Breakout (17 page)

She gives me a look that is something like sympathy, and wait, is she going to agree with me? Did I just earn our freedom?

“That said,” she continues …

I should have known better.

“Bereit!”
the German general shouts across the snow-covered field
.

“The simple fact of the matter is that Arts Night is a family event attended by our entire school, with an audience ranging in age from preschool children to grandparents.”

“Ziel!”
The line of troops raise their MP40 submachine guns
.

“And thus, this performance has to be appropriate for the full range of the audience. Clearly, the f-word is not. I’m afraid that’s pretty cut-and-dry, and there’s no way around it.”

“Feuer!”
Bullets spray the crowd in slow motion, blood flying everywhere, and we drop in a heap to the mud-smeared snow
.

“So we can’t perform?” asks Keenan. He sounds crushed, like I feel.

“You cannot sing the f-word at Arts Night,” Ms. Tiernan says. “I think that’s pretty clear-cut.”

“Anthony, why not just change the lyrics?” asks Mr. Travis. “I mean, I listened to the song, and really all you’d have to do is change one little word and it’d be fine.”

“That would be your best bet,” Ms. Tiernan agrees.

“But,” I say, “it’s not one little word. It’s, like, the whole point of the song.”

“I thought the point of the song was feeling trapped?” says Ms. Rosaz.

“Well,” I say, “yeah, that’s part of it, but …”

“Isn’t there some other way to make your point?” says Ms. Tiernan.

“I don’t know,” I answer. I feel like I’m losing all my air, collapsing in on myself.

Ms. Tiernan sighs like we have reached the end of the
time for discussing this. “All I can say is, if you want to perform you will have to change it, at least for this one show.”

She says it like we have
any
other shows, like she’s giving us some kind of choice.

“But change it to what?” I ask.

“How about, ‘Forget this place’?” says Ms. Rosaz, all eager, like this is her chance to be a real writer instead of an English teacher.

“Or ‘I hate this place,’ ” says Mr. Travis.

All I can think as they’re talking is that those ideas sound
so dumb
, and I am starting to feel the tightness again. Trapped. Every time you tunnel out, you end up against another concrete wall topped with barbed wire and grown-ups in the sentry posts.

And so really what’s the point? Maybe I should just say forget it, or
fine
, I’ll change the lyrics, whatever, because really I knew this was going to happen, didn’t I? I mean, I thought about this way back on Saturday morning.

But that was before three thousand plays! The UK! All the people who felt like the song described them, who said it was just how they felt. Or what about what happened in the cafeteria today? If I change the lyrics just because
they
say so, then what about how
we
feel? How I felt? If I change it, I’ll be a sellout! That would be basically the same as having your song in a commercial for Coke or a minivan.

“Anthony?” Ms. Tiernan says.

“I don’t know,” I mumble, and then suddenly I feel like,
you know what? Whatever, I’m lying here riddled with bullets. I should just say the truth. “You’re just treating us like babies again.”

“Excuse me?” Ms. Tiernan says.

“Anthony,” my mom says in her warning tone.

“Well, it’s true,” I say. “We’re fourteen years old, but you’re making us express ourselves like we’re in kindergarten.”

“Now, come on …,” Mr. Scher says.

“Anthony, that is enough,” says Mom.

“Actually, Anthony,” Ms. Tiernan says, “I’d argue that part of assuming grown-up responsibilities is having an awareness of your audience.”

“So I should lie?” I say. “You’re all always telling us to be honest, to express ourselves, but you don’t mean it. You only want us to say the good things, the safe things, and you want to pretend that the bad things we feel, the hard stuff, doesn’t exist. You wouldn’t want
the audience
to hear it. To know how we really feel.”

“But the song doesn’t offer a solution,” says Ms. Rosaz. “What if you wrote about that same feeling, but made it hopeful? Like, when you have that trapped feeling, what can you do to make it better? That could be powerful and inspiring for your peers.”

Listening to her, I hear my heart pounding. What she’s saying is making me feel stupid. Why didn’t I think of that?

But no! I realize why what she’s saying is so completely wrong: “But I don’t
know
how to make it better,” I say. “This
song isn’t about, like, inspiration. It’s about frustration. That’s why people like it. They get that feeling, like sometimes there isn’t a solution.”

I look around the circle at all the blank faces, either looking at me, like Tiernan and my mom, looking somewhere into space, like Rosaz, Scher, and Keenan, or looking at their hands, like Valerie and Mr. Travis. I’m saying all this and everyone is just silent, like I’m speaking another language.

It’s useless.

“Whatever,” I mutter.

“Okay, well, Anthony,” Ms. Tiernan says. Suddenly she sounds like we’re just one of the twenty piles on her desk. “I think that about does it. The bottom line is, it’s school policy, so that’s that. And I think you already knew that. I’ll trust you to talk it over with Mr. Darren and your family and decide what to do. Thanks for coming, everyone.”

The other teachers start to get up and leave and you can tell they want to get out of there. Beside me, Keenan kicks his chair with his heel.

Mr. Darren pats our shoulders. “We’ll talk at practice tomorrow.”

“Let’s go.” I look up and Mom is standing beside me. I can already hear what she is going to be saying all the way home and all night and what I am thinking is exactly what I put in the song.

But I guess you can’t say what you feel.

“See ya,” I say to Keenan.

I look over and find Valerie gazing at me. Her eyes flash to my mom and back, and all she says is “Sorry” and then gets up to leave. I wish we could talk more.

“See you tomorrow,” I say, and follow Mom out.

Everybody knows how the car ride home goes with parents when they are mad. There’s the not talking, then the loud radio, but the radio is annoying, and so there’s the angry clicking off of the radio and then the silence again. Then about a mile from home, it can go one of two ways: either you get the ultimatum, or the pre-ultimatum bonding that is just a trick to make the coming ultimatum seem reasonable. But Mom surprises me by going with a third option, which is even more silence.

And that’s actually another annoying power that parents have because by the time we are pulling into the driveway, I have this uncontrollable urge to apologize, to crack. But I keep reminding myself that
no
, I didn’t do anything wrong!

Keenan texts me a little later:
Parents
=
not happy
.

I reply:
tell me about it
.

I lie low doing homework until dinner, though at least half of homework time is me checking BandSpace.

Then dinner is stupid just like you’d expect it to be.

When Mom finally talks, she says, “I wish you’d told us about this beforehand. I did not appreciate having to hear about it from Ms. Tiernan.”

Oh
, I feel like saying.
I’m so sorry you had to be humiliated like that. How sad for you
.

I just eat.

Mom keeps going. “I can’t believe you put that song online for anyone in the world to hear.”

“I didn’t put it up,” I say back, “Keenan did.”

“Oh, and you don’t have the power to pull it down?”

“Mom, people love the song! If you’d been on the site you’d see all the plays and comments, and kids at school tell me it’s like this amazing thing.”

“I
have
been to the site, Anthony,” says Mom. “I’ve seen all the profanity-laced comments. You—didn’t you think about how you were presenting yourself?”

“What, you mean being honest?” I shoot back, and
blammo!
that’s a good one.

“There are other ways to express—”

But I cut her off. “Mom, that’s how I felt! Why doesn’t anybody care how I feel? And it’s how other people feel too.”

“Anthony,” says Mom, and I see the moment of uncertainty in her eyes, like she wasn’t expecting me to make such a good point. She gets quiet. “We do, we … we do.”

I don’t say anything else, because maybe I know they do care, that they do worry about me, but part of what they think shows that they care is exactly the ways they make me feel trapped. Or something. And anyway, they’re parents. They
couldn’t possibly get the song and how it feels, the way the rest of my world does.

After a minute, Dad says, “Have you decided what you’re going to do about the show?”

“No,” I say, and shove a forkful of steamed broccoli in my mouth so that I can’t answer when he says more. But he doesn’t. Still nothing …

Then Mom talks with Erica about school, and then dinner is over and I get out of there.

I spend the rest of the night not wanting to think about the whole stupid day today or what I’m going to do about the song or any of it. I want to wake up tomorrow and not have this choice between sucky and more sucky. I just want to go to sleep but then I just lie there wide awake. I could play guitar, but I don’t feel like it. I could play
LF
, but I don’t feel like that either. Nothing sounds fun. Nothing is fun to think about. I’m lying in my bed going nowhere and the only thing that’s moving is time ticking by in my stupid life.

I shamble through Wednesday, all zombie. No shower, exhausted, bag hanging off my shoulder, and the urge to eat all the brains around me.

Nobody says anything to me about the song. Some people seem to look at me and the look is strange, like they are feeling sorry for me, and I figure word has gotten around about the meeting.

And every time I see one of
them
, the teachers, I get that feeling like they are watching me, wondering what I am going to do. Change the words? Don’t play the show? I can’t decide which option sucks worse.

I’m not the only one who’s a zombie by Wednesday afternoon, though, because during last period we have a School Spirit Dance.

That’s right, our school dances are during the school day.

I know.

I didn’t realize that I could feel even more hopeless and
defeated, but being here in the school gym while a few cheap lights spin and a portable stereo blasts distorted songs by lame bands leaves me feeling pretty certain that life cannot get any worse.

Nobody’s dancing, because why would you? There’s daylight coming through the windows. Actually, four kids are: Parker, Maggie, Kendall, and Ricky, but they’re the type of kids that don’t need a dance to give them school spirit. You can tell by their crazy spinning and laughing out in the middle of the gym floor that they already have so much they are dangerously close to overdosing.

The rest of us are leaning against the walls like we’re stuck to them. Some kids have paper cups of the syrupy fruit punch of death that’s being served, along with cookies, in the corner. The parent chaperones are talking louder than the kids, including Ms. Tiernan, who is standing by the door and gazing out at the dance floor like if any of the younger chaperone dads were game, she’d totally go out there and get it on like some ancient MTV video from the eighties.

Keenan and I are under the basketball hoop. Skye and Meron and Katie went to the bathroom or something like two years ago. A couple boys who tried to escape the zombie-fying boredom by climbing the rock wall just got escorted out of the gym.

The Danger Twins are the current band blaring from the stereo, and they are about as bad as it gets. They are these boy-girl twins who seem really fake like they were grown in a lab. Their voices tune perfectly together, and the only thing
“dangerous” about them is that even though you hate their songs, you cannot get them out of your head.

And standing there against the wall, I am hating how well I know the words to “Clone Double Date”:

This should be the sound track to a montage about the fall of the modern world, like with bombs detonating and earthquakes and tsunamis. Actually, they could just show this stupid dance.

We don’t have to be here. In yet another of the teachers’ brilliant ideas about how to make this event cool (here’s a hint:
make it at night!!!
), you are also allowed to hang out in the library. Ooh.

I’ve been here about ten minutes when I finally see Valerie show up. She spots me and waves, but then Lena drags her toward the snack and punch table.