Five Flavors of Dumb - Antony John [34]
Everyone shuffled back to the car, until only Josh and I remained on the sidewalk. As he approached me, he waved the five-dollar bill accusingly.
“What did he do, pay our expenses?”
“Does it matter?”
“You think you’re clever, huh?” he sneered. “Well, if you’re really our manager now, then sort out this mess.”
“How, Josh?”
“Kallie is a member of this group, same as everyone else. They don’t like it, then too bad.”
“She shouldn’t have joined in the first place.”
“You voted her in.”
“It was a mistake.”
“Live with it. Just the same as we live with Ed.”
I almost laughed. “Not the Ed argument again. We’ve been through this, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember. And it’s the same thing.”
“No, it’s not. Ed can actually play his instrument. Ed is a musician. Heck, Ed has a functioning brain.”
Josh’s head whipped up. “Yeah, well, you know what I think? I think that even if Kallie were the best musician in this band, you’d still hate her. So would Tash. And if everyone had treated you the way they just treated Kallie, you wouldn’t have lasted a single day as our manager. And you know why we didn’t treat you badly?”
I rolled my eyes—I knew what was coming. “Because I’m deaf.”
“No. Because I convinced Will and Tash to give you a chance to prove yourself. We gave you a month, but all you needed was three weeks. Don’t you think it’s hypocritical you couldn’t even give Kallie half that long?”
Josh acted like he was waiting for me to respond, but I think he knew there was nothing more to say. For once, he was absolutely right, even if I couldn’t bring myself to admit it.
CHAPTER 22
Over breakfast the next morning I stared at Kallie’s junior year portrait on my laptop screen. I remembered when I first saw it in the school yearbook, a passport-sized photo with all the mysterious allure of a Vogue photo shoot. And now here it was again, blown up to fill the entire screen.
I glanced up from the computer to see if Finn had come downstairs yet, but no. He probably figured there was no need to be on time for school when he was always late leaving at the end of the day. I finished my last piece of waffle and checked out the photo again.
Maybe I should have been thrilled. All press is good press, right? But there was something deeply unsettling about seeing Kallie’s likeness gracing a website run by a concerned parents’ support group. And the photo was just too large, like the authors had decided that their audience would enjoy ogling Kallie even more than reading the text below.
I scanned the article. It was chock-full of phrases like “positive message,” “endearingly humble,” and “ideal role models.” I tried to reconcile these observations with my own experience of Dumb—Josh’s overflowing ego, Tash’s overflowing temper—but the two just wouldn’t mesh, so I kept reading . . . and discovered the article wasn’t about Dumb at all, although the band’s name appeared often. It was All About Kallie, and whatever she had said on the radio had clearly enchanted concerned parents across Washington State.
And that wasn’t the only site dedicated to preaching the gospel of St. Kallie. Even religious bloggers got in on the act, describing Dumb as ideal role models for teens everywhere. Some splashed older photos of Kallie across the screen, ones I hadn’t even seen before. Below one of them, a caption read: “Kallie Sims—modest, kind, and beautiful too!” Another described Kallie as “not only stunningly gorgeous, but a supremely talented lead guitarist.”
I read that last sentence again, tried to pretend it didn’t really use the word “talented” in connection with her playing. Heck, she hadn’t played at all on the recording. And while I knew I should be laughing at a situation so completely improbable, I just couldn’t. Because as Finn entered the kitchen and stared at me like he was about to administer CPR, it dawned on me that Kallie had just become the face of Dumb—a pretty face that Tash was no doubt eager to rearrange.
CHAPTER 23
It was raining hard by the time school