The Taming of the Drew (3 page)

Tio, shaking his head in horror, said, “You’re not getting me a
triangle
. Tell me you’re not.”

“Don’t look so panicked. ANYONE can play the triangle. You hit it with a stick.” I took a breath, so my voice wouldn’t shake from the fear that rattled inside me like a high wind. “
Attitude
, Tio, that’s all we need. Think about it. Who’s going to stop us?”

Please God, I thought, let me be right.

***

Usually I try to slow it down when Tio and I are speed-walking across campus, being as how he’s got two steps to my every one. But there wasn’t time right now, so he pistoned beside me like a toy wind-up car, kicking up dust in his wake.

Tio said, “Have you even thought about what happens if you make it inside? You don’t know anything about the Dog. You don’t know what you’re up against.”

It kind of annoyed me how he never got winded. Me? I was hauling a long, heavy instrument case and a metal triangle chiming every step I took and I already had a stitch needling my side.

“So he’s got a big ego. Maybe he’s rude. So what if he finds out? So what if he gets angry? With all this money at stake, he can say what he wants. Words are just words. It’s only so much air.” Maybe if I said it enough, I’d believe it.

“You know you’re insane. Have I mentioned that? You’re obsessed with those trees. It’s like you’ve got a tree addiction. You’re…you’re an arbophile.” He said it like it was a dirty word, then muttered, “I bet there’s medication for that.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

He grabbed my arm, dug in his heels, and I nearly spun around at the abrupt stop.

“You. Are. Taking. A. Picture. Of. A. Naked. University. Student.” He rapped me on the head with his knuckles.

“Ow. That hurt.” My voice sounded shakier and weenier than I wanted it to and I felt the prickly heat of a blush crawling up my face. I held the long black instrument case tight against my chest, hiding behind it, feeling the metal flip-buckle digging into my breastbone. My eyes even started to sting. Did he think I was a fool? “You
heard
me — I don’t do naked.”

“You’re right. Sorry,” he muttered. “But you’re not taking another step until you hear me out.”

This was way more emotion than we usually had hanging in the air between us. Usually I did stuff and Tio trotted along. He’d never before thumped me, yanked me and rapped me, all in a few minutes. It didn’t really hurt that much, but still. What it actually hurt was my feelings.
 

Tio had the humungo camera still clutched in his left hand. He shoved his right fist in his new cargo pants. No one in our group ever mentioned the fact that Tio still bought his clothes in the boys department. Thinking about it made me a little less angry with him.
 

“Viola’s probably already waiting. Say what you got to say.”

He pulled some folded papers out of his thigh pocket. “Look, I grabbed these from the Legacy Campus News files. Some are confidential tips. Some are stories that got printed in the school paper.” He clearly wasn’t giving me the camera until I read the pages.

I could feel time ticking away as I took them. The distant roar of the school stadium rose and ebbed. The game between the Legacy Lemurs and the Cal B-team was going to end soon, I could feel it down to my bone.
 

My trombone, that is. When you play for a marching band, you get a sense for these things. It’s like you can feel the tide shifting in the deafening sound all around you, so you stand, clear your spit valve, and start paying attention — otherwise you miss the downbeat for playing the team off the field.

And then the school’s newspaper’s headlines in my hand caught my eye. Celebrity Senior Involved in Drunken Brawl. Pac-10 Comes Calling. The Pit- Bull Named To Parade’s High School All-America List. Legacy Probation Extended for The Dog — Will He Ever Get Out Of The Pound?
 

“You see that one?” Tio extended a shaky finger to hand-written sheet sticking out underneath the others, where the words “Dog’s homecoming date complains about aggressive behavior” were written. “There’s more. ‘From all such devils, the Good Lord deliver us.’”

“You’re doing it again,” I said. Whenever Tio gets really stressed, he involuntarily spouts lines from Shakespeare. Instead of Tourette’s syndrome, our group calls what Tio does Bard-ette’s syndrome. When no Hostiles are around, we have some code phrases to help Tio rein it in — “stop with the verbal ‘Spears” was our best, because saying it seemed to help him snap out of it. The whole thing started in Middle School.
 

Tio was the Target. There were so many reasons for it. First, well, there’s the fact that puberty passed him by. Second, his name, Lucentio, came from Shakespeare, which I personally thought was an unforgivable crime committed against him by his English-major parents. Finally, there was the Shakespeare obsession. Tio used to read and re-read Shakespeare obsessively.
 

Why Shakespeare — other than the name connection, that is? Shakespeare probably gave Tio some smart ways to answer his middle school tormenters — the old writer-dude always was handy with an insult guaranteed to impress your adversary. If, that is, your adversaries wore codpieces and neck-ruffs. Tiny Tio had faith, though, so he read and re-read Shakespeare like there was a mystical answer buried in the plays. But then the words burrowed so deep in Tio’s mind, he sort of lost control of them. Things popped out. His mom saved up for months and got him a few visits with a therapist, who said that Tio’s Bard-ette’s syndrome would go away on its own eventually. Tio himself always says, hey, at least I didn’t get obsessed with quoting Harry Potter.

“This guy — the Dog — isn’t allowed to kill me. I won’t
die
,” I said, folding the rest of the school paper pages so I couldn’t see any more. “Besides, you can’t believe rumors.”

“No. You can’t
print
rumors. At least not in the school paper, you can’t. They call him the Dog for a reason.”

“How do you know?”

“His real nickname is the Pit-Bull. Does that sound touchy-feely to you?”

I took a deep breath. “He’s just another student.”

“You realize you could get suspended. You even could get
expelled
. Forever. This is the Dog. His mom is worth a fortune. He’s been in the L.A. Times. Three thousand words. He was even mentioned in the Prep section of Yahoo sports. Everyone wants a piece of him. And no one cares that he’s a jerk. There’s got to be other ways to make money.”

“Not in chunks like this. If I pull this off, we might get a few more orders. That’s all it would take. If we don’t do something different, we won’t raise enough money in time. The book sales, the monster rummage sales, the clothes swaps, and even the Flash Mob snack sales aren’t cutting it. You know that. You can do the math as well as I can.”

“You can’t let those trees go, can you?”

“Tio, babe, if I thought they wouldn’t get a cherry-picker and just drag me out like they did those Berkeley and Santa Cruz students, I’d be sitting high up in them right now.” I could hear the announcer’s squawk drifting on the breeze toward us. Every second we stood here, the game — and my chance to save the trees — came closer to ending. “Listen, we’ve got to go. Give me the camera. Now.”

And then Tio did something unbelievable. He clenched his jaw — I could actually see a muscle tightening at the edge of both his pudgy cheeks, “You’ll have to take it from me.”

There was a shocked silence.

“Are you kidding? I’m twice as big as you are. This is ridiculous. Hand it over.”

“No. You’re going to take me with you. Into the locker room. You think you can do this on your own. But you need help.”

I glared at him, hands on hips.

He had the decency to look away for a second. “Okay, maybe you don’t want me to get in trouble too if things get ugly. But that doesn’t change the fact that I can get closer to a boys locker room than you can.”

“Not without a University I.D. badge, you can’t. And you can't take the picture. It has to be me.”

“I’m not letting you mess this up.”

Oh no he didn’t. Of the two of us, he was the one that
always
crashed and burned under stress, and we both knew it.

The knuckles on Tio’s hand holding the camera were white. The one thing that was clear was that he wasn’t backing down. If I wanted that camera, I had to include him. But taking Tio with me was a pure disaster in the making — I’d never be able to live with myself if I got him expelled. His life would be absolute hell if he had to start over in another school.
 

Why
was he doing this to me?
 

Maybe we’d all ruffled his hair too many times, and treated him too often like a little kid. Heck, he was going to be 16 soon. Was I willing to risk this one shot to save the trees, all for his ego? To be honest, all for our friendship? Because if I shut him out, even for his own good — no scratch that —
especially
for his own good, nothing would ever be the same between us again.

I tilted my trombone case up over my shoulder, elbow up and pointed forward, the handle gripped in my fist. I looped my other elbow around Tio’s head and tucked it into my side, so that he oofed and had to walk hunched over sideways, trotting again, to keep up.

“Let’s do this thing,” I said, hoping I sounded braver than I felt.

***

Viola, Tio and I stood together on the concrete ramp, side-by-side, a mass of humans roaring and screaming behind us. I’m not sure, but I think it meant that the game's score was close.
 

“Here’s the deal,” I shouted. I had my hands cupped around my mouth so they could hear, even though we were so close our shoulders bumped, “When the game ends and the guys are running down this ramp, we’re going to play the da-dut, da-DUH lead-in.”

Tio’s eyes bulged so much I thought his tongue might actually pop out and catch a fly. He shouted back, “You mean the one where the stands shout ‘CHARGE!’ afterward?”

“Yep.”

Viola said, “But I don’t know all the words.”

Tio shouted, “You’re telling me…that you think we’re going to be able to…
inspire
…this whole stadium to yell '
charge
' with only a trombone, a flute and a
triangle
?!?”

Luckily for me, I was saved from answering. Everyone in the stands came to their feet, stomping and throwing things. I thought the aluminum bleachers might crack and disintegrate. The three of us retreated to the bottom of the ramp-wall, dodging thrown popcorn and crumpled paper hotdog wrappers. There was a long, bone-rattling “Boooooooo.”

I told myself all these people were probably unhappy about a referee’s call, and not my lame idea to impersonate a band.
 

I could feel a hard concrete chill seeping into me. Viola hummed over her flute and when the deafening sound lessened for a second, I heard her making weird harmonics with her voice and instrument. She couldn’t have been more relaxed if she’d been sitting in a bubble bath.
 

Tio and I twitched and watched the game clock inch its way down. Who knew one “minute” of game time could last fifteen? It was weird actually
seeing
the end of a game. There seemed to be a lot of grunting, ker-powing, and even some earth shaking involved.

“That’s pretty loud, when they hit, isn’t it?” I hated the fact that my voice shook. I had no idea anyone could slam another person that hard. I cleared my throat. “Like a slap of thunder.”

Tio muttered under his breath, like he was chanting a rosary, “Heaven’s artillery thunders in the sky…”

Sheesh. More ‘Spears. I needed to change the subject, fast, or we were both going to freak out here.

“So what do
you
think the Dog is — a depp or a pitt?” I asked to cut the tension. It’s a game our group plays, ever since I explained my theory of guy attractiveness based on the timeless 1990's dichotomy. See, underneath it all, there are only two kinds of hot guys: young Johnny Depp (witty repartee, rebellious, omnisexual) and Brad Pitt in his Thelma and Louise phase (square-jawed, clean-cut, push-your-cowboy-hat-up-with-a-thumb uncomplicated). You can go through history and peg every attractive guy as one or the other from a combination of looks and personality. Try it for yourself. Take Errol Flynn. A depp. Kirk Douglas? A pitt. Oscar Wilde? A depp. Zac Efron? A pitt. Robert Pattinson? Current group consensus: trying too hard to be a depp.

Tio answered me between gritted teeth. “I don’t know.”
 

This was a shocker. Could the Dog be both? Or neither? That would be a first. “How do you reckon that?”

“I’ve never seen him.”

As the buzzer sounded and the stadium roared, we stared at each other in horror. “I thought YOU knew what he looked like.”

“I don’t!”

“I don’t either!”

“Wasn’t there a picture in the newspaper?”
 

“He’s always wearing a helmet!”

“A number for his jersey? A last name?
Something
?”
 

“I don’t do sports. Besides,” Tio shouted at me like I was hard of thinking, “I was just supposed to grab the camera, remember?”

Oh Jesus.
 

The announcer came on overhead, the volume deafening, so loud that the words smeared and buzzed over the crowd's screaming. We won — a high school team defeated a college team. Apparently people cared.

Tio bounced up and down, hands flapping and I could see his mouth moving as he shouted something at me. Oh crap. My trombone. That’s what he was saying. I was supposed to already have it out.

Four seconds later, my trombone was out, the case tossed aside. I perched one hip on the side concrete wall of the exit ramp down to the changing rooms.
 

For just one second, I had a mental panic attack. This truly was insane. How could we possibly carry this off? Thousands of people were screaming above us. People that we knew, people who knew our parents. Classmates and teachers. Tio was shaking so hard, the triangle bobbed and jerked on its string. Viola licked the mouth of her flute, frowning as she twisted the end to get a more precise alignment, all business.