Five Flavors of Dumb - Antony John [28]
Finn stared straight ahead, blinked twice. “Please don’t be mean to me.”
I could have responded with something sarcastic, or dismissive, but I didn’t. Because for all his faults, Finn looked small in the seat beside me, and I knew he was right. Besides, I was about to say something that would annoy him: “We won’t be leaving school until five o’clock tonight.”
Finn kept the scarf wrapped over his mouth, but his eyes gleamed as his hands produced an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
I figured he must be kidding, but as I continued to stare at him it was obvious Finn wasn’t feigning enthusiasm. For whatever reason, the same kid who seemed hell-bent on expulsion seemed positively thrilled that we’d be staying late at school.
Something was up, and I just hoped I found out what it was before Belson did.
CHAPTER 19
Josh had omitted to mention Kallie’s instrument of choice for a good reason: Lo and behold, she was an aspiring guitarist, with the emphasis on “aspiring.” Tash saw Kallie removing a guitar from her case and muttered a phrase that seemed to consist entirely of expletives, while Kallie smiled as if it were the most delightful coincidence in the world.
Josh sidled up and grinned at me, presumably to reassure me that this was all for the best. I even believed it until he wrapped an arm around Kallie’s shoulders, easing her toward him like he was claiming her. Meanwhile Kallie ran her fingers along a broken guitar string, seemingly unaware of his attention.
“Guess this is a bad time to say I don’t have any spare strings, right?” she asked no one in particular.
Josh squeezed Kallie’s shoulders playfully and nodded in Tash’s direction. “Don’t worry, Tash has spares. Can you fix this, Tash?”
Tash glared at Kallie, no doubt thinking of several better uses for a steel string. I contemplated asking Will to bail Kallie out instead, but then I realized that his bass guitar strings wouldn’t work.
“I only have one spare set,” Tash huffed.
Josh produced a five-dollar bill like so much spare change he’d found in the folds of his pocket. “You can get yourself another, right?”
Tash hesitated, but she took Kallie’s battered guitar, wound the string around the nut, and tuned it methodically. Then she tried tuning the neighboring string as well, which instantly snapped. She gazed at her dwindling supply of spare strings and shook her head.
“Have you ever tuned this?”
“Of course,” insisted Kallie.
“With what? A tuning fork?”
“No. I only play by myself, so I just tune the upper strings to the lowest.”
Tash threw up her hands in surrender. “Okay, I’m done. I’m not going to sit here and replace every single string.”
Josh dug into his pocket and retrieved five more five-dollar bills. “Just get on with it, Tash.”
He meant it to end the discussion right there, but instead all eyes were drawn to the wad of notes he dangled like a carrot inches from Tash’s face. Even Will looked up, his face creased like he’d just detected a nasty odor, or maybe in distaste at his brother’s flaunting the family wealth in public.
Tash paused again, but it was just for show. It was clear she’d do it, and was privately hoping that every single one of the strings snapped before she was done.
Which they almost did. Twenty-five minutes later, Kallie had four new guitar strings, Tash had twenty dollars, Josh had his arm surgically attached to Kallie’s shoulder, and Dumb had significantly less than two hours to learn a new song and discover they had just been reinvented as a soft rock band.
“What?” Tash exploded.
“Soft rock,” I repeated. “If we can learn this song today, we’ll be heard on KSFT-FM, and interviewed live too.” (Okay, so I was getting ahead of myself, but I figured if it all fell through I’d be out of a job anyway, so it hardly mattered. After all, there were only twelve more days until my month was up.) “It’ll be serious exposure, the kind we can use to get Dumb’s music heard on other stations, maybe even get us paying gigs.”
I knew I had Josh at “exposure.” At “paying,” I