The Boy Recession

  My meetings with Ms. Duff have pretty much followed the same pattern since freshman year. She asks me, “How are you doing?” in this understanding voice and tries to figure out if I’ve got any big emotional crisis going on. I never do, which I think disappoints her.

  Then she’ll talk about how awesome my standardized test scores are. I do pretty well on those kinds of tests—the ones you don’t have to study for. I kicked ass on the PSATs. At my meeting in the spring, Ms. Duff said I was “highly gifted” and called me a “natural test taker.” She showed me all these charts that said I was some kind of math genius. She moved me up to precalculus and signed me up for AP chem.

  Usually, after she strokes my ego, she gives me a pep talk about putting more effort into my homework and essays and all that crap.

  This meeting seems different, though. It’s October now, which is when juniors are supposed to start planning for college applications. Maybe it’s because meetings about college stuff are supposed to be intense, or maybe Ms. Duff is stressed out because the other guidance counselor left, but I’m getting a bad vibe from her. First of all, the candy bowl is missing. Even worse, Ms. Duff is armed with her Fahrenbach file, which has all my grades and test scores in it, and she launches right into the investigation.

  “What happened on this precalculus test last week, Mr. Fahrenbach?” Ms. Duff asks. “Can you tell me why you got a sixty-eight?”

  “Uh… well… that was a pretty tough test,” I say. “There were some trick questions at the end, I think. Everyone in the class was, like, freaking out.”

  “The class average was a ninety-two.”

  She also has the class averages for every test, quiz, and essay from this year. Faaaantastic.

  “When are you going to complete this lab report for AP chemistry? Why were you late for U.S. history every day last week? Why didn’t you participate in the President’s Physical Fitness Test?”

  Man, I’ve got to get some excuses going. I can’t tell Ms. Duff that I skipped the President’s Physical Fitness Test to sit in the locker room and eat a White Castle burger.

  “Well, for me, it’s like…”

  I try to pull myself up so I’m sitting straight in the chair, so I look more serious. But the chair is really soft leather, so I’m still slouching.

  “What about this pop quiz in humanities?” Ms. Duff demands.

  “Yeah, I…”

  Ms. Duff looks up from the file. “Honestly, Hunter,” she begins—I’m Hunter now, instead of Mr. Fahrenbach—“you shouldn’t even be taking this humanities course. You should be in AP English.”

  Ms. Duff shuts the Fahrenbach file.

  “Hunter,” she says, “I am now the guidance counselor for every single student at this school. I know everyone’s abilities. I know everyone’s grades. So I know that you are more intelligent than ninety-five percent of the students here.

  “But almost every single one of them,” Ms. Duff continues, “is trying harder than you.”

  I don’t want to look Ms. Duff in the eyes, but everything I look at in this office reminds me what a slacker I am—the college pennants, the books about writing a killer résumé.

  “What about extracurriculars?” Ms. Duff asks.

  “Um, I’m in the band,” I say. “But… I guess that’s… The band doesn’t exist anymore. But I still play! I play the guitar, too, at home. And I write some stuff. I write some of my own music.”

  “Okay, that’s good,” Ms. Duff says, nodding. But she doesn’t write anything down. “Is there anything you can do with music? Any way to show your leadership skills?”

  “Leadership skills?” I ask. “Like, uh, conducting an orchestra or something?”

  “Maybe organizing a concert for senior citizens at a nursing home? Fund-raising to buy instruments for underprivileged kids?” Ms. Duff says. “You need to connect to other people. You need to show colleges that you’re involved with your community. You must care about something, Hunter.”

  “Well, I care about music. I do.”

  “It’s time to prove it,” Ms. Duff says. Then she stands up behind her desk and extends her hand. I don’t think a teacher has ever tried to shake my hand before, but I try to hide my surprise and give her a firm handshake, because Eugene’s always lecturing me about how important it is to give a firm handshake.

  As I push open the double doors to the hallway and breathe in the normal, bad-smelling hallway air, I see Kelly and Chung’s sister Kristin coming out of the nurse’s office.

  “Here you go,” Kelly says, handing Kristin a coat and two books. “This is what was in your locker. Is there anything else?”

  Kristin is coughing up a lung, and Kelly reaches out and touches her back and says, “Feel better, okay? Lemme know if you need anything.”

  Suddenly a lightbulb goes on in my head. This is exactly who I need right now. Kelly and I have been in band together since freshman year, and we have a bunch of other classes together, too. She’s always showing up to class on time and lending people pencils. I sprint down the hallway toward Kelly and stop short right in front of her.

  “Hunter!” she says, surprised to look up and have me panting right in her face. “Are you okay? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you… run… before.”

  “I’m good,” I say. “I’m really good. I was just thinking… I’ve been thinking about the music program. Ya know, the kids not learning music. Remember? In the band room?”

  “Yeah, of course, the third-graders,” Kelly says.

  “I want to do it,” I tell her. “Let’s do the thing, the peer thing. Let’s teach them. You and me.”

  “We should!” Kelly says. “We should start figuring it out. Maybe for next year? We’d have to get permission, and find a teacher who would—”

  “No! Let’s do it this year. Let’s get some instruments, get some kids, and get going.”

  Kelly smiles, and her eyes crinkle up at the edges. That sounds weird, or not cute, but it’s actually really cute.

  “Okay, I don’t know how long it will take to get going,” she says, laughing a little bit. “But we can get going.”

  CHAPTER 8: KELLY

  “Opposites Attract: What Makes Unlikely Couples Tick”

  “The Boy Recession©” by Aviva Roth, The Julius Journal, October

  “Which one of you is flam tap?” Hunter asks. “And which one is paradiddle?”

  It’s third period on a Thursday in mid-October, and Hunter is holding a drumstick in each hand and pacing the bandstand behind three of our third-graders, who are sitting in chairs with drum pads on their laps. One is this tiny girl with two pigtails that stick straight out of her head, and the other two are boys—one calm and one with no front teeth.

  “I’m flam tap!” No-Teeth Kid says, raising his hand and drumstick really high in the air.

  Hunter takes his sticks and poises them over No-Teeth Kid’s head. Gently, he taps the kid’s head with each stick in rapid succession, saying, “flam,” and then with only the right stick, saying, “tap.”

  No-Teeth Kid loves getting hit in the head—even really, really lightly. When Hunter is done, the third-grader tilts his head back and gives Hunter a gummy smile.

  “Now you guys try it,” Hunter says. “All of you. Flam tap.”

  Hunter’s three students tighten their grips on their drumsticks and repeat on their drum pads what Hunter did on their heads. When they pronounce “flam tap,” they sound awed, as if “flam tap” were a spell from a Harry Potter movie. Actually, it’s a rudiment—one of the basic patterns you start with when you’re learning the drums.

  “Awesome! You guys got it!” Hunter says. “Now it’s time for the paradiddle. Your head ready, Molly?”

  This is how Hunter teaches music. Today isn’t even the first time he’s hit the kids on the head. Last week, during the first lesson, he taught his students to hold drumsticks and then set them free to run around the room, hitting things. Anything they want—the blackboard, the floor, the music s
tands, one another…

  “Hear how something hollow has a different pitch?” Hunter yelled to them over the racket. “The blackboard has that tinny sound when you hit it, but the wall sounds different. Here, c’mere, hit the wall.”

  For his second lesson, Hunter walked his kids to the top level of the bandstand and showed them all the parts of the drum kit. Then he assigned one student to the cymbals, one to the bass drum, and one to the snare drum.

  “This is a contest,” he announced. “Which one of you can be loudest?”

  And then, on Tuesday, he found out that if you hit an eight-year-old on the head on purpose, they think it’s really, really funny.

  The fact that we don’t have a faculty adviser in the room while we’re teaching music is good for Hunter. His lesson plans would probably fall apart if you took away that element of danger. But it means that I have to be the responsible one, because I worry that if someone gets a concussion and their parents sue our school, this music program will definitely be canceled.

  “Um, Hunter?” I call across the room. “Can you guys maybe get to the drum-pad part of the lesson?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Hunter grins and tosses his hair back. He jumps down from the bandstand and jogs to the piano to grab his own drum pad, calling out while his back is turned, “Loosen up that grip, flam tap!”

  So this is PMS. No, we don’t have a better name for it yet—and yes, I know we need one. For the past two weeks, Hunter and I have had fun talking about PMS in the hallways and having people give us strange looks, but I don’t plan on listing PMS on my college applications next year. The only person who could legitimately do that is Pam, who spends so much time with actual PMS that it’s an extracurricular activity for her.

  Every Tuesday and Thursday, nine third-graders come over from the elementary school on a bus. Hunter and I walk them to the band room and give them lessons in drums or the flute. The room is back the way I like it—there’s music, laughter, and lots of noise; the instruments our kids rented are in the cubbies.

  That day in the hallway, when Hunter told me we should start the music program ourselves, he surprised me. I had no idea he was that interested. When he and I asked our friends from band to help teach, all of them had either signed up for another class or liked having a study hall so much they wouldn’t give it up, which made me realize that Hunter had given up his study hall. Before our first lesson, he told me he’d never worked with kids before, or babysat, or anything, but our students loved him right away. He’s super-patient and so easygoing that he can even deal with No-Teeth Kid, whom I personally think could use some Ritalin.

  Setting the program up wasn’t exactly the easiest process in the world, though. When we first met to go over the details, I brought a two-page to-do list, and he brought a bag of Cheetos.

  “I think we should figure out instrument rentals first,” I said. “So we can put that information in when we mail out the permission slips to the parents.”

  “Right, the instruments,” Hunter said. “Well, there’s a drum set in the band room already, so I’m good.”

  “But they don’t start on the drum set when they’re first learning, do they? I thought you used those drum-pad things.”

  “Oh, right, the drum pads,” Hunter said, his mouth full of Cheetos. “I still have mine; they can use it.”

  “But we might need a lot of them,” I said.

  “How many?”

  “We don’t know how many kids are signed up,” I said. “We won’t know until we get the permission slips back.”

  “True, right, you’re right,” Hunter said. “So let’s find some instruments to rent. Should we just, like, Google places?”

  At that point, I realized I was going to have to handle most of that to-do list: the permission slips, the coordination of the bus from the elementary school, the program proposal to the school board.

  Sometimes I get so distracted thinking about all the things I haven’t done that I forget about actually teaching. Like right now.

  “Kelly,” one of my students says and looks up at me. “Can I stop blowing now? I have a headache.”

  One of my redheaded twins has been trying over and over to make a sound with her flute, and she’s light-headed. Poor girl.

  “Yes! Yes, take a break,” I tell her, patting her head. “We’re gonna work on reading music. Everyone take out a crayon! Who remembers what a C looks like?”

  Not only have I been doing all the PMS paperwork, I actually have twice as many kids to teach as Hunter does. That’s not his fault, though. And I volunteered to put my name on all the permission slips, and the contract with the bus driver, and the proposal we submitted to Dr. Nicholas. But that was after Hunter told me he wasn’t sure Dr. Nicholas would trust him with a room full of eight-year-olds armed with sticks.

  “I don’t think he likes me that much,” Hunter told me hesitantly, the day before we were supposed to talk to Dr. Nicholas. “Last time I was in that office, he threatened to suspend me.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, freshman year I got one of those UNICEF boxes, you know? How you go trick-or-treating for UNICEF and collect money from everyone? I did that, but I didn’t hand in the box. I just totally forgot, because it was under all this crap in my locker, so… then, remember how they brought those, like, drug dogs to school to go through the lockers?”

  I guess I had a totally horrified look on my face, because Hunter started crossing his arms in front of himself, like he was canceling what he just said.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “Not anything like that, no. They just opened all the lockers, and they found my UNICEF box in there, like, five months later. That was it. It’s not as bad as you think.”

  “Yeah, you were just embezzling money from kids in the third world.”

  “No!” Hunter protested, but when our eyes met, we both started laughing. And in the end, whether Dr. Nicholas likes him or not, Hunter has turned out to be a great teacher.

  “So that’s one flam tap, two paradiddles, and a flam tap at the end,” Hunter says. “Are we ready for it? One, two, one-two-three-four…”

  Knocking his drumsticks together over his head, Hunter counts off.

  “You did it! Awesome! Rock and roll!” Hunter says, giving them high fives.

  “Okay, everyone, time to pack up!” I say, standing. “Put your instruments in your cubbies. The bus is already outside.”

  After we load the kids into the bus, I return to the band room and notice that the freshman boy with the nice sweaters is holding the door open.

  “Hi!” I say to him. “You’re the piccolo!”

  “Um…” He smiles. “Yeah. I’m Johann.”

  Johann is pretty attractive for a freshman. He definitely looks young, but he’s cute—and probably foreign, with a name like Johann.

  “I was hoping I could help out with the music program,” he says, very formally, with his hands in the pockets of his neatly ironed khakis.

  “Really? You want to?”

  I’m so excited that my voice squeaks, which is embarrassingly amplified because of the band room’s acoustics.

  “I can teach, if you want,” he says. “I’ve given flute lessons and piano lessons before, and some percussion. And my dad is a music professor, so I have a bunch of theory books.”

  “Music theory! We haven’t even thought about that.”

  “Well, I don’t have to…”

  “No, we should! We should be doing that!”

  “But if you already have teachers, I can just help out and do paperwork, or whatever you need,” Johann says. “I guess I’m pretty responsible.”

  Responsible. That is exactly what I need. Johann will let me be my Libra self. He’ll be super-responsible, Hunter will be slightly irresponsible, and I’ll make sure everyone gets along.

  “Oh my gosh, I love you!” I exclaim.

  Johann, embarrassed, looks down at his clogs. I don’t think he’s the kind of guy you should declare your love for.


  CHAPTER 9: HUNTER

  “Girls’ Teams Dominate at Homecoming: Femme Fatales of Fall Sports”

  “The Boy Recession©” by Aviva Roth, The Julius Journal, October

  What is all this crap?

  It’s late October, and I’ve fallen into my habit of arriving to first period fifteen minutes late. But this morning, my dad dropped me off only ten minutes late, so I figured I had time to go to the cafeteria for a bacon-egg-and-cheese.

  But when I turn from the main hallway down south, there are green streamers all over and balloons strewn across the floor, impeding my way to bacon-egg-and-cheese. In the cafeteria, I notice another weird thing: Eugene and Chung wearing matching suits.

  “Yo, Scarface!” I yell with my mouth full.

  I pay for my half-eaten sandwich and walk over to Eugene and Chung.

  “Happy homecoming, mio fratello!” Eugene greets me.

  “What’s going on with this?” I ask him, gesturing to the two of them and their suits.

  “With what?” Eugene asks.

  But he knows what, because he presses the lapels of his jacket smooth and reaches for his shirt cuffs to make sure they’re sticking out of his jacket sleeves.

  “You finally figure out how to clone yourself?” I say, looking from him to Chung.

  Chung looks down at Eugene, confused.

  “Dude, I’m, like, a foot taller than him,” Chung tells me.

  “And you’re Asian,” Eugene adds. He turns to me and asks, “You like my special game-day suit? This isn’t one of my regular suits. We got these specially made for homecoming.”

  Eugene’s on the football team now. He still sucks as much as ever, but they took all the guys who tried out, because they were so desperate to fill up the roster. The team has played three games so far, and lost every one. Eugene sits on the bench, but he feels like a badass because he gets to hang out with Chung and those guys.