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By Root 354 0

the band and thought it was promising. There were also several new messages of the generic “You’re an inspiration, Kallie” variety, and even more of the “Oh my! Now I see why Dumb needed Kallie” type from people who had evidently followed the link to Dumb’s Battle of the Bands performance on YouTube and suffered emotional trauma as a result. And there was one message from someone called ZARKINFIB that didn’t fit any category at all: get educated u money-grabber. go see kurt at 171 lk wash blvd e It was like getting a threatening letter—you know you should ignore it, or tell your parents, but instead you read it over and over, like secretly you knew you had it coming all along. And although I was pretty sure ZARKINFIB wasn’t likely to bust through the window brandishing a machete anytime soon, I still felt pretty shaken up.

I closed the messages and struggled to focus on the rest of the MySpace page. The main change since Sunday was the number of profile views: 6,259. I couldn’t actually remember what the number had been before the radio interview, but I knew it was triple digits only, which meant that all those bloggers had directed some serious traffic our way. And even if people were only there to check out extra photos of Kallie, it was still an astounding number. More importantly, it was the ammunition I needed to keep fighting.

I launched the word processor and without pausing to think, I began to type:

Piper’s Manifesto:

Problem: Josh is an asshole. Solution: Suck it up as long as the band makes money.

Problem: Tash is bad for morale. Solution: (gulp) Stand up to her.

Problem: It’s not entirely clear that Will even has a pulse. Solution: That’s a problem?

Problem: Kallie can’t play guitar for crap. Solution: Get Finn to help her—he owes you.

Problem: Ed doesn’t think I know what I’m doing. Solution: Prove him wrong.

Problem: Dumb can’t do soft. Solution: Make them hard again.

Problem: Mom and Dad suck. Solution: Wait until next summer, then join a commune.

Apart from the last line (which I deleted) the manifesto sort of made sense. And somewhere in the few minutes it took me to write it, I’d even begun to formulate a plan.

I Googled “Dumb Kallie Sims” and found links to twenty-three bloggers who had written about Dumb’s resident goddess-muse. I figured they’d be mostly guy blogs, the kind with close-ups of Kallie’s barely visible boobs and a copy of her birth certificate proving she’d be fair game once she turned eighteen the following March. Instead, almost all of the blogs were written by women, linked to each other like the tentacles of a Kallie Sims fan club that Kallie herself probably didn’t know existed. And there were other common links too, to the websites of KSFT-FM, the Christian Family Beacon, Seattle Today . . .

I’d heard of Seattle Today—one of those breathtakingly dull talk shows that air in the late morning when the coffee has worn off and viewers are trapped in a pre-lunch stupor so disabling they can’t even summon the energy to switch channels. The website informed me that the host, Donna Stevens, had been “guiding” the show with her “effortless blend of gentle humor and homespun wisdom” for eighteen years, and in all that time had never once missed a show, even turning up for work promptly the day after undergoing gallbladder surgery (“!”). (Comparing the almost identical photos of Donna from her first and most recent shows made me suspect that her gallbladder wasn’t the only part of her that had undergone surgery.) The show, it turned out, still aired live, “a decision favored by Donna for the spontaneity of the results and not, as many have suggested, because it puts her in a different category at the annual Seattle TV awards, where Seattle Today has won uncontested for the past six years.”

It was past one a.m. when I composed my e-mail to Donna Stevens, requesting an invitation for Dumb to appear on her show. I wrote that she was an inspiration to the Vaughan family. I quoted the bloggers who applauded Dumb’s “wholesome” values. I provided a link to the podcast of our—okay, Kallie