Five Flavors of Dumb - Antony John [41]
“Here’s the thing,” he began, an opening gambit that assured me the list was about to be alarmingly long. “Dumb is a hard rock band. Josh and Tash and Will don’t get soft rock at all. Meanwhile, we’ve got an extra guitarist we don’t need who can’t really play. But because she’s hot she’s become the face of the band, and now we can’t get rid of her, even though she wants to quit. This isn’t rocket science, Piper. You need to decide what kind of band Dumb is going to be, and you need to decide quick, because I don’t think we’ll survive many more occasions like last night.”
He’d finished his analysis, but I couldn’t speak. I felt the seconds passing and the crushing emptiness of the shop as Ed waited for some kind of acknowledgment that I’d heard a single word. I knew he’d wanted to help, and that under other circumstances I’d have wanted his advice. But at that moment his words stung more deeply than those of Kallie and my mom combined. I didn’t think about what that meant—or why it bothered me so much that he’d described Kallie as “hot”—I just nodded like I was strong enough to accept responsibility for everything that was going wrong.
Then I turned away, leaving half a cup of coffee and the remaining shreds of my self-confidence behind.
CHAPTER 26
I needed to distract myself, but none of my homework assignments engaged me at all. And I couldn’t shake that look Mom had given me. She hadn’t looked angry; she’d looked hurt, like I’d just told her she was fat, or that Grace was an ugly baby. It was the kind of look that left no room for quick retractions. I felt guilty. I hated feeling guilty.
Without thinking it through, I e-mailed Marissa, told her the whole story. I knew it was too late to IM—it was eleven o’clock—but I needed to tell my side of the story to the one person who’d understand. A moment after I’d sent it, Marissa IM’d me:
MARI55A: that sucks
P1P3R: YES. everything sucks at the moment
MARI55A: everything?
I hesitated. Dumb wasn’t Marissa’s favorite topic—I knew that—but we’d never kept information from each other before. Besides, I needed to vent.
P1P3R: yes. tash and kallie had a blowup after Dumb’s interview last night
MARI55A: kallie sims is in dumb?
P1P3R: didn’t i tell u?
MARI55A: no
P1P3R: oh. anyway, i had an argument with her about staying in the band, and then i went to see ed and he was kind of mean too
MARI55A: no way
P1P3R: yes. told me i needed to work out what Dumb was all about
MARI55A: seems fair
P1P3R: i guess so, but i got the feeling he blamed me somehow
MARI55A: ur the manager. who else should he blame?
She may as well have stabbed me in the heart. I reread the line, tried to inflect it with a positive spin, but it was a million miles from the unconditional support I’d always counted on.
P1P3R: i thought u’d understand
MARI55A: i do. look, i gotta go. hang in there, okay? xoxo
I would have written back, but she’d already logged off.
I turned off the light and crawled into bed. I wanted to fall asleep, to escape the thoughts clawing at my consciousness, but instead the evening just replayed in my mind, a crappy movie on endless loop. Even Josh made a cameo appearance, smirking as if to confirm that my promotion to manager was no coincidence at all, that he’d planned Kallie’s arrival in Dumb as carefully as a military offensive. Unwittingly I’d played my role to perfection. It was enough to make me want to quit, but what if he’d planned for that too? I couldn’t bear to give him the satisfaction of being proved right yet again.
Once the clock had yawned all the way to midnight, I resigned myself to not sleeping. I dragged myself out of bed and turned the light back on, then stuffed my pillow at the bottom of the door so Dad wouldn’t see the strip of light when he eventually went to bed (even rebels need to pick their battles). Firing up my laptop, I pasted two new reviews of Dumb on our MySpace page, and linked to some bloggers who had discovered