This is not the way you want to feel about your father. When I was little, I’d always thought that my dad was right about everything and that there wasn’t a man on earth he couldn’t take. But standing there looking in, I realized that Mr. Baker could squash him like a bug.

Worse, though, was the way he was acting. Watching my dad chum it up with Juli’s dad—it was like seeing him lie. To Mr. Baker, to Juli, to my grandfather—to everybody. Why was he being such a worm? Why couldn’t he just act normal? You know, civil? Why did he have to put on such a phony show? This went way beyond keeping the peace with my mother. This was disgusting.

And people said I was the spitting image of my father. How often had I heard that one? I’d never thought about it much, but now it was turning my stomach.

Mom jingled the dinner bell and called, “Hors d’oeuvres are ready!” and then saw me still standing in the hallway. “Bryce, where’d your sister and the boys go?”

I shrugged. “Down to her room, I think.”


“Go tell them, would you? And then come have some hors d’oeuvres.”

“Sure,” I said. Anything to get rid of the taste in my mouth.

Lynetta’s door was closed. And normally I would have knocked and called, Mom wants you, or, Dinner! or something, but in that split second before my knuckles hit wood, my hand became possessed by Evil Baby Brother. I turned the knob and walked right in.

Does Lynetta freak out or throw stuff at me and scream for me to get out? No. She ignores me. Matt-and-Mike give me a nod, and Lynetta sees me, but she’s got her hands over some headphones and her whole body’s bobbing up and down as she listens to a portable CD player.

Matt-or-Mike whispers, “It’s about over. We’ll be right there,” like of course I was there to say it was time to eat. What else would I be doing there?

Something about that made me feel, I don’t know, left out. I wasn’t even a person to those guys. I was just baby brother.

Nothing new there, but now it really bugged me. Like all of a sudden I didn’t fit in anywhere. Not at school, not at home… and every time I turned around, another person I’d known forever felt like a stranger to me. Even I felt like a stranger to me.

Standing around eating little round crackers smeared with whipped cheese and fish eggs didn’t do much for my mood either. My mother was acting like an entire swarm of busy bees. She was everywhere. In the kitchen, out of the kitchen. Serving drinks, handing out napkins. Explaining the food, but not eating a thing.

Lynetta didn’t buy Mom’s explanation on the hors d’oeuvres — she wound up dissecting hers, categorizing the parts into gross, disgusting, and revolting.

Hanging near her didn’t stop the Baker boys from shoving crackers in whole, though. Man, I was just waiting for them to wrap themselves around a table leg and flex.

Juli, her dad, and my grandfather were off to the side talking nonstop about something, and my dad was over with Mrs. Baker looking about as stupid as I felt, standing by myself talking to no one.

My mom flutters over to me and says, “You doing okay, honey?”

“Yeah,” I tell her, but she forces me over to where Granddad is anyway. “Go on, go on,” she whispers. “Dinner will be ready in a minute.”

So I stand there and the group of them opens up, but it’s more like a reflex than anything. No one says a word to me. They just keep right on talking about perpetual motion.

Perpetual motion.

My friend, I didn’t even know what perpetual motion was. They were talking closed systems, open systems, resistance, energy source, magnetism… it was like joining a discussion in a different language. And Juli, Juli was saying stuff like, “Well, what if you put the magnets back to back — reversed the polarity?” like she really understood what they were talking about. Then my granddad and her dad would explain why her idea wouldn’t work, but all that did was make Juli ask another question.

I was completely lost. And even though I was pretending to follow along with what they were saying, what I was really doing was trying not to stare at Juli.

When my mom called us for dinner, I did my best to pull Juli aside and apologize to her, but she gave me the cold shoulder, and who could blame her, really?

I sat down across from her, feeling pretty low. Why hadn’t I said something to Garrett in the library? I didn’t have to punch him. Why hadn’t I just told him he was out of line?

After Mom served everyone their food, Dad seemed to decide that he ought to be the one directing the conversation. “So, Mike and Matt,” he says, “you’re seniors this year.”

“Amen!” they say together.

“Amen? As in you’re glad high school’s over?”

“Absolutely.”

My father starts twirling his fork. “Why’s that?”

Matt and Mike look at each other, then back at my dad. “The regurgitation gets to you after a while.”

“Isn’t that funny,” he says, looking around the table. “High school was probably the best time of my life.”

Matt-or-Mike says, “Seriously? Dude, it’s totally lame!” Mrs. Baker shoots him a look, but that doesn’t stop him. “Well, it is, Mom. It’s that whole robotron attitude of education. Confine, confute, conform—I’ve had totally enough of that scene.”

My dad eyes my mom with a little I-told-you-so grin, then says to Matt and Mike, “So I take it college is out of the question?”

God, what was with him? In a flash I was clutching my fork and knife, ready to duke it out for a couple of guys who pinched my cheeks and called me baby brother.

I took a deep breath and tried to relax. Tried to dive down to calmer water. This wasn’t my fight.

Besides, Matt and Mike seemed cool with it. “Oh, no,” they said. “College is a total possibility.” “Yeah, we got accepted a couple of places, but we’re going to give the music thing a shot first.”

“Oh, the music thing,” my father says.

Matt and Mike look at each other, then shrug and get back to eating. But Lynetta glares at him and says, “Your sarcasm is not appreciated, Dad.”

“Lyn, Lyn,” says Matt-or-Mike. “It’s cool. Everyone’s like that about it. It’s a show-me-don’t-tell-me thing.”

“That’s a great idea,” Lynetta says, jumping out of her seat and dashing down the hall.

Mom freezes, not sure what to do about Lynetta, but then Mrs. Baker says, “Dinner is absolutely delicious, Patsy.”

“Thanks, Trina. It’s… it’s nice to have all of you over.”

There’s about three seconds of quiet and then Lynetta comes in and jabs at the CD player buttons until the drawer slides back in.

“Lyn, no! Not a good idea,” says Matt-or-Mike. “Yeah, Lyn. It’s not exactly dinner music.”

“Tough,” says Lynetta, and cranks the volume.

Boom, whack! Boom-boom, whack! The candles practically shake in their holders; then guitars rip through the air and about blow them out. Matt and Mike look up at the speakers, then grin at each other and call over to my dad, “Surround sound — awesome setup, Mr. Loski!”

All the adults were dying to jump up and turn the thing down, but Lynetta stood guard and just glowered at them. And when the song’s over, Lynetta pulls out the CD, punches off the player, and then smiles — actually smiles — at Matt and Mike and says, “That is the raddest song. I want to hear it again and again and again.”

Matt-or-Mike says to my dad, “You probably don’t like it, but it’s what we do.”

“You boys wrote that song?”

“Uh-huh.”

He motions Lynetta to pass the CD over, saying, “Just the one song?”

Matt-or-Mike laughs and says, “Dude, we’ve got a thousand songs, but there’s only three on the demo.”

Dad holds up the CD. “This is the demo?”

“Yeah.”

He looks at it a minute and says, “So if you’re Piss Poor, how do you afford to press CDs?”

“Dad!” Lynetta snaps at him.

“It’s okay, Lyn. Just a joke, right, Mr. Loski?”

My dad laughs a little and says, “Right,” but then adds, “Although I am a little curious. This is obviously not a home-done demo, and I happen to know studio time’s cost-prohibitive for most bands….”

Matt and Mike interrupt him with a slamming hard high five. And while I’m getting uptight about my dad asking them questions about money, of all things, my mom’s fumbling all over herself, trying to sweep away my dad’s big pawprints. “When Rick and I met, he was playing in a band….”

Poached salmon was suddenly swimming down the wrong hatch. And while I’m choking, Lynetta’s bugging out her raccoon eyes, gasping, “You? Played in a band? What did you play, clarinet?”