“Don’t you worry,” whispered Principal Van Vreeland to Jasper, who was lost in thought, planning his dream wedding to Ms. Finkleman. “Our rock-and-roll extravaganza will destroy these little snot-nosed showoffs.”
Just then, the booming baritone of the announcer filled the auditorium.
“Ladies and gentlemen, there is only one performance left! ” The slouching hordes of middle-school students sat up and burst into wild applause. Ms. Aarndini put down her knitting and clapped vigorously. Mr. Darlington
leaned forward in his seat. The room filled with shouts and hollers.
“Whooooo!”
“Yeah!”
“Let’s rock! ”
All the rumors, all the excitement, and all the speculation had been building up to this moment. What songs were they doing? Would there be a smoke machine? Was Ms. Finkleman really going to sing? (There were those, particularly among the sixth-grade boys, still hoping that
someone
was going to bite the head off of
something.)
“Are you ready? ” the announcer continued “Are you pumped? Have you checked for gum under your seat? ” (The announcer was Janitor Steve). “Then put your hands together for your very own … Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School!”
The curtain flew up, revealing a full rock-and-roll stage setup. There were two guitars, an electric bass, and a keyboard, all resting on their stands, with long snaking cords connecting them to tall stacks of jet black amplifiers. There was a full drum kit, the bass drum adorned with the profile silhouette of Mary Todd Lincoln that was the school’s official logo, though someone had given Mrs.
Lincoln a green spiky Mohawk for the occasion. There was a microphone in its stand, the stand festooned like a peacock with bright scarves.
The assembled students and teachers cheered loudly at the sight. They stomped their feet and hooted, holding aloft signs that read MARY TODD LINCOLN RULES and MS. FINKLEMAN ROCKS. And then they waited for the show to begin.
And waited.
“I don’t exactly know where to start, so I guess I’ll start with my sister.”
As Ms. Finkleman spoke, her students huddled together in Janitor Steve’s closet, listening quietly. Pamela Preston leaned sulkily against a wall. Tenny Boyer glared from the far side of the closet, his arms folded across his chest, his hooded sweatshirt drawn up over his head.
“We’re twins. Identical twins. She’s four minutes, six seconds older than I am.”
Ms. Finkleman hesitated, finding her way forward, and in that split second of silence, the name of Ms. Finkleman’s sister leaped into Bethesda’s mind—she remembered the one tiny detail of that boring, standard-issue
teacher’s desk in the Band and Chorus room.
“Clementine,” Ms. Finkleman said, just as Bethesda thought it. “Her name is Clementine. We haven’t spoken in fourteen years.”
Someone breathed in sharply. Everyone thought the same thing.
Whoa. Fourteen years?
Shelly and Suzie Schwartz looked wordlessly at each other, from where each sat on a patch of concrete, on opposite sides of Janitor Steve’s closet. Suzie and Shelly weren’t exactly best friends like some twins are, but each spoke more to the other than to anybody else. They spoke a zillion times a day. The idea of not talking to Shelly made Suzie sad in some deep place inside her stomach, and she was sure that Shelly felt the same.
“So, but why, is the question, right?” Ms. Finkleman went on. “And I wish, more than anything, that I had a better answer.
“We haven’t spoken in so long because we had a fight. A stupid fight that somehow turned into something worse, something that never went away. Something that, in a sense, has poisoned my whole life. Yes, Chester?”
“Can I go to the bathroom? ”
Three different people, in unison, told Chester to shut up. Ms. Finkleman continued.
“We were both really into music, me and Clem. Well, her more than me.” She smiled wistfully. “I just liked hanging out with my sister. Anyway, when we were sophomores in high school, we started a band. The Red Herrings.” Ms. Finkleman looked around at her students. “It was us and a couple friends from school. But the other girls kind of came and went. Really the Red Herrings was just us, me and Clementine. We both played guitar, and we both sang. She wrote the songs.
“Of course, we were amazing. Or at least we thought we were amazing.”
Pamela Preston cleared her throat noisily. “Excuse me? I hate to be the responsible one here, but—”
“Stuff it for a second, will you, Pam?” said Todd. Pamela’s mouth dropped open, and she turned bright red, but no one noticed.
“The Red Herrings competed in this Battle of the Bands at a local community college. This hotshot producer from Chicago, a man named Buddy Pendleton, was the judge. And after the competition, he took us aside.” She paused and took a breath. “Well. He took Clementine aside.”
Buddy Pendleton had told Clementine Finkleman two things. Number one, she would never be a rock star with
a name like Clementine Finkleman. And number two, her rhythm guitarist was dragging her down.
“Buddy Pendleton told her the Red Herrings had a shot at being huge. But not as long as I was in the band.”
In the auditorium, the cheering died down and was replaced by an anxious and confused silence. Where were they?
The kids holding up signs began to tire and slowly lowered them. Ms. Pinn-Darvish coughed. Sally Esteban, an eighth grader, blew a bubble and popped it, and the crack echoed loudly through the huge room. From his seat in the second row, Winston Cohn craned his neck around and gave the fuming Principal Van Vreeland a glance that was one part perplexed and three parts gleeful.
Seven rows back and dead center, Bethesda’s dad cast a worried glance at Bethesda’s mother, who had rushed across town from Mackenzie Magruder McHenry for the eleven o’clock show, and who needed to be back in time for a twelve thirty deposition.
“Clementine fired me from the Red Herrings. It was the most painful conversation I’ve ever had.”
Ms. Finkleman risked a glance at Kevin McKelvey, who had said much the same thing to her about his recent argument with his parents. Kevin was staring at the floor, his arms crossed. She pressed on.
“Honestly, I don’t even know why I cared so much. I was never as serious about rock music as Clementine. Which is probably the reason she was so good and I wasn’t. I guess what hurt is that Clem didn’t want to discuss what we were going to do. She had already made up her mind. She was just telling me. I was out of the band.”
“Oh, man,” said Guy Ficker with a long whistle. “That stinks.”
“So
UR,” agreed Lisa Deckter solemnly.
“Seriously,” Natasha Belinsky added. “Lameness! How could she do that? ”
“How could she
not
do it?” countered Rory Daas. “I mean, I’m sorry, Ms. Finkleman, but that was her chance to be a rock star. She had to go.”
Ms. Finkleman gave her head a little shake. “It doesn’t matter what she did. It matters what
I
did. She left, and I never got over it.”
A couple of weeks later, Clem announced she was moving to Chicago with the band. Their strict
Midwestern parents tried to stop her, but Clementine was determined. “And I let her go, without so much as a good-bye.”
“Well, I mean, yeah,” said Natasha, still horrified at what Ms. Finkleman’s sister had done to her. “What else could you do? ”
“I could have said good luck. I could have said that I was mad, but I still—You know. I still loved her.”
Bethesda Fielding thought of her father and the time he came to Biography Day in fifth grade, when she had been Charles Dickens. Her dad had videotaped her whole speech, and kept loudly asking other parents to duck their heads down, and afterward she had been embarrassed and irritated and told him he wasn’t allowed to come to any more Biography Days. He looked pretty bummed, but said okay, and that she’d always be his Little Dickens, no matter what.
“But I thought I was the center of the universe,” Ms. Finkleman continued. “And anything good that happened to someone else somehow took something away from me.”
At this, Pamela Preston bit anxiously at her lower lip and cast a complicated glance toward Bethesda Fielding.
* * *
In the auditorium, the crowd got bored. The nervous silence blossomed into whispers, which erupted into raucous shouting and hollering and fart noises. Ms. Zmuda led her students out of the room and back to class, since they had a standardized-test prep session third period. A sixth grader had to go to the nurse when another sixth grader smacked him with his MS. FINKLEMAN ROCKS sign.
Jasper felt the familiar sting of perfectly manicured fingernails biting into his flesh.
“Go!” hissed Principal Van Vreeland. “Go find out what’s happening! ”
“The more popular the Red Herrings became, the worse I felt. Like Clementine was getting successful just to hurt me. So silly. And then when their second album was a total flop, and North Side dropped them from the label, I felt like if I called her
then,
she would think I was gloating, trying to make her feel bad.”
“Whoa,” Chester Hu said to Victor Glebe, who nodded gravely.
“Life is …,” started Hayley Eisenstein, trying to find the words.
“It’s a mystery,” said Bethesda.
Ms. Finkleman wiped a single tear from her eye with the back of her hand. “Anyway, I’ve tried very hard for a very long time not even to
think
about rock music, because all it does is remind me of my sister, Clementine. Sweet, funny Clementine.” Ms. Finkleman drew a deep breath and stood up straight. “But then came Bethesda and her Special Project, and then Principal Van Vreeland got this idea and—well, you know the rest.
“And, look,” Ms. Finkleman concluded. “I understand if you children don’t want to go on. Tenny is right. I didn’t really create this show you’ve all been working on so hard. And I am not really a rock star.”
Kevin McKelvey raised his head, uncrossed his arms, and pointed right at Ms. Finkleman. “Yes,” he said simply, his rhinestone suit glimmering in the fluorescent supply closet lights. “Yes, you are.”
Then Shelly Schwartz said, “You
totally
are.”
And then Chester and Victor, in unison, like a good rhythm section should be: “Of
course
you are.”
In the months to come no one could remember exactly who it was that spoke next. Everyone was thinking the same thing, so in the moment it didn’t really matter who actually said the words.
“Tenny? What should we do?”
Before Tenny could answer, the PA system crackled back to life. “Let’s try this one more time,” Janitor Steve said. “Please put your hands together—and put your trash in the proper receptacles—for the students of Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School!”
The door to the supply closet flew open, and Jasper entered in a mad panic, frantic and panting, not noticing the bottle of all-purpose cleanser he crushed under his foot. “Children!” he said. “What are you doing?”
Tenny looked at Bethesda, who looked back at him. They exchanged their secret nod. Tenny turned to his fellow students and said, “Go rock.”
Ms. Petrides,
the English teacher, would probably disagree, but the truth is, certain things can’t be described in words. The rock show presented by the students of sixth-period Music Fundamentals was one of those things. Even when everyone at school had long since learned the secret truth about Ms. Finkleman (the
real
truth) and the day had passed when everyone thought a genuine rock star walked among them—everyone could agree on one thing: That show was
awesome.
Chester Hu
wailed
on the drums.
Suzie Schwartz’s bass playing was soulful and dynamic.
Carmine Lopez strutted around and waggled his tongue
and
played rhythm guitar in perfect tempo.
Braxton Lashey made it through the entire show without hurting himself, though it was later revealed he
had Krazy Glued his keyboard to the stand so it wouldn’t fall off.
Bessie Stringer and Tucker Wilson were a killer horn section, note perfect on both their unison parts and their four-step shuffling choreography.
Kevin McKelvey’s solo on “Livin’ on a Prayer” was exuberant and acrobatic. He straddled the bench, shimmied his skinny frame, alternately battered and massaged the keys, and (at the end of it) did barrel rolls all over the stage. The whole time, teachers who had him in their other classes were checking their programs to make sure it was him.
As for Ms. Finkleman … Ms. Finkleman
rocked.
Ida, who as her students had just learned, had not sung a rock song for over a decade, grabbed the microphone and howled riotously through the entire set without dropping a note. To the delight of the enthusiastic crowd, she shook her leather-clad hips, bared her teeth, and banged rhythmically on a tambourine.
It was
remarkable.
There were very few people in attendance that day who did not thoroughly enjoy Mary Todd Lincoln’s performance at the Seventeenth Annual Choral Corral. One person was Principal Winston Cohn of Grover
Cleveland Middle School, who sank lower and lower in his seat, until by the end of the set he was basically a puddle of green blazer and bald head.
The others were Bethesda’s father and mother, who throughout the show exchanged puzzled looks:
Where was she?
Standing just offstage, Bethesda Fielding watched Tenny Boyer watch the show. Again they were isolated, as they had been on the principal’s bench, trapped together on the sideline of events. For the second time that day, Bethesda experienced this bizarre sensation—here was this strange, spacey kid, who she barely even knew two months ago. And now their fates had somehow been tied together.
As Tenny watched, his fingers played along with the guitar parts, describing chords in the empty air. His feet shuffled slightly as he ghosted the dance breaks. He played phantom drums and mouthed all the lyrics.
“This show is amazing,” Bethesda said, speaking loudly over the vigorous applause for Band Number One’s performance of “I Got You.” “You totally lived up to your end of the bargain, Tenny. You should be really proud.”