A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban Read Free Book Online Page A

out by yourself and dash into the market without dragging somebody else along who might start begging for a bag of Better Made potato chips. Which I wouldn't do, because today is the day I am going to tell everybody that I am quitting, and thinking about telling everybody that I am quitting is making my stomach all twisty and I couldn't eat anything, anyway.
    Soon as we're in the car, Mom flips on the radio. WCLS. There's this show on that I've never heard before, with all these teenagers playing classical music. There 's a studio audience and every time one of the teenagers finishes playing, the audience hoots and claps and the host has to beg them to settle down so he can do his interview.
    "So, Daniel, how long have you been playing the cello?" he asks and Daniel Cello-player says, "Since I was a kid," and this makes the audience laugh. Mom laughs, too.
    "You stay in the car, okay?" says Mom. "I'll get the eggs and be right out." She turns off the car, but leaves the key in the ignition so the radio keeps playing.
    Daniel Cello-player is talking about how he started playing the cello when he was five. "But I didn't get good at it until I was eight. Before that I didn't practice much."
    "And how much do you practice now?" asks the host.
    "It depends on how much homework I have," says Daniel, and the audience laughs again. I don't get what's so funny.
    "Probably I practice about two or three hours a day," he says. "Plus I'm in orchestra at school, so that's another hour."
    Four hours a day.
    "And this piece that you played today, the Bach Cello Suite no. 3, how long have you been working on that?"
    "That's a competition piece. I started working on it in the fall. I still mess it up sometimes." The audience laughs again. "This part still trips me up," he says, and

then he plays for a minute or two. I don't hear any tripping.
    The audience doesn't, either, and they hoot and clap some more.
    Then the host asks Daniel if he has a girlfriend, which seems kind of nosy to me, but Daniel doesn't mind.
    "I do. Her name is Kelly," he says.
    "And does it bother Kelly that you spend so much time practicing when you could be going to the movies with her?"
    Mom opens the car door and slides in, setting the bag of groceries at my feet, just as Daniel is saying that Kelly understands that when you love something as much as he loves the cello, you make sacrifices. Besides, Kelly plays the oboe and practices more than he does. This makes the audience laugh again, and then Daniel starts in on another number.
    "Beautiful," says Mom. "He makes it sound so easy, doesn't he?"
    He does. It sounds like the notes are lifting themselves off the cello strings. It's hard to believe that a teenager with homework and a girlfriend is making that sound. Who knew you'd have to work four hours a day to make something sound so easy?
    "What do you say we drive around for a couple of minutes, so we can hear the rest?" Mom asks. "The popovers can wait."
    I nod, and as we turn a corner, the grocery sack tips over and a bag of Better Made potato chips slides out.
    "Crunch quietly," Mom says.

Key Change
    I'm not quitting.
    Instead, I will practice four hours a day. I will get up early and practice. I will come straight home from school and practice. I will stay up late and practice.
    At the Perform-O-Rama, I will play and people will hoot and applaud and stomp their feet until the judges tell them to settle down.
    And after I perform, radio people will show up to interview me and ask how much I practice and how I got to be so good in such a short time and if I have a boyfriend. And I will give them witty answers and they will ask me to play "Forever in Blue Jeans" one more time and I will.
    And sometime, weeks later, my mom will be driving along listening to WCLS and they'll play my interview and she will drive right past work so she can keep listening to me.

What I Do
    1. Get up.
    2. Eat breakfast.
    3. Go to school.
    4. Do school stuff.
    5. Come home from