face that says “terminal constipation.”
“Yes, sir,” I say, way too brightly for a guy hiding under
a table in an all-night Laundromat in his underwear at three
o’clock in the morning. “I mean, we didn’t come here to
rehearse, and we didn’t plan to be practically naked, but . . .”
“Is that your van outside?” growls the big cop.
“Yes, sir,” says Hector. “I mean, no, sir. It actually belongs
to both of us, so . . .”
“Where are your clothes, guys?” the first cop says with a
sigh.
“See, the van has a hole in the roof, officer, and the rain got
us all pretty wet. We decided to stop in here to get dried off.
And since it was so late, and there obviously wasn’t anybody
here, we didn’t see any harm in it,” says Pierce. That’s Pierce?
He sounds like a Harvard lawyer. “I certainly hope we haven’t
caused you any inconvenience.” The cops look at each other.
Pierce smiles and gets kind of a smirk on his face. “This prob-
ably looked like a possible four fifty-nine, but I bet you were
thinking a three eleven when you looked through the window,
am I right?” The mustache cop kind of chuckles.
“Yeah,” he says, looking in my direction. “Or maybe even
a fifty-one fifty.” Pierce slaps his thigh and hoots. The big cop
even smiles a little. What the heck is happening here? The
next thing I know, Pierce is telling them how his uncle was a
cop in Boston and taught him all the police codes, and they’re
swapping stories like old friends. I guess we don’t pose much
of a municipal threat, so after a few more questions and about
fifty additional “yes, sirs” and “no, sirs” from Hector and me,
we’re dressed and back in the van.
“Thanks again, guys,” Pierce yells. Once we’re out of the
parking lot I look at Pierce.
“What’s a fifty-one fifty?” I ask.
Ha.
Ha.
Ha.
It’s stopped raining. The moon breaks through the clouds
and casts a shimmering light on the wet highway ahead of us.
Our most dependable driver, Hector, is behind the wheel and
we’re heading north toward Sheboygan again. The coupon for
Dog Tired Records says that the half-price offer is only good
between the hours of ten and ten fifteen a.m. today. If I didn’t
know better, I’d say that they’re trying to limit the number of
customers.
I look down at my phone and report, “The maps app says
that we have a little over three hundred miles to go.”
I’m riding shotgun and navigating, and Pierce is keeping
all of us supplied with a steady stream of junk food for energy.
With Chunky’s used fryer oil in the tank and three Red Bulls
in hand, Hector puts the pedal to the metal—or whatever the
floorboard is patched with on the driver’s side. The residual
spices in the oil from the hot wings must be good for the
engine, because we’re actually approaching the speed limit
without going downhill. And we’re all appreciating the fact
that we’ve slipped out of metro Indianapolis without a felony
on our records. Things are looking up. At least they are until
the hamster escapes.
CHAPTER 8
he has a point. But then, I was just woken from a great
nap by a half pound of hairy mayhem trespassing in my
S
shorts, and that automatically gives me a free pass on speed
talk. I haven’t known a lot of hamsters (Pierce named this
one Lucifer, which seems about right), but this guy definitely
seemed to have anger issues, or at least a nasty case of rodent
ADHD. Either way, he was fast and equally surprised as me
to learn that a human can actually levitate when threatened in
the groinish region.
“I just had sort of a near-castration experience, and I needed
to tell somebody about it,” I say.
“Ohmygawd! What happened?” Sara asks. That’s what I’m
looking for . . . just a hint of concern from a caring person.
took a scenic tour up my pants and around the neighborhood,
so to speak.”
“All right. Never mind. Just tell
me how everything is going with
you,” I say, changing the subject to
anything non-hamster.
“Oh! I didn’t tell you, did I? D’ijon
heard that idiot Connor Mattson changed the date of his party
to tomorrow! Can you believe that jerk? I think he did it just to
mess with our Freckled Children fund-raiser dance, so, yeah.
There goes, like, probably ninety percent of our crowd!” I hear
a ripping sound, like a girl taking a bite out of a pillow, fol-
lowed by a spitting sound, like a girl trying to get feathers out
of her mouth. Then Sara sighs. “Sometimes success feels like
lightning years away, you know?”
“You mean light-years,” I say.
“What?”
“Never mind. I like your way better.” Saraphrasing. That’s
what I call it when she massacres the language like that. It’s
one of the, like, ten million things that is so amazing about
her. “Anyway, that sucks,” I say, changing the subject back to
Connor Mattson’s jerkish ways. “What are we going to do?”
Sara yawns, and I can hear her pull the covers up around
her shoulders.
It’s obvious that the success of the whole fund-raiser thing
is up to Hector, Pierce, and me now. After just planning the
dance, reserving the space, doing the promotion, making
posters, selling tickets, soliciting donations, buying supplies,
renting tables, baking brownies, and setting everything up,
Sara, Autumn, and D’ijon have pretty much dumped the proj-
ect into our laps. Leave it to them to ruin a perfectly good
group effort by expecting the guys to help.
The last six hours of highway between the Laundromat and
wherever we are have made me hungry again. I take a pic-
ture of the back of Pierce’s head just to annoy him and stuff
my phone into my pocket. The sun has been up for a while
now, and we must be getting pretty close to Sheboygan. “If I
eat another bag of anything barbecue/nacho/sour cream ’n’
onion–flavored, I’m going to yodel my groceries,” I graphi-
cally announce. “Is anybody else hungry for real food?”
No need to ask twice. Hector steers the van up the next off-
ramp toward a truck stop sign the size of my front yard.
We weave through a canyon of big rigs and finally find a
parking space about a quarter of a mile away from the res-
taurant. Even though our rig burns fast-food grease instead
of diesel, and it’s probably twenty times smaller than most of
these rumbling monsters, we belong. Parking here feels dan-
gerous, but protected . . . kind of like being surrounded by a
bunch of smelly big brothers.
I try to slide off my seat, but I’m not going anywhere. A
closer look reveals that a quarter inch of Cheetos dust and a
few splashes of Red Bull
have molecularly bonded my jeans to
the rug I’ve been sitting on. Pierce and Hector yank me out
by my arms, and I walk away wearing several square inches
of fake Persian tapestry on my butt. It’s a look. After being
stuffed in the van for most of the past twelve hours, we’re all
pretty dazed and confused, probably the closest we’ve ever
come to looking like an actual rock band.
With the help of my GPS, the three of us stumble through
the rows of trucks, and by the time we find the door we’re all
starving. We have to be at Dog Tired Records by ten fifteen,
which, according to our navigator, Pierce, leaves us exactly
seven minutes for breakfast. Seeing as how most of my week-
day morning meals are eaten as I’m barreling through the
kitchen on my way to school, it seems like a doable schedule
to me.
Inside, this place is a beer belly/butt crack/trucker hat
theme park. And that’s just the people with the motor homes.
The actual professional truck drivers look fairly normal, if you
ask me. It’s an interesting crowd. Pierce spots an open table
in the corner, so the three of us slide in and start studying the
menus.
“Can I get you sugar plums some coffee?” I look up and
see a friendly but sleep-deprived waitress smiling at us.
She looks like somebody’s mother, except without the half-
lidded mom-stare that they all develop after a few years of
having a teenager in the house. She actually seems happy
to see us.
Hector raises his index finger and says, “Coffee.” Pierce
does the same, and then she looks at me.
“I’ll have a venti half soy, half milk decaf mocha vanilla
latte with Splenda, extra hot, with a triple shot of caramel
syrup, light foam, and extra caramel sauce lining the sides
of the cup, no whip but a pinch of nutmeg and an extra shot
of vanilla.”
Okay, there’s the mom-stare. Apparently “Coffee?” is a yes
or no question around these parts. Duly noted. “On second
thought, I’ll just have orange juice,” I say.
“Two coffees and one juice,” she confirms, morphing back
to her original cheerful self. “Are you ready to order now,
sweetie pies, or do you need some more time?”
“I think we’re ready,” I say. Hector orders the Trucker’s Spe-
cial that comes with its own defibrillator, Pierce asks for (and
gets) oatmeal with gummy worms, and I go for six scrambled
eggs with biscuits and gravy from the “On the Lighter Side”
flap of the menu.
“Comin’ right up, baby jelly beans,” she says and disap-
pears.
My phone warbles and I see that it’s a text from my grandma.
“Just talked to your mom,” it says. “Told her we’re having a
wonderful time visiting. If she asks, you ordered the Neapoli-
tan ice cream for dessert last night. Be safe. Love, GMa” Is
there anything better than having a cool grandma? For a long
time I wondered why she and I get along so well, then one day
I figured it out. It’s pretty simple, really. We’re annoyed by the
same things: my parents. When I told her that we were going
to make this record and that we might need a little white alibi
from her, she was all over it. I barely text back a thanks when
our waitress slides our plates in front of us. Nice. We may even
have enough time to chew this meal.
“So, who’s got a plan B if this fund-raiser tanks and none of
us gets into a halfway good college?” I ask between mouthfuls
of eggs. The food is most decent, and we’re all starting to feel
alive again.
“The fund-raiser is not going to tank,” says Pierce. “It has
us and our most awesome vinyl record.”
“Which we haven’t recorded yet. Or rehearsed. Or totally
finished writing, as a matter of fact,” Hector points out.
“Listen to Detail Danny over here,” says Pierce. I’ve been
watching him pick bits of gummy worm and oatmeal out of his
bowl and slip them into the pocket of his hoodie. Then I see
movement and realize that he has the stupid hamster in there.
No big deal, I guess, unless . . .
. . . somebody sees it.
After a fast and furious hamster rodeo, and a tornado of
apologizing and explaining, I toss some money on the table
and we’re out of there. I guess the tip wasn’t big enough
because our waitress winds up and whips a package of beer
coasters at me, which bounces off my head. For a middle-
aged woman, she has a fairly decent arm. I shove the coasters
in my pocket, wave, and follow Pierce and Hector into the
parking lot. The restaurant manager sticks his head out the
door and wishes us safe travels (which to the people walking
into the place, probably sounds more like a death threat), and
we duck around the first semi we see and catch our breath.
Pierce scrolls his phone with his free hand—the one Lucifer
isn’t currently chewing on. “YES! I got the whole thing on
video! This is SO going on Facebook!”
“It’s almost ten after ten,” says Hector. “We’d better hit the
road.” So we stand up, brush the chunks of sticky asphalt off
our butts, and start making our way back through the maze of
rumbling big rigs. This must be what it’s like to walk through
a forest of giant sequoia trees . . . if the sequoias happened to
be horizontal and ran on diesel.
After topping off our fuel tank with another ten gallons of
Chunky’s wing oil (we figure that we’d better use it up before
it eats a hole in the barrel), we’re back in the van and heading
up the on-ramp. Hector starts laughing and looks over at me.
“You should have seen your face when Lucifer landed in your
juice glass!”
“MY face?” I yell. “Dude, you blew a powdered-sugar donut
out your nose!”
Pierce pretends to touch a pencil tip to his tongue and adds
in his best truck-stop waitressese, “Can I get you anything
else, you baby ducky downy li’l honey-dipped sweet potato
mushmelons?”
Between the sugar, caffeine, and hysteria, we’re all feel-
ing pretty buzzed, including Lucifer, who’s racing around
in circles on his little portable hamster wheel like a rodent
possessed. I turn on some music and crank the volume up.
This trip is getting more rock ’n’ roll by the minute! Next
stop, the awesome studios of Dog Tired Records!
It’s exactly ten fifteen, and there isn’t a car in the parking
lot. Just a nasty-looking bike chained to a random cement post
sticking out of the ground. If the windows weren’t so dirty or
covered in plywood, we’d probably see that there aren’t any
lights on inside, either. Our coupon says that the record offer
is only good until ten fifteen.
“What do we do?” I say.
“Let’s just knock.” Pierce shrugs. He walks up to the door
with Hector and me right behind him and starts pounding on
it. Something is moving around inside the building—probably
a depressed raccoon—but Pierce just keeps on pounding until
a buzzer sounds and the door slumps open.
Pierce steps inside first. “Um, this is Dog Tired Records,
right?”
“It is,” says the guy. “And we’re still closed. It’s Saturday,
remember?”
My eyes are starting to get used to the dim light inside,
and I can see the guy we’re talking to. He’s middle-aged—
about twenty-five—and skinny with long hair and a bushy
beard. He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt that would embarrass
any Hawaiian, cargo shorts, flip-flops, and the bags under
his eyes are the size of carry-on luggage. He doesn’t look
that dangerous, so I take a step closer. “We’re here to make
a record,” I say, and then Pierce shows the guy his phone
screen.
The guy sighs and drags himself out of his chair, shaking
free a shower of sandwich crumbs and cigarette ashes from
his beard. He trudges toward the back of the building and
motions for us to follow.
“This way,” he says. Yes! We’re in!
CHAPTER 9
“
id it sound okay?” I ask.
“That,” says Ponytail Guy, “was possibly the worst
D
thing I’ve heard since I crawled under the fence at the state
fair to catch a Sting concert.”
Pierce looks a little annoyed for a couple of reasons. First,
he doesn’t really take criticism well (which is interesting for
a guy who attracts it like a lightning rod), and second, the
junkyard drum kit he’s playing on is made from a few retired
marching band pieces and a bent cymbal, with a hard-sided
Samsonite suitcase for a bass drum. And I thought we were
underfunded.
“You know . . .” Pierce says as he slams his sticks down.
“Shut up,” says Ponytail. “Shut up and learn.”
The guy is being a total jerk, but he has a quality that makes