He barely jostled. He was the size of a small mountain.
Dash got all the height and Terrance got everything else, I had heard someone say of the Cunningham brothers once. Brit had shut that down with a simple but pointed Excuse me? and as such, I had never heard it again.
Dash, Brit, and I had been in class together since preschool. I remember him bringing a plastic dump truck into show-and-tell back then, holding it under one arm and looking out at the class with solemn eyes while the teacher gently urged him to tell us more about it.
“It’s a truck,” he had said.
“What kind of truck?”
“A good truck.”
That was Dash. The most serious four-year-old I’ve ever met, my mom would say. Always looked like he was trying to solve the world’s problems. She and Aunt Denise would trade off watching us sometimes, when the other had to stay late at work. But when Dash smiled, Mom would always add, it was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds.
Tonight Dash nodded at August when I introduced him.
“Where’s Terrance?” Brit said.
“Getting drinks,” Dash replied.
“Good idea.” Brit turned to us. “Dash is covered. We need boring sodas for Sophie and Flora.” She pointed at August. “What about you?”
“Surprise me,” he said.
I followed Brit into the house, because a surprise-me drink from her could be lethal.
“So what’s going on with you and the secret brother?” she asked when we reached the kitchen. She started uncapping a two-liter as I set out some cups.
“Nothing,” I said.
She eyed me for a moment. “But you want there to be.” She raised and lowered her eyebrows several times as she began pouring drinks. “You want to get your Teen Zone on his Teen Zone.”
“Brit.”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re not right.”
“That’s a certified Sophie lie right there,” she said, and forced two cups of soda into my hand. “Take that to your boyfriend. Tell him you’re the surprise.”
“I hate you.”
“Now that’s a certified Brit I love you,” she replied, which was entirely accurate.
* * *
At any party or school thing, we always managed to carve out our own little spot. This time, it was at a wooden picnic table back by the trees, a little ways from the fire pit. Close enough that there was still light, but not so close that it was too hot. One of the drum majors, Jason Sosa, was nearby, strumming on an acoustic guitar, while two girls from the woodwinds—Alexa Valenti and Jessica Walsh—watched lovingly. Brit rolled her eyes at me in a Get a load of them kind of way, and I acted like I didn’t remember that she had a momentary crush on Jason Sosa in the seventh grade, and one on Alexa Valenti in eighth.
Terrance and I told everyone about the booster club meeting, which Brit pretended to find really boring. I had had to convince her—hard—to even march this year.
“It’s a huge commitment,” she had said, sitting on the wall out by the athletic fields, playing slapjack with Dash. “I hate commitment. Anyway, you know I need to train.” She had been spending more and more time at the track or in the gym, conditioning. She was trying to shave time off her 200 meter.
“Training sounds like a commitment,” I said.
She made a face.
“You’re a good drummer. We need you.”
“One more drum’s not gonna make a difference.”
“Brit.” I blinked. “Please.”
She had stared back for a long moment and then rolled her eyes. “Jesus. Okay. Fine.”
“You gotta teach me how you did that,” Dash said with a grin.
Tonight, we seemed to be the only people talking band-related stuff, if the snatches of conversation from the surrounding groups were any indication. Jason Sosa probably wasn’t thinking about fundraising during yet another flaccid acoustic ballad.
“The July Fourth barbecue should be good,” I said, when we reached the end of our rundown. “But we need to be able to bring in some real money at Fall Fest.”
Terrance took a sip of his drink and looked at me innocently. “Is this the year you guys finally win the Megan Pleasant contest?”
“That was one time,” Brit said. “In sixth grade. Let it go.”
“I’ll never forget those moves,” Terrance replied. “Brit looked like one of those inflatable guys at a car dealership. Sophie looked like a knife caught in a garbage disposal.”
“What did I look like?” Flora asked.
“Perfect, right?” Dash supplied.
“The best dancer ever seen by human eyes,” Brit guessed, before Terrance could answer.
“Who’s Megan Pleasant?” August said from next to me.
Terrance, probably about to expound on Flora’s talents as a dancer, froze. “Who is Megan—Who? Who is Megan Pleasant?” he repeated, expression aghast. He turned to me. “Who is this kid? Where did you find him?”
“She’s a singer,” I told August. “From Acadia. She’s pretty famous.”
“Never heard of her.”
“‘Gave You My Heartland’? ‘Letters Home’?”
“Sorry.”
“She was on TV,” Flora said helpfully. “They play her stuff on the radio.”
“What kind of music?”
“Country.”
He grimaced. “Oh.”
“It’s not terrible.”
“I’ve never heard a country song that doesn’t suck.”
“Maybe you haven’t listened to the right ones,” I said.
“I know a country song that doesn’t suck,” Brit interjected. “Written by a small-town boy with big-city dreams—”
Terrance’s eyes grew wide. “Everybody needs to shut up right now right this second.”
A slow smile spread across Dash’s face. “Brit, does it take place on a farm?”
“It sure does, Dashiell,” Brit said. “Inexplicably.”
“Does it involve … footwear?”
“Oh yes.”
“Sneakers?”
“Nope.”
“Flip-flops?”
“No.”
Terrance stood up. “I’m leaving.”
“Clogs,” Dash said sagely.
“Not clogs, dear friend.”
“This is the last time you’ll ever see me,” Terrance said, and started away.
“Terrance wrote a country song when we were in middle school,” I told August.
“‘The Girl with the Brown Boots,’” Brit said with relish, and Terrance doubled back instantly.
“It was ‘The Girl with the Blue Boots’ and you know it. Her eyes were brown, her boots were blue, that’s the first damn line of the song, Brit.”
“‘The girl with the blue booooooooots,’” Brit half yelled, half sang.
“I was ahead of my time!” Terrance said loudly, and then to August, at a lower decibel: “Man, I was ahead of my time, okay? A few years later, everybody starts doing the whole retro-throwback thing, and I was right there on the cusp of it. Just without the proper respect—”
“It’s great because there are so many rhymes for the word ‘boots,’” Brit said.
“—that a true visionary deserves—”
“Shoots,” I said, just as Flora said, “Roots.”
Dash: “Toots.”
Brit: “Flutes.”
“Cahoots?” August offered.
“Nah, that’s too good,” Dash said.
With that, Terrance turned and really left. I was worried that he was actually mad, until he returned with the acoustic guitar that Jason Sosa had earlier. A quick glance around the backyard revealed that Jason and Alexa were now making out fervently by the shed.
Terrance planted himself on top of the picnic table, the guitar over one knee. “Fine. Let’s do this,” and he began to strum, and to sing—poorly, but with conviction—“‘Her eyes were brown, her boots were blue—’”
“Wait wait wait!” August held up a hand. “Can we guess the next line?”
Brit snorted. “You say that like you think the lyrics to ‘The Girl with the Blue Boots’ aren’t indelibly burned into our brains for all eternity.”
“You all know this song?”
“We’re literally going to meet Jesus with the words to this song still in our heads,” Dash said.
“That being said,” Brit added, “I’ll pay you a thousand dollars if you get it right.”
Brit had probably seventeen dollars to her name. She went through money like it was water. But it was also a pretty safe bet.
August thought for a long moment, and then: “‘She had blond hair … and blue shoes’ ? ”
Terrance looked offended. “That doesn’t even scan. And why would I mention the shoes twice in a row?”
“Like the real lyric is so much better,” I said.
“Hey!” he squawked.
“Okay, what is it?” August asked.
Terrance began again: “‘Her eyes were brown, her boots were blue. The cat meowed, the cow said moo—’”
“Wait, what?” August said. “What?”
“He had to set the scene,” Brit explained. “You see, the animal sounds establish the fact that we’re on a farm—”
“I was a visionary!” Terrance bellowed. “UNDERMINED IN MY PRIME!”
“Oh man.” August put a hand over his mouth, but the crinkles at the corners of his eyes gave away his smile.
“You have to hear the whole thing. The lyrics don’t make sense out of context,” Terrance insisted.
“Be careful, though,” I said, leaning toward August a little. “If you listen to the song all the way through, you die in seven days.”
“It’s true,” Dash said. “We’re all dead right now.”
August grinned full-out now.