Notes From An Accidental Band Geek by Erin Dionne Read Free Book Online Page A

and ask Mr. Sebastian if I could practice at lunch, he told me he had a meeting and the band room would be closed. So I waited for Jake after history, hoping that he’d include me in whatever plans he’d made.
    “Lunch?” I said, feeling and sounding stupid. It just came out stiff and formal-y.
    “Yes,” he said, and slung his backpack over his shoulder. Okay, as vague as my question was, his answer was too. Should I follow him? Did he want me to eat with him? I had to go to my locker and get my lunch, plus I didn’t want to lug my bag around with me for the whole period, but I didn’t know if that’s what high schoolers did. So I settled for waiting, mouth closed.
    “I’ve gotta stop by my locker. See you in the lunchroom ?” he asked. I nodded, and Jake disappeared into the crowd.
    The HeHe caf was not at all like the junior high lunchroom with its round tables and high windows. Instead, picture a mass of students lounging around tables, more noise than a tuning symphony, and a cloud of that thick, fried-food starchy smell. I stood off to one side, clutching my treble clef lunch bag, feeling young, young, young. How was I supposed to find Jake ?
    And then I heard it: “Buck-buck-ba-gawwk! Buck-buck-ba-gawwk!” To my left, halfway across the room, was a group of band people clustered around a table, waving.
    Seriously, did they have to cluck ?
    “Hey, Chick-chick.” It was Steve, my section leader.
    “I thought this lunch period was only for freshmen and sophomores,” I said, plopping my lunch bag on the table. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized how snarky they sounded. Steve’s a junior.
    “Happy to see you too,” he snapped. “I have AP chem this year, so to accommodate the lab I have first lunch.”
    “Oh.” I didn’t look at him, instead scanning the rest of the table, which had gone quiet since my arrival.
    Jake, Sarah, and Hector sat with brown-bag lunches spread out in front of them. A couple of girls from the woodwind section huddled over Diet Cokes and salads, and two of the drummers draped over their chairs like dirty laundry.
    “We were just talking about our favorite movies,” Sarah said, probably trying to restart the conversation after my snark attack. “Hector was going on and on about Star Wars .”
    “Not the newer ones,” he jumped in, leaning over the table. “The originals. Which are actually numbers four, five, and six in the series.”
    “Did you know that John Williams lifted a lot of the themes in the Star Wars score from classical pieces?” I offered.
    “Really?” Hector leaned forward in his chair, and Steve and Jake turned to me, interested. Sarah, I noticed, kept her eyes on her sandwich. She’d been cool toward me ever since band camp, like whenever she saw me she thought of the junior high articulation incident. I wasn’t sure if she liked me, and I wasn’t sure why that bothered me. It hadn’t last year.
    Now I blushed. “I don’t know much about the movies, but John Williams, who wrote the score for them, was the conductor of the Boston Pops for years. Wagner and Holst, and a bunch of other classical composers, inspired him.” I hummed a few bars of Holst’s piece “Mars: The Bringer of War,” then “The Imperial March,” Darth Vader’s theme in the movies, for them.
    “That’s so cool!” Hector cried. I blushed deeper, and dug into my sandwich.
    Hector and Steve then spent the rest of the period debating whether or not tauntauns could actually keep you alive on Hoth, while Sarah and I listened. Jake would chime in every few minutes with some bizarre and totally wrong comment—like “Didn’t Captain Kirk do that?”—and Hector or Steve would throw a napkin at him and shout “That’s Star Trek !”
    Maybe it was because for once I didn’t have to worry about practicing or Shining Birches, but I kind of had fun. Even if I didn’t say much.
    The bell buzzed, ending the period.
    “Where’re you guys off to?” Steve