The Truth About Books and Boys

eleven

eleven

“I don’t understand football,” complained Thalia. “It’s so confusing!”

“Why are you telling us?” Oliver asked. “Do we look like we understand it?”

Thalia glanced over to Oliver and me, just to get a visual image on whether or not we looked as though we understood the game. After an elongated second, she shook her head and said, “I guess not. No offense, but, like, you two look like you don’t even understand golf.”

“Oh! Shots fired!” Thalia’s date exclaimed with a laugh. He commended her scathing remark with a high-five, which Thalia was obviously repulsed by, though the boy couldn’t care less. All night, he had been treating Thalia more like a bro than his date, and it had become increasingly clear that by the end of the night, the only thing he would be getting was a kick in the groin or a slap across the face. Usually, Thalia had pretty okay taste in guys (presuming that you considered well-dressed douchebags who thought that they could mooch off of their rich parents for the rest of their lives “pretty okay”). But occasionally, she had a lapse of judgment and picked up someone like Mr. Dude Bro here, only to end up regretting it before the evening had even begun.

“Excuse me, Thal, but I’ll have you know that I was on the golf team during my freshman year,” Oliver boasted, eliciting another “ooooooh!” from Mr. Dude Bro.

“Were you really?” I turned to face him, surprised that he had had that much involvement in a sport. Oliver was lithe (because of genetics), but in no way did he possess even a trace of molded muscle. He had absolutely no agility, and he wasn’t even the type of nonathletic kid that turned to track as a way to get onto a varsity sport. Him being even twenty feet near a golf course was pretty hard for me to fathom.

The corners of his lips turned up in a smirk, and he draped an arm over my shoulder. “Well, I was the caddy. That counts, right?”

“It doesn’t,” Thalia informed us. “Like, not even a little bit. But seriously, are we even winning right now?”

“Nah, dude, they are. The score’s twenty-seven to three,” chimed in Mr. Dude Bro with a helpful hand pointed at the scoreboard.

Thalia squinted to see it and said, “Is it almost half time? Where’s Beyoncé?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t think that Queen Bey is coming,” Oliver sighed at our cruel calamity.  “Maybe a marching band, though. Does Barnes have a marching band?”

“Ha. No.” Thalia rolled her eyes at the ridiculous reference to a Barnes legend, though Oliver wouldn’t understand it, because he had no knowledge of Barnes Academy folklore.

Long, long ago, back when Barnes wasn’t coed and only catered to the male gender, there was a marching band. It comprised of about twenty students, which—in comparison to every other marching band on the planet—was a bit small. Because of this, some geniuses at Barnes decided that if they couldn’t get more involvement, they would eradicate the program all together. Essentially, the marching band sucked from the very beginning, and everyone in it was just there because they had been cut from the football team (back then, we had a good football team). So with one final hoorah at homecoming, the marching band completed their very last performance.

But they didn’t go without a bang. No, the marching band played at full blast, off-key, the entire time, and it was one of the worst performances in the history of music. Since then, Barnes hadn’t had a marching band. We had a choir and a band and an orchestra and an acapella group, but to this day, there was still no marching band. It was too mainstream for Barnes, and they also didn’t want to go through the hassle of having to get every kid a uniform and instrument. It was just best for everyone to not have a marching band. Or cheerleaders. But not having cheerleaders was an entirely different story…