Rules to Rock By Read Online Free PDF Page A

whatever song they were singing, she looked like she couldn’t wait to get out.
    “Hon, I thought that last take was fine,” she said through the microphone.
    “It was, it was, babe,” said my dad. “But we want better than ‘fine,’ right? We want … magic.”
    “Okay, okay.” She smiled, but it looked like an effort. It was four fifteen p.m. I was trying to figure out how long this session had been going. They had been hard at it when Jake drove X and me to school that morning. Had they started in the morning, or was this an all-nighter about to hit its twenty-fourth hour? Still, Mom looked pretty. Even tired and zonked out, she looked fashion-modelly. I couldn’t understand how she could look that good, even on zero sleep. I also couldn’t understand how she could put up with my dad. He was seriously obsessing.
    “All right, here we go,” he said. “Take sixteen. Ready, and rolling …”
    Shaky Jake twisted his fingers nervously through his orange beard.
    My mom started singing again. Watching her, I remembered how hard she had tried to convince me that moving to Providence would be good for me, too. “It’ll be a new start, Annabelle,” she’d said. “You’ll find a new band, and it’ll be just as good as Egg Mountain. Better.” I wasn’t so sure about that, but at least my mom knew how good Egg Mountain was in the first place. Unlike my dad, she came to every gig that didn’t conflict with Benny and Joon’s schedule, and she supported me all the way.
    She finished singing, and to my ears she sounded great. She didn’t have a big voice—she couldn’t hit loads of high notes like some singers on the radio—but it was calm and cool, with a little tease in it. I thought the take was great.
    “Nice,” my dad said, although I could tell that wasn’t what he meant at all. “Very nice … but let’s try it one more time.”
    “Aww, hon. Come on …” Mom looked like she was about to cry.
    Jake caught my eye and nodded toward the door. X picked up on it, too, and slipped out of the booth to join us. We crept out as quickly and quietly as we had come in.
    “Belle!” X cried out. “Rescue me! This is sooo boring.”
    “Okay, buddy, in a sec.” X had never wanted to hang out this much in Brooklyn, but he was so starved for company in Providence that he was constantly hanging on me. It was half cute, half crazy-making.
    “Sorry, guys,” Jake said. “It was about to get a little tense in there.”
    “It already was a little tense in there,” I said.
    “Good point.”
    It wasn’t the first time I had witnessed that scene this week. How could my dad, a guy who barely kept himself in clean socks, who would wear the same grimy T-shirt three days in a row, be such a perfectionist when it came to recording? How could he get on my mom’s case about these tiny details, especially when just about every take she sang sounded perfect?
    “Your dad always gets more … particular toward the end of a record,” Jake said.
    Don’t get me wrong. I loved Benny and Joon. Or at least, I used to. They were the reason I wanted to start playing music. And I had picked the bass—an instrument my parents usually did without—with the hopes of joining the group someday. I feel cheesy saying that now. Who wants to play music with their parents? But until I joined Egg Mountain, I had always dreamed that I would one day be in Benny and Joon, and that we could tour and record together. As a family.
    That was a long time ago, though. Now being in Benny and Joon was the last thing on my mind. Benny and Joon had been responsible for everything wrong in my life. Because of that band, I was in a new city, with no friends, with parents who barely noticed my existence. Now I wanted my own band.
    That’s right. I wanted to rebel against my parents by doing exactly what they do. Weird, but true.
    “Chocolate chip pancakes, anyone?” said Jake, pulling out a mixing bowl.
    “Yes!” cried X, oblivious to the fact