Rules to Rock By (2 page)

“Aren’t we a little old for this?” I asked.

“According to the Rhode Island Department of Education, no school-age child is too old for a bit of nonsensical and irrelevant reading material.” He smiled and raised his left eyebrow slightly. “Please continue. I assure you it is quite painless.”

At the grocery store, people spend money to pay for goods such as milk, vegetables, and meat. Also, the people who own the grocery store use money to pay the farmers who supply these goods. The farmers and the grocers get paid with money, and you get to eat!

Sure, the farmers and the grocers get paid. But who gets paid to write this junk?

“Okay,” I said. “That was … stimulating.”

“It is not meant to be stimulating, Ms. Cabrera, only readable,” said Mr. V. And in a whisper: “And you should be glad to know that you are reading at a sixth-grade level. Congratulations.”

“I’m
in
sixth grade.”

“Very few Federal Hill sixth graders read on grade level, Ms. Cabrera,” he whispered.

When the bell rang—lunch, finally!—I was out of my seat in a nanosecond.

“Take it easy, Ms. Cabrera,” Mr. V said with a playful smirk. “Slow and steady wins the race.”

Yeah, right. How could I stay slow and steady when my future band members were somewhere out in those halls? I jogged toward the cafeteria, but made sure to slow down before I got there.

Rock stars don’t jog. They strut.

In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, at PS
44
3, almost every kid in my school had been into hip-hop and reggaeton. The kids who even knew who The Beatles were thought they were just some pasty old English guys whose music didn’t matter anymore. They all thought I was a total freak for being so into old music. Except Ronaldo.

Ronaldo Duffy was two years older than me. Like me, he also had one Latin parent and one white one—his mom was Puerto Rican and his dad was Irish. And, also like me, he was a retro freak, except he thought it wasn’t cool enough to just like The Beatles. “Everybody likes them,” he would say. “But have you ever heard The Kinks? The Troggs? The Zombies?”

Ronaldo had
style.
The dude really knew how to dress. Plus, I gave him bonus points for pulling it off in Sunset Park. PS
44
3 was no fancy private school. You could get beaten
down
for looking different, but Ronaldo didn’t care. All the other boys, even the very poorest ones in a neighborhood where sharing your bedroom with only
one
brother or sister made you the equivalent of Hilton-rich, had to wear the best brands. Even if it meant wearing the same two outfits over and over again. These guys would strut around, all puffed out, swiveling their chests in every girl’s direction so nobody could miss the label. And by fifth grade, some kids were even starting to sport chains. Fake gold, but still.

Ronaldo got his style off the backs of his dad’s punk album covers, stealing all those ideas and then mixing in his own until he looked like a cross between Edward Scissorhands and the bassist from The Clash. He angled an old-school white-rimmed Cuban hat on his head, saying, “That Clash guy stole his look from Spanish dudes—I’m just stealing it back.” He wore his jeans so tight it looked like he had to steam them off, then tied a bandanna around one ankle. He laughed it off when the thug wannabes pushed him into the lockers or followed him onto the street, calling him
pendejo
. Ronaldo was willing to take a beating every once in a while; he was going to keep dressing the way he pleased, to keep being who he wanted to be, and none of the B-boys could stop him.

One day at the beginning of fifth grade—just like Federal Hill, PS
44
3 had been a fifth-through-eighth middle school—Ronaldo approached me in the hall. I already knew who he was, of course, and I thought he was the coolest thing ever. I was so surprised, I actually looked behind me, once over each shoulder, before realizing he wanted to talk to
me
. Egg Mountain, who had already been gigging around town at all-ages clubs, had lost their bassist. He had heard I played, and he wanted to give me a try.

It didn’t take more than one practice for Ronaldo to see that I knew my way around the bass. I was in the band before I even knew what hit me.

Ronaldo was an amazing leader. He had stage presence, great taste, and a plan of action from the very beginning. He helped the rest of us pick clothes that looked cool on us and made us look like a real band when we were onstage. He had picked the name Egg Mountain a few months earlier, saying he had heard it in a dream. “I don’t care if the name sounds weird,” he said. “People will remember it.” And they did. By the time I joined, Egg Mountain had already landed gigs at kid-band afternoons in clubs in Brooklyn and Manhattan. A month later, we were opening up for Blitzen Trapper at the Mercury Lounge and headlining our own shows at Pete’s Candy Store, where we packed the house.

By summertime, we were one of the biggest local acts in the city, kid
or
adult, and because I was the lead singer of three songs, the bassist, and the only girl in the band, I had tons of fans. But more importantly, I had found somewhere I belonged. My favorite times in the band actually weren’t even in public. I loved practicing and, even more, hanging out during and after practice. Fast Eddie was hilarious and told the most amazing jokes. He and Ronaldo played off each other like pint-sized kings of comedy, and their routine always had Dakota and me doubled over in spastic laughing fits.

Nobody in the band ever seemed to care about my gender. I wasn’t a girl to them; I was a
bandmate
. And being a bandmate was the only place outside of my family where I felt like I mattered, where I felt like I belonged. Unlike in school, I could say whatever I wanted and not worry about what people would think. Those three guys took me seriously and cared about what I had to say, from day one. So it wasn’t the roar of the crowd that I missed the most—although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love that, too—so much as just
being in the band
. I missed that feeling, that incredible sensation of being a part of something bigger than myself, and I wanted it back.

Rock stars don’t like to be alone.

Lunch at Federal Hill looked pretty much like lunch at my old school: cardboard burgers, pasty potatoes, an overcooked mystery vegetable. And that wasn’t the only thing that reminded me of school in Brooklyn. Without even trying, I had somehow landed in Loner Land. At least that’s what they would have called this table of loser outcasts at PS
44
3. I wasn’t looking for friends, it’s true. But I had never been pushed
this
far to the sidelines in Brooklyn. For the first time, I was seeing Loner Land from the inside out.

To my left sat a freckly boy whose index finger seemed to be permanently wedged up his nose. How could he eat his plasticized burger with that finger in the way? Somehow he managed. To my right, a tiny, eyelinered girl dressed head to toe in black, an evil kitty logo on her T-shirt, read aloud from a book perched on her lap. It was
David Copperfield.
She whispered the dialogue in a foppy British accent.

I had seen these kids before. Every school had them. Federal Hill might have had new players, but it was the same old game.

I looked back at the
David Copperfield
girl, searching for hidden promise. Goths were always super into whatever they were doing. Like me, they were obsessed. The key was, what were they obsessed with? This one might have been adapting the eight-hundred-page book she was reading into a seriously strange rock opera. Or she might have been plotting ways to murder the family cat. With goths, you never knew.

I took a deep breath and approached her.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Are you addressing me?” I could tell it was a mistake right away. The girl didn’t drop the British accent, even when not reciting from her book.

“Um … yep.”

“Forgive me, but I’m in the middle of an especially propulsive chapter. I’d like to continue reading.”

I stared at her for a second. My mouth was probably hanging half open.

“It’s Dickens!” Goth Girl cried. “I’m in the middle of a cliff-hanger!”

“Okay, whatever. Enjoy your reading, I guess.”

I looked around the massive room. Two tables of cave-dwelling hip-hop thugs; a mixed-gender nerd group in which kids appeared to be quizzing each other from a pre-algebra textbook; one wannabe-exclusive table of giggling, pink-nail-polished glamour girls. And the all-important miscellaneous extreme-loser table—well, I was sitting at it.

I tried to reassure myself with the thought that if Ronaldo had formed Egg Mountain from the ruins of PS
44
3, I should be able to pull off the same thing at this dump.

“So you’re into The Beatles?” a raspy-voiced girl asked, nodding at my hoodie, which, I realized, was responsible for pretty much every social interaction I had had that day.

“Yeah. You?”

“Totally. George is the best. I like ‘Here Comes the Sun.’ ”

This girl was wack. She knew who had written “Here Comes the Sun,” which was promising. But she confused me. She had such a deep, scratchy voice, but she was pretty, blond, and very put-together. Her white jeans were spotless. My old school didn’t have kids like this; in Brooklyn, this girl would have been private school all the way. Still, though, even if I was paying attention to her for the wrong reasons, she was into The Beatles! It was worth a shot.

“So, hey, I’m a musician, and I’m trying to start a band. Do you know any musicians around here I could talk to?”

“Well, there’s this band Raising Cain. But you don’t want to talk to them. Those guys are animals.”

“Okay …” Another band? Maybe I was being naive, but I had sort of hoped I’d have the only band at Federal Hill. Egg Mountain had been the only band at PS
44
3. Still, Raising Cain probably wasn’t any good, even if their name did sound kind of cool.

“I’m a musician, though.” The girl sounded like she had a cold, or cake crumbs lodged in her throat.

“Yeah? What do you play?”

“I sing.”

And right then and there, she busted out into song, smack-dab in the middle of the cafeteria. I could immediately see how, despite her prettiness and girly-girl style, this spaz was stranded in Loner Land.

“And the earth, it was a poem,” she sang. “And the poem made me cry. And maybe die inside, just a little …”

Oh no,
I thought.
Musical theater!

The girl’s singing voice was froglike, too. She coughed a couple of times, but she still sounded like a chain-smoking sixty-two-year-old. On top of that, she couldn’t keep still. She kept clicking a ballpoint pen in her hand, and she walked around in circles while she sang. As the song started to build, she circled faster and faster, moving toward the center of the cafeteria. She seemed close to a literally dizzying climax. Kids with lunch trays had to swerve out of the way to avoid her. She looked like a nut.

I glanced down at my notebook, hoping the entire cafeteria wasn’t looking over at us yet.
See how things work here,
my Band Formation Plan said.
Hopefully don’t get beaten up or made fun of.
Five minutes of this and I would be more than teased—in people’s minds I’d be connected with this crazy girl for the next year.