Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie Read online

  Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie

  Jordan Sonnenblick

  This one is for my son,

  Ross Matthew Sonnenblick,

  who invented Dangerous Pie,

  and for my daughter,

  Emma Claire Sonnenblick,

  who would happily have eaten it.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  DANGEROUS PIE

  JEFFREY’S MOATMEAL ACCIDENT

  ANXIETY WITH TIC TACS

  THE FAT CAT SAT

  JEFFREY’S VACATION

  NO MORE VACATION

  TAKE ME!

  FEVER

  TROUBLE

  STARVING IN SIBERIA

  POINTLESSNESS AND BOY PERFUME

  THE SILVER LINING

  FEAR, GUM, CANDY

  GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS

  CLOSE SHAVES IN AN UNFAIR WORLD

  THE QUADRUPLE UH-OH

  A MEN’S JOURNEY

  I’M A MAN NOW

  ROCK STAR

  THE END

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Q&A with Jordan Sonnenblick

  Bonus Material

  Preview

  Copyright

  DANGEROUS PIE

  There’s a beautiful girl to my left, another to my right. Hundreds of colored balloons are tethered down behind me, baking in the June sun. I’m wearing a brown gown that’s sticking to my sweat-drenched skin, trying to keep my head straight so that my weird square cap doesn’t fall off in front of the thousand people who are watching me. And of course, because I’m me, I’m spacing out. The questions are just tumbling through my mind.

  “How did I get up here? What have I learned since September? How could my life have possibly changed so much in only ten months?”

  I’m not even sure I understand the questions, much less where to begin looking for the answers.

  I guess a good starting point would be the longest journal I’ve ever written in English class. This was back in September, when I was pretty sure about life. The topic was “The most annoying thing in the world,” and we were supposed to write the usual one-page response to it. I sat there for a few minutes, staring at the back of Renee Albert, who’s the hottest girl in the eighth grade, trying to concentrate. Unfortunately, all I could concentrate on was Renee Albert. Did I mention she’s the hottest girl in the eighth grade? Miss Palma is always going on and on about brainstorming and lists and “prewriting,” so I started a list of truly annoying things:

  Journal assignments

  Dull pencils

  The pencil sharpener smell

  Miss Palma’s perfume

  Why doesn’t Renee Albert ever look at me?

  Hot girls who never look at skinny geeks

  Being a skinny geek

  Being a skinny geek named Steven

  Just then I realized that Miss Palma was standing behind me, reading over my shoulder (I guess that’s why I was being asphyxiated by her perfume).

  Thinking fast, I covered up my list, turned to her, and asked, Miss Palma, can the journal be longer than a page?

  Sure, Steven. Why? What are you thinking about creating here?

  (“Creating here.” She actually said that. Don’t English teachers just slay you? My mom is actually an English teacher, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find my own English teachers a bit odd.)

  Well, I’m having trouble crafting my prose.

  (Yeah, “crafting my prose.” Two can play this game…)

  What’s your topic? Remember what I always say: “F.F.F!”

  (Stands for “Form Follows Function,” don’t ya know.)

  Ummm…I want to write about a big topic. And it’s not exactly a thing. It’s…it’s…

  (And then it hit me. The most annoying thing in my world is…)

  My little brother, Jeffrey.

  Wow, that’s an ambitious topic! Go ahead. If you need extra time, feel free to take the project home tonight, as well.

  Thanks, Miss Palma. A lot.

  Anyway, here’s what I wrote:

  Having a brother is horrible. Having any brother would be horrible, I suppose, but having my particular brother, Jeffrey, is an unrelenting nightmare. It’s not because he’s eight years younger than I am, although that’s part of it. How would you like to be King of the Planet for eight glorious years, and then suddenly get demoted to Vice-King? It’s not because he’s cuter than I am, although that’s part of it, too. I have mouse-brown cowlick-y hair, glasses that are about an inch thick, and braces that look like I tried to swallow a train wreck. He has those perfect little-kid Chiclet-white teeth, 20-20 vision, and little blond ringlets like the ones on the angels you see on the posters in art class. It’s not even because he hates me—he doesn’t. The truth is that he idolizes me. And that’s the problem: The kid follows me around like I’m Elvis or something. And while he’s being much too cute and following me around, he also destroys all of my stuff, including my self-esteem and my sanity.

  Take, for example, the “Dangerous Pie” incident. Jeffrey has known from an early age that the worst possible thing he can do to me is to touch my drum stuff. I have some rules about this: He may not PLAY the drums, he may not pretend the cymbals are shields and he is a knight, he may not hide IN the bass drum, and pretty much any Jeffrey-to-drumsticks contact is a massive no-no. But on one fateful afternoon last year, Jeffrey threw the rules out the window.

  On the tragic day, I came home, said hi to Mom, glugged down some milk, and headed down to the basement to practice. I was in a particularly good mood, I remember, because Renee Albert had told me in P.M. homeroom that she liked my shirt. As this was such a grand occasion, I decided to take the Special Sticks down from their sacred perch and use them for my practice-pad warm-up. In case you didn’t know this, a practice pad is a thick, dense, flat piece of rubber. Usually it’s glued onto a piece of wood. You practice playing drums on it, because it feels a lot like playing on a real drumhead. Anyhow, the Special Sticks would be just an ordinary pair of my favorite sticks—Regal Tip 5A’s with nylon tips—except that they have been autographed by my all-time drum hero, Carter Beauford of the Dave Matthews Band. I once saved up all my babysitting money for a couple of months, got two tickets to a drum clinic Carter Beauford was giving an hour and a half away in Philadelphia, and begged my dad to take me for two weeks until he finally gave in. At the clinic, during what I like to think of as the Two Glorious Minutes, Carter Beauford himself called me up front to demonstrate a double-stroke roll. After I did it, he said I had “nice technique” and signed my sticks, right there in front of a roomful of drummers! So I had spent quite a bit of blood, toil, tears, and sweat in order to get the Special Sticks.

  But the Special Sticks weren’t on their shelf.

  Jeffrey!

  I ran upstairs at top speed, hoping I would be in time but knowing that the odds were stacked against me. I burst into the kitchen and found Jeffrey doing his “cooking” thing on the floor. Pots and pans were everywhere—don’t ask me how I had somehow not noticed this on my way downstairs the first time—and Jeffrey was stirring some pretend concoction in the deepest pot of all. With my Special Sticks.

  I advanced toward him, with what must have been a disturbing gleam of violence in my eye.

  Jeffrey! Give-me-the-sticks!

  But I’m just COOKING.

  Give-me-the-sticks!

  But the Dangerous Pie isn’t READY yet.

  I don’t care about your stupid four-year-old makebelieve food. Give-me-the-sticks!

  But this is REAL food!

  And it was. Jeffrey’s “Dangerous Pie” was a zesty blend of co
ffee grounds, raw eggs and their smashed shells, Coke, uncooked bacon, and three Matchbox racing cars.

  The Special Sticks STILL smell funny.

  Or maybe I should tell you about the “Please kill me, Mom” affair. This fiasco happened after my All-City High School Jazz Band concert last June. Getting into the All-City band is a big, big deal, especially for a drummer—because there are six trumpeters, five saxes, four trombones, et cetera, but only two drummers. It was even a bigger deal for me last year, because I was the first seventh-grade drummer EVER admitted into the All-City high school band. They even had to send a special van to the middle school just to get me and this girl named Annette Watson, who’s the backup piano player. She’s actually really good, but there’s this twelfth-grade guy who’s been the main pianist since he was a freshman, and he’s not about to get booted by a middle school girl in his senior year. She’s funny, and she may be the only kid in the middle school who cares about music the way I do, but she’s also kind of weird. It’s like she’s figured out how to play Beethoven and Thelonious Monk but hasn’t quite mastered the art of being a girl yet.

  It’s not easy being the youngest guy in the band, by the way. They make fun of me all the time about my age, my size, my braces, and the way I stick out my tongue when I play. Also, everyone in the band has a cool nickname. When I first found this out at a rehearsal, the other drummer, Brian, was telling me what to call all the different people:

  Who’s that?

  That’s the King.

  Who’s he?

  The Duke.

  Who’s she?

  The Princess.

  What do they call you?

  The Count.

  What does that make me?

  Umm…how about the Peasant?

  And the name stuck.

  Anyway, my whole family came to the concert, and it was AWESOME. I had this huge drum feature in this Brian Setzer song called “Jump Jive an’ Wail,” and I nailed the whole thing. I usually practice at least an hour a day on my practice pad and another half hour on my drum set, plus I play in the marching band and the jazz group in school, AND we had been rehearsing twice a week for All-City for a couple of months, AND I used to take lessons once a week, so I was playing great that night. So after the concert, my parents and Jeffrey came to the band room. They were all excited and everything, but Jeffrey was bouncing off the ceiling.

  You’re a rock star, Steven.

  No, I’m a JAZZ star, Jeffrey.

  MY BROTHER IS A ROCK STAR! MY BROTHER IS A ROCK STAR!

  Just then, Renee Albert stopped right next to us to congratulate her boyfriend (we’ll just call him Biff), a sophomore guitarist with an alarmingly perfect complexion and muscles like Barry Bonds. Jeffrey saw Renee and started to whirl toward her—she lives around the corner from us, and I guess not even four-year-olds are immune to her charms and wiles. It seemed to happen in slow motion; events were just crawling. Yet still, I knew I would never have time to run across town to the local zoo, steal an elephant tranquilizer gun, run back, and fire it into Jeffrey’s buttock before he could blurt out something that would mortify me and destroy my social status forever.

  Life snapped back into full speed, and Jeffrey shouted: Hey, Renee! MY BROTHER IS A ROCK STAR!

  As Biff looked on with a sneer, Renee replied, Oh, really? I didn’t know that.

  Yup, he IS. Did you SEE him? His arms were ZOOMING around the drums. Just like when he practices at home in front of the MIRROR.

  Steven…ummm…practices in front of a mirror?

  Yeah, it’s COOL. In his UNDERWEAR. The BLUE ones! Right, Steven?

  I sagged against my mom’s shoulder and muttered, Please kill me, Mom.

  My dad tried at that point to control the situation, but by now Jeffrey had drawn a little crowd of my bandmates, who were just waiting to see what else he would reveal about the Peasant.

  My brother’s GREAT! Hey, Renee, do you want to hear a JOKE? What does I-C-U-P spell?

  I give up.

  Close the bathroom door! GET IT?

  I tried to end this torment. Come on, Jeff. It’s time to go out for ice cream with Mom and Dad.

  Just then Brian chimed in (he had dropped a stick during “In the Mood,” and may have been annoyed by the big applause after my solo). Let him finish, Peasant.

  To which Renee and my mom simultaneously turned to me and burst out, They call you PEASANT?

  Dear Reader: Are you starting to see a pattern here?

  Miss Palma gave me an A on the journal entry—she called it “droll”—so I guess I actually managed to get some use out of Jeffrey’s antics before the chaos of this year started. Looking back on those days now, I’d have eaten the Dangerous Pie if I could have stopped October from coming.

  JEFFREY’S MOATMEAL

  ACCIDENT

  If I live to be a hundred and seventy-nine, I will never forget October 7th of this year. Oh, I’ll try. I’ve been trying already. But I will never be able to throw off the weight of this particular day.

  The weird thing is, the day started off great. I recall that I woke up early, for some reason, and couldn’t go back to sleep. So I got out of bed, tiptoed to the bathroom, peed, and did my usual slow-motion Ninja walk to get down our squeaky stairs without waking up the ‘rents or Jeffrey. I stopped in the kitchen to suck down some OJ, and then continued my silent journey to the basement. My dad has a separate little office down there. He’s an accountant, and because he sometimes works really late hours during tax season, he had the walls filled with extra insulation for warmth and soundproofing. I figured I’d get some practice in on the pad before school, so I set myself up in the office. I started to work my way through my usual warm-up routine—five minutes of single-stroke rolls (right-left-right-left), five minutes of double-stroke rolls (right-right-left-left), and five minutes of paradiddles (right-left-right-right, left-right-left-left). My hands were feeling particularly loose, and somehow it was nice being up before anyone else, doing my own thing. Which, of course, meant that Jeffrey was bound to find me.

  Steven!

  Yaaaggghhh! You almost gave me a heart attack, you little madman.

  (This made him giggle hysterically, as it always does when I pretend he’s snuck up on me. But today he really HAD snuck up on me; my drumming concentration can be pretty fierce).

  Steven, I don’t feel good.

  Lately, Jeffrey had been complaining a lot that his “parts hurt,” which we hadn’t been understanding too well. I thought it was just another one of his little-kid things, like the summer he turned three, when he convinced himself that he slept with his eyes open. I spent weeks trying to convince him that he slept with his eyes closed, just like everyone else on the planet. I finally videotaped about fifteen minutes of him sleeping, which I thought would settle the issue. When I played the tape back for him, though, he insisted, “Of course my eyes close SOMETIMES when I sleep. That’s just what we call a slow blink.”

  So you can see why nobody was running outside to flag down an ambulance when this kid’s “parts hurt.”

  What do you want me to do?

  Can you make me some moatmeal?

  Some oatmeal?

  Right. Some moatmeal.

  Jeff, gimme a break. I’m practicing here.

  But I’m cold. I need moatmeal to warm up my parts.

  I could see I wasn’t going to get out of this one without a fight, and I am a pretty big oatmeal fan myself to tell you the truth. However, I couldn’t resist teasing Jeffrey a little, so I said:

  Cream of wheat.

  Moatmeal.

  Cream of wheat.

  MOATMEAL.

  Cream of wheat.

  MOATMEAL!

  Okay, you don’t have to call out the National Guard. I’ll make the oatmeal.

  Yay! Moatmeal!

  Up in the kitchen, I sat Jeffrey on a bar stool so he could “help” by mixing the oatmeal with the water before I nuked it. My mom always tells me not to leave Jeffrey up on the h
igh stools without me standing right next to him, but she’s ridiculously overprotective. If she had her way, he’d be wearing body armor to kindergarten. Anyway, he was babbling away about how our “special moatmeal treat” would “refix” his “parts” when I turned away for a second to get a wooden spoon. I heard a swish, a crack, a thump, and a little whimper. When I looked back, I realized that Jeffrey must have slipped off the stool and banged his face on the counter. He looked up at me from the floor for that miserable split second little kids always take before the wailing starts, and I saw a drop of blood under his nose. Then two things happened at once: He started to scream like a banshee, and the drop of blood turned into a torrent.

  I grabbed the hand towel off of the refrigerator handle and held it to Jeffrey’s nose. He looked terrified in a way I hadn’t seen him before, and he was still screaming. I found myself pulling him onto my lap, saying things to him over and over, like, Hush, Jeffy—I never call him that unless he’s upset—it’s OK. You’re all right.

  When this didn’t stop his wailing, and I knew the ’rents were about to come flying into the room any minute, I started to get a bit impatient. C’mon, Jeffrey! It’s a little nosebleed, that’s all. You’ve had a million nosebleeds before, right?

  No, I’ve had TWO nosebleeds before. The time you let me skateboard and—

  Okay, two nosebleeds. But nosebleeds go away, Jeff. You’re fine. Now stop shouting before Mom and Dad—

  Steven! What have you done to your brother?

  Doh! Too late…

  Nothing, Mom. I was making him breakfast, and he fell off his stool.

  He JUST fell off? There was no pushing?

  No.

  No shoving, Steven?

  No.

  Did you drop him, Steven?

  No.

  Was this one of your wrestling moves, Jeffrey?

  Finally, my parents were getting past the interrogation phase, and dealing with the injured child—who, by the way, was still receiving first aid from his heroic, wronged brother.