Tempo Change Read Online Free PDF Page B

about surfing and skateboarding. When they did that, all the work fell on Jeff’s shoulders and mine, and sometimes on the snarly cook, Ella, who had to jump in and work the cash register. That was never a good plan because she didn’t have much in the way of people skills. She looked like a boy and didn’t mind people making that mistake. Other than the fact that she cooked really fast, I didn’t know much about her.
    Jeff and I always took our breaks together and we talked about music. He had great taste and he was the only person I knew who could talk music history. He could get from Jimmie Rodgers to the Beatles to U2 in three steps. I liked that in any person. I wondered why he couldn’t put on a few pounds. But it was none of my business.
    It was shortly after Madrigals, and we were sitting on the picnic bench outside of work, when he said to me, out of nowhere, “Hey, Street, I heard a rumor that your father was Duncan Kelly. That guy from the nineties who invented the whole grunge movement before its time.”
    He called me Street because my name was Blanche. Ididn’t mind the nickname. Get it?
Streetcar Named Desire
, Blanche DuBois. That was engineering-geek humor.
    “It wasn’t grunge,” I said. “It was more like hard acoustic.”
    “What?”
    “He played acoustic guitar but it wasn’t, you know, soft. It rocked. And the lyrics were smart.”
    “Like Paul Westerberg or something?”
    I had to admit, I was impressed that he knew who that was. Paul Westerberg was a guy about my dad’s age who had a band called the Replacements who were poppy and punk at the same time. My dad was a little like that, only more moody and less poppy.
    “Not exactly like Westerberg. They were contemporaries.”
    “Did he know him?”
    “Jeff,” I said, “who told you about my father? How can a geek like you care about music? Aren’t you going to build bridges or rockets or something?”
    “Just because I’m good at math doesn’t mean I can’t like music. Now, come on, Street, answer my question.”
    “Yeah, that’s my dad.”
    “Wow. So do you know where he is and stuff?”
    “Not really, she lied.”
    “Why don’t you ever tell anybody?”
    “I’m not supposed to know where he is. He doesn’t want anyone to know.”
    “I mean that you’re related to him.”
    “Who would I tell?”
    “You could have told me.”
    “Nobody cares who he is anymore.”
    “I care who he is.”
    “You’re weird.”
    “I’ve heard his music, too. That record
Ineffable
, that’s a seminal record.”
    I looked down and blushed. Suddenly it made me feel weird to think of anyone other than me listening to my father’s music. Someone I actually knew.
    Even though I teased him about being a geek, I knew Jeff’s iPod was the envy of everyone. It’s the one we always plugged into the system when we were working.
    Jeff was one of those people who collected music, and the information about it, as if it were baseball cards or stamps. He didn’t try to play it himself. He thought knowing about it somehow got him in the club. I knew I was in danger of becoming exactly that kind of person. Writing
about
music wasn’t the same as writing it. I intended to correct that about myself one day. Just as an exercise, to prove I could do it. A pastime, not a way of life.
    Well, the truth was, I had already started the process. I had contraband under my mattress.
    Not weed or a flask or even something worse. What I had tucked away was pages and pages of what I liked to call poetry. Teenage girls were expected to write poetry. But really they were songs. Words waiting for notes. I was as ashamed of it as another girl might be about pornography. It was the thing I didn’t want to know about myself and certainly never wanted my mother to know. That in my most rebellious, secretive hours, I was practicing something dangerously close to art. I thought if I never told anyone, itdidn’t have to be true. I figured I’d never tell anyone but