“My generation
Has no admiration
Or veneration
For your worldview.”
Chad likes to think he’s political, but really he’s full of hot air. Plus, I’ll bet Chad has never used “veneration” in a sentence in his life. I think he wrote this song entirely with a thesaurus.
Anyway, Drew, Kyle, and I come to a screeching and simultaneous halt, with me bringing the full force of my stick down on the crash cymbal and then deadening it immediately with my hand. The effect is a musical exclamation point … on steroids. I normally love this trick, but I scraped my palm during the seven-person collision in gym class and it still hurts.
After a three-beat pause we slam back into the song in unison and Chad starts belting out the chorus.
Besides the cut on my hand, I have a bruise on my ass that is making drumming harder than usual today. Not to mention the bruise on my ego. Apparently the whole school heard about the PE pileup.
“How’s it going, Trippy McTripperson?” was Drew’s greeting when I arrived at rehearsal, which cracked Chad up.
Kyle, who is the nicest of my three bandmates, tried to suppress a smile but didn’t do a very good job. “What happened?” he asked.
I’m the only guy in Unexpected Turbulence without a girlfriend, something about which I’m frequently teased. How these guys have time for relationships, I just don’t understand. Anyway, I can’t tell them the reason I tripped the entire gym class was because I was ogling a girl. First, they’ll demand to know who she is, and second, they’ll never let me hear the end of it.
I make up a lie for Kyle about my shoelace being untied. I know. Lame. But I figure it’s such a cliché no one would use it unless it was true.
While I don’t say a word about Eliana, I haven’t been able to shake the image of her since I took my seat behind the drum kit an hour ago. I think it’s her eyes that get me the most. It’s not that they’re Disney-character big or anything, but they have this incredible depth, like there’s a whole other person hiding behind them. Yeah, it’s definitely her eyes. Or maybe it’s her—
“Dmitri!” Chad’s voice cuts through my snare drum. It’s only now that I notice the rest of the band has stopped playing and they’re all staring at me.
“What?”
“What do you mean ‘what’? You played right through the change, dumbass.”
Oh my god, Chad’s right. I never do that. Never. The look on Kyle’s face can only be described as shock. “Dimmi, you okay?”
I nod. I’d rather have them think I got a concussion in PE than know the truth. “I’m fine,” I say, “maybe just a bit dizzy.”
“You wanna take a break?” Kyle asks.
“No breaks.” Chad would be the kind of officer to get shot by his own troops in Syria or Afghanistan or wherever we’re at war this week.
“Shut up, Chad.” I love that Kyle doesn’t put up with Chad’s crap.
“Up yours, Kyle. The gig is in two weeks. We need to be perfect.”
The gig Chad’s talking about is our first-ever show at the First Avenue and Seventh Street Entry. It’s the coolest club not only in Minnesota, but really the whole Midwest. Prince made it famous, but bands like the Replacements and U2 played there. (And yes, so did Hüsker Dü. I looked it up.) Chad has been at DEFCON 1 over this gig since he booked it a month ago. The truth is, I agree with him. This gig is, as my Spanish teacher would say, muy importante.
“No, I’m good. Chad’s right; we need to nail this. Let’s just play.”
Chad gives Kyle a “told you so” look, which makes me mad at myself for giving Chad an opening to be right about anything. Kyle shrugs and starts the guitar riff to our next song.
I try to put Eliana out of my mind and focus on drumming. It only partly works. I don’t screw up again at rehearsal, but images of Eliana’s butt—her eyes, I mean her eyes—dance across my mind.
I either need to give up on this girl, or I need to find a way to get her to notice me. No, that’s not right. She’s definitely noticed me. In fact, that’s the problem. Now I need to get her to want to notice me.
There’s only one person who can help. I have to talk to Reggie.
Eliana
My walk home is particularly slow today. I need time to think. Or maybe I need less time to think. Thinking often brings my mood levels way down, so I attempt a detour. As I walk, I listen to music on my phone to create a sort of soundtrack to my life. If I can get my brain to stop thinking about me things, I can sometimes deter the inevitable drop into bummerville. Sometimes, when I’m overthinking things or just hating on myself even too much for, well, myself, I turn up the volume on my music really loud in hopes of jarring the thoughts right out of my brain. I don’t know if that’s why it works, or if it’s just the shock to my eardrums, but it usually helps me switch brain tracks for a little bit.
Today I’m surprisingly not thinking in a downward spiral, even though I know it will be Groundhog Day at home (one of my dad’s favorite Bill Murray movie references, where the same day repeats over and over again). I waffle between mortification that I may have caused the PE Accident of the Century and blushing at the potential that I, Eliana Hoffman, may have caused the PE Accident of the Century.
The other day I reread my seventh-grade diary to see if I always felt so crappy. In it I talk about this boy, Arlo Eggers, from my science class who, every single day, would ask me about my gym shoes. This was way back with my first pair of Chucks, black high-tops that have disintegrated since then. I liked to draw on them with a white paint pen, mostly nerd symbols from TV shows and movies I hoped nobody would understand (but secretly hoped they would so they’d know how cool I was). A direct diary excerpt:
Arlo asked me about my shoes today. Again. He asks me almost every day about them. Today he pointed at the Supernatural anti-possession symbol and asked, “Are you a Satanist?” I looked at him with a total eye roll. “What do you think?” He smiled so cute, and I almost died but tried to look like I thought he was an idiot. I wish I could make a face that says, “I like how you keep asking me about my shoes. Ask me about them again while we’re naked in the Caribbean.”
Man, I was a weird middle schooler. Why would I want to be naked with Arlo Eggers in the Caribbean, of all places? Also, what did I think we would be doing while we were naked? Like, just sitting there, getting a tan? I was in seventh freakin’ grade! What a doof. And yet, when I look back at that journal entry (I really should burn it before I die or someone else finds it), I think that maybe he kind of liked me. Yes, he danced with someone else at the mixer (classiest name for a middle school dance ever), and all I did was stand in the corner with Janina and make fun of people. But if I had been a different sort of person, say, one who actually knew how to read the social cues of boys, I would perhaps have played the whole shoe-admiring thing differently.
And then what?
Would we have dated in seventh grade? Fallen in love? Gotten married? Ended up naked together in the Caribbean? (Seriously, what the hell was that?)
My point in taking this death-defying walk down memory lane is that I now realize that maybe boys have liked me in the past. (Does the snowball kiss count? Or was it just par for the bat mitzvah course?) And maybe that means a boy could like me again. Like a particular boy who I totally made face-plant into the gym floor.