Born to Rock Read online

  12-18

  We go to school every day. Why? Because it’s the law? If nobody showed up, what could they do? Put us ALL in jail? We’re such sheep!

  P.S.—Baaah!

  1-17

  The problem with wimps is that they’re too wimpy to know what wimps they are.

  2-10

  Life’s too short to be nice to people you hate. While you’re nodding and smiling at some jerk, the clock is ticking. Pretty soon you’ll be dead, under a hunk of marble that says, “Here lies an idiot who wasted his life being polite to people who didn’t deserve it.”

  Feisty? Crazy would be more like it. Gates ought to have his head examined!

  My eyes fell on the latest entry:

  3-22

  Seven years since Dad died. Can still see his face, but can’t seem to call up his voice anymore.

  Every time I think I’ve got her pegged, something happens to remind me that Melinda may as well be from outer space for all I understand her.

  “I know somebody who likes you,” I told her the next day at lunch.

  She looked at me like I had shot her dog. “Don’t mess with my head, Leo. You’ve seen what happens to people who mess with my head.”

  “Do you want to know who it is, or not?”

  “Well, obviously you’re determined to tell me,” she said. “So go ahead.”

  And when I gave her the name, she didn’t even know who Gates was. She remembered him as Caleb Drew—nobody’s called him that since he first got his pudgy fingers on the keyboard of a laptop.

  “That guy?” She was annoyed. “Quit pulling my chain.”

  “Honest—the guy likes you! I’m telling the truth!”

  “But he’s one of you,” she argued. “The forces of steal-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich. P.S.—he doesn’t even know me.”

  I didn’t want to admit that Gates was on to her secret Web identity. She’d think he was a stalker or something. “He admires you from afar. That happens, you know.”

  “I would never date a Republican,” she said flatly.

  “Well, if he asks you out, just say no—don’t make a political speech,” I pleaded. “He’s a good guy, even if he has lousy taste in women.”

  “Hey, I’m flattered. I’m the only thing he’s looked twice at that doesn’t have a forty-gig hard drive.”

  Here’s another example of the sheer audacity of the girl. In the middle of putting down my friend, she had the nerve to hit me up to tutor her friend Owen Stevenson in algebra.

  “Forget it,” I told her. “If Gates’s feelings mean nothing to you, Owen’s algebra grade means even less to me.”

  In an outraged instant, her black fingernail was positioned half an inch from my left eye. “You’re homophobic!”

  “I don’t have a problem with Owen being gay!” I defended myself. “I have a problem with him thinking he’s smarter than everybody else!”

  “He’s gifted,” she insisted. “And that doesn’t just come from me. It comes from the state of Connecticut.”

  “Then why does he need a tutor?”

  “Math is his weakness.”

  I snorted. “And English, history, geography, science—”

  “Not true!”

  “He isn’t even good at being gay. When’s the last time you saw him with a boyfriend?”

  “When’s the last time we saw you with a girlfriend?” she shot back. “I guess you’re not very good at being straight.”

  I refrained from pointing out that if Melinda hadn’t forced herself onto that boat trip, Shelby Rostov might very well be my girlfriend.

  “You know how it is with Owen,” she persisted. “They make him take all honors courses. He doesn’t have a choice.”

  She was right about that. At the age of six, Owen had scored 180 on an IQ test, wowing his teachers and the Connecticut Department of Education. They’d slapped a “genius” classification on the poor kid that he just couldn’t shake. It never occurred to anybody that maybe the 180 was a fluke. Owen was a bright enough guy, but he was never going to live up to all those expectations. Yet whenever he tried to switch out of honors everything, the school wouldn’t let him. Connecticut still believed in its diamond in the rough. The diamond had no voice in the matter.

  “He got a raw deal,” I conceded.

  “You can help him,” she wheedled. “You’re great at math—McAllister Scholarship, early acceptance to Harvard—”

  She talked me into it. I wasn’t gullible—I knew she was snowing me. She just plain bulldozed it through. Senior year, up to my nose in exams, with Harvard on the line if I couldn’t maintain my grades, I was donating my free periods to tutoring the untutorable.

  Owen allowed me to work with him. That’s just the kind of guy he was. Of course, I wasn’t helping him; we were studying together.

  “I hear you’ve been having trouble with vectors.”

  Owen looked me up and down. “That shirt isn’t really a good style for you. You need a full collar to de-emphasize your Adam’s apple.”

  If my Adam’s apple was big, it bulged to twice the size when I had to deal with Owen. “Let’s just do this,” I grunted.

  “Okay,” he agreed. “Explain to me the part you don’t understand.”

  That’s how the lessons went. I wasn’t tutoring him. He was tutoring me.

  Apparently, I had a mental block about vector kinematics. For three weeks, I explained it upside down and underwater. I might as well have been speaking Swahili.

  Every day, Melinda asked me, “How’s it going?”

  And when I replied, “Not well,” the look she shot me clearly said that she blamed my failure on homophobia.

  We tutored on. I can’t say I didn’t learn anything: my voice was a little too high; my pants were pleated when they should have been flat front; I could never be a hand model with knuckles like that. What I didn’t learn was vectors, which was to say he didn’t learn vectors.

  At last, a breakthrough. Owen loved old-fashioned pinball machines. So I used the path of a pinball as it bounces around the game to represent vectors. Each bounce has distance and direction, and the algebraic tally of the vectors is the final position of the ball.

  Sound familiar? It was my pinball theory. Of course, I never applied it beyond the field of algebra until after I’d learned the truth about McMurphy.

  And he got it. I knew he got it, because he said, “I think you’ll be just fine now.”

  I bristled. “Hey, man, I knew this stuff already.”

  “See what we can accomplish when we work together?”

  “You’re delusional,” I informed him.

  But Melinda was pleased. And even though her opinion should have meant zero to me, I basked in it. I even checked Graffiti-Wall.usa to see if KafkaDreams mentioned my accomplishment. The closest thing I found was:

  Am toying with the possibility that people aren’t such total boneheads after all. I think it might be PMS.

  For security reasons, the senior algebra classes took the big test together in our cafeteria. That was how I wound up at the same exam table as Connecticut’s former 180 IQ.

  I shouldn’t have cared. I’d done more than my bit for Melinda’s friend. But when I saw Owen sitting there, lost at sea—again—I couldn’t keep my eyes off his test booklet. Sure enough, he was on question twelve—vectors.

  I wanted to scream. I thought of three weeks of study hall, countless hours, searching for a way to get through to that guy. And at last, success—or so I’d thought.

  He forgot it! He actually forgot it!

  So I took the fateful step. “Owen—” I hissed. “The pinballs! Remember the pinballs!”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  [3]

  LUCKILY, MR. BORMAN LIKED ME. ONE of the big advantages of the Young Republicans was that I had a decent reputation among our teachers. They thought I was going places, which reflected well upon the school.

  But talking during an exam—that didn’t look good.
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  “Copying answers from Owen Stevenson.” He frowned at me over his reading glasses. “Why don’t you explain what’s going on here?”

  I told the truth. “I didn’t copy from Owen. I’ve been tutoring him during study hall. It wasn’t cheating, Mr. Borman. He knows this stuff.”

  The assistant principal shuffled some papers and shot me a glance that was suspiciously like a smirk.

  A little confused, I forged on. “He was having a hard time with vectors, but he finally got it. I didn’t give him any answers. What I said was a buzzword to jog his memory a little.”

  He sat forward, eyes alert. “So what you’re saying is, it was Owen who did the cheating, not you.”

  “No,” I insisted. “Nobody cheated. It was just—”

  “I think I know what cheating is,” Mr. Borman interrupted. “You said yourself that Owen didn’t understand vectors. He made you give him the answer. That’s a violation of school rules.”

  “But that’s not how it happened,” I protested. “He didn’t ask me for an answer. If anything—” I fell silent. The last thing I wanted to do was get myself in trouble over this.

  “You’d better speak up, Leo,” Mr. Borman warned me. “There was an ethics violation, and someone is to blame. You’re a gifted young man with a bright future. If it wasn’t you, now is the time to say so.”

  An alarm bell went off in my head. Mr. Borman had no interest in giving me a hard time over this non-incident. He was gunning for Owen.

  I almost understood it. I mean, here was this kid who showed up with a file a foot thick from the Connecticut Department of Education proclaiming him to be this mental messiah. Paperwork up the wazoo as the state painstakingly nurtured its little jewel into adulthood. And it all would have been worth it if Owen really was a genius. But by high school, the IQ thing was ancient history, and he was no smarter than the rest of us.

  “It’s admirable to tutor another student and take a leadership role,” Mr. Borman went on. “But you’re a man now; your actions define your character—what you say, what you do, the company you keep.”

  And I just knew. There were plenty of reasons to find Owen annoying, and I subscribed to most of them. But that wasn’t what Mr. Borman was getting at. He didn’t like Owen because Owen was gay.

  I felt him then—my genetic hitchhiker. It was my jaw stiffening, yet the cussedness making it happen was all McMurphy.

  For a year and a half I had been a Young Republican, talking about things like character, when what was really on my mind was getting into Harvard and how Shelby Rostov probably looked in a bra and panties. But this, McMurphy seemed to be telling me, was the true meaning of character. Could I face myself in the mirror if I let the assistant principal use me to set up another student?

  “I didn’t cheat, Mr. Borman,” I said gently but firmly. “And neither did Owen.”

  “Careful, Leo. Someone is going to pay for this. You should make sure it isn’t you.”

  McMurphy and I stood up. “If that’s all, I’ve got a class.”

  Whatever friendliness this meeting once had, it was gone now. Mr. Borman glowered at me. “Think about what this means, Caraway. Do you want a black mark like this on your permanent record?”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” I repeated, and got out of there before McMurphy said something I’d regret.

  All day long I suffered the tortures of the damned. For years, my genetic hitchhiker had been safe under lock and key somewhere inside me. What a time for him to show up again. When my permanent record was on the line and I had early acceptance to Harvard!

  By the time I got home, I was a basket case. I locked myself in my room and called Mr. Hazeltine, my adviser from Harvard admissions.

  I must have sounded pretty desperate, because he was kind to me. “Take it easy, kid. Harvard doesn’t care about one test once you’re already accepted. If you get a diploma, your place here is secure.”

  I allowed myself to breathe again.

  “I heard you got caught cheating on the big algebra test.”

  Fleming placed his tray next to mine on the cafeteria table.

  Shelby sat down beside him, her luminous eyes all concern. “What happened, Leo?”

  “Big misunderstanding,” I mumbled. “You know Borman. There’s no talking to the guy. I won’t bore you with the details.”

  “You weren’t copying off that Stevenson kid, were you? Because that’s what people are saying.”

  I snorted. “If I ever have to copy off that guy, save me a cyanide capsule. I took a zero, and it’s all over.”

  “Well—” Fleming wasn’t comfortable. “I don’t want to be a jerk about this, but the club rules say your record has to be clean to be an officer.”

  The club was what Fleming called the Young Republicans. Like we had our own golf course or something.

  I was disgusted. “Who came up with a stupid rule like that?”

  He looked surprised. “You did.”

  “Don’t worry,” I promised. “I’ll straighten it out.”

  “Hey, Leo.” Melinda plopped her tray down across from me. “Hi, Shelby, Flem. How’s the portfolio hanging?”

  Fleming didn’t like being called Flem, he didn’t like Melinda, and he definitely didn’t like discussing his portfolio—at least not until Pfizer bounced back.

  Melinda swiveled on the bench and waved Owen over to make a fifth. That pretty much completed my joy.

  Owen had an unerring capacity to say the absolute wrong thing. “How’d you guys do on the algebra test?” He had the gall to look inquiringly at me.

  “You know exactly what I got,” I growled, “and why I got it.”

  “Well, I’m done,” Fleming announced, having wolfed down his entire sandwich in record time. He turned to Shelby, who had taken a grand total of three bites from her lunch. “Ready, Shel?”

  “I’m still eating,” she said, a little annoyed.

  Fleming swept her tray out from under her and began dragging her away. “Keep me posted, Leo,” he tossed over his shoulder. “The club needs to know.”

  “That guy is majorly constipated,” Melinda observed mildly.

  Owen nodded wisely. “He needs to get in touch with his gay side.”

  I choked on my V8. “Gay side? Fleming?”

  “He suppresses it,” Owen explained. “That’s what makes him so—”

  “Republican,” Melinda supplied.

  Desperate to change the subject, I picked up the sheaf of papers from the edge of Melinda’s tray. “What’s this?”

  “My English project,” she replied. “I’ve been working on it since Christmas.”

  “It looks like a PhD thesis,” I commented, glancing at the title page: “Poets of Rage: A Sociological History of Punk and Its Offshoots.” Twenty-seven pages. “I pity your teacher.”

  Owen stuck up for her. “What do you know about music?”

  “More than you know about vectors,” I returned bitterly.

  And that would have been the end of it—if it hadn’t been for that damn Web site.

  Ever since Gates had alerted me to Melinda’s blog on Graffiti-Wall, I’d been checking in periodically to see what KafkaDreams had to say. And even though I disagreed with most of it, I found it strangely compelling. It wasn’t so much Melinda’s commentary on life, the universe, and Tater Tots that captivated me. It was the fact that she had fans—real Web-surfers from all over the world who genuinely derived enjoyment and spiritual guidance from Melinda’s oddball ideas. Like DarthLightning03 from Missoula, Montana, who wrote:

  rock on kd, u grok the BIG UNREALITY, boycott all government till somebody in washington gets a Mohawk, u’r the greatest, u totally suck.

  Sucking, I gathered, was a good thing on Graffiti-Wall. It was used as high praise in many postings.

  There was also CzechBouncer from Prague, who became emotional when Melinda mentioned living in the United States:

  My American jewel, you restore my faith in superpowers, be
my oracle, be my guru, sorry can’t worship you in person, your country may be strong, but the beer tastes like—

  Some kind of content filter apparently kicked in here, since the sentence was never finished. It led me to suspect that CzechBouncer was actually writing from a computer in his middle school in Prague or possibly New Jersey. Just because the guy claimed to be European didn’t mean it was true.

  KafkaDreams made no direct response to her admirers. Instead, she wrote:

  Hey guys, forget the jocks, the senators, the principals, and all those morons who don’t get it and never will. Smash your CD collections, melt your parents’ vinyl, chuck your iPods. This is what it’s all about!!!

  Posted directly below that was Melinda’s essay: “Poets of Rage: A Sociological History of Punk and Its Offshoots.”

  This is the music of the damned, the anthems of outcasts and addicts and felons. From the scum of the earth comes the assault of distorted guitars, the shriek of vocals barely reclaimed from the depths of madness, boiling over in waves of anger and frustration. It is the roar of not just songs, but revolution, and the world will never be the same again.

  Leave it to Melinda to take the crappiest music ever recorded and turn it into an earthshaking historic event. But give her credit—I was reading it. How could you not? I was mostly interested to see what she could possibly say to back up those outrageous statements that her topic was anything more than garbage noise. Believe me, if I’d switched off my computer in disgust then and there, the course of my life would have been radically different, and I would have saved myself one cavity search in the bargain.

  According to Melinda, punk had its roots in the 1960s. But the genre itself came into being in 1970s New York, and went prime time with the British band the Sex Pistols toward the end of the decade. In the ’80s, punk dropped off the radar screen (maybe all its fans had gone deaf). The underground scene was alive and well, especially in L.A. But no punk group stepped forward to carry the Pistols’ banner until 1984, with the arrival of Purge, the undisputed “angriest band in America.”