The Haters by Jesse Andrews Read Free Book Online

explanations for that, but okay
    COREY: sorry, maybe i shouldn’t have said
    WES: i guess it was gonna come out sooner or later
    ASH,
deciding to ignore the adoption thing
: so you guys have played a lot of music together, huh
    [
corey and wes both nod a little and then stop
]
    COREY: i mean not that much outside of jazz band
    WES: we more just listen to music
    COREY: sometimes we play the game garfunkel
    ASH: i don’t know garfunkel
    COREY: yeah because we invented it
    Okay. We need to copyright Garfunkel. Because it’s the greatest game on earth. It’s incredibly simple and elegant. Literally all it is is, someone puts on a song, and the other person or people have to guess who it is. Not the song, but the person or band. That’s the entire game. If you’re playing it right, it’s all deep cuts and artists people think they know but actually don’t. But there’s no wrong way to play it really.
    You get five points if you get it on your first guess, three if you get it on your second or third, otherwise one if you get it by the end of the song. And if you don’t, the other person gets a point, EXCEPT you can prolong the point by asking for a second song by the same artist/band/rapper/etc., in which case, you still get one point if you guess it, but if you don’t get it, the other player gets three. First person to fifteen wins, or you can just keep score for your entire lives, which Corey and I have been doing. Right now he is up 2,063 to 1,849. He went on an epic but controversialrun last summer with Modernist classical composers that I’m still recovering from.
    If you choose someone who it turns out the other players have never heard of, then the point is a wash. So obviously there’s an honor system component, because if you’re guessing, you can always be a dick and just lie and say, oohh, sorry, I’ve never heard of Mobb Deep, or Carly Simon, or Brahms.
    But probably the strongest thing about me and Corey’s friendship is that neither of us has ever even accused the other of violating the honor system.
    ASH: do you guys ever play with anyone else
    WES: we’ve tried to
    COREY: you can really only play with people who are at your level or it gets frustrating
    [
ash gulps a scallop and points to corey’s phone
]
    ASH: try me
    Bear in mind, we’ve been playing Garfunkel for years. Also we invented it. So our game is ridiculous.
    And Ash’s early lobs, Run–D.M.C. and the Jesus and Mary Chain, were pathetic and quickly destroyed by each of us.
    But soon it became clear that she was a hundred percent at our level.
    She threw on a Gary Numan arrangement of Erik Satie. Then she followed it up with a track that sounded like luau music but turned out to be the Strokes. She hit us with a Jonas Brothers ballad that stumped the hell out of us because who knew the JonasBrothers had ballads. And on the guessing front she was holding her own, too. She was able to get Stewart Copeland’s solo work. She got the Baha Men on her first try. She had never heard of Hank Mobley, which admittedly was a little strange for someone attending a jazz camp, but we accepted that without argument and moved on.
    We were in there for two hours just cranking tunes on her phone and munching high-grade artistic sushi and yelling bands and musicians at one another. And honestly, I know I told you how great it was jamming out earlier. But I think in terms of just overall happiness and contentment, playing Garfunkel with Ash and Corey in that sushi restaurant was probably the pinnacle of my entire life.
    I just felt like maybe for those two hours I actually was being a person I could feel good about, or living a life that I could be happy about, or whatever. I don’t know. I know it’s stupid.
    Corey got so psyched after Ash nailed the Baha Men that he immediately picked up the
uni
with his bare hands and swallowed it whole.
    â€œTONGUE OF THE SEA,” he