam laughed at that, this laugh like he'd been surprised into it. He gave Kris a what the hell? look, but he'd gone from almost smiling to actually smiling, and it made Kris want to hop back out of the car so he could do a little victory dance. "Oh my god, that would be the perfect horrible end to this day," Adam said. "Blinding you with a cassette tape."
"Please don't," Kris said, holding his hands up protectively in front of his eyes.
"I'll try my best," Adam said. "It's not like I want to blind you. But I'm just warning you that it may be out of my hands. I mean, this is my senior year and they're probably doing Annie as the spring musical, so I'm obviously cursed."
"Annie?"
"Yeah, with the orphans, and her trusty dog Sandy, and---"
"No, I know," Kris said. "But why is that a bad thing?"
"Because the male lead is Daddy Warbucks," Adam said, crinkling his nose. "'Old, bald rich guy who takes in orphans' isn't exactly my dream role. It's the one year I'd basically be guaranteed the lead, and I don't even want it. Plus it sucks because we'll have to get all these middle school girls to be the orphans, which means dealing with their schedules for rehearsals and stuff, and the fact that they're twelve year old girls. And all anyone will pay attention to is the dog."
"They're going to have a real dog?"
"See? You're already excited about the dog."
"Yes," Kris said. "I am. I'm its biggest fan, and I haven't even seen it yet. Can you get me its autograph?"
"Maybe," Adam said. "And then I found out that I failed this physics test that counts for almost half my quarter grade. I didn't even want to take physics, and now I'm probably failing it, and Megan forgot we were supposed to go out for lunch so I had to get a bagel from the cafeteria and all they had left was this single squashed sesame bagel with way too much cream cheese, and it was seriously depressing. And I don't even like sesame bagels, so it was like...this whole metaphor for my day. So I was just in a horrible mood, and I disagreed with some kid in my economics class about income taxes and he called me a fag---"
"In front of your teacher?"
"I know, right? Apparently he was really mad about taxes, I have no idea. So I told him to fuck off---like, literally, in those exact words, so we both had to go see the assistant principal and talk about appropriate language use for like half an hour. And the more I thought about it, the more it pissed me off that we were basically in equal amounts of trouble over it. It's like I'm supposed to be sitting there going 'oh, sure, I understand that you're an ignorant asshole, I can be patient while you learn to get over it.' I don't want to be patient. When I came out---when Mark and I---it was just, it was terrifying, but I was so proud, too. I thought it would...I don't even know what I thought. But sometimes I don't know if it was worth it. It was definitely---it was worth it to tell the people who matter to me, obviously, but I don't know if letting the whole school know I like dick was my best idea ever. At the time it seemed like I kind of had to, like it would be...I don't know, cheating if I didn't, but I have no idea why. It's not like it magically made everyone more open-minded, and now I just have to deal with their bullshit all the time. Sometimes I think I should have just waited until college or something."
"I'm glad you didn't," Kris said, without thinking.
"Why does it matter to you?" Adam said, a little sharply.
"I don't know." Kris pulled at a thread on his backpack without meeting Adam's eyes.
"Okay." Kris could feel Adam looking at him, and he wrapped the loose thread around his index finger and thought about reasons why it mattered to him. If Adam hadn't come out and decided to start the GSA, Kris never would have met him, for one thing, and Adam sort of had magically made him more open-minded, and he just liked Adam the way he he was, liked knowing that he was being honest, being himself. Adam exhaled deeply. "Shit. Sorry. I shouldn't---you're the last person I should be snapping at."
"It's okay." Kris turned to look at Adam again. "I don't know how you deal with it. I'd go crazy."
"Going crazy is how I deal." Adam shrugged and started the car. "At least some of the time. Sometimes I sing better when I'm upset or something, you know? So I try to use it. But sometimes I just end up telling someone to fuck off in the middle of class instead. Or---you're not one of those people who doesn't eat ice cream just because it's December, are you?"
"No..."
"Great. Because ice cream is like, the other huge part of my dealing strategy." Adam made a left out of the school parking lot. There was a Carvel in town, but it was in the other direction, so Kris assumed...
"Are we going to Moo Heaven?"
"Definitely," Adam said.
"My brother and I always entered those contests they have to come up with new flavors."
"Seriously? My mom won one of those a couple years ago, she suggested this...ginger maple something, for the fall."
"Yeah, we were really young, so our ideas were pretty bad," Kris said. "One time my brother wanted them to make Lego ice cream. With real Legos in it. He was all 'it's like a prize in a cereal box, you can collect them while you eat and then build something!'"
"Either that or choke to death."
"My dad tried to explain that part to him, but I don't think he got it."
"Actually...that could be kind of cool."
"Choking on Legos?"
"No, not the Legos, but 'Choking Hazard' could be a cool name for an ice cream flavor, if it had like, a ton of stuff in it."
"I don't think anyone would buy that."
"Maybe not," Adam said. "But it would look good on the flavor board. And it would have to have like, Brazil nuts or something, so I would try it."
Kris was hoping that they'd still be serving pumpkin pie ice cream, because it was technically still fall, but it had been replaced by eggnog (gross), gingerbread latte (possibly not gross), and something called "hot chocolate stirred with a candy cane," which Kris ordered. Adam got a Mint-Oreo Smash and, as an afterthought, a orange-mango swirl to go.
"That's for my brother---he's at home sick," he explained, grabbing a stack of napkins and shoving them in the pocket of his jacket. "Should we go eat in the car?"
"Sure," Kris said. Moo Heaven didn't have any tables inside, and even though Kris wasn't boycotting ice cream because it was December, he also didn't want to eat it sitting out in the cold. "You should have ordered this flavor," he said after they'd been sitting and eating in silence for a couple minutes. "It's totally a hazard. But more of a...cutting-your-tongue hazard. It has pieces of candy cane in it, they're kinda pointy. Here," he held out his little waxed-paper cup of ice cream to Adam so he could try a spoonful.
Adam, using only gestures and his eyebrows, suggested that Kris should try some Mint-Oreo Smash (which seemed to be made up of about 50% crushed Oreos), too, and they did a complicated, stationary dance involving plastic spoons that made Kris glance out the car windows to see if anyone else was in the parking lot, because this looked like a date. This time Kris was aware of it even as it was happening; maybe because they were the only two people here and he wasn't distracted by music, maybe because there was just something different about having to use a spoon to share food with someone than just grabbing something off of their plate, he had no idea, but Adam looked so happy with his spoonful of Kris's chocolate-and-peppermint-pointy-bits ice cream that he didn't care.
"I should have ordered this," Adam said. "It has marshmallows."
"Now you know for next time."
Adam made an affirmative noise around his spoon. Kris shifted in his seat and ended up smacking himself in the ankle with his viola case, so he tried to shove it further back into the footwell. Adam winced.
"Hey, be nice to your viola," he said.
"That was nice," Kris said. "Sometimes I want to throw it out the window."
"Really? Why? I mean, you love music---or it seems like---"
"I do," Kris said, but Adam was still talking.
"That's one of the things---at the open mic, I could just...I could see that. When you were playing guitar. I could see how happy it made you."
"Thanks," Kris said. He didn't think that was exactly the right response, but it was close. "And I do love music, but there's...it's different, you know? Like, playing with Megan was amazing. I don't hate the viola or anything, but I just get tired of it. I'm not picking the music I play, so I don't always care about it that much, but I still have to play it over and over..."
"Yeah, I get that," Adam said. "It gets like that with choir, too. Especially with Christmas songs."
"You don't like Christmas songs?"
"Well, I'm Jewish, for one thing. But it's not even that---or it's partly that, I don't know. But I don't have any emotional connection to it, so it's just words going in circles, and then you have to deal with the whole 'group performance' part, which..." Adam trailed off, making a face.
"It's so much better to just pick something yourself and learn it," Kris finished. "And not get graded on it, and corrected all the time. I never took guitar lessons, so I had to learn to correct myself when I started playing guitar, I was so used to having the orchestra teacher to boss me around when I did something wrong."
"You taught yourself guitar?" Adam sounded surprised.
"Yeah. It's really not that amazing, I had a chord book."
"How long have you been playing?"
"A couple years," Kris said, and the next words that came out of his mouth surprised him. "I learned the summer my best friend moved away. I, uh, I was really upset. His dad got a job in Ireland, and I guess I thought it was the end of the world. I don't know. It's not that I don't have---that I didn't have have any other friends, but I didn't even care, all I felt like doing was locking myself in my room and listening to music, but that wasn't---anyway, my dad's always had guitars around, he used to be in a band, and Brett---my friend and I always said we wanted to to have a band, and one day my dad was at work and I just dragged his guitar off to my room with me and sat there all day playing it. I sat there trying to figure out this Green Day song by ear like an idiot, like if I just played enough chords in a row I'd find the right one and know the whole song. Mostly I just got blisters, and I didn't even know I had blisters and my mom like, freaked out because she came to get me for dinner and I was sitting there on the floor and my fingers were bleeding. But I loved it---the guitar, I mean. I tried to put band-aids on my fingers and pick it back up the next day. That's all I did, all summer."
I've never told anyone that before, Kris almost said, because he hadn't. He figured his parents might have guessed at the time that Brett leaving and his sudden obsession with the guitar were somehow connected, but they'd never said anything about it, and neither had he, to them or anyone else. His "how I learned to play guitar" story always just went I was thirteen, I taught myself over the summer. He had no idea why he'd just told Adam the longer version, or if it had been a stupid story to tell. Kris felt a sharp little pang of shame just thinking about it, his thirteen year old self seemed so young and dumb, all numbly wrapped up in his own pointless misery and unable to play a single chord without staring intently at the neck of the guitar, but at the same time it almost still hurt, his chest felt a little tight.
"What song?" Adam said, and Kris was almost startled to hear his voice.
"What?"
"What Green Day song were you trying to learn?"
"Oh. Um, 'Good Riddance.' Or 'Time of Your Life,' sometimes it gets called that, too."
"Oh," Adam said. Since he'd finished talking, Kris mostly been gazing down into his empty ice cream container, pretending to try and scoop up the very last candy cane shard with his spoon, but he looked up at Adam and Adam was looking at him with the strangest expression on his face, this combination of confusion and understanding, like he was trying to figure something out but was most of the way there, and Kris couldn't look at him anymore.
"Sorry. I didn't mean to tell you my life story," he mumbled.
"Don't apologize," Adam said. "You can tell me whatever you want----oh fuck. Fuck, I've been almost sitting on this ice cream I bought for my brother. I just put it down on the seat next to me and it's probably half melted. Do you mind if we stop by my house first so I can drop it off before it turns into soup and gets all over my car?"
"That's fine with me," Kris said, and held out his hand for Adam's ice cream container. "I'll go throw this stuff out."
"Thanks."
Adam still had a kind of considering look on his face, and Kris was happy to hop out of the car and walk across the parking lot to the trash can, just to have a few seconds to breathe and remind himself that Adam didn't seem to mind that he'd just talked a lot, but he wasn't sure that was even what was making him jittery. He felt a little lost. He'd started this afternoon hoping to cheer Adam up, and he'd succeeded (with help from Moo Heaven, anyway), but now they were somewhere else entirely and he wasn't sure how they'd gotten there or where they were, and he had this insane feeling that Adam could read his mind. That he knew things, parts of the story Kris hadn't said out loud.
That Brett had called Kris after he'd been in Ireland a week, all excited about everyone's accents and some kind of weird soda they had and these kids he'd played soccer with the day before, and all Kris had been doing was sitting around in his room so deep in headphone-land he was practically scuba diving in a cave, and he thought about Brett saying they needed to play cooler instruments someday (girls weren't crazy about the viola) and he'd lied and said he was learning to play guitar.
He never thought about any of this anymore, about how the first time he'd played a chord and none of the notes were muffled or buzzy it was like a beam of light cutting through the clouds in his head; how when he managed to play an entire chord progression correctly the sheer rightness of it had almost made him cry, because all of a sudden it was music, the notes slotting together perfectly, a completely real thing just falling off his fingertips. He almost wanted to tell Adam the rest of the story, find out if Adam had ever felt that way about singing. At the same time, he wanted to hop in a time machine and take back everything he'd already said, because it was too much somehow.
He settled for getting back it the car and asking where the box of tapes was.
"On the backseat," Adam said. "I should have grabbed them for you while the car was stopped. You can put on the radio if you want."
Kris turned on the radio to someone talking about the stock market, and raised an eyebrow at Adam, who glanced over at him and rolled his eyes.
"Every time I leave my brother alone in the car for two minutes he changes all my radio presets to like, church music, talk radio, and the country station," he said. "Why did I just buy him ice cream?"
"How do I reset them?"
"It's---you have to hold down that button with the arrows when you find the right station, and it'll beep when it's set. But you don't have to do that, just find something listenable and we'll be fine."
Kris pushed a couple of the preset buttons, just because he was curious, and got "Achy-Breaky Heart" and some guy talking about Paul's letters to the Corinthians.
"I'm not leaving him in the car alone anymore," Adam said. "Seriously."
"Did you want me to go back to 'Achy-Breaky Heart'?" Adam just shot Kris a death glare, so Kris tuned the radio past a traffic report and some commercials and the hideous lite rock station, which was playing a Celine Dion song. He stopped station-surfing at the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under the Bridge" and looked at Adam for confirmation that this counted as listenable.
"This song has so much room for singing harmonies," Adam said.
Kris shut his eyes and just listened for a bit. "I can hear that," he said. "Do you think Megan still wants me to sing with her at the next open mic?"
"Of course! But we can't go to the next one, it's on the fifteenth, which is---"
"The winter concert."
"Yeah. It sucks. But tell her you want to sing with her in January, she'll be thrilled. I think she actually has a song she wants to do, she was trying to talk Matt into it back in October but she didn't really want a piano cover. I don't know, ask her about it."
"I was talking to Matt about the jazz band the other day. I might see if they want me to play guitar."
"You should. I mean, there's probably not a lot for you to do right now, they've got a bunch of people."
"That's what Matt said. But a couple of them are graduating this year, so he thought if I joined now..."
"You'd have a better chance of taking one of their places next year. I wish you could take Taylor's place now, he's a good guitarist but he's such an asshole. But don't tell Matt I said that, he and Matt were starting some kind of quartet or something, so they're all friendly right now. I swear Matt's only putting up with him because he has this van that can fit a drumset and all the amps and stuff in it." Adam turned into what was presumably his driveway and shut the engine off. "Oh, my mom's home."
Kris hadn't really been paying attention to where they were going, but now that he looked around, he was pretty sure Adam lived a couple streets over from his friend Evan.
"Come inside, I'll grab you that Nirvana CD Allison wanted me to loan you." Adam leaned into the open car door to talk to Kris.
"Yeah, okay." Kris followed Adam up to his house, which had a little pineapple-shaped sign that read "Welcome!" hanging on the front door.
"Hi, mom," Adam half-yelled as they walked in. "You're home?"
"I'm in the kitchen," Adam's mom yelled back. She was standing at the stove, stirring something, and Adam gave her a one-armed hug. Kris had met her before at the car wash, but he hadn't really noticed then that she and Adam looked a little bit alike, there was something similar about their features.
"Where's Neil? I got him some ice cream."
"I think he's asleep, you can just put it in the freezer."
"But you see how nice I'm being to him right now, right?"
"Mmmhmm." His mom didn't sound convinced.
"This is Kris, by the way," Adam said, looking over his shoulder at his mom, and then at Kris.
"Hi," Adam's mom said. "Are you staying for dinner? There's plenty of chicken soup to go around."
"I'm not even staying for dinner," Adam said. "I have to go paint scenery for the winter play, we'll probably end up getting a pizza."
"I thought you weren't in the winter play," Kris said.
"I'm not. But I have to suck up to the scenery kids a little so they'll help us paint stuff for the dance."
"I can go with---no, wait, I can't, I might go guitar shopping with my dad tonight."
"You're getting a new guitar?"
"Yeah, I hope so," Kris said.
"That's awesome. And way better than scenery painting, trust me. I think I'm going to get stuck painting fake books on fake library shelves all night."
"Another library?" Adam's mom sounded dismayed.
"Oh, of course. It's like, a rule by now. Because they hate me. They keep doing plays that need these library backdrops," Adam explained to Kris. "And they never save the backdrops from previous plays, either, they always paint over them and then we have to do a whole new fake library. It's so stupid."
"But this is the last one you'll ever have to paint," Adam's mom pointed out.
"Don't even say it, you'll jinx me. I'll get to college and 'painting fake libraries' will be a requirement."
"That sounds like an easy class," Kris said.
"I'd definitely pass it. I'll see you tonight," Adam said to his mom. "Save me some soup."
"There's a lot of soup, don't worry."
"Good," Adam tugged on Kris's sleeve so Kris would follow him back out into the living room.
"It was nice to meet you," Kris said over his shoulder to Adam's mom.
"You, too," she said.
"You are so polite." Adam looked delighted, it seemed like forever ago that he'd been standing in front of his locker with his head bowed and his eyes closed.
"Sometimes I forget that your hair isn't actually black," Kris said, glancing at the framed family photos on the living room wall.
"Aww, thank you," Adam said. Kris thought it was a weird thing to get thanked for saying, but whatever, as long as Adam was happy.
"You have an inflatable mummy," Kris said as they walked into Adam's room. (Which, aside from the inflatable mummy leaned in the corner, was sort of what he'd expected---posters, clothes everywhere, three very full CD racks, which Adam was currently looking through.)
"Yeah, never tell anyone you're interested in Ancient Egypt. You end up with the weirdest birthday presents. I hope this CD is actually in the case...perfect." He handed Kris a CD case with Kurt Cobain playing guitar in a sea of candles and lilies on the front, and walked over to his dresser, which had a mirror mounted on the wall over it. He rummaged in the top dresser drawer until he found a black eyeliner pencil and lined his eyes, talking the whole time. It was weirdly fascinating to watch, and Kris realized that he'd been so focused on just talking to Adam that he hadn't noticed his lack of makeup until now. "It was their last performance before Kurt killed himself, so it's a little...spooky to listen to. But really good, I think you'll like it. There's some covers, and it was like, this big deal because they didn't want to play any of their big singles, they didn't do 'Teen Spirit,' for one thing...I'd offer to do your makeup, too, if I had time," he said, meeting Kris's eyes in the mirror so suddenly that Kris's heart sped up a little. He felt...caught. Adam looked so much sharper with his eyeliner on.
"That's okay," he said. "I don't think I could pull it off."
"You totally could," Adam said, rearranging his hair a little before turning away from the mirror.
"You should have told me you were painting scenery, I wouldn't have asked you for a ride," Kris said as they walked back out to the car. "You could have just stayed at the school."
"Why would I have wanted to stay at the school? I would have just sat around being pissed all afternoon if you hadn't hijacked me."
"...Hijacked?"
"In a good way. So thank you." He slung an arm around Kris's shoulders, and Kris leaned into him. The beat-up leather of his jacket felt nice against Kris's face, soft but a little rough at the same time, and Kris wrapped an arm around Adam's back and closed his eyes for a moment and felt like he was basking in a sunbeam.
"Sure, anytime," he said, and he felt like he should say something else, that it had been fun, that he was glad the hijacking had been successful and Adam was happier now, but Adam disentangled himself, opened the car, and leaned into the backseat for his box of tapes.
"Here, pick some music." he handed the box to Kris and walked around to the driver's side. "And tell me about your new guitar."
____________
Daniel was sitting on the couch playing Gran Turismo 2 when Kris walked in the door, and he didn't even look up from the TV. Kris considered taking advantage of Daniel's obliviousness and sneaking up on him serial killer style, but it didn't seem worth the effort. He flopped down on the opposite end of the couch.
"I'm trying to unlock another course," Daniel said, all impatient like Kris had even asked to play in the first place.
"Whatever." Kris took off his shoes and shoved them under the coffee table, which his mom would probably be annoyed about later.
"Did you walk home? Because the after-school bus came by here already."
"No, I got a ride."
Daniel made an affirmative noise and continued mashing buttons on the Playstation controller. Kris almost wished Daniel had asked him who he'd gotten a ride with. He sort of wanted to say Adam gave me a ride, and we got ice cream, and now he's going to go paint scenery, just to say it, even though Daniel probably wouldn't care. Kris sat around listening to the game's soundtrack and fake racetrack noises for a while, then made himself get up and drag his viola and his backpack to his room. He debated which was the lesser of two evils, math homework or selections from The Nutcracker Suite, and decided to start with the viola because Daniel was in racecar-world and less likely to come in and whine about the boring ballet music on endless loop. It seemed less annoying than usual, like maybe telling Adam how annoying playing music he hadn't picked could be took some of the annoyance out of it, but after an hour or so he called it quits and went to play Playstation.
It turned out that Kris's dad had forgotten about a meeting he had to go to after dinner, so the guitar-shopping trip got postponed and Kris did homework and talked to Katy on the phone instead.
"Where'd you go after school? I thought you were going to a math thing, but you weren't on the bus," she said.
"Yeah, I didn't go, and then Adam gave me a ride home," he said, and the second it was out of his mouth, the rest of it---the ice cream, the story of Adam's bad day, the random inflatable mummy---all seemed weirdly private, like something that would change shape if he shared it.
"Aww, that was nice of him," Katy said, and just like that Kris changed his mind and wanted to tell her after all, but she was already moving on to something else like it wasn't a big deal or even that interesting, which Kris guessed it really wasn't. "The violin rehearsal was horrible. I think Mr. Shapiro wanted to strangle us all, and Melissa started crying again."
"Seriously?" Melissa sat a couple chairs down from Katy in orchestra and had a tendency to burst into tears when things got really tense.
"Yeah. I'm kind of worried about her. I thought maybe I'd invite her to a GSA meeting or something."
"You think she's crying because she's a lesbian?"
"No---" you idiot, Katy's tone implied "---But the GSA meetings are a good place to talk about stuff. Wait, unless she'd think I was saying she was a lesbian because I invited her. Do you think she'd think that?"
"Probably."
"What if I just told her that we have like, cookies and stuff?"
"What, like I don't think you're a lesbian, I just want you to have a cookie?"
"Oh my god, I wouldn't say that---"
"We'll just rename ourselves the After School Cookie Alliance, otherwise she'll cry because you think she likes girls."
"You are awful," Katy said, but she was laughing.
"No, wait, it should be---it has to be two things that are allied, though, like...the Cookie-Cupcake Alliance."
"After School Cookie Alliance sounds better, though."
"Maybe I could call my band that."
"You could have really cool t-shirts, with different kinds of cookies..."
"What are those Girl Scout cookies, with the stripes---" Kris sketched a circle and some stripes in the air with his fingers before he remembered Katy couldn't see him.
"Samoas."
"Yeah, those. I definitely want those on there."
"Everyone loves those," Katy agreed. "Did I tell you I figured out why I hate the stupid Nutcracker music so much?"
Katy's dad kicked her off the phone a little while later, but not before she'd explained that she had traumatic ballet recital memories involving music from The Nutcracker Suite, and they'd agreed to walk to her house after school tomorrow because the weather was supposed to be warmer. Kris went to put his homework away in his backpack and found the Nirvana CD Adam had loaned him in between some folders. He popped it into his CD player with the feeling of slightly nervous anticipation he always got when he was listening to music he knew someone wanted him to like.
The album opened with the song Allison sang at the open mic (and Kurt Cobain introduced it the same way Allison had---this is off our first record, most people don't own it---so that explained that), and Kris found himself swaying and playing air guitar without realizing it by the time the second chorus rolled around. That set the tone for his experience with the entire album, which had him yearning for his guitar (even though it was just in the garage) and at the same time made him never want to pick up his guitar again, because he wasn't sure if he'd ever be this good. Kurt Cobain wasn't the best singer in the world, but there were moments when his voice went straight to Kris's heart anyway---the way Adam's had at the open mic---like someone tightening down a tiny vise in his chest. The recording had applause and crowd banter and Kris wished the next open mic was sooner because he wanted this. He didn't know if he was good enough, if he'd ever be good enough, but he wanted to be. He wanted to say something cool and dry like I'm probably going to screw this song up... into a microphone; to start playing his guitar knowing people were listening. He wanted to take a shaky breath and sing and hear his voice amplified, bigger than he was used to, ringing out of the speakers and boomeranging back to him.
He made himself play the CD straight through, without listening to the songs he liked multiple times or skipping through the ones that didn't grab him as much. The last song had such raw power that by the time his CD player shut itself off with its familiar little whirring noise, Kris was stunned, almost dizzy. He wondered if that was what Adam meant when he'd said this album was spooky, and what Adam's favourite song was. He stared at the track listing on the album jacket for a while like that would help him figure it out. For a few minutes he considered looking up Adam's number in the phone book so he could ask about it, so he could say holy shit, that CD is amazing and have Adam say I know, isn't it? back. He could already hear exactly how Adam's voice would sound saying it. But looking up someone's number and calling them was kind of a weird thing to do, and it was after ten o'clock anyway, which also meant that Kris probably didn't have enough time to sneak onto the computer and find some Nirvana guitar tabs. He wished Adam had given him this CD on a Friday. He wished he was a guitar prodigy. He wished there were something, anything he could do besides take a shower, half-heartedly read a chapter of The Great Gatsby, and go to sleep.
____________
Kris hurried to the choir room the next morning, on a mission to find Adam and talk grunge music. He'd woken up with "Pennyroyal Tea" twined around his brain like kudzu and there was something he found suspiciously satisfying about telling someone what was stuck in his head and getting it stuck in their head, too. It was like that proverb about misery loving company, maybe. He didn't see Adam as he walked into the room, but Megan stood up and waved at him with both arms like she was shipwrecked and trying to signal a rescue plane.
"It's Kris!" she squealed, jumping off the risers and jogging over to him. "Good morning, Kris."
"Hi," Kris said. "Do you know where Adam is?"
"No, but some guy from the jazz band asked us to watch his guitar. Do you want to help us watch it?"
Kris raised his eyebrows. "You need help watching a---oh. You want me to play something?"
"Please," Megan said, clasping her hands together. "It's just sitting there, and none of us know any songs." She walked back to the risers and gestured to the guitar with both hands like she was presenting the grand prize on a game show. It was a blue and black electric, sitting on the bottom riser in an open case. Alicia was sitting one riser above it, sharing a miniature box of Froot Loops with a curly-haired girl who had four earrings in each ear.
The fingerprint smudges that were visible on the guitar's surface made Kris feel weird about just reaching into the case and grabbing it, but Megan solved his crisis of conscience by picking it up herself and holding it out to him.
He shrugged his backpack off first, then sat down on the bottom riser and took the guitar, settling it in his lap without putting the strap over his shoulder. (For some reason, that made him feel better about playing someone else's guitar without their permission.) "Did he also ask you to watch an amp, by any chance? Because it's not going to sound very good---"
"Doesn't matter," Megan said. "It'll still be a million times better than people coming in here and people playing that song from Titanic on the piano."
"People do that?" Kris had assumed that song was finally dead.
"Yes." Megan sounded grim. "And sometimes stuff from Phantom of the Opera. It's a nightmare."
Kris played a few experimental chords on the guitar. The sound was quiet, hard to hear over the noise in room, and had a flat, metallic quality that made him feel better he'd mostly decided on an acoustic electric. He closed his eyes and played a C. The resonance of the strummed strings felt different against his hands, and where the guitar was cradled against his body. There was something about the way the individual notes sounded together that was sharper than his acoustic, and he could have sat there for a long time just strumming random chords and trying to figure it out, but that wasn't what he was supposed to be doing.
"What do you want me to play?" he said.
"I want to hear some NoFX," Alicia said.
"Do you know any Pavement?" said Earrings Girl.
"Kris is not a jukebox!" Megan said, which both made Kris laugh and saved him from having to admit that he definitely didn't know anything by either of those bands. He only knew that NoFX was a band because Alicia had several t-shirts that proclaimed her love for them. "...But if you play us something we can sing, we'll start a cult that worships you."
"And give you the last of these Froot Loops," Alicia offered. She peered into the tiny cereal box. "They're mostly purple ones."
"But Froot Loops are like M&Ms," said Earrings Girl. "The colours all taste the same anyway."
Kris thought about songs he knew that Megan, Alicia, and Earrings Girl would also know. There was always his Beatles catalogue, but he felt like he and Megan had already covered that, and he wanted something new. He wasn't sure if Alicia and Earrings Girl were the right audience for his single-guitar version of "Baby One More Time." He considered the slowed-down and only semi-successful rendition of "Lovefool," but he hadn't worked on that for a while, and it seemed wrong to play it without Adam there. He wished he'd had time last night to learn something from the Nirvana CD, his fingers were still itching for those songs and he was pretty sure everyone but him knew them already and could sing along. But everyone usually knew Eighties music, too, so he decided on something his dad had taught him back when he'd only been playing guitar for a few months.
"Do you guys know '867-5309'?"
"Hell yes we do," Megan said.
"Rose will sing harmony," Alicia said, nudging Earrings Girl---Rose---with her shoulder.
"Okay," Kris said, and shifted the guitar in his lap. The song had a little intro part with some picking, but he skipped that and went straight to the chords.
"Wait, wait, stop a second," Megan said, and Kris stopped playing. "That's really quiet."
"Yeah, that's why it needs an amp."
"No, I mean you're going to have to sing with us so we know where we are, I don't know if we'll be able to hear."
Kris hesitated for a moment. Playing guitar at school was one thing, but playing guitar and singing was another. As badly as he'd wanted an audience last night, this wasn't the audience he'd meant. The other people in the choir room were just trying to finish homework and play piano and gossip before homeroom, and they were probably going to think he was showing off or a giant dork or maybe both of those things at the same time. But he didn't want to explain all that to Megan, who was obviously fine with spontaneously bursting into song.
"Yeah, okay," he said, and started again, his heart speeding up a little as he played the intro chords. He only had to sing the song's first line (Jenny, Jenny, who can I turn to) by himself before the girls jumped in. Alicia and Rose were sitting behind him, so there was a kind of surround-sound effect. Their voices were drowning out the guitar completely---Kris couldn't even hear it, and it was in his lap---but he kept playing anyway. He liked the way the guitar felt in his arms, the vibrations of the inaudible chords. Rose picked up the harmony one line in, and Kris was surprised that they actually sounded halfway decent until it fell apart after the chorus because Alicia and Megan started singing the first verse over again instead of the second verse.
"So how does the second verse actually start?" Megan said.
"Jenny, Jenny, you're the girl for me," Rose said, stepping down a riser to sit next to Kris.
"...Really? Okay, I thought that would make me remember the rest, but it doesn't. Can we just do the first verse over again? Kris? Do you mind?"
Kris shrugged and tried to ignore the group of girls sitting by the window who were staring at them. "That's fine, the guitar part's all the same anyway."
"Does Adam know Kris can sing?" Alicia said, climbing down to sit on Kris's other side and giving him a look he couldn't interpret.
"What?" Kris said, because seriously, it wasn't cool to talk about him like he wasn't there, and why did Alicia think Adam would care that he could sing?
"I told him," Megan said at the same time, waving Alicia off. "Less talking, more singing. Rose, why don't you and Kris sing the first 867-5309 in the chorus, and then Alicia and I will do the echo, that way it's even."
"That works," Rose said, and Kris gave up and played the intro chords again.
They managed to get through the verse and chorus one more time before the warning bell rang, and the guy whose guitar Kris was playing (who was tall and blond and didn't seem to care at all that Kris was playing his guitar) came back for it and they all headed to their homerooms. Kris sat down at his desk and looked down at the fingertips of his left hand, almost hoping the indentations of the guitar strings would still be visible, but they weren't. He missed the weight of the guitar in his lap already, but he consoled himself with the box of Froot Loops that Alicia had given him as they left the choir room. He spent his first few classes daydreaming about guitars and doodling a t-shirt design for his nonexistent band and ended up feeling annoyed with himself for always talking about having a band like it was a joke instead of something he was actually considering.
He kept an eye out for Adam all day, hoping they'd run into each other in the hall at some point so he could at least tell him he liked the Nirvana CD, if nothing else, but Adam was nowhere to be seen. His day hovered between average and annoying, and by the time he was rushing out of his business class to meet Katy at her locker, he half wanted to pull her hair over his face like a curtain and take a nap.
"I heard you were playing guitar this morning," she said, lacing her fingers into his as they left the school.
"Yeah, I---wait, who told you that?"
"Sarah Klein."
Kris just gave Katy a blank look.
"You totally know her. She's kind of short, she always wears headbands. Anyway, she said you were singing and stuff. You keep having concerts without me."
"It wasn't---I didn't plan it or anything, I just went down there and Megan was like 'hey, we have this guitar'---"
"I was joking." Katy squeezed his hand. "But I'm sad I missed it."
"We just sang the first verse of '867-5309' twice, it wasn't that exciting." Obviously it was exciting enough to Sarah Klein (she'd probably been one of the staring girls sitting by the window) that she'd had to go tell Katy about it, which reminded him of Alicia saying does Adam know Kris can sing? and the fact that he still didn't know what that was about.
"Sarah thought you were good," Katy said, which didn't make him feel any less weird, even if it was flattering at the same time.
Katy sort of steered them to the playground instead of her house, which had become the way she and Kris asked each other to make out for a while without actually asking. The elementary school didn't let out until 3:30, so it was usually empty before then, although there'd been a couple embarrassing incidents involving moms with kids who were too young to be in school at all. They were the only ones there today, though, and they snuggled up in a little fort type thing and kissed for a while. Katy was half in Kris's lap, soft and sweet like always, and he felt strangely suspended in between the warm presence of her and the cooler, greyer swirl of everything that was in his head---guitar chords and conversations people were having about him outside his hearing and the history quiz he'd probably failed---and he wasn't completely in either place. Katy must have noticed, because she pulled away from Kris with a final brush of her lips against his cheek and turned around to sit with her back leaned against his chest, head tipped back onto his shoulder and elbows resting comfortably on his legs like he was her own personal armchair. Kris wrapped his arms around her and closed his eyes. His nose and his fingertips were getting cold, but he wanted to stay here a little longer. He felt good, sitting with her like this, both safe and like he was protecting her at the same time. (What he would be protecting her from, he wasn't sure. Renegade squirrels and disapproving moms with toddlers, maybe.)
"I think I actually want to have a band," he said after a moment. "Like, for real." He felt Katy move her head to look up at him and opened his eyes.
"So talk to Joey," she said. "Whose side was he on when his band broke up?"
"Victor's---the singer's---I think."
"See, then you'd have a bassist and a singer."
"I kind of want to be the singer," Kris said.
"Oh." Katy twisted around so she could see him better. "I thought you just wanted to play guitar."
Kris shrugged. "I don't know."
"Then you just need a drummer," she said, and Kris could see the questions she wasn't asking in her eyes, and he loved her for not asking them, for not making a big deal out of it and needing him to explain why. It made him want to lean down and kiss her, so he did. "Maybe you should ask Rob."
"To what? Play timpani for me on 'Baby One More Time'? I don't think that would work..."
Katy smacked his leg lightly. "Don't be obnoxious. He might play drums, too. I don't think they had timpani the first few years we did orchestra in elementary school, he probably started out just doing general percussion."
"That still doesn't mean he can drum to non-classical music."
"You should ask him, though. He's nice----I ran the bake sale table with him one time. I wonder what Alicia's going to bake tomorrow?"
"What, for the GSA meeting?"
"Yeah, the people from student council are coming. Maybe she'll do something super-complicated to impress them so they'll help us out."
"Or we could try to hypnotize them with a giant watch, like in a cartoon," Kris suggested, and Katy laughed. "So did you ask Melissa to come to our cookie club?"
"No, because you have me all paranoid that she'll think I mean she's gay and get upset! And tomorrow wouldn't be a good time anyway, the student council people are coming so we'll probably just talk about dance stuff."
Kris rolled his eyes, unseen.
"Okay, too cold," Katy said. She sat up straight, grabbed her backpack, and hopped out of their little fort, and Kris followed her. They sat in Katy's kitchen for a while when they got to her house, drinking hot chocolate and eating pretzel sticks and talking to Katy's mom. Kris showed Katy his After School Cookie Alliance design, and they told each other stories about the alternate universe where this band existed and Katy ran their merch table wearing her Girl Scout sash from fourth grade. They did some homework and migrated over to the computer and play-argued over who got to type. Katy wanted to talk to her friends on instant messenger, Kris wanted to search for guitar tabs, and while her mom was in another room Katy sat in Kris's lap and neither of them could type at all, which was also fine.
Kris's mom picked him up on her way home from work, and after dinner he started learning to play "Pennyroyal Tea." This ended up being a semi-bad idea when he woke up with it stuck in his head again after having a dream where he was supposed to get to a Nirvana concert but he had to drive there in a vintage limousine that would only go in circles around this fountain. Charles was sitting next to him wearing a chauffer hat and holding a plate of sandwiches, and Kris knew it would be his own fault if he didn't get to the concert in time and Kurt Cobain died.
part 5 >
Master Post
Thanksgiving went more or less the way it always did; Kris woke up to the sounds of his mom putting the turkey into the oven while the sun was barely up and quickly fell back to sleep. When he woke up again later, the Thanksgiving Day parade was playing on the TV, even though no one was really watching it. Kris was semi-responsible for the vegetable side dishes, which mostly meant eating the mini marshmallows and little crispy onion things as he put them on top of the sweet potato and green bean casseroles. They'd been doing Thanksgiving at their house for a few years, and Kris liked this part, when it was still just the four of them getting everything ready. His mom let him have some of the apple pie filling before it went into the pie shell, he talked football with his dad while they swept leaves off the driveway, he set the table with Daniel and tried to decide if they were going to let their little cousins have the wishbone again this year. Kris went back into the kitchen to ask his mom if they needed soup spoons at the place settings, and found her standing in front of a cutting board of halved onions with her eyes squinched shut.
"I was just going to call for you," she said. "Can you chop these onions for me? I can already feel them making my eyes water, and I just put on my makeup."
"Sure," Kris said.
"You're a lifesaver," she said, kissing Kris on the cheek.
"Could you go tell Daniel if we need soup spoons for everyone or not? He thinks we need soup spoons for some reason."
"I don't think we do," his mom said, heading out to the dining room. Kris chopped onions (he'd never really chopped anything before and they ended up in really uneven pieces, he hoped it didn't matter) and thought about Adam, about whether he was trying to avoid chopping onions today to keep from ruining his makeup, too. Or maybe he wasn't wearing makeup today. He wondered what Adam was doing for Thanksgiving, if he was staying home or going to a relative's house, what kind of pie he was eating.
When Kris's uncle asked him during dinner what he was up to, Kris said he was thinking of starting a band, which was technically true. He was definitely thinking about it. Just saying it out loud was almost like having champagne bubbles inside his head, crisp and sweet.
Kris and Katy met to swap pie slices on Friday after dinner. They'd been planning to meet at a little playground that was roughly halfway between their two houses where they hung out a lot during the summer, but it seemed too cold and dark for that, so Kris went over to Katy's and they ate at her kitchen table as they waited for their ride to the movies to come pick them up.
"How's Marie?" he asked, stealing a sliver of apple off of Katy's plate. He'd been thinking about her yesterday after dinner while his grandfather teased Kris and Daniel about having a girlfriend and not having a girlfriend, respectively.
"I haven't talked to her since the meeting on Wednesday," Katy said. "Why?"
"I don't know." Kris pushed some Boston Cream Pie crumbs into a little circle on his plate. "She was so upset about her mom saying that, that she and Alexandra is just a phase."
"I think she's all right," Katy said. "She said her mom apologized to her about it."
But that wasn't the point, Kris wanted to say. Her mom apologizing didn't fix it, didn't change the fact that she hadn't taken it seriously; that this was a huge, important thing that had taken Marie a lot of courage to even talk about, that it was part of who she was and her mom assumed (or hoped) that she'd get over it someday. It made him feel hurt, almost betrayed, just thinking about it, but he didn't know how to put that into words, how it would sound coming out of his mouth, if it would make sense.
"Okay," he said, and got up to put their plates in the sink.
They met up with a bunch of people at the movie theater to see Unbreakable, which ended up kind of sucking. Kris's favourite part was when Katy, who had been up since 5 AM to go shopping, actually fell asleep on his shoulder. She was breathing heavily, almost snoring, all funny and adorable, and Kris let her keep sleeping until the pins and needles in his arm got to be too much to handle.
"Was I just asleep? What did I miss?" she said, rubbing her eyes with one hand and reaching for Kris's box of Sno-Caps with the other. Kris thought about making up a whole fake plot for the stuff she'd slept through, but he'd hardly been paying attention to what actually had happened, so he didn't.
"Nothing," he said, smoothing her hair down where it was scrunched up from being pressed against his shoulder.
____________
The Monday they got back from Thanksgiving break, Kris wandered into the choir room before homeroom, telling himself he was just going to say hi to Adam and Megan and it wasn't a big deal. Even though he went to the music wing every day, the idea of actually loitering around rather than just dropping off or picking up his viola and leaving had a strange kind of mystique in his head. He almost believed that if he stayed there long enough, he'd be transported into a scene from a high school movie version of the world where everyone was artistic and kind of nuts but also much cooler than him, wore a lot of black, and walked around constantly doing vocal warm-up exercises and talking about foreign films. The actuality of it was stuff like Becky pressing her milk carton into Kris's hands and saying "There's something weird about this milk. Here, taste it."
"Don't make him taste that if there's something wrong with it," Adam said, without looking up from the copy of The Heart of Darkness he'd told Kris he had to finish reading by third period.
"I'm not trying to poison him, I just want a second opinion," Becky said, avidly watching Kris take a sip.
"It tastes fine to me," Kris said, and handed the carton back to her.
So the music wing was crazy, but in a different way than he'd expected. It was a kind of crazy he felt at home in, and on Wednesday he took Katy along with him and they played "Chopsticks" together on the choir room's piano, with Megan accompanying them (sort of) on bongos. Making music---even the most ridiculous piano-lessons-for-kindergartners music---with Katy was so amazing that he wanted to pick her up and swing her around in delighted circles. The next day he didn't even make it into the choir room because he lost track of time standing around in the hall talking to Matt about the jazz band, and he spent the rest of the day completely convinced that he was going to buy a regular electric guitar and join the jazz band next semester. (He was much less sure when he woke up the next morning that this was a good idea, but it was a fun few hours. His imaginary electric guitar had been the flat, semi-glossy red and white of a 50s Chevy.)
It made him feel a little more awake, being there first thing in the morning. There were always tons of separate conversations going on, usually someone playing the piano, and while Kris had yet to hear any vocal warm-ups of the kind he'd imagined, there was a lot of singing. On Friday, Adam and Megan and two girls Kris didn't know were practicing a quartet they were considering for an upcoming vocal competition, and the sound of their voices intertwined in harmony carried Kris around for hours like he was floating a few inches above the ground. There were moments when all the layers of sound verged on giving him a headache, but mostly trying to keep up with all of it and sort out what he actually wanted to listen to was fun. The chaos of the room felt warm and musical and good, and in a way, hanging out in the music wing was a little like Adam's mixtape notes, something small and interesting about him that seemed significant somehow. Adam read and sang and helped Alicia untangle her earrings from the sleeve of her fishnet shirt, and Kris felt like he understood something about Adam better just by being there, even if he couldn't quite articulate what that something was.
____________
There were a lot of tall, dark-haired guys at their high school, but Adam managed to be completely distinct from the rest of them. His eyeliner was probably what made him seem that way---physically, anyway---to everyone else, but for Kris that was only part of it. Despite the fact that Kris was a little nearsighted (he had glasses he was supposed to wear to read the blackboard, but he didn't usually bother with them), he could pick Adam out from pretty far away, whether his eyeliner was visible or not. It was just the way he stood, or walked, or moved his head; Kris would see him from way down the hall and know. He was on his way to a review session for a math test after school when he happened to glance down the wing where the seniors' lockers were and saw Adam, standing at his open locker, bent forward slightly so that his head was resting up against the locker next to his. He was the only person in the hallway, and his posture looked so defeated that before Kris could even think about it, he was standing at Adam's locker.
"Hey," he said. "Are you okay?" Adam had his eyes closed, and for a second Kris was terrified that he was crying or something, and he had no idea how he'd react to that, what he could say or do, but when Adam turned to look at him, his eyes were dry. He looked sad and tired and angry all at once, but he wasn't crying.
"Yeah," he said. "Just...bad day." He stood up straight and stared blankly into his locker for a moment before slamming it shut and adjusting his bag on his shoulder. Kris watched him, waiting for him to elaborate, but he didn't.
"Mondays suck," Kris said, just to say something. Adam nodded at him, distracted, and Kris was hit with a sudden, sharp realization about the way Adam usually looked at him, the way he usually lit up the space he was in. He wanted to get Adam to smile at him, tell him a ridiculous story. He wanted to find out what was wrong and fix it, but he had no idea how. Adam looked so cool and closed-off that he sort of felt farther away than usual, like Kris was still watching him from down the hall. Kris was almost scared by that, that sudden distance, and he was tempted to just say he had somewhere to be and he hoped Adam would have a better day tomorrow and leave, but what ended up coming out of his mouth was "Can I maybe get a ride home?"
He wanted to take it back the moment he said it, because what the hell, that was his subconscious idea of how to cheer someone up? You're having a bad day, maybe driving me around would make you feel better? "Uh, if you're even leaving now, if not it's fine, I was supposed to go to this math review but I don't really want to and I already missed my bus..."
"Sure, okay," Adam said, mercifully cutting Kris off before he started describing his upcoming math test or his bus driver or something to fill the silence. "But I have to go find Nina for a second before we leave."
"And I have to go get my viola," Kris said, almost light-headed with relief.
"Just meet me at my car," Adam said. "It's sort of on the left side of the parking lot, toward the back..." He was sketching out a diagram in the air with his hands.
"I'll find it," Kris said. He went to get his viola (and his jacket, which he almost forgot about), and considered going out to Adam's car and saying nevermind, he'd just take the after school bus, but he thought that maybe some part of his idea---even if it hadn't been so much an idea as a connection failure between his mouth and his brain---wasn't a terrible one. When he was in a bad mood, being left to his own devices generally put him in an ultimately worse mood because he had the time to mope around and turn everything over and over in his head, so it wasn't completely crazy to assume maybe it was the same for Adam. That by keeping him company for a little while, Kris might help him shake off whatever had ruined his day. That was what he was going to tell himself, anyway.
When Kris walked out into the parking lot, Adam was leaning up against the hood of his car with his legs all stretched out and a stony, impatient look on his face. He looked like he'd been cast in a sitcom episode as the alluring, leather-jacketed bad-news boyfriend. He would have seemed unapproachable if he hadn't been twirling his keyring around idly, which broke the spell for some reason. He gave Kris a half smile as they climbed into the car. Kris put his viola on the floor between his feet and his backpack on his lap. Adam turned the key in the ignition and Kris recognized Radiohead's "Creep" coming out of the speakers at top volume for a few seconds before Adam snarled "Oh, of course," stabbed the eject button, and tossed the cassette over his shoulder. Kris heard it bounce off of something in the backseat.
"Hey," Kris said again, resting his hand on Adam's shoulder, lightly and just for a second, hoping Adam wouldn't hate him for repeating himself. "Seriously, are you okay?"
"I'm okay," Adam said, darting his eyes over at Kris without turning to look at him straight on. He shut the car's engine off again and rested his head against the steering wheel briefly. "No one died or anything. I'm just having one of those days where every time you walk into another room, something else annoying happens, and it just starts piling up until you want to start throwing things."
"Like cassettes."
Adam did turn to look at Kris this time. He was almost smiling. "Exactly," he said.
"As long as you're not throwing them at me," Kris said. "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye."
Adam laughed at that, this laugh like he'd been surprised into it. He gave Kris a what the hell? look, but he'd gone from almost smiling to actually smiling, and it made Kris want to hop back out of the car so he could do a little victory dance. "Oh my god, that would be the perfect horrible end to this day," Adam said. "Blinding you with a cassette tape."
"Please don't," Kris said, holding his hands up protectively in front of his eyes.
"I'll try my best," Adam said. "It's not like I want to blind you. But I'm just warning you that it may be out of my hands. I mean, this is my senior year and they're probably doing Annie as the spring musical, so I'm obviously cursed."
"Annie?"
"Yeah, with the orphans, and her trusty dog Sandy, and---"
"No, I know," Kris said. "But why is that a bad thing?"
"Because the male lead is Daddy Warbucks," Adam said, crinkling his nose. "'Old, bald rich guy who takes in orphans' isn't exactly my dream role. It's the one year I'd basically be guaranteed the lead, and I don't even want it. Plus it sucks because we'll have to get all these middle school girls to be the orphans, which means dealing with their schedules for rehearsals and stuff, and the fact that they're twelve year old girls. And all anyone will pay attention to is the dog."
"They're going to have a real dog?"
"See? You're already excited about the dog."
"Yes," Kris said. "I am. I'm its biggest fan, and I haven't even seen it yet. Can you get me its autograph?"
"Maybe," Adam said. "And then I found out that I failed this physics test that counts for almost half my quarter grade. I didn't even want to take physics, and now I'm probably failing it, and Megan forgot we were supposed to go out for lunch so I had to get a bagel from the cafeteria and all they had left was this single squashed sesame bagel with way too much cream cheese, and it was seriously depressing. And I don't even like sesame bagels, so it was like...this whole metaphor for my day. So I was just in a horrible mood, and I disagreed with some kid in my economics class about income taxes and he called me a fag---"
"In front of your teacher?"
"I know, right? Apparently he was really mad about taxes, I have no idea. So I told him to fuck off---like, literally, in those exact words, so we both had to go see the assistant principal and talk about appropriate language use for like half an hour. And the more I thought about it, the more it pissed me off that we were basically in equal amounts of trouble over it. It's like I'm supposed to be sitting there going 'oh, sure, I understand that you're an ignorant asshole, I can be patient while you learn to get over it.' I don't want to be patient. When I came out---when Mark and I---it was just, it was terrifying, but I was so proud, too. I thought it would...I don't even know what I thought. But sometimes I don't know if it was worth it. It was definitely---it was worth it to tell the people who matter to me, obviously, but I don't know if letting the whole school know I like dick was my best idea ever. At the time it seemed like I kind of had to, like it would be...I don't know, cheating if I didn't, but I have no idea why. It's not like it magically made everyone more open-minded, and now I just have to deal with their bullshit all the time. Sometimes I think I should have just waited until college or something."
"I'm glad you didn't," Kris said, without thinking.
"Why does it matter to you?" Adam said, a little sharply.
"I don't know." Kris pulled at a thread on his backpack without meeting Adam's eyes.
"Okay." Kris could feel Adam looking at him, and he wrapped the loose thread around his index finger and thought about reasons why it mattered to him. If Adam hadn't come out and decided to start the GSA, Kris never would have met him, for one thing, and Adam sort of had magically made him more open-minded, and he just liked Adam the way he he was, liked knowing that he was being honest, being himself. Adam exhaled deeply. "Shit. Sorry. I shouldn't---you're the last person I should be snapping at."
"It's okay." Kris turned to look at Adam again. "I don't know how you deal with it. I'd go crazy."
"Going crazy is how I deal." Adam shrugged and started the car. "At least some of the time. Sometimes I sing better when I'm upset or something, you know? So I try to use it. But sometimes I just end up telling someone to fuck off in the middle of class instead. Or---you're not one of those people who doesn't eat ice cream just because it's December, are you?"
"No..."
"Great. Because ice cream is like, the other huge part of my dealing strategy." Adam made a left out of the school parking lot. There was a Carvel in town, but it was in the other direction, so Kris assumed...
"Are we going to Moo Heaven?"
"Definitely," Adam said.
"My brother and I always entered those contests they have to come up with new flavors."
"Seriously? My mom won one of those a couple years ago, she suggested this...ginger maple something, for the fall."
"Yeah, we were really young, so our ideas were pretty bad," Kris said. "One time my brother wanted them to make Lego ice cream. With real Legos in it. He was all 'it's like a prize in a cereal box, you can collect them while you eat and then build something!'"
"Either that or choke to death."
"My dad tried to explain that part to him, but I don't think he got it."
"Actually...that could be kind of cool."
"Choking on Legos?"
"No, not the Legos, but 'Choking Hazard' could be a cool name for an ice cream flavor, if it had like, a ton of stuff in it."
"I don't think anyone would buy that."
"Maybe not," Adam said. "But it would look good on the flavor board. And it would have to have like, Brazil nuts or something, so I would try it."
Kris was hoping that they'd still be serving pumpkin pie ice cream, because it was technically still fall, but it had been replaced by eggnog (gross), gingerbread latte (possibly not gross), and something called "hot chocolate stirred with a candy cane," which Kris ordered. Adam got a Mint-Oreo Smash and, as an afterthought, a orange-mango swirl to go.
"That's for my brother---he's at home sick," he explained, grabbing a stack of napkins and shoving them in the pocket of his jacket. "Should we go eat in the car?"
"Sure," Kris said. Moo Heaven didn't have any tables inside, and even though Kris wasn't boycotting ice cream because it was December, he also didn't want to eat it sitting out in the cold. "You should have ordered this flavor," he said after they'd been sitting and eating in silence for a couple minutes. "It's totally a hazard. But more of a...cutting-your-tongue hazard. It has pieces of candy cane in it, they're kinda pointy. Here," he held out his little waxed-paper cup of ice cream to Adam so he could try a spoonful.
Adam, using only gestures and his eyebrows, suggested that Kris should try some Mint-Oreo Smash (which seemed to be made up of about 50% crushed Oreos), too, and they did a complicated, stationary dance involving plastic spoons that made Kris glance out the car windows to see if anyone else was in the parking lot, because this looked like a date. This time Kris was aware of it even as it was happening; maybe because they were the only two people here and he wasn't distracted by music, maybe because there was just something different about having to use a spoon to share food with someone than just grabbing something off of their plate, he had no idea, but Adam looked so happy with his spoonful of Kris's chocolate-and-peppermint-pointy-bits ice cream that he didn't care.
"I should have ordered this," Adam said. "It has marshmallows."
"Now you know for next time."
Adam made an affirmative noise around his spoon. Kris shifted in his seat and ended up smacking himself in the ankle with his viola case, so he tried to shove it further back into the footwell. Adam winced.
"Hey, be nice to your viola," he said.
"That was nice," Kris said. "Sometimes I want to throw it out the window."
"Really? Why? I mean, you love music---or it seems like---"
"I do," Kris said, but Adam was still talking.
"That's one of the things---at the open mic, I could just...I could see that. When you were playing guitar. I could see how happy it made you."
"Thanks," Kris said. He didn't think that was exactly the right response, but it was close. "And I do love music, but there's...it's different, you know? Like, playing with Megan was amazing. I don't hate the viola or anything, but I just get tired of it. I'm not picking the music I play, so I don't always care about it that much, but I still have to play it over and over..."
"Yeah, I get that," Adam said. "It gets like that with choir, too. Especially with Christmas songs."
"You don't like Christmas songs?"
"Well, I'm Jewish, for one thing. But it's not even that---or it's partly that, I don't know. But I don't have any emotional connection to it, so it's just words going in circles, and then you have to deal with the whole 'group performance' part, which..." Adam trailed off, making a face.
"It's so much better to just pick something yourself and learn it," Kris finished. "And not get graded on it, and corrected all the time. I never took guitar lessons, so I had to learn to correct myself when I started playing guitar, I was so used to having the orchestra teacher to boss me around when I did something wrong."
"You taught yourself guitar?" Adam sounded surprised.
"Yeah. It's really not that amazing, I had a chord book."
"How long have you been playing?"
"A couple years," Kris said, and the next words that came out of his mouth surprised him. "I learned the summer my best friend moved away. I, uh, I was really upset. His dad got a job in Ireland, and I guess I thought it was the end of the world. I don't know. It's not that I don't have---that I didn't have have any other friends, but I didn't even care, all I felt like doing was locking myself in my room and listening to music, but that wasn't---anyway, my dad's always had guitars around, he used to be in a band, and Brett---my friend and I always said we wanted to to have a band, and one day my dad was at work and I just dragged his guitar off to my room with me and sat there all day playing it. I sat there trying to figure out this Green Day song by ear like an idiot, like if I just played enough chords in a row I'd find the right one and know the whole song. Mostly I just got blisters, and I didn't even know I had blisters and my mom like, freaked out because she came to get me for dinner and I was sitting there on the floor and my fingers were bleeding. But I loved it---the guitar, I mean. I tried to put band-aids on my fingers and pick it back up the next day. That's all I did, all summer."
I've never told anyone that before, Kris almost said, because he hadn't. He figured his parents might have guessed at the time that Brett leaving and his sudden obsession with the guitar were somehow connected, but they'd never said anything about it, and neither had he, to them or anyone else. His "how I learned to play guitar" story always just went I was thirteen, I taught myself over the summer. He had no idea why he'd just told Adam the longer version, or if it had been a stupid story to tell. Kris felt a sharp little pang of shame just thinking about it, his thirteen year old self seemed so young and dumb, all numbly wrapped up in his own pointless misery and unable to play a single chord without staring intently at the neck of the guitar, but at the same time it almost still hurt, his chest felt a little tight.
"What song?" Adam said, and Kris was almost startled to hear his voice.
"What?"
"What Green Day song were you trying to learn?"
"Oh. Um, 'Good Riddance.' Or 'Time of Your Life,' sometimes it gets called that, too."
"Oh," Adam said. Since he'd finished talking, Kris mostly been gazing down into his empty ice cream container, pretending to try and scoop up the very last candy cane shard with his spoon, but he looked up at Adam and Adam was looking at him with the strangest expression on his face, this combination of confusion and understanding, like he was trying to figure something out but was most of the way there, and Kris couldn't look at him anymore.
"Sorry. I didn't mean to tell you my life story," he mumbled.
"Don't apologize," Adam said. "You can tell me whatever you want----oh fuck. Fuck, I've been almost sitting on this ice cream I bought for my brother. I just put it down on the seat next to me and it's probably half melted. Do you mind if we stop by my house first so I can drop it off before it turns into soup and gets all over my car?"
"That's fine with me," Kris said, and held out his hand for Adam's ice cream container. "I'll go throw this stuff out."
"Thanks."
Adam still had a kind of considering look on his face, and Kris was happy to hop out of the car and walk across the parking lot to the trash can, just to have a few seconds to breathe and remind himself that Adam didn't seem to mind that he'd just talked a lot, but he wasn't sure that was even what was making him jittery. He felt a little lost. He'd started this afternoon hoping to cheer Adam up, and he'd succeeded (with help from Moo Heaven, anyway), but now they were somewhere else entirely and he wasn't sure how they'd gotten there or where they were, and he had this insane feeling that Adam could read his mind. That he knew things, parts of the story Kris hadn't said out loud.
That Brett had called Kris after he'd been in Ireland a week, all excited about everyone's accents and some kind of weird soda they had and these kids he'd played soccer with the day before, and all Kris had been doing was sitting around in his room so deep in headphone-land he was practically scuba diving in a cave, and he thought about Brett saying they needed to play cooler instruments someday (girls weren't crazy about the viola) and he'd lied and said he was learning to play guitar.
He never thought about any of this anymore, about how the first time he'd played a chord and none of the notes were muffled or buzzy it was like a beam of light cutting through the clouds in his head; how when he managed to play an entire chord progression correctly the sheer rightness of it had almost made him cry, because all of a sudden it was music, the notes slotting together perfectly, a completely real thing just falling off his fingertips. He almost wanted to tell Adam the rest of the story, find out if Adam had ever felt that way about singing. At the same time, he wanted to hop in a time machine and take back everything he'd already said, because it was too much somehow.
He settled for getting back it the car and asking where the box of tapes was.
"On the backseat," Adam said. "I should have grabbed them for you while the car was stopped. You can put on the radio if you want."
Kris turned on the radio to someone talking about the stock market, and raised an eyebrow at Adam, who glanced over at him and rolled his eyes.
"Every time I leave my brother alone in the car for two minutes he changes all my radio presets to like, church music, talk radio, and the country station," he said. "Why did I just buy him ice cream?"
"How do I reset them?"
"It's---you have to hold down that button with the arrows when you find the right station, and it'll beep when it's set. But you don't have to do that, just find something listenable and we'll be fine."
Kris pushed a couple of the preset buttons, just because he was curious, and got "Achy-Breaky Heart" and some guy talking about Paul's letters to the Corinthians.
"I'm not leaving him in the car alone anymore," Adam said. "Seriously."
"Did you want me to go back to 'Achy-Breaky Heart'?" Adam just shot Kris a death glare, so Kris tuned the radio past a traffic report and some commercials and the hideous lite rock station, which was playing a Celine Dion song. He stopped station-surfing at the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under the Bridge" and looked at Adam for confirmation that this counted as listenable.
"This song has so much room for singing harmonies," Adam said.
Kris shut his eyes and just listened for a bit. "I can hear that," he said. "Do you think Megan still wants me to sing with her at the next open mic?"
"Of course! But we can't go to the next one, it's on the fifteenth, which is---"
"The winter concert."
"Yeah. It sucks. But tell her you want to sing with her in January, she'll be thrilled. I think she actually has a song she wants to do, she was trying to talk Matt into it back in October but she didn't really want a piano cover. I don't know, ask her about it."
"I was talking to Matt about the jazz band the other day. I might see if they want me to play guitar."
"You should. I mean, there's probably not a lot for you to do right now, they've got a bunch of people."
"That's what Matt said. But a couple of them are graduating this year, so he thought if I joined now..."
"You'd have a better chance of taking one of their places next year. I wish you could take Taylor's place now, he's a good guitarist but he's such an asshole. But don't tell Matt I said that, he and Matt were starting some kind of quartet or something, so they're all friendly right now. I swear Matt's only putting up with him because he has this van that can fit a drumset and all the amps and stuff in it." Adam turned into what was presumably his driveway and shut the engine off. "Oh, my mom's home."
Kris hadn't really been paying attention to where they were going, but now that he looked around, he was pretty sure Adam lived a couple streets over from his friend Evan.
"Come inside, I'll grab you that Nirvana CD Allison wanted me to loan you." Adam leaned into the open car door to talk to Kris.
"Yeah, okay." Kris followed Adam up to his house, which had a little pineapple-shaped sign that read "Welcome!" hanging on the front door.
"Hi, mom," Adam half-yelled as they walked in. "You're home?"
"I'm in the kitchen," Adam's mom yelled back. She was standing at the stove, stirring something, and Adam gave her a one-armed hug. Kris had met her before at the car wash, but he hadn't really noticed then that she and Adam looked a little bit alike, there was something similar about their features.
"Where's Neil? I got him some ice cream."
"I think he's asleep, you can just put it in the freezer."
"But you see how nice I'm being to him right now, right?"
"Mmmhmm." His mom didn't sound convinced.
"This is Kris, by the way," Adam said, looking over his shoulder at his mom, and then at Kris.
"Hi," Adam's mom said. "Are you staying for dinner? There's plenty of chicken soup to go around."
"I'm not even staying for dinner," Adam said. "I have to go paint scenery for the winter play, we'll probably end up getting a pizza."
"I thought you weren't in the winter play," Kris said.
"I'm not. But I have to suck up to the scenery kids a little so they'll help us paint stuff for the dance."
"I can go with---no, wait, I can't, I might go guitar shopping with my dad tonight."
"You're getting a new guitar?"
"Yeah, I hope so," Kris said.
"That's awesome. And way better than scenery painting, trust me. I think I'm going to get stuck painting fake books on fake library shelves all night."
"Another library?" Adam's mom sounded dismayed.
"Oh, of course. It's like, a rule by now. Because they hate me. They keep doing plays that need these library backdrops," Adam explained to Kris. "And they never save the backdrops from previous plays, either, they always paint over them and then we have to do a whole new fake library. It's so stupid."
"But this is the last one you'll ever have to paint," Adam's mom pointed out.
"Don't even say it, you'll jinx me. I'll get to college and 'painting fake libraries' will be a requirement."
"That sounds like an easy class," Kris said.
"I'd definitely pass it. I'll see you tonight," Adam said to his mom. "Save me some soup."
"There's a lot of soup, don't worry."
"Good," Adam tugged on Kris's sleeve so Kris would follow him back out into the living room.
"It was nice to meet you," Kris said over his shoulder to Adam's mom.
"You, too," she said.
"You are so polite." Adam looked delighted, it seemed like forever ago that he'd been standing in front of his locker with his head bowed and his eyes closed.
"Sometimes I forget that your hair isn't actually black," Kris said, glancing at the framed family photos on the living room wall.
"Aww, thank you," Adam said. Kris thought it was a weird thing to get thanked for saying, but whatever, as long as Adam was happy.
"You have an inflatable mummy," Kris said as they walked into Adam's room. (Which, aside from the inflatable mummy leaned in the corner, was sort of what he'd expected---posters, clothes everywhere, three very full CD racks, which Adam was currently looking through.)
"Yeah, never tell anyone you're interested in Ancient Egypt. You end up with the weirdest birthday presents. I hope this CD is actually in the case...perfect." He handed Kris a CD case with Kurt Cobain playing guitar in a sea of candles and lilies on the front, and walked over to his dresser, which had a mirror mounted on the wall over it. He rummaged in the top dresser drawer until he found a black eyeliner pencil and lined his eyes, talking the whole time. It was weirdly fascinating to watch, and Kris realized that he'd been so focused on just talking to Adam that he hadn't noticed his lack of makeup until now. "It was their last performance before Kurt killed himself, so it's a little...spooky to listen to. But really good, I think you'll like it. There's some covers, and it was like, this big deal because they didn't want to play any of their big singles, they didn't do 'Teen Spirit,' for one thing...I'd offer to do your makeup, too, if I had time," he said, meeting Kris's eyes in the mirror so suddenly that Kris's heart sped up a little. He felt...caught. Adam looked so much sharper with his eyeliner on.
"That's okay," he said. "I don't think I could pull it off."
"You totally could," Adam said, rearranging his hair a little before turning away from the mirror.
"You should have told me you were painting scenery, I wouldn't have asked you for a ride," Kris said as they walked back out to the car. "You could have just stayed at the school."
"Why would I have wanted to stay at the school? I would have just sat around being pissed all afternoon if you hadn't hijacked me."
"...Hijacked?"
"In a good way. So thank you." He slung an arm around Kris's shoulders, and Kris leaned into him. The beat-up leather of his jacket felt nice against Kris's face, soft but a little rough at the same time, and Kris wrapped an arm around Adam's back and closed his eyes for a moment and felt like he was basking in a sunbeam.
"Sure, anytime," he said, and he felt like he should say something else, that it had been fun, that he was glad the hijacking had been successful and Adam was happier now, but Adam disentangled himself, opened the car, and leaned into the backseat for his box of tapes.
"Here, pick some music." he handed the box to Kris and walked around to the driver's side. "And tell me about your new guitar."
____________
Daniel was sitting on the couch playing Gran Turismo 2 when Kris walked in the door, and he didn't even look up from the TV. Kris considered taking advantage of Daniel's obliviousness and sneaking up on him serial killer style, but it didn't seem worth the effort. He flopped down on the opposite end of the couch.
"I'm trying to unlock another course," Daniel said, all impatient like Kris had even asked to play in the first place.
"Whatever." Kris took off his shoes and shoved them under the coffee table, which his mom would probably be annoyed about later.
"Did you walk home? Because the after-school bus came by here already."
"No, I got a ride."
Daniel made an affirmative noise and continued mashing buttons on the Playstation controller. Kris almost wished Daniel had asked him who he'd gotten a ride with. He sort of wanted to say Adam gave me a ride, and we got ice cream, and now he's going to go paint scenery, just to say it, even though Daniel probably wouldn't care. Kris sat around listening to the game's soundtrack and fake racetrack noises for a while, then made himself get up and drag his viola and his backpack to his room. He debated which was the lesser of two evils, math homework or selections from The Nutcracker Suite, and decided to start with the viola because Daniel was in racecar-world and less likely to come in and whine about the boring ballet music on endless loop. It seemed less annoying than usual, like maybe telling Adam how annoying playing music he hadn't picked could be took some of the annoyance out of it, but after an hour or so he called it quits and went to play Playstation.
It turned out that Kris's dad had forgotten about a meeting he had to go to after dinner, so the guitar-shopping trip got postponed and Kris did homework and talked to Katy on the phone instead.
"Where'd you go after school? I thought you were going to a math thing, but you weren't on the bus," she said.
"Yeah, I didn't go, and then Adam gave me a ride home," he said, and the second it was out of his mouth, the rest of it---the ice cream, the story of Adam's bad day, the random inflatable mummy---all seemed weirdly private, like something that would change shape if he shared it.
"Aww, that was nice of him," Katy said, and just like that Kris changed his mind and wanted to tell her after all, but she was already moving on to something else like it wasn't a big deal or even that interesting, which Kris guessed it really wasn't. "The violin rehearsal was horrible. I think Mr. Shapiro wanted to strangle us all, and Melissa started crying again."
"Seriously?" Melissa sat a couple chairs down from Katy in orchestra and had a tendency to burst into tears when things got really tense.
"Yeah. I'm kind of worried about her. I thought maybe I'd invite her to a GSA meeting or something."
"You think she's crying because she's a lesbian?"
"No---" you idiot, Katy's tone implied "---But the GSA meetings are a good place to talk about stuff. Wait, unless she'd think I was saying she was a lesbian because I invited her. Do you think she'd think that?"
"Probably."
"What if I just told her that we have like, cookies and stuff?"
"What, like I don't think you're a lesbian, I just want you to have a cookie?"
"Oh my god, I wouldn't say that---"
"We'll just rename ourselves the After School Cookie Alliance, otherwise she'll cry because you think she likes girls."
"You are awful," Katy said, but she was laughing.
"No, wait, it should be---it has to be two things that are allied, though, like...the Cookie-Cupcake Alliance."
"After School Cookie Alliance sounds better, though."
"Maybe I could call my band that."
"You could have really cool t-shirts, with different kinds of cookies..."
"What are those Girl Scout cookies, with the stripes---" Kris sketched a circle and some stripes in the air with his fingers before he remembered Katy couldn't see him.
"Samoas."
"Yeah, those. I definitely want those on there."
"Everyone loves those," Katy agreed. "Did I tell you I figured out why I hate the stupid Nutcracker music so much?"
Katy's dad kicked her off the phone a little while later, but not before she'd explained that she had traumatic ballet recital memories involving music from The Nutcracker Suite, and they'd agreed to walk to her house after school tomorrow because the weather was supposed to be warmer. Kris went to put his homework away in his backpack and found the Nirvana CD Adam had loaned him in between some folders. He popped it into his CD player with the feeling of slightly nervous anticipation he always got when he was listening to music he knew someone wanted him to like.
The album opened with the song Allison sang at the open mic (and Kurt Cobain introduced it the same way Allison had---this is off our first record, most people don't own it---so that explained that), and Kris found himself swaying and playing air guitar without realizing it by the time the second chorus rolled around. That set the tone for his experience with the entire album, which had him yearning for his guitar (even though it was just in the garage) and at the same time made him never want to pick up his guitar again, because he wasn't sure if he'd ever be this good. Kurt Cobain wasn't the best singer in the world, but there were moments when his voice went straight to Kris's heart anyway---the way Adam's had at the open mic---like someone tightening down a tiny vise in his chest. The recording had applause and crowd banter and Kris wished the next open mic was sooner because he wanted this. He didn't know if he was good enough, if he'd ever be good enough, but he wanted to be. He wanted to say something cool and dry like I'm probably going to screw this song up... into a microphone; to start playing his guitar knowing people were listening. He wanted to take a shaky breath and sing and hear his voice amplified, bigger than he was used to, ringing out of the speakers and boomeranging back to him.
He made himself play the CD straight through, without listening to the songs he liked multiple times or skipping through the ones that didn't grab him as much. The last song had such raw power that by the time his CD player shut itself off with its familiar little whirring noise, Kris was stunned, almost dizzy. He wondered if that was what Adam meant when he'd said this album was spooky, and what Adam's favourite song was. He stared at the track listing on the album jacket for a while like that would help him figure it out. For a few minutes he considered looking up Adam's number in the phone book so he could ask about it, so he could say holy shit, that CD is amazing and have Adam say I know, isn't it? back. He could already hear exactly how Adam's voice would sound saying it. But looking up someone's number and calling them was kind of a weird thing to do, and it was after ten o'clock anyway, which also meant that Kris probably didn't have enough time to sneak onto the computer and find some Nirvana guitar tabs. He wished Adam had given him this CD on a Friday. He wished he was a guitar prodigy. He wished there were something, anything he could do besides take a shower, half-heartedly read a chapter of The Great Gatsby, and go to sleep.
____________
Kris hurried to the choir room the next morning, on a mission to find Adam and talk grunge music. He'd woken up with "Pennyroyal Tea" twined around his brain like kudzu and there was something he found suspiciously satisfying about telling someone what was stuck in his head and getting it stuck in their head, too. It was like that proverb about misery loving company, maybe. He didn't see Adam as he walked into the room, but Megan stood up and waved at him with both arms like she was shipwrecked and trying to signal a rescue plane.
"It's Kris!" she squealed, jumping off the risers and jogging over to him. "Good morning, Kris."
"Hi," Kris said. "Do you know where Adam is?"
"No, but some guy from the jazz band asked us to watch his guitar. Do you want to help us watch it?"
Kris raised his eyebrows. "You need help watching a---oh. You want me to play something?"
"Please," Megan said, clasping her hands together. "It's just sitting there, and none of us know any songs." She walked back to the risers and gestured to the guitar with both hands like she was presenting the grand prize on a game show. It was a blue and black electric, sitting on the bottom riser in an open case. Alicia was sitting one riser above it, sharing a miniature box of Froot Loops with a curly-haired girl who had four earrings in each ear.
The fingerprint smudges that were visible on the guitar's surface made Kris feel weird about just reaching into the case and grabbing it, but Megan solved his crisis of conscience by picking it up herself and holding it out to him.
He shrugged his backpack off first, then sat down on the bottom riser and took the guitar, settling it in his lap without putting the strap over his shoulder. (For some reason, that made him feel better about playing someone else's guitar without their permission.) "Did he also ask you to watch an amp, by any chance? Because it's not going to sound very good---"
"Doesn't matter," Megan said. "It'll still be a million times better than people coming in here and people playing that song from Titanic on the piano."
"People do that?" Kris had assumed that song was finally dead.
"Yes." Megan sounded grim. "And sometimes stuff from Phantom of the Opera. It's a nightmare."
Kris played a few experimental chords on the guitar. The sound was quiet, hard to hear over the noise in room, and had a flat, metallic quality that made him feel better he'd mostly decided on an acoustic electric. He closed his eyes and played a C. The resonance of the strummed strings felt different against his hands, and where the guitar was cradled against his body. There was something about the way the individual notes sounded together that was sharper than his acoustic, and he could have sat there for a long time just strumming random chords and trying to figure it out, but that wasn't what he was supposed to be doing.
"What do you want me to play?" he said.
"I want to hear some NoFX," Alicia said.
"Do you know any Pavement?" said Earrings Girl.
"Kris is not a jukebox!" Megan said, which both made Kris laugh and saved him from having to admit that he definitely didn't know anything by either of those bands. He only knew that NoFX was a band because Alicia had several t-shirts that proclaimed her love for them. "...But if you play us something we can sing, we'll start a cult that worships you."
"And give you the last of these Froot Loops," Alicia offered. She peered into the tiny cereal box. "They're mostly purple ones."
"But Froot Loops are like M&Ms," said Earrings Girl. "The colours all taste the same anyway."
Kris thought about songs he knew that Megan, Alicia, and Earrings Girl would also know. There was always his Beatles catalogue, but he felt like he and Megan had already covered that, and he wanted something new. He wasn't sure if Alicia and Earrings Girl were the right audience for his single-guitar version of "Baby One More Time." He considered the slowed-down and only semi-successful rendition of "Lovefool," but he hadn't worked on that for a while, and it seemed wrong to play it without Adam there. He wished he'd had time last night to learn something from the Nirvana CD, his fingers were still itching for those songs and he was pretty sure everyone but him knew them already and could sing along. But everyone usually knew Eighties music, too, so he decided on something his dad had taught him back when he'd only been playing guitar for a few months.
"Do you guys know '867-5309'?"
"Hell yes we do," Megan said.
"Rose will sing harmony," Alicia said, nudging Earrings Girl---Rose---with her shoulder.
"Okay," Kris said, and shifted the guitar in his lap. The song had a little intro part with some picking, but he skipped that and went straight to the chords.
"Wait, wait, stop a second," Megan said, and Kris stopped playing. "That's really quiet."
"Yeah, that's why it needs an amp."
"No, I mean you're going to have to sing with us so we know where we are, I don't know if we'll be able to hear."
Kris hesitated for a moment. Playing guitar at school was one thing, but playing guitar and singing was another. As badly as he'd wanted an audience last night, this wasn't the audience he'd meant. The other people in the choir room were just trying to finish homework and play piano and gossip before homeroom, and they were probably going to think he was showing off or a giant dork or maybe both of those things at the same time. But he didn't want to explain all that to Megan, who was obviously fine with spontaneously bursting into song.
"Yeah, okay," he said, and started again, his heart speeding up a little as he played the intro chords. He only had to sing the song's first line (Jenny, Jenny, who can I turn to) by himself before the girls jumped in. Alicia and Rose were sitting behind him, so there was a kind of surround-sound effect. Their voices were drowning out the guitar completely---Kris couldn't even hear it, and it was in his lap---but he kept playing anyway. He liked the way the guitar felt in his arms, the vibrations of the inaudible chords. Rose picked up the harmony one line in, and Kris was surprised that they actually sounded halfway decent until it fell apart after the chorus because Alicia and Megan started singing the first verse over again instead of the second verse.
"So how does the second verse actually start?" Megan said.
"Jenny, Jenny, you're the girl for me," Rose said, stepping down a riser to sit next to Kris.
"...Really? Okay, I thought that would make me remember the rest, but it doesn't. Can we just do the first verse over again? Kris? Do you mind?"
Kris shrugged and tried to ignore the group of girls sitting by the window who were staring at them. "That's fine, the guitar part's all the same anyway."
"Does Adam know Kris can sing?" Alicia said, climbing down to sit on Kris's other side and giving him a look he couldn't interpret.
"What?" Kris said, because seriously, it wasn't cool to talk about him like he wasn't there, and why did Alicia think Adam would care that he could sing?
"I told him," Megan said at the same time, waving Alicia off. "Less talking, more singing. Rose, why don't you and Kris sing the first 867-5309 in the chorus, and then Alicia and I will do the echo, that way it's even."
"That works," Rose said, and Kris gave up and played the intro chords again.
They managed to get through the verse and chorus one more time before the warning bell rang, and the guy whose guitar Kris was playing (who was tall and blond and didn't seem to care at all that Kris was playing his guitar) came back for it and they all headed to their homerooms. Kris sat down at his desk and looked down at the fingertips of his left hand, almost hoping the indentations of the guitar strings would still be visible, but they weren't. He missed the weight of the guitar in his lap already, but he consoled himself with the box of Froot Loops that Alicia had given him as they left the choir room. He spent his first few classes daydreaming about guitars and doodling a t-shirt design for his nonexistent band and ended up feeling annoyed with himself for always talking about having a band like it was a joke instead of something he was actually considering.
He kept an eye out for Adam all day, hoping they'd run into each other in the hall at some point so he could at least tell him he liked the Nirvana CD, if nothing else, but Adam was nowhere to be seen. His day hovered between average and annoying, and by the time he was rushing out of his business class to meet Katy at her locker, he half wanted to pull her hair over his face like a curtain and take a nap.
"I heard you were playing guitar this morning," she said, lacing her fingers into his as they left the school.
"Yeah, I---wait, who told you that?"
"Sarah Klein."
Kris just gave Katy a blank look.
"You totally know her. She's kind of short, she always wears headbands. Anyway, she said you were singing and stuff. You keep having concerts without me."
"It wasn't---I didn't plan it or anything, I just went down there and Megan was like 'hey, we have this guitar'---"
"I was joking." Katy squeezed his hand. "But I'm sad I missed it."
"We just sang the first verse of '867-5309' twice, it wasn't that exciting." Obviously it was exciting enough to Sarah Klein (she'd probably been one of the staring girls sitting by the window) that she'd had to go tell Katy about it, which reminded him of Alicia saying does Adam know Kris can sing? and the fact that he still didn't know what that was about.
"Sarah thought you were good," Katy said, which didn't make him feel any less weird, even if it was flattering at the same time.
Katy sort of steered them to the playground instead of her house, which had become the way she and Kris asked each other to make out for a while without actually asking. The elementary school didn't let out until 3:30, so it was usually empty before then, although there'd been a couple embarrassing incidents involving moms with kids who were too young to be in school at all. They were the only ones there today, though, and they snuggled up in a little fort type thing and kissed for a while. Katy was half in Kris's lap, soft and sweet like always, and he felt strangely suspended in between the warm presence of her and the cooler, greyer swirl of everything that was in his head---guitar chords and conversations people were having about him outside his hearing and the history quiz he'd probably failed---and he wasn't completely in either place. Katy must have noticed, because she pulled away from Kris with a final brush of her lips against his cheek and turned around to sit with her back leaned against his chest, head tipped back onto his shoulder and elbows resting comfortably on his legs like he was her own personal armchair. Kris wrapped his arms around her and closed his eyes. His nose and his fingertips were getting cold, but he wanted to stay here a little longer. He felt good, sitting with her like this, both safe and like he was protecting her at the same time. (What he would be protecting her from, he wasn't sure. Renegade squirrels and disapproving moms with toddlers, maybe.)
"I think I actually want to have a band," he said after a moment. "Like, for real." He felt Katy move her head to look up at him and opened his eyes.
"So talk to Joey," she said. "Whose side was he on when his band broke up?"
"Victor's---the singer's---I think."
"See, then you'd have a bassist and a singer."
"I kind of want to be the singer," Kris said.
"Oh." Katy twisted around so she could see him better. "I thought you just wanted to play guitar."
Kris shrugged. "I don't know."
"Then you just need a drummer," she said, and Kris could see the questions she wasn't asking in her eyes, and he loved her for not asking them, for not making a big deal out of it and needing him to explain why. It made him want to lean down and kiss her, so he did. "Maybe you should ask Rob."
"To what? Play timpani for me on 'Baby One More Time'? I don't think that would work..."
Katy smacked his leg lightly. "Don't be obnoxious. He might play drums, too. I don't think they had timpani the first few years we did orchestra in elementary school, he probably started out just doing general percussion."
"That still doesn't mean he can drum to non-classical music."
"You should ask him, though. He's nice----I ran the bake sale table with him one time. I wonder what Alicia's going to bake tomorrow?"
"What, for the GSA meeting?"
"Yeah, the people from student council are coming. Maybe she'll do something super-complicated to impress them so they'll help us out."
"Or we could try to hypnotize them with a giant watch, like in a cartoon," Kris suggested, and Katy laughed. "So did you ask Melissa to come to our cookie club?"
"No, because you have me all paranoid that she'll think I mean she's gay and get upset! And tomorrow wouldn't be a good time anyway, the student council people are coming so we'll probably just talk about dance stuff."
Kris rolled his eyes, unseen.
"Okay, too cold," Katy said. She sat up straight, grabbed her backpack, and hopped out of their little fort, and Kris followed her. They sat in Katy's kitchen for a while when they got to her house, drinking hot chocolate and eating pretzel sticks and talking to Katy's mom. Kris showed Katy his After School Cookie Alliance design, and they told each other stories about the alternate universe where this band existed and Katy ran their merch table wearing her Girl Scout sash from fourth grade. They did some homework and migrated over to the computer and play-argued over who got to type. Katy wanted to talk to her friends on instant messenger, Kris wanted to search for guitar tabs, and while her mom was in another room Katy sat in Kris's lap and neither of them could type at all, which was also fine.
Kris's mom picked him up on her way home from work, and after dinner he started learning to play "Pennyroyal Tea." This ended up being a semi-bad idea when he woke up with it stuck in his head again after having a dream where he was supposed to get to a Nirvana concert but he had to drive there in a vintage limousine that would only go in circles around this fountain. Charles was sitting next to him wearing a chauffer hat and holding a plate of sandwiches, and Kris knew it would be his own fault if he didn't get to the concert in time and Kurt Cobain died.
part 5 >