This had caused me to greet my skinny freshman with an “Ahoy, matey, did your parrot die?”
Aubrey, who’d recently discovered how funny talking like a pirate was, answered, “Aye, me hearty. ’Twas a burial at sea.”
Pirates became a running joke between us. When she was a sophomore, I once served her artichokes, arugula, and arroz con pollo for dinner, and we “arred” our way through the entire meal. Sometime during her junior year, though, she stopped laughing when I called her a scurvy bilge rat and threatened to shiver her timbers. I should have noticed and dropped the pirate teasing then.
Certainly I should have ceased and desisted long before the start of her senior year last August. Exactly one year ago today, which was when everything started to spiral out of control. If only I had stopped my stupid teasing, she might have worn the damn hat and not gotten heat exhaustion and not dropped out of band. Certainly that goofy feathered hat would have immunized her against Tyler Moldenhauer’s attention. If only I hadn’t persisted in making those moronic jokes. But like a hummingbird returning to an empty feeder, I kept going back for one more drop of nectar, one more shared joke.
The hat, though, that’s just a theory. I get frantic sometimes wishing I knew for certain. I think that if I had the whole story, I might be able to reverse the evil spell, cure her psychic flu, and send her off to college with a happy heart. Even if having all the details gave me no power at all, I would still give anything to know what really happened to my daughter on that day one year ago.
AUGUST 12, 2009
It’s the first day of my senior year. Well, unofficially, school isn’t really in session yet, but the whole band has to be here a week early for “camp.” The big marquee sign at the edge of the field where we march reads: AUGUST 12, 2009. 10:43 A.M. 92 DEGREES, WELCOME, BAND CAMP!!!! SCHOOL STARTS IN ONE WEEK!!! … WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19!!!! SEE YOU THEN! GO, PIRATES!!!!
Rivers of sweat run down my back. It is way too hot for all those freaking exclamation points. And way, way too hot for Mr. Shupe, who is bellowing at me, “Clarinets, wake up!” I try to focus. “Lightsey, get your section under control! You’re a senior now! Start acting like one!”
Once Shupe finishes bullying me and the section I lead, he moves on to torture the freshman trombone players. “T-bones! Did they teach you the definition of ‘line’ in middle school?” Their section looks like an amoeba wobbling all over the field. Mr. Shupe does not do wobbly. Mr. Shupe does crisp.
Then he tells us what he tells us at the start of every school year about how we are “Shupe’s Troops” and the way they did things “in the Corps.”
The Corps? Dude, you were in the Marine Corps band.
This fake military stuff makes the band boys feel like they’re Green Berets. They are as delusional as Mom, who is always telling me that I am “marching, both literally and figuratively, to the beat of a different drummer” and that “being uncool at Parkhaven is the coolest thing imaginable.”
Uh, right, Mom, hang on to that dream.
Shupe yells at the percussion section, “Drum line! It’s called a line, not a squiggle! What did you all spend your summer doing? Smoking crack?”
The freshman horn players laugh so hard they lose their embouchure. Wait until they’re seniors like us and have heard all of Shupe’s lines often enough to recite them along with him.
I can almost remember when the first day of band was fun. When it was a thrill to be one of a hundred people all marching in perfect, straight lines. When I loved the neatness and crispness of it and felt like I belonged. Now, though, it is like that moment when you discover that you’re too old to ride the Teacups. That they’re not the tiniest bit scary or fun and that even riding them as a joke, goofing on the whole thing, isn’t fun anymore.
My fingers drip sweat and slide around on the keys, which doesn’t really matter, because I’ve been faking it for the past hour anyway. My lips are barely touching the mouthpiece. The air is too hot to touch. Like I am really going to stick a piece of scorching metal in my mouth. I feel weirdly distant from everything. It is taking