Page 18

I so wanted to tell her he couldn’t and wouldn’t. Please , I begged the universe, please let me be imagining that my mom was flirting with the boy I loved desperately.

Zack nodded, giving her a stiff smile. Maybe he sensed the weirdness, too. “I was just getting ready to tell Dani not to play after nine o’clock.”

“That’s great advice. And also don’t play at four if your mom’s still sleeping.”

“I know, mom.” I wondered if Zack’s mother was as big a pain in the butt.

“So I suppose you’re going to be playing in a band?”

Zack’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, I already have a band, but my drummer bailed. I’m gonna make it big, Lisa, and I want to take my best friends with me.”

“So you consider Dani one of your best friends?”

“Hell, yeah. I mean heck , yeah.”

My mom laughed—actually laughed—but it was then that it dawned on me that her liking Zack was something I could use to my advantage. It hadn’t been so long ago that she’d lectured me about being a whore in a car with four boys, so this was progress.

“Well, carry on. Like I said, just don’t play if I’m sleeping.”

“No problem. My mom works nights, too, so I get how that works.”

Mom winked. “Smart boy. Dani, there’s some money on the kitchen table if you guys want to order a pizza.”

All my muscles felt like jelly. Mom hadn’t completely embarrassed me—and maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.

And she wouldn’t need to know that we decided to go for pizza in Dalton instead of the rinky-dink operation located in a gas station in my tiny town.

That night, I stayed up until eleven-thirty practicing, already disregarding the not-after-nine-o’clock rule.

I wasn’t actually connecting the sticks with any of the drums or cymbals, but I was trying to get my body to work right.

I’d learned to drive, damn it. This shouldn’t be that difficult—and yet my hands and feet were at war with each other.

My seeming lack of coordination reminded me of that old “pat your head while rubbing your belly” exercise—either you’d wind up patting your tummy or making your hair staticky.

By the time I finally crawled into bed, I was not only exhausted but realized I wasn’t going to get better pushing myself that late at night.

The next morning, I was half in a daze, but I had a mug of coffee and a great attitude. After sleeping on it, I liked the idea of playing drums in a band.

A cool metal band. My friend’s band.

Later on in Government, I started doodling, applying some of the concepts I’d been learning in art class.

I wanted to come up with an awesome logo for Once Upon a Riot.

I’d been examining logos for some of my favorite bands, and then I looked up the highest paid rock bands, wondering if their logos had anything in common.

None did.

All I knew was that I wanted our logo to be legible—otherwise, people wouldn’t know who to look up online once they got home. And if my design passed muster, I could try my hand at painting it on the bass.

I thought maybe I needed to design my own font first. Braden had made a crack at one time about Lamb of God’s logo being created with Papyrus, and that was the “only uncool” thing about the band.

But I’d seen lots of bands whose logos were more than just the design of their name—Godsmack, Guns N’ Roses, Avenged Sevenfold, and Bon Jovi, to name a few.

A year earlier, I wouldn’t have known how effective their designs were, but I’d discovered it working at the grocery store that summer.

Because that place didn’t have self-checkout, I got to see all the customers, and a guy came in for chips and salsa.

I bagged them while he paid the cashier, and I noticed on his forearm in black a sun design with wavy tribal lines for the sunbeams, ornate intertwined lines at every quarter hour position.

Even without the gothic-type font of the band name that would sometimes appear on top of the logo and even though it wasn’t the typical orange hue, I recognized their logo. To be certain, I’d asked, “Godsmack?”

“Hell, yeah. For life!”

I didn’t yet know what a superfan was, but he was my first encounter.

So I knew I wanted to design something like that, something easily recognizable, even without text.

I also wanted to see if I could come up with a cool font, even if it was similar to others, but what I knew for sure was that I wanted people to be able to read it.

As the teacher in Government droned on about checks and balances, the teenage girl in me drew a heart and then penciled it in black.

Zack would hate that.

But what if I made it metal?

I drew the heart again, but this time, I drew it in two parts—the old “broken heart” symbol with the lightning-crack between each piece. And then I drew three drops of blood beneath it. It would be all black.

But no. That, too, was derivative.

I was getting ready to flip the page when Zack stopped me. Touching my arm, he whispered, “Can I see that?”

I nodded, handing it to him. It wasn’t until he was drawing on the page that I noticed Ava sitting beside him on the other side.

What the hell was she doing back here?

When she smiled at me, sweet as could be, I felt bile simmering in my gut.

How this girl had gone from being my best friend ever to a despised enemy was something I couldn’t understand at the time.

It was all a change in my perception and realization as I sought out my own identity, but I knew as a senior in high school that Ava symbolized everything I never wanted to be.

I was way more than my looks, and I would never want to use my looks to get something I wanted.

Never mind the fact that I had zero confidence in that regard anyway.

So, with her on the other side and Braden out of reach because he was in front of Zack, I had no other option than to pay attention to the teacher. At least nowadays when people mention the three branches of government, I actually know what they’re talking about.

Thanks, Mr. Henry.

About ten minutes later, Zack tapped on my arm. When Mr. Henry turned to the board, Zack slid the notebook back to me. And once I saw it, I knew he was on to something. He’d drawn wavy letters but stacked each word on top of each other, like so:

Once

Upon

A

Riot

But then he’d drawn an upside-down heart for the A , with three drops of blood, one of them as the dot for the i in Riot.

When I nodded, Zack mouthed, “You like?” And I gave him another nod, mindful that Mr. Henry’s eyes were now on us.

I turned my full attention to the front of the room, endured the knowing stare, and then, when the teacher began lecturing again, I looked back down at the notebook .

I could sense that Ava was curious, but I wasn’t going to give her any satisfaction.

At the beginning of our next class—Zack, Braden, and me, sans Ava—we showed Braden and he indicated that he liked it.

Unfortunately, our English teacher would have no shenanigans in her class, and it wasn’t a boring lecture-type anyway.

It was interactive participation, like it or not, so we couldn’t goof around.

But the teacher couldn’t completely take over my brain, because my subconscious kept playing with the idea.

At lunch, Zack kept playing with it. After we sat at the table, he started scrawling on a piece of paper and then held it up for Braden and me to see.

The upside-down heart had become a pair of buxom breasts.

“Seriously?”

“What?” Zack tried to act innocent, but I could tell by the sparkle in his green eyes that he knew exactly why I was irritated.

“Come on, Zack. You made a huge deal about wanting me to be your drummer, about wanting a female in your band. Do you really think I’d want to be part of it if you had boobs in the logo?”

He all but rolled his eyes. “It was just a joke, Dani. Chill.”

Shrugging my shoulders, I tried to let my anger go, but I hoped he understood that no boobs was non-negotiable.

The older I got, the more I disliked seeing women treated like sex objects and nothing more.

I knew Zack valued me as way more than that, but seeing him draw a pair of breasts like he had made me fear that all men were alike deep in their core.

And I didn’t want to believe that.

Then he said, “Mostly.”

“I’m serious, Zack.”

“I know. So what about this?” He flipped over the paper to show us a more sincere effort.

This time, the words were still stacked on each other, but they were tighter and more compact.

The A was still the upside-down heart with blood drips, but the point wedged right in between the P and O in upon .

We were getting there.

So, before fourth period, I swung by my locker to grab my colored pencils. Zack and I headed to Statistics and, after the teacher went over the concept we needed to learn that day and then let us work on homework, I instead took that free time to work more on the logo.

The letters were black; the heart was red.

This time, though, I sketched a red heart, red drops of blood, and then overlaid a black A , making the letter itself more noticeable.

And I kept the swirly logo Zack had been drawing.

By the time the bell rang, I was tired of drawing it, but I didn’t know that it was any better than it had been before.

In the noise of students packing up their stuff to head to the next class, though, Zack all but hollered and let me know that I’d done it. “Perfect,” he said, picking me up and swirling me like he had that first time.

Mr. Brennan, our math teacher, reminded Zack that there was “No inappropriate touching, Mr. Ryan.”

Zack put me down and we headed out the door. “ Inappropriate? ” He whispered, “Good thing he didn’t see those tits I drew earlier.”

For sure. And now, if I could keep them out of the logo, I could feel like I’d won a battle.