Breakout (10 page)

She is quiet for a second, but then she says, “Okay, we’re going to bed. Don’t forget you have class at ten tomorrow.”

“Right,” I say.

“Good night.”

“Yup.”

Mom closes the door. I am having a weird feeling of being in two different worlds or something. I can feel the adrenaline working its way through my system and it’s like this huge relief, this huge relaxing. What just happened? I grab my phone and drag the cursor back to the start of the tune.

I am almost afraid to listen to what I just did, but I also can’t wait to hear it because I feel like I barely remember doing it, like it happened to somebody else.

I hit Play.

I hear me singing, in this weird quiet way, and it’s all muffled beneath the covers but actually that effect sounds kinda cool. The verses build, and here comes the final part, and then I hear myself singing those last lyrics, shouting with a grit and growl that would make Jake Diamond proud.

And then it gets to the f-bombs and it sounds like something magical or terrible or stupid or perfect but what it does more than anything is give me the chills and then it makes me laugh out loud. I can’t help it. It’s like a recording of some creature inside me unleashed, some kind of demon or something. Like the sound of my true soul when things are at their worst.

“Take that,” I say to nobody.

I listen to it probably ten more times, thinking it’s amazing sometimes, but then stupid, but then amazing again. I am shocked, but then psyched, and by the tenth time I have started to think about the obvious fact:

This will never fly for the song for
real
. I mean, obviously these f-bomb lyrics will never work for Arts Night. Sure, it would be totally fine for SilentNoize, or even for Sister’s Secret when they’re playing at Vera, but not for us.

I try to imagine the look on Mr. Scher’s face if he heard this, his eyes getting all bugged out and his mouth dropping open, the parents at the Arts Night covering the ears of their little protozoans. That would actually be
insane
. But whatever. There’s no way it can happen.

Still, for tonight the song exists like this and I made this and it’s true and nobody can tell me it’s
wrong
or do anything about it.

So I highlight the whole track and export it to an MP3 and text it to Keenan with a note that says:
Here’s how we bring down the Reich
.

Then I put away my phone and grab
Strummer
magazine and sit back against the wall and read.

It’s weird. I feel so calm. And I feel weird about how I’m feeling calm but I also feel okay, like less mad. I’m not really thinking about the week or any of the dumb things or really much about anything.

I sit there reading an article about the sound track for the new WereNinjas! movie that is coming out this summer.
They’re calling it an inter-prequel because it takes place within a one-month time gap that happened in the second prequel. That sounds stupid. The guy who wrote the sound track apparently used totally fake digital guitars that he played with a keyboard and that is an idea that’s as dumb as the movie itself, but I figure me and Keenan will have to check it out to see how much it sucks and laugh at it.

This is the kind of thing I am thinking about.

The anger is gone.

And then the next thing I know it is four a.m. and I am waking up to find my clothes still on and my light still on and I don’t change either and just fall back asleep.

I wake up to KEXP playing Fractured Senses and I remember that last night I was supposed to see them and Valerie was going to be there. I wish I’d gotten to hang out with her, and I hope she wasn’t disappointed, but it all feels like a long time ago.

I look down at the microphone lying on my floor and remember the song and that feels like a long time ago too, almost like a dream. Then I remember the crazy swearing lyrics and that seems like some other person, like watching a character like me in a movie. I wonder what Keenan thought of it but there is no text back from him or any emails and so I get up and put on my sweatpants and hoodie for Fat Class.

Downstairs Mom and Dad are up like they always are because they have forgotten how to sleep in. I am never going to let that happen. For them, the weekend has schedules to be kept, order to be maintained.

There are strawberries and blueberries, nonfat vanilla
yogurt and scrambled egg whites and salsa. I grab some and sit on the couch, where Dad is watching one of his favorite shows,
Fatal Storms!
, on the Disaster Channel. He loves anything about science and specifically all the ways that nature is going to kill us. A lot of it is relevant too, since in Seattle we are right near a giant fault line and a huge volcano. It’s crazy to think that we worry about all these little things like writing assignments or even our BMI when at any moment some giant geological event could wipe us out. Then again, if Mount Rainier blew, it would be awesome because we’d be able to see it from our roof.

Mom is doing sudoku, the laundry already in. Neither of them really hassles me until Mom’s inner clock goes off and she gives me a ride over to the gym where the class is held.

When we got the prediabetes news last year, I started going to a YMCA teen fitness class for a while but I didn’t like it. The class was fine and they had you do good stuff but it was the other kids that were annoying. There were nine of us and because we were all teens it was like we all suddenly infected each other with the
I’m too cool for this
disease. The instructor, Brenna, was nice and she had a good routine but it was just too annoying with everyone acting like jerks.

Life-in-STYLE! class is totally different. There are about ten regulars and a few others each week and they are all grown-ups and they are all serious. They want it. And when I’m there, I end up wanting it too.

Like Craig, who’s in his forties and a doctor. “There’s the young Jedi,” he says to me as we head up the stairs to the workout room. He’s wearing his usual workout shirt that has a picture of Yoda and says
THERE IS NO TRY
.

“Hi, Craig,” I say.

“How’s school?” he asks. “You surviving?”

“Barely.”

Craig and I enter the classroom. The floor is shiny wood and one wall is all mirrors and then two of the other walls are lined with windows. Outside, the world is blurry with fog but in here it’s warm and bright. We walk around the edge of the room collecting the gear that we will use for class: a set of dumbbells, a straight bar, a mat, a plastic step, and then a rubber half-ball called a BOSU.

“Hey,” says Craig, “I downloaded those albums you told me about for Peter.” Peter is Craig’s son and he’s in sixth grade. Craig asked me what some good albums were that Peter might like for his birthday and I told him SilentNoize and the Zombie Janitors but then also the Breakups. “He just kinda looked at me funny,” says Craig, “but now I notice that he’s got the SilentNoize on all the time. So thanks.”

“Sure,” I say.

We stake out spots on the floor and arrange our gear so it’s ready to go.

“Hi, Anthony,” says Morgan, the woman beside me. She’s pretty seriously overweight and wears these two knee braces and has to modify a lot of the workout moves. I think she’s
younger than my mom from the way she talks about things but it’s hard to tell from how she looks. She tries really hard in class and you can tell it hurts. “So, do you have a review of
Virtuality
for me?”

Morgan is cool too because she always wants to know my opinions about movies. She knows I will have seen any big movie worth seeing or at least heard the verdict.

“Pretty good,” I say, because I saw that movie last Saturday. “The effects are great so definitely see it in three-D. The plot is kinda what you’d expect, but Marni Kane gets to kill lots of zombie avatars, which is cool.” I tell her this because I know Morgan likes movies to have women in them who do more than just scream a lot and get tied up until they get rescued by guys.

“Nice,” says Morgan. “Sounds like I’ll have to go tonight.”

“Yeah,” I say, and it’s cool how these adults don’t treat me like some kind of problem or burden or failure and how they think I have interesting things to say and like I’m an expert on music and movies. It’s so different than school and home. If this was how all adults acted, things would be so much better.

Instructor Mike walks in, wearing his black T-shirt and workout pants. He has ridiculous muscles but not too big. You can tell he earned them through years of sick workouts. “All right, let’s fire it up,” he says, and everybody quiets down and gets ready. We all love Mike because he is like a drill sergeant and he makes us feel like we are a unit and we can take the high ground on the battlefield against our bodies. You just know he really wants everybody to do well. Also, he plays
classic workout music like Rage Against the Machine and stuff that gets you going.

He turns on the sound system now and it’s nice and loud. We run our laps around the perimeter of the room, then circle up for stretching. Some of them are easy but then there are others that are tough because they’re about balance.

“Remember to activate your core,” says Sergeant Mike as we do those quad stretches where you pull one leg up. With him everything is about core conditioning and how your abs and lower back and glutes are like the power center of your body. We do this one stretch where we stand on one foot and then have to bend forward and put the other leg straight behind us, with one arm out to the side and the other down to touch our toes and you really have to lock your core not to fall over. It’s a tough one and Craig kind of fudges it and Morgan and I both go for it and end up wobbling and having to put our other foot down a lot, but we look at each other with red faces and smile.

Next we do planks, which are ice-hot pain, then some work with the dumbbells and then lunges onto the BOSU. You lay the BOSU on its flat plastic side, the blue rubber half-ball facing up, then you squat and jump and you have to land on that squishy surface like a giant mushroom in some alien forest and stick the landing. It is all about activating your quads and your core, of course. These are superhard and when you watch Mike do them it is
sick
because he squats so far down and then has this huge vertical leap and
bam!
comes down on the BOSU and his entire body freezes like a
concrete statue and he lets out this huge deep breath and is poised there like a ninja. I am able to stick one or two of the landings without having to step off but even then my legs feel like they’re made of rubber.

After those, Mike walks around the room giving everyone a fist bump and a “Nice work,” and it is forty-five more minutes of this and it hurts but we are soldiers and we can take it.

Somewhere in the middle of the workout, as we are doing jumps and crossovers on the step, my mind drifts off and I start to hear the song again. I think about how awesome it was coming up with that, and also I think about the ending with the f-bombs, and how it’s crazy but also how that was exactly how I felt and there is something amazing about that. But then I think about how those words would be a
Situation
if adults heard them. And more than anything what I want is to perform the song at Arts Night.

It bothers me how SilentNoize or a hundred other bands can play to thousands of people with lyrics way worse than what I wrote and it’s totally fine because they are artists and they are telling it like it is. I know that won’t be the case for the Rusty Soles. The stalag guards will never allow it. So I’ll have to figure out how to change them, but I’ll worry about it later because writing them was awesome and I’m still kinda
impressed with myself that I even did that, and that’s all I want to think about right now: how I’m a songwriter and also rocking these crossover steps samurai-style.

Class knocks me out but it feels good. Everyone seems happy it’s over but also satisfied. I feel like I’ll be sore, and Sergeant Mike is always telling us that we can do this stuff at home during the week to keep our muscles engaged, but I don’t really get to it very often. Still, I improve a little each week, land one or two more BOSU jumps or do a few more mountain climbers or crunches, and that’s how you win the war, step by step, hill by hill.

After lunch, which includes me telling my parents that the wish list assignment is almost done even though I haven’t touched it, I go upstairs and load up
Liberation Force
. I log on and search for Keenan but he’s not online. I check my phone to see if he’s texted back from last night but he hasn’t. It’s weird for Keenan to go radio-silent for this long. Maybe he got in trouble or something. It’s starting to bother me not to know what he thought of the song, and also about what happened at Vera and if he saw Valerie.

The more time goes by, the more I get a little nervous. Maybe he thought the song was stupid. And he’d better not show it to Skye or he’s
dead
.

I send him another message:
whats up with u?