4
Daniel
Ahuge grin spread across Daniel Walker’s face as he popped his chin to the funk strains of “Too Hot to Stop” by The Bar-Kays, his shaggy blond hair swaying back and forth to the rhythmic beat of his imagination. Although the room’s mission-style architecture was about as un-funky as you could get, that wasn’t about to stop Daniel from enjoying a musical interlude, especially if the situation demanded it. And to Daniel’s mind, it usually did.
148. How hot is too hot?
As if the multiple-choice questions hadn’t been weird enough, the short answer section was downright bizarre. Number 148 had started him in on “Too Hot to Stop.” Now it was all he could do not to tap his pencil frenetically on the desk: tap tap tap tap BAP-BAP BAP-BAP BAP-BAP POW! His fingers ached to pluck out the bass line—adding a few embellishments of his own, of course.
He considered writing “When it’s too hot to stop” as his answer, but thinking about it as prose, without the music, he suddenly felt awkward, and the song faded away. He couldn’t write that on a test—not even one that didn’t count. He paused only a moment before his head was nodding again, this time with less pop and more groove, weaving to the sultry beat of “Smooth.”
Ask Santana, he wrote.
Daniel decided he liked tests that didn’t count. He liked them a lot.
Before moving on to the next question, he finished the melody all the way through in his mind, the easy rhythm of the tune perfectly matching both the title of the song and the gorgeous southern California day.
• • •
At lunch, the test was all anyone could talk about.
“Which color is the best color? What was that?” Daniel’s best friend, Jared, was a short, dark-haired teen with pretty-boy features and unnaturally long fingers that could fly over a bass guitar like a hummingbird’s wings.
“Please, brah. Blue’s the best color, hands down. Don’t be stupid.” The reply came from Scott, a heavyset teen with nondescript brown hair and a solid if somewhat uninventive gift for drumming.
The three of them had talked about forming a band for years, but Daniel was the only one who could really sing, and he was too shy even to play his guitar in front of most people, despite his obvious talent. Instead, they held occasional jams in Scott’s bedroom, but even these were few and far between, depending as they did on the other residents of the house feeling inclined to tolerate an hour or two of inescapable percussion—which they usually were not.
“Jared’s not stupid,” Daniel said, quick to defend his oldest friend.
“Aw, don’t mind him.” Jared flourished his hand through the air as though to sweep the comment away. “A grommet swooped his wave off the line-up this morning. He’s been in a bad mood ever since.”
“Effing kooks oughta stay on the beach where they belong.” Scott scowled at his roast beef sandwich, hardly touching it.
Daniel offered Scott a sympathetic smile, trying to snap him out of it, but Scott’s theme song for the day—Three Days Grace’s “I Hate Everything About You”—was already on a play loop. Its wailing strains threatened to make Daniel laugh as he imagined Scott behind a mic, howling out the melody in his high-pitched, off-key tenor. He dropped his head as fast as he could, hiding his smirk behind his hair.
“Hey, Daniel,” Jared said, interrupting his thoughts with a friendly punch to the shoulder. “Don’t look now, but I think Alyssa’s watching you.”
“If she’s looking over here, she’s not watching me, she’s watching you,” Daniel replied, and he laughed at his friend’s stunned expression. The shy, petite blonde had been staring love songs at Jared for weeks now. “She’s cute. You should ask her out. You two would look good together.”
Daniel looked to Scott for confirmation, but Scott said nothing. Only the barest hint of rage passed across his round, cherubic face before he could mask it, but Daniel was onto him.
Apparently, Jared wasn’t the only one who liked Alyssa Summers.
Daniel had no idea when that had happened, but underneath Scott’s neutral exterior the volatile drummer had already traded in the angst-ridden howling of Three Days Grace for the high-intensity pounding of “Platypus,” by Green Day, which echoed riotously in Daniel’s imagination, its breakneck tempo contrasting starkly against the brutal hostility of the lyrics.
“You think so?” Jared wanted to know.
“Sorry, what?”
“You think I should ask her out?” Jared tried again, sounding hopeful.
Daniel looked back and forth between Jared and Scott, The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” now locked in an epic battle of the bands against Scott’s Green Day angst. No matter what Daniel did, he was going to hurt one or the other. How had his beautiful Santana morning come to this?
“Um, hey, you know what? I just remembered I have math homework to finish before class. I’m gonna hit the library. I’ll see ya, OK?”
“Yeah, OK,” they both replied, each of them staring at Alyssa Summers with vastly different expressions.
Daniel hightailed it out of the cafeteria as fast as he could.
• • •
Thankfully, Daniel didn’t have to see the two boys together again for the rest of the day, but he did have one class with each of them.
He had math with Jared first, and he spent the entire period enjoying a mash-up of his own invention that ranged from Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” to “I’m a Believer” by The Monkees, despite the fact that Jared didn’t mention even one word about Alyssa Summers, asking instead in mouthed whispers whether Daniel understood any of this quadratic equation nonsense, to which Daniel replied easily that no, he did not.
History, however, was a solemn affair. Scott pointedly ignored him for the entire class, his chipper Green Day anger having devolved into a seething Eminem tirade. Given Scott’s mood, Daniel didn’t even want to know what had happened between his friends after he had left the lunchroom. Fortunately, Scott didn’t seem inclined to tell him either, storming out after class before Daniel could have said a word.
Not that he was trying to.
Daniel took his time packing up, giving Scott plenty of space to get the heck out of Dodge without another awkward encounter. He hated it when his friends were fighting, and this squabble had all the telltale signs of becoming an epic feud—which was stupid, since Alyssa had started liking Jared weeks ago, and Scott had never even mentioned her before. But of course, that didn’t matter. If Scott decided Jared had ‘stolen’ Alyssa from his unrequited affections, there would be no quarter for his imagined crime.
By the time Daniel reached the parking lot, just about everyone had already cleared out. He sauntered over to his truck, his mood already lifting. Daniel drove a teal, mint-condition 1975 F100 pickup. His grandmother had never much liked driving to begin with and had finally given it up altogether, offering the truck to Daniel on his sixteenth birthday the year before. He had loved it from the moment he first laid eyes on it, and even now, more than a year later, he remembered that initial joy of knowing it was his every time he slid behind the wheel.
It didn’t have any kind of sound system worth speaking of, but Daniel didn’t mind. He had several thousand songs on his phone and far more stored in his head, and he could listen to them in his memory any time he wanted. Daniel only had to hear a song once to repeat any part of it, even changing the arrangement at will to suit his mood. Although he had been known to dabble in any instrument he could get his hands on, his favorites were lead and bass guitar, and he reveled in them both with equal skill and enthusiasm.
Perching happily on the old truck’s bench seat, Daniel paused before starting the engine to take a few deep breaths and let go of the afternoon’s negativity. He had promised his father, a firefighter who had seen more than his share of horrific accidents, that he would never drive in agitation, and Daniel took his promises seriously. So he sat in the truck, breathing in the salty tang of the ocean-swept air until he felt the good mood of the morning settling back into his bones, while his empty hands played Santana’s lead guitar in the warm California sunshine.
• • •
“So, how was your day?” Daniel’s mother, Sarah, asked him the same exact question every afternoon. She was an artist by profession, and he found her today, as he usually did, in her home studio, in the midst of a new painting. He took a moment to enjoy the familiar scent of paint, paint thinner, and his mother’s lavender shampoo. The question began a ritual they had developed when he was small, and he answered her now in the same way he had begun answering her even then.
“Really good, then good and bad, then funny, then really bad, and now good again.”
Sarah Walker laughed. “OK, spill,” she said. “Tell me everything.”
So Daniel sat on the spare stool while she stood at the easel, painting and listening to her son’s day. He told her about the strange test in the morning, about the awkwardness at lunch, about seeing how happy Jared was in math class, and about Scott’s cold shoulder in history.
“And what was the last bit?” Sarah prompted him. “The bit about it being good again?”
“That,” he said, completing the ritual, “was coming back home. Obviously!”
“Obviously!” Sarah repeated, chuckling at their long-standing routine. She couldn’t hug him because her smock was full of paint, but she smiled at him for a long moment before turning back to her work. She was not, however, finished with the conversation.
“So, do you think Scott will get over it soon?” she wanted to know.
“I doubt it.” Daniel frowned. “Alyssa has liked Jared for months, and Jared seems to like her, too. So I think that’s probably going to happen. But you should have seen Scott. I don’t think he’s going to get over it soon at all if Alyssa ends up Jared’s girlfriend. Maybe not even before school’s out.”
Daniel’s mother sighed in sympathy. Outside of the family, Jared and Scott were about the only two people Daniel spent any time with. If those two weren’t speaking to each other, things didn’t bode well for him.
“What are you going to do if they ignore each other all summer?”
Daniel just shrugged. “Play guitar, go surfing with Marshall, bring you snacks so you don’t forget to eat while you’re working. You know, the usual.”
“Daniel, sweetheart, you can’t spend all summer by yourself.”
“I said I’d go surfing with Marshall.”
“Your twelve-year-old brother does not count as company your own age.”
“Jeez, Mom, you’d think hanging out with my kid brother was a bad thing. Most parents I know would be ecstatic if their seventeen-year-old son started driving his little brother around.”
His mother lowered her brush, turning back toward him.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she started, her tone gentle. “I’m glad you like spending time with Marshall. It’s good for him. He looks up to you, and you’re a wonderful role model. You always have been. I just think it would be nice if you had a few more friends your own age. Maybe even a nice girl to go to the movies with.”
“Mom,” Daniel groaned, “don’t start.”
“I’m not starting anything—”
“You are starting something. But I’m telling you, I’m not interested in any of the girls at school, OK? I’ve seen Jared and Scott go through this more than once, and it’s not worth it. I don’t want to end up in a fight with one of them—or with anyone else for that matter—over liking some girl who wouldn’t even be my girlfriend more than a few weeks before she started liking someone else anyway.”
“OK, I hear you,” she said, relenting. “Really, I hear you. Be a perfect son and drive Marshall around all summer, making him happy. See if I care.” She grinned at him, waving her brush in the air as though to shoo him away. “Go on, then. This canvas isn’t going to paint itself.”
Daniel grinned back, relieved she had decided not to push the topic—for now, anyway. “I’ll be in my room if you need me.”
Sarah Walker stared at the doorway until the sound of her son’s guitar echoed down the hall, a quick, happy tune that she knew he was playing to reassure her. She stood a while without moving, letting it soothe her, as it always did. He was so talented. Why wouldn’t he play for anyone else?
I hope it won’t be too long before you find a girl you can share your music with, she thought to herself. Life is too short to spend it alone. She knew she should get back to work, but instead she set down her brush, sat on the stool, closed her eyes, and listened to her son play—she in her art studio and he in his room just down the hall, as close as any mother and son have ever been, a lifetime of experience standing between them.