Breakout (3 page)

Finally, it’s time to rock.

“Mr. Cantrell, Mr. McCartney, welcome.” Mr. Darren is sitting on a brown metal folding chair with his Les Paul across his lap. He’s got it hooked into the Line 6 amplifier and has it set to a wicked crunch distortion. It sounds like a hive of hollow-tipped knives. (Ms. Rosaz, you never knew I could describe things like that, did you? That’s because you just make us write stupid memoirs and five-paragraph essays instead of asking us to describe music.)

My last name obviously isn’t Cantrell. It’s Castillo. But Mr. Darren always anoints us with the names of killer rock musicians, based on who he thinks we’ve been sounding like, and so lately I’ve been Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains. Other times I’ve been Mr. White, Morello, Page, Slash, Perry, and so on. After a long day, it’s nice to have someone treat you like who you
could
be, instead of what you
aren’t
.

What’s also cool is that Mr. Darren isn’t just picking today’s
superstars—he’s not calling me Trohman or Koenig, even though they are who lots of kids think of as the best guitarists. Some kids act like the guitar was invented last week, and like any music that’s not on the sound track to the latest horror movie is irrelevant.

Paul McCartney is about the oldest reference that Mr. Darren uses, and yeah, he’s older than my grandfather at this point, but we’ve spent some time putting our ears on the
Sgt. Pepper
bass lines and you kinda have to pay your respects to Sir Paul.

Mr. Darren is up on the second of three curved levels that are built into the floor. Before this place was a student lounge, it was the band room. Rows of kids used to pack in here and play flutes and stuff, but then the school’s formal music programs got cut.

The only thing that changed during this room’s brief life as the world’s worst student lounge was that they added three couches and a soda machine. Except then a bunch of parents freaked out because soda is the
Worst Thing Ever
, and then people started writing obnoxious messages on the whiteboards, and finally a kid broke his ankle leaping from one couch to the other, and that was the end of that.

Rock Band Club was actually Ms. Tiernan’s idea. She got a bunch of music gear donated to the school, probably using six thousand of her best winks, and then hired Mr. Darren, who was already around tutoring kids in math. The lounge was the only free space in the building, and so now the couches are pushed against the wall, and there are amps,
drums, speakers, and guitar cases everywhere. You can still kind of read the echoes of the nasty messages on the boards, and there are still brown soda stains in the carpet, but otherwise, this room went from being the worst to the coolest place in school.

For everything that is unbearable about Tiernan and Catharine Daly, no other school in the city has a Rock Band program. When I’m actually safe inside this room, I can remember that.

Mr. Darren is chunking on the sixteenth-note riff that’s part of the song we’ve been working on this fall, the one that we have less than two weeks to finish.

“How was the war?” This is how Mr. Darren always asks about our day.

“A few casualties, sir,” I say, “but we took the hill.”

“All right then,” he says. “Let’s fire it up.”

Mr. Darren is cooler than any other adult in school by far. He is never stressing or making music feel like homework. And even though I see him talking to the other teachers, he never brings up things that have gone wrong in other parts of our day. When we get here, he’s just about the music.

It’s awesome too how he actually pays attention to what we’re into, like using war lingo with us. Also, we’ve talked with him about how World War II was actually, like, a good war. Real heroes, real villains. Ever since then, war has basically sucked. It’s this complicated thing that makes your parents get in fights with your uncles, and it seems like nothing with the far-off deserts and dictators and the oil and the villages
is worth dying for. Case in point: tons of kids’ parents wouldn’t let them play
Liberation Force 3
, which took place in Afghanistan, and yet this version, set in World War II, is like the top-selling game ever.

Some other ways that Mr. Darren is cool: he actually cares about how he looks, unlike so many adults. He has a rock haircut, dyed black, and he wears jeans that are actually in style. And even though he’s married and has two kids, he’s still in two bands, called the Breakups and Subdivisions on Mars.

We’ve only seen him perform once. The Breakups played at school one time, which was pretty great except for the fact that it was at three in the afternoon and lots of parents came. A couple of them knew the Breakups and actually started dancing a little bit right there in the school gym, and, ooh, not good. Luckily, Keenan and I got to be roadies for the day, tuning guitars and running the sound system, so we were able to mostly ignore that display. And then Mr. Darren and his band were really good.

We’ve also watched videos on YouTube of his band from like fifteen years ago called Tender. There is young Mr. Darren, with spiked hair, playing in Europe and even on
Saturday Night Live
. That must have been sweet!

Still, I wonder if it’s weird to be a has-been like that. I don’t mean that in a bad way, like he’s pathetic or anything. Just that he
has been
those things and now he’s not. That’s got to be strange. Sometimes, when Mr. Darren is talking about what his current bands are up to, he sounds a little flat, and
I wonder if he’s thinking back to those awesome times with Tender and wondering how he ever ended up in some gross student lounge with a couple of teenagers.

And yet, when the topic is us and our music, he is always enthusiastic. He acts like what we’re doing is just as important as any other part of our school day, maybe even more important, because music is about expression and connecting people. He makes it feel like a noble calling, not just a cheap
extracurricular
activity, and definitely not something you could just
take away
like we’re children and it’s a shiny toy. If more teachers were like Mr. Darren, school would suck so much less.

“You two ready to work on the Killer G tune?” Mr. Darren asks. “It was sounding great last time. Definitely another memorable Rusty Soles hit.”

By the way, our band name was Keenan’s idea. And before you ask, yes, the spelling like feet is intentional. Like we’re all robots, and since we’re in rainy Seattle our feet get rusty on the bottoms. He did a great sketch for an album cover where a giant rusty robot foot is about to stomp you. But also the name has the cool double meaning about your soul getting worn out.

I don’t actually love the name, but we spent forever trying
to think of one and everything we came up with had either already been done, sounded stupid, or had no album art that you could imagine, and so here we are. My one good idea was the Flak Jackets. It was so great! But Keenan didn’t like it, and Sadie, our lead singer, thought it was too “boy.”

Sometimes I still think of new band names and suggest them to Keenan, just in case one ends up being better. Like the other day I thought of Androids with Neckties. Keenan didn’t like that either. But Rusty Soles is fine, I guess. At least for now.

“And,” Mr. Darren adds, “the clock is ticking for Fall Arts Night.”

“Twelve days,” says Keenan.

“Don’t worry,” says Mr. Darren. “That’s plenty of time in rock and roll. Maybe today we can find that elusive second part.”

“Cool,” I say, grabbing my guitar case from the corner where I stashed it before school.

“I should tell you guys, though,” Mr. Darren adds, “the other bands are starting to sound good. Could be some real competition for you.”

I know he’s kidding, but it still gets my competitive juices flowing. There is one band for each grade—sixth, seventh, and eighth.

“Bring it on,” I say.

I lay my case down on the floor. It’s one of those tweed ones and it’s beat up because I bought it used, so I covered it with cool stickers. I flip open the latches and inside there she is:

Merle.

An Epiphone SG, used. It looks like a real Gibson, but Gibsons cost too much and besides the Epiphone is close enough. For now. I’m totally going to get a real Gibson someday. Maybe in high school if I keep saving my allowance, which is no easy thing but I try.

Merle is dark sparkle blue. I wanted the classic crimson blood color but we couldn’t find one for the right price, and that’s okay too. Merle is dented and scratched, but my dad had Colin over at Trading Musician fix her up. He says the intonation is a little weird as you go up the neck and sometimes I notice it but not really.

“What’s up, Merle?” Keenan says.

I hold Merle out and shake it and make a deep, rumbling sinister voice: “All hail Sataaaannn …” (Don’t worry, it’s just a running joke between me and Keenan about old-school metal bands and how funny they were. Nobody needs to contact child services and no, we won’t be coming to bite the heads off your hamsters anytime soon.)

And I know that Merle is the kind of name for a guitar that makes you go,
Um, Merle?
but here’s the thing, it wasn’t my choice. The original owner of this guitar etched the name into the body. The letters curve right around the volume knob. Nobody knows who that guy was, and I guess I could paint over them, or I could just call it Merle, so that’s what I do.

Plus when I showed it to Keenan, after he was like, “Merle?” he said, “That’s so cool!”

Keenan usually thinks weird stuff is cool. He cares a little more about image than I do. He works on his shaggy mess of hair and shops for clothes at vintage places like Red Light. Today he’s wearing a navy blue bowling shirt with the name
SAL
stitched into it. I usually try not to stand out as much.

Merle is my one exception. Otherwise, it’s okay with me if the only place anyone notices me is onstage, preferably after I just melted their brains out their ears and they are like,
Who is that?
and I’m just nodding and playing like,
Yup
.

Mr. Darren has cables out for us. I plug Merle into the Marshall amp that we’ve been dialing in to a perfect watery crunch. Keenan’s bass is going through the Ampeg. We make a triangle, me standing on the curved level above Mr. Darren and Keenan.

Mr. Darren hits a low E and then taps a couple different octaves so we can get in tune. He never lets us use a tuner pedal unless it’s performance time, because he says you have to develop your ear. “You need to be able to hear E and A everywhere in the world,” he said once. I think that idea is cool, like how music is in the environment and if you can hear it, that’s like having a superpower or knowing a secret code.

I slip a clear blue pick from my pocket. It’s engraved with the two intertwined snake
S
’s of Sister’s Secret, our favorite underage band in town. I got the pick at a Vera Project show last summer. Their guitar player, Ty, threw it into the crowd.

Ty and the rest of Sister’s Secret are sophomores at Ballard High. Ty was in the eighth grade band when we were in sixth grade. His band back then was called Beeblebrox! They were
kind of mathy, but now Sister’s Secret just rocks. They play at Vera all the time, and also High Point Community Center, and Ground Zero over in Bellevue.

Keenan and I talk about having our own real band when we are in high school. We imagine playing those all-ages shows, but it doesn’t stop there, because we get so big that we tour the country, and then after high school we move to New York and keep getting bigger. Sometimes it feels like it could totally happen. Other times it just sounds like a crazy dream. But we still talk about it all the time.

We finish tuning and look to Mr. Darren. He always plays along with us. “One, two, three …,” he counts, and we are
in
.

The Killer G riff is cool. It’s mostly on the low E string, and it’s all sixteenth notes with lots of upbeats. It sounds complicated by itself, but once you lay it over a half-time drumbeat it turns into this giant iron tank rolling over the battlefield.

The three of us are sloppy at first, but Mr. Darren doesn’t stop us or tell us we’re doing it wrong because he knows you have to warm up, and so we keep looping it. It’s an eight-bar pattern, and after a couple minutes we start to lock in. Our forearms spike up and down in unison, almost like bows in a symphony. Time starts to become bars, and soon the rest of the world is gone and music is all there is.

Until the door opens and Valerie walks in.

“All right, Ms. White is here,” says Mr. Darren.

“Hey, Mr. Darren,” says Valerie. She’s our drummer, new this year after our drummer from the past two years, Liam, moved to Tacoma. Nobody at school had any idea that Valerie
even played drums and we were worried because she doesn’t really look the part, but then she came to auditions and rocked it.

“Hey, Valerie,” I say, trying to sound cool, casual.

“Hey,” she says, smiling for a half second before she looks away.

As she crosses the room I can feel Keenan watching me. He wants to see if I can keep my cool.

Because lately, around Valerie, I’ve been having a harder and harder time.

The thing is, if you were sitting in my eighth grade class and you were checking out the girls for hotness, you wouldn’t notice Valerie Clark because at first there is nothing to notice. She doesn’t do all that stuff the Pockets do that makes them sparkly eye magnets. She’s also kinda tall and big, but not
big
big, maybe just more like normal-sized, and she doesn’t wear the really stylish leggings and low-cut shirts and all that the Pockets wear. And don’t get me wrong, those outfits are hot, but it’s not worth looking at for too long because the Pockets are only interested in a certain model of boy and Keenan and I have already figured out that we are
not
that type.

With Valerie it’s weird because you’re not sure what she’s supposed to be. It’s like she doesn’t fit an obvious type. She
never really dresses up: just wears jeans and either a flannel shirt or a hoodie every day, her dark hair back in a ponytail or braids. She has light brown skin and is maybe part Native American? I feel like maybe that’s what she did her social studies presentation on last year, but I wasn’t really paying attention. But the main thing about her look is that she doesn’t seem to be that worried about it.