Rebecca is Always Right (15 page)

Anyway, Alice’s mum was going to a friend’s house in Drumcondra so she dropped Alice off at mine and we got the bus in together. I felt like we hadn’t seen each other on our own for a while. Cass and I go to each other’s houses more often in the evenings because she lives quite near me, but it’s a much bigger deal for Alice to get anywhere, what with her living in the middle of nowhere. So it was kind of nice to just hang out with her for a while, even if we were just sitting on a 16 bus for most of it. I almost told Alice about Sam, but then I thought it would make me very self-conscious if we bumped into him as soon as we arrived at the Knitting Factory. So instead, we talked about school and telly and books we were reading and
stuff. And then we got talking about her and Richard and how good it was to go out with someone who she could talk to properly about band stuff.

Then Alice said, ‘Bex … do you still think about Paperboy?’

And when she asked me, I realised that I don’t. I mean, seriously, hardly ever. In fact, I don’t think I’ve thought about him once all week, which might be a record.

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I suppose he comes into my head sometimes. But it’s definitely not like it used to be.’

‘It just shows you can get over everything,’ said Alice, but she didn’t say it in a ‘I told you so’ way. It was in a kind way, and it was a very cheering thought. If you’d told me back in January that I wouldn’t be crying over Paperboy all the time, I simply wouldn’t have believed you. I never thought I’d be totally happy again, or at least I never thought I’d stop thinking about Paperboy all the time. But there you go. I have actually moved on. I suppose you can get over pretty much anything.

I was still feeling pleased about this when we arrived at the Knitting Factory and found Cass and Liz talking to Tall Paula from Exquisite Corpse. It was great to see them all.

‘I didn’t realise you’d got a practice space here!’ I said to Liz.

‘Neither did I until this morning!’ she said. ‘We got a cancellation. We’ve been on the waiting list since it started, but
all you summer-camp people had first dibs. Which is fair enough.’

‘Hey, look who it is,’ said Cass.

I turned and saw three boys around our age. They were all wearing impressively outlandish garments – one was wearing a fur coat, cycling shorts and a sort of floral bum bag. They looked vaguely familiar, but it took me a few moments to realise who they were. Then it hit me.

‘It’s Puce!’ I said in surprise. The boys glanced over and waved, looking a bit shy. I definitely recognised them now. They had been on the summer camp, and when it started they were all wearing cardigans and played their instruments while staring shyly at their feet. But, by the end, thanks to some lessons in stagecraft from Shane Driscoll, the lead singer of The Invited, they were strutting around the stage in leather trousers and jumpsuits. It was quite a transformation. And it looks like they’ve kept up their commitment to eye-catching ensembles. They came over to say hello properly.

‘We’ve got a workshop with Shane today,’ said Niall, the lead singer. He was wearing a bomber jacket in a sort of Hawaiian pattern. It was very colourful.

‘We’ve got one with Kitty,’ said Alice. ‘Oh look, there she is!’

It was so, so cool to see Kitty again. We hadn’t seen her at all since the camp ended. Puce and Paula knew her from the camp, of course, because she’d taught all of them in the big workshops, but we introduced her to Liz and they all talked about guitar pedals for a minute until Kitty remembered she was meant to be mentoring us, so we told the others we’d see them later in the art space and we took her off to our practice room.

‘This place is VERY cool, guys,’ she said. ‘Now show me what you’ve been doing here.’

We played a couple of our newish songs, including of course ‘Pistachio’.

We finished that one by repeating the chorus a few times (which is, of course, Cass’s favourite approach). Then Alice said, ‘We’ve been having some trouble with the ending …’

‘Alice and I think it should end suddenly, straight after the last chorus,’ I said.

‘But I think we should repeat the chorus a few times,’ said Cass. ‘What do you think?’

‘I can’t tell you what to do with your songs, people!’ laughed Kitty.

‘We really do need outside input, though,’ I said.

‘Hmmm,’ said Kitty. ‘Okay. Well, I see what you’re going for, Cass, but let me hear it the other way. Just run through
the last chorus and end there.’

We did. Kitty looked thoughtful. ‘I think that works better, to be honest. It’s tighter. But it’s still up to you.’

Alice and I looked at Cass, who rolled her eyes but conceded defeat in a good-natured fashion.

I knew I was right about that song! Though Kitty did say later that ‘there’s no right or wrong when it comes to music. It’s all subjective. But it’s about finding out what works best for you.’

Anyway, she stayed in the studio with us for a whole hour and it was really great. I’d almost forgotten how good she was at making us feel all enthusiastic and full of energy. And she showed Alice how to do a really cool thing with an effect pedal she’d never used before, which was awesome. But the coolest thing was that she told us she and the other mentors have been talking to Veronica and we can start doing afternoon gigs in the Knitting Factory in a couple of weeks! About three or four bands will be playing at each one, so we won’t be doing really long sets, but it’ll still be the first time we’ll have played more than five songs in public. I can’t wait.

After Kitty left, we had another hour of practice time left, so we tried out her suggestions and they all worked really well. Before we started playing ‘Ever Saw in You’ with added pedal
effects, I remembered my great studying idea and suggested that we try talking in German for a bit, but Cass refused.

‘You can’t just spring the idea of talking in another language on me like that with no warning,’ she said. ‘I need to psychologically prepare myself.’

‘Oh, alright,’ I said. ‘Maybe next week, then. What’s the German for drum, anyway, Alice?’

‘Um, Schlagzeug, I think,’ said Alice.

Apparently Schlagzeug literally means ‘hit-thing’, as in a thing for hitting. Good grief. But what can you expect from a language where the word for glove is ‘Handschuh’, which just means ‘hand shoe’? Anyway, eventually Cass reluctantly agreed to do some German speaking next Saturday after I pointed out how useful it would be to know how to talk about music ‘auf Deutsch’ if we ever went on tour in Germany.

‘Or Austria,’ said Alice helpfully. ‘Or bits of Switzerland.’

When our time was up, we went back to the art space to meet the others. As soon as I saw Sam, I felt a strange fluttery butterfly feeling in my tummy. I was really glad he was there, but I also felt weirdly nervous. It felt like everything had changed since I saw him last week, like I wouldn’t know how to talk to him normally now. Luckily, so many people were there – Senan, Liz and her bandmate Katie, Paula and her
bandmate Sophie, Ellie and Lucy, the Puce boys – that I didn’t have to say anything to him straight away besides ‘Hi’, which gave me time to collect myself.

In fact, after a while, I started to worry that I wouldn’t get to talk to him at all today. Everyone was sitting around the art room chatting and drinking cans of fizzy drinks or cups of coffee and tea from the tiny studio kitchen. But I was on one side of the room with Cass and Liz, next to Katie and the Puce boys, who were talking very enthusiastically about bass amps. Sam was right on the other side of the room talking to Senan, Ellie and Paula, and I couldn’t figure out a way of getting to talk to him, without it looking totally obvious. At one stage, he caught my eye and raised a hand in a ‘hello!’ sort of mini-wave, but that wasn’t exactly an invitation to march across the room to join him.

So I kept talking to the others, even though I was hyper aware of Sam on the other side of the room with his messy hair and his scruffy old shirt and cords and boots and his nice hands (he has such interesting hands) all covered with ink and charcoal. I was trying so hard not to look at him, I was worried I was making myself even more obvious. And, as time went on and we both stayed on opposite sides of the room, I got more and more depressed. I mean, I’d prepared myself for
the possibility that he wouldn’t be there at all, but not for the possibility that we could both be in the same room and not actually talk to each other. Eventually, everyone was sitting around sort of talking together, but that meant I still didn’t get to talk to Sam on his own. All the excitement I’d had that morning seemed to drain away as it got later and later and we still hadn’t said more than a few casual words to each other.

Then everyone started getting ready to leave. Cass and Liz were going to Liz’s house, so they set off with Katie to get the bus on Nassau Street. Alice was meeting Richard, who hadn’t been practising today because the Wicked Ways guitarist has gastric flu and is too sick to play the guitar. And Lucy has been thinking of learning how to sew so she was going home with Ellie, who was going to show her how to use her sewing machine (well, technically it’s her mum’s sewing machine, but Ellie uses it more than her mum does these days).

So basically, when everyone was saying goodbye to each other outside the Knitting Factory, Sam and I ended up being the only ones who didn’t have anything to do straight away. I felt very self-conscious and I thought I should just get away before I said something stupid so I said, ‘Well, I suppose I should …’

And then Sam said, ‘Are you in a hurry to get home?’

And I said, ‘Um, not really.’

‘Do you want to go and get a coffee?’ said Sam. ‘Or whatever hot drink you like? To be honest, I’m not in a huge hurry to get home myself. My parents are repainting the kitchen and they’ll just make me sandpaper skirting boards. And, besides, I haven’t talked to you all afternoon.’

I could feel my tummy fluttering again, only this time it was with excitement. But I tried to sound completely casual.

‘Yeah, sure,’ I said. ‘Where will we go? What about the Pepperpot?’

So that’s where we went. Thank heaven Mum had given me extra sandwich money for bringing those shoes down to the hall. Imagine if I’d had to say, ‘Sorry, Sam, I can’t go out for a drink because I only have thirty-five cents in the world, apart from the money in my savings account, which my parents won’t let me take out because they think I’ll “waste it”, whatever that means.’

Anyway, when we were sitting down at our table by the railings, I suddenly felt a bit awkward because I realised it was the first time Sam and I have actually gone anywhere together. I mean, we’ve talked loads, but it’s always been in corridors and at bus stops and while walking down the street or sitting around in arts spaces. It’s just been casual. But this all felt rather formal. Until then, I’d never found it difficult to talk to
Sam, but now I couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘Sooo,’ I said, and then wished I hadn’t, because I worried I sounded like I was nervous. Which I was. But luckily Sam didn’t seem to notice anything weird. He just looked at the wool shop next to the café and said, ‘Wow, I didn’t realise wool came in so many colours. That display looks really cool. Like an art installation or something.’ And then the waitress arrived and took our orders – hot chocolate (as usual) for me and a coffee for him.

‘I should probably be cutting down on coffee,’ he said. ‘I find myself drinking loads of it at night when I’m working on my comics and then I end up wide awake at four in the morning.’

‘Well, one won’t hurt,’ I said. ‘It’s only four o’clock in the afternoon.’

‘Yeah, you’re probably right,’ he said. ‘And it’s really good coffee. Right, this is my last one of the day.’

‘Do you find you work better at night?’ I said. ‘I don’t mean homework, I mean, like, art or writing stuff. I think I do. I mean, sometimes I’ll start writing something quite late and it’s like I get a second wind. I just want to keep going even though I was tired earlier.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ said Sam. He paused. ‘Although I suppose
that could be the coffee.’

Our drinks arrived, and then we stayed there for ages talking about loads of things, about art and writing and books and our annoying families. He talked about how people still don’t think comics can be really great art, no matter how beautiful or serious they are. He pulled out a graphic novel from his bag by a writer and artist called Jaime Hernandez. The pictures were really brilliant.

‘Ooh, is there a band in it?’ I said, when I opened a page and saw a really cool picture of a girl holding a bass.

‘There is. The stories are amazing,’ said Sam. ‘But will we ever study something like this in school? No, because not enough people realise that comics are proper art!’

I told him that I wanted to write funny books and they weren’t given enough credit either.

‘Let’s drink a toast,’ said Sam. ‘To books that don’t get the credit they deserve.’ He raised his coffee cup and clinked it off my mug of hot chocolate. ‘Just think,’ he said. ‘In thirty years maybe you’ll be a really famous writer and I’ll be a famous artist …’

‘And writer,’ I said. ‘Of comics.’

‘And writer of comics,’ said Sam. ‘And you’ll have won, I dunno. The Nobel Prize or the Booker or something. And I’ll
have won whatever you get for doing great comics.’

‘And we’ll both be, like, in your face, everyone who sneers at funny books and comics!’ I said happily. Then I thought of something. ‘Of course, I might also be an international rock star too. With Hey Dollface.’

‘Meh, you can do that as well as the writing,’ said Sam with a shrug. ‘You could write on the tour bus. Or the private jet.’

He is so easy to talk to, about big ideas and little silly stuff. I’ve never really talked like that with a boy before. With Paperboy I never really had a chance because we were still kind of getting to know each other when he went away, and with John I spent most of the time just listening to his own grand plans and theories about life. But when I talk to Sam, it’s like we’re both into what the other person is saying. He actually makes me feel like I could become a famous writer. Or rock star. Or both.