This Song Is (Not) for You

  “Yeah, cool,” I said.

  • • •

  We were waiting in the drive-through when it happened; we saw the poster.

  “I hate shit like that,” Tom said. He pointed at the side of the building where an ad for the fast-food place hung. The picture was supposed to be of a woman eating the new Snack Big burger they’re pushing, but it didn’t even look like she was eating.

  It looked like she’s trying to make out with the sandwich.

  “I guess a female having sex with a burger will make males buy it,” I said.

  “I hate society,” Tom said. “I really, really, really do. All of this misogynistic bullshit should have been fixed long before we were even born.”

  “I guess it falls to us to fix it then.” I was talking about society when I said that, but I guess Tom thought I meant the poster.

  “Sam, you are so, so right,” he said. And then he climbed out of my car, went up to the poster frame, and removed the girl and her burger lover.

  “What is happening?” I said as he got back in the car.

  “We’re gonna fix the poster, like you said,” Tom said. “Now just pay for our food and act normal. Do you have art supplies at your house?”

  I did not have art supplies.

  Grift Craft is in Soulard, a gentrified neighborhood on the edge of the city, and Tom told me not to judge the store too harshly based on that.

  “They still have to turn a profit after all,” he reasoned as I parallel parked. I nodded, but inwardly I was laughing that Tom thought I might hold it against him that his favorite craft store is in a yuppie neighborhood.

  Outside of the car, Tom stood back and swept his arm dramatically against the skyline of redbrick buildings.

  “People have been living in this neighborhood since the late seventeen hundreds, and that is the kind of thing that is always cool.” Tom said.

  I nodded again, this time in perfect agreement.

  The inside of Grift Craft looked like an urban witch’s garden. Things were hung from fishing wire from the ceiling and crowd along shelves. “Things” is as specific as I can get. Mirrors caught the light. Metal objects clanged and chimed against each other in the air currents. Art projects perched on every surface, and the walls were covered in frames and shelves. There were a thousand things to look at, and a thousand painted or sketched, plastic or Styrofoam eyes looking back at me.

  “Ramona told me about this place,” I said.

  “Yeah, she loved it,” Tom said. The store is an odd shape, and the aisles make it even stranger, but he led me with ease to the stencils at the back of the store.

  “So what’s our message? I mean, maybe some woman out there would want to have sex with a hamburger (and that’s totally fine), but people need to realize that they are being manipulated. How do we show that, Sam?”

  We stood in front of the stencils and he looked at me imploringly. He genuinely wanted to know what I thought, and he was going to stand there staring at me until I told him.

  “Most people are actually pretty smart when they remember to actually stop and think about things,” I said.

  • • •

  CONSUME

  CONSUME

  CONSUME

  AND DIE WITHOUT THINKING

  ABOUT IT

  said the poster we placed in the frame outside the restaurant very late on Friday night. Tom insisted that the words be outlined in red glitter. Alongside the words the woman still pressed the burger into her face. We didn’t change anything on her image, but now it looked more like she was being smothered by the burger.

  The next day we went through the drive-through in the late afternoon, and the employees still hadn’t taken it down.

  “This is the greatest compliment we could ever receive,” Tom said. “No one’s told the manager yet. It means they like it. You’ve taught me a lesson, Sam. I must never forget that most people are actually pretty smart and actually pretty cool.”

  And I finally understood what Ramona knew all along.

  Tom was meant to meet us in same way a meteor is destined to crash into whatever is along its trajectory.

  Tom

  Here’s how Sara broke up with me.

  She called me late in the afternoon and said she was coming by. She’d finally saved enough money to buy her own car. She’d quit her job at the mall so that she could do an internship at her dad’s company over the summer.

  School wasn’t even out yet, but I hardly ever saw her anymore.

  (And, yeah, it’s all obvious to me now.)

  So I waited for her out on the front porch, and after she parked, I walked down the steps. I met her on the sidewalk and kissed her cheek. She started crying.

  “Tom, just don’t,” she said. “Don’t even try.”

  “Try what?” I asked. I felt like the baffled boyfriend on a sitcom. She just stood there crying, and I just stood there doing nothing.

  “You don’t feel that way about me. I know that you don’t,” she finally said.

  “What way?” I said.

  “You don’t want to have sex with me,” Sara said, standing on the sidewalk outside my parents’ house. “God, not that I’m ready. But you—you—” There were tears studding her eyelashes. Her ponytail was slipping down, and the setting sun made a halo out of her loosened hair.

  She was so beautiful.

  She was right.

  “You get bored kissing me,” Sara said. “You hold me and never try anything else. You know it’s true.”

  “I love you, Sara,” I said. I knew that it was true.

  “I know you do,” she said. “But you’re gay, Tom. And that’s okay, but—”

  “I’m not—”

  “We need to break up.”

  “I’m not gay,” I said. I put my hands on her shoulders to steady both of us. “I just don’t feel that way about anybody.”

  There.

  I’d said it.

  I’d told Sara what I had never said aloud to anyone ever before.

  “You don’t…” She frowned and shook her head.

  “I’m not gay. I’m not straight. I just don’t really care about sex.”

  “You don’t care. About sex.” She said it like I’d said I didn’t care about curing cancer.

  “I don’t know why,” I said. I tried to gather together my years of puzzling over this and lay it all before her. “I just never developed this obsession with sex that everyone else has. It’s never interested me, and it just seems to cause everyone else a lot of trouble. But I love you, Sara. I think you’re so smart and beautiful, and I love being with you. I just don’t want to have sex with you.”

  I looked at her, and she looked at me, and I hoped that she could accept me.

  “No, Tom,” she said. “That’s not possible.”

  “It’s true. I—”

  “You need to do some thinking, Tom,” she said. It was starting to annoy me how often she was saying my name. “Everybody’s sexual. You’re in denial about something, and it’s not fair to either of us to keep up with this charade of a relationship.”

  She turned away from me and got into her car.

  And I let her go.

  Because to me it had never been a charade,

  To me our relationship had been everything I had ever wanted,

  But to her, it had been missing the most basic human need.

  There was nothing to do but let her go.

  After that I was alone.

  Until Ramona found me.

  And she introduced me to Sam.

  (And I started to think that maybe it was

  safe to get close to someone again.)

  Ramona

  It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to play the piano for fun.

  This past week and a half, I’v
e spent every afternoon alone with the piano in Dad’s condo.

  Playing without practicing.

  I’d forgotten what that felt like.

  Bach is my favorite. He is the rock-star king of baroque music.

  I’ve also been indulging in the Tori and Fiona songs I used to obsessively play at thirteen.

  It feels so good to take the empty condo and fill it with a song that I love.

  I adore this long stand of black and white,

  the vibration and rumbles

  of this instrument,

  the pedals under my feet.

  When I was little, this was how I spent most of my time.

  It made Dad happy, and I didn’t have any close friends back then. Back then, playing the piano felt like my purpose.

  Beavers build dams.

  Bees make honey.

  Ramona plays piano.

  My whole world was structured around the piano. It was my joy and my passion, and every adult I knew praised me for my dedication.

  And then something changed, in the way that things always change.

  • • •

  I went to junior high at McKinley, a magnet school in the city. All through sixth and seventh grade, I looked with longing at the musicians in eighth grade. If they passed the audition, they got to take advanced music with Mrs. Trundle, my favorite teacher. The advanced music students played in an ensemble, and they were invited to play with the St. Louis Symphony at Powell Hall in the spring, where the best student would also play a solo.

  In my early-adolescent mind, playing that spring concert solo was the objective of my being.

  In the weeks before the audition, I slaved over the piano, and I wept with joy when I was accepted into the class. On the first day of eighth grade, my leg jiggled nervously under my desk in each class, impatient to reach the goal of the last line on my schedule.

  Finally, last period came.

  I burst into the music room and found that Mrs. Trundle was not there.

  Mr. Jones was there. He had red hair, a bizarre tie that looked like a lightning bolt, and new ideas. He stood in front of the classroom and shattered me to the very core.

  “You are here because you are gifted and therefore worthy of being challenged. And that means going out of your comfort zone. The instrument you auditioned with is not the instrument you will be playing with the symphony this spring.”

  We were told that over the next few months we would all be trying out new instruments, and by the end of the semester, we would select the instrument we would then focus on for the spring concert.

  I hated Mr. Jones.

  I hated his tie and his words and his face.

  I hated him with a fiery passion you cannot imagine.

  Just cut to a scene of me sullenly scratching on a violin in the corner of the music room, my icy eyes focused on Mr. Jones as he joyously instructs a student at the piano.

  Then, Friday came.

  And we were told that as a special treat we would have a drum circle.

  I hated Mr. Jones and his stupid hippie ways.

  But the rhythm got to me.

  I’d grimly grabbed the bongo without thought, but I found myself fascinated by the varying texture of sound. The drums weren’t the simple instrument that I’d thought.

  I hated Mr. Jones, but on Monday I went to the corner where he kept the percussion instruments.

  In the spring concert, I played the xylophone, a percussion instrument that uses chimes laid out like a keyboard. It was familiar enough that the solo I coveted had gone to me by a landslide. Afterward, I hugged Mr. Jones with tears in my eyes.

  And told my dad that I absolutely had to use my birthday money on a drum kit.

  • • •

  I still play piano, but I play the drums too.

  Loving the drums hasn’t made me love piano less.

  Just as Sam has stayed in my heart even after I fell for Tom.

  Some things, it seems, are always the same even after things change.

  Sam

  “That is the coolest thing you have ever done,” Ramona said. We were at school on Monday, under the stairwell by the music department, where we first met. I was showing her the pic on my phone of the poster. “I get grounded, and you immediately go off and do the coolest thing ever.”

  “You went glitter bombing with Tom,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah.” She paused and cocked her head to the side. “When I go off with Tom, we do something subtle and quiet, but Tom and you go do something loud and inyourface.”

  “I get the feeling that Tom is the sort of guy who brings the hidden side out of a person,” I said.

  Ramona smiled. “You get it now, don’t you? You understand why we needed him in the band.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do. I don’t know how you knew, but you were right.” She smiled again and adjusted her book bag.

  “I really like him,” she said.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “I mean—I mean I like like him, Sam. Tom.”

  “Oh,” I said. I’m such an idiot.

  “Is that cool? I don’t want to mess stuff up with the band.” She shrugged her shoulders and averted her eyes, then glanced up at me from under her eyelashes. So pretty.

  Damn her for being so pretty.

  “Of course it’s cool,” I said. “I want you to date whoever you want.”

  I want you to want to date me, I didn’t say.

  Ramona got this soft, sad look on her face.

  “You’re such a good friend to me,” she said.

  The warning bell rang, reminding us that we were supposed to be headed to class.

  “I’ll see you after school for band practice!” she yelled, and turned and ran up the stairs, away from me.

  Away from

  me.

  Tom

  I’m hanging out with Ramona at her place today. She and her dad live in a condo in the city. It’s nice, but it’s not anything like Sam’s mom’s brownstone, which has four stories and the kind of sprawling lawn one rarely sees in metropolitan areas.

  Ramona’s front door has a tiny patch of grass with a green giggling Buddha sitting by the door. The inside is crowded with the grand piano and her father’s bookshelves. It’s obvious that they are a family focused on intellectual pursuits.

  We’re in her bedroom now. Her dad reminded her to leave the door open. She has a posters of Chopin, Björk, Kathleen Hanna, and Evelyn Glennie on her walls. Her bedspread is pink and girlie. I didn’t expect that.

  “For elementary school, I went to this hippie charter where we had this class called ‘Art with Found Materials,’” Ramona is saying. “We literally went to junkyards and made stuff. And yesterday”—she holds up a large tin can with a long spring attached that dances just above the floor—“I remembered the day I made one of these.” She finishes with a flourish and shakes the can.

  The spring sways and thrums, echoing inside the can. It sounds like a thunderous, ominous wind filling the room. It sounds like the wind inside my car, the noise I’ve been trying and failing to replicate electronically.

  (Ramona is probably the coolest girl I know.

  And I don’t know why I said “probably.”

  She just is. The Coolest.)

  “I also know how to make a tambourine out of bottle caps,” she says. She sits down on the carpet next to me.

  (She reminds me of Sara,

  but at the same time,

  I’ve never met anyone like her.)

  “We should do a piece where you and Sam play homemade instruments, and I record you guys and play it back with weird effects,” I say.

  “Yes!” Ramona shouts. She flings her arms wide and the spring rattles.

  I laugh.

  “What?” she says.
>
  “You,” I say. I’m smiling, and so is she.

  But I’m still unprepared when she leans forward to kiss me.

  Maybe I should have been expecting it, but I’m just not good at these things.

  So I have to make a decision fast.

  I think I might like to be with her like that,

  (kind of)

  and she is the coolest girl I know.

  So we kiss.

  I like it.

  But after a while it’s just

  A little boring.

  A little wet.

  And afterward we hold hands, which I like, and we talk about going to the art museum with Sam, which sounds fun.

  And Ramona smiles this secret smile now, reveling in this thing I only kind of understand.

  Ramona

  Tom.

  Tom.

  Tom. Tom. Tom.

  Tom.

  TOM.

  I kissed Tom.

  Then we smiled, and we talked and we laughed, and before he left for home, he kissed me good night and told me he’d call me.

  It’s all so natural.

  So right.

  TOM.

  Tom. Tom.

  I can’t believe I actually did it.

  I leaned forward and I kissed him like I was this cool, confident chick.

  I was worried that he would think my kissing was awkward.

  I hadn’t actually kissed someone since eighth grade.

  And a guy like Tom who is so cool, he’s got to be experienced.

  But he kissed me back. He likes me too.

  Tomorrow after school we’ll go to Sam’s garage and make music together.

  We’ll hold hands and laugh.

  We’ll be boyfriendandgirlfriend and all will be well.

  (And I’ll forget to ache when I look at Sam.)

  Sam

  I knew this day would come, so it was easy to pretend that I didn’t mind. I knew that someday, someone would see Ramona the way I do.

  I knew there would be someone who she wanted too.

  I’m not saying that this doesn’t hurt like hell.