On Peter’s old headphones, puffy, silver, with a curly black cord, Deming listened to Are You Experienced after school, lying on the living room floor. He counted the heartbeats during that little catch between songs, savoring the delicious itch as the needle dropped and the melody snuck its toe out from behind a curtain. The disc of a record was hardier yet more delicate than plasticky CDs. A record was to be treasured, its circle scratches a mysterious language, a furtive tattoo. Deming walked the hallways of Ridgeborough Middle with lyrics scrolling mad loops in his mind: Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand? He translated the lines into Fuzhounese and snickered as other kids gawked. He repeated the line in Mandarin as a group of eighth graders passed, looked at one another, and said, “What the?” Headphones delivered shapes and notes directly to his bloodstream. A drumbeat’s taut assault gave him a semi-boner.
How he had missed music, how he craved it! The city had been one long song, vivid, endlessly shading, a massive dance mix of bus beats, train drums, and passing stereos, and in Ridgeborough its absence was flagrant; before he found the records he would turn up the little clock radio in his room and point it toward the window to receive weak signals from a station that played scratchy techno music and another that played scratchy Spanish music, but the reception was spotty and the songs flashed in and out. In Ridgeborough there wasn’t enough sound to produce any colors but the weakest, haziest ones.
Peter gave him a pair of tiny earbuds and burned a couple CDs. Kay gave him her old Discman and a pack of batteries. Deming preferred Peter’s old headphones because they were a bigger buffer to the world. The blank streets and large trees became comical when paired with a soundtrack, made him an action hero instead of an abandoned boy, and Planet Ridgeborough blew up. Platinum flowers morphed into oscillating lines and dancing triangles, electric blue snare drums punctuated a chocolate bass line topped with sticky orange guitar, turquoise vocals whipped into a thick, buttery frosting. He played and replayed, played and replayed. As he walked down Oak Street he shut his eyes and pretended he was in the city with his mother.She looked like him, he looked like her, they looked like the other people they saw on streets and trains. In the city, he had been just another kid. He had never known how exhausting it was to be conspicuous.
HE CAME HOME FROM school the next day expecting to find the house empty as usual, but when he unlocked the door, he heard voices. Kay was in the living room with the television on, scooping apple slices into a jar of peanut butter. The TV played a soap opera, an older woman scolding a younger woman in front of a window overlooking a beach.
“Television stunts development,” Deming said. He’d heard her and Peter say it before.
“At least someone’s been listening to me, unlike my undergraduates. I couldn’t handle office hours today, so I played hooky. Don’t tell anyone.” Kay patted the couch. “Look, these women are about to find out that they’re married to the same man. Come watch with me. Eat apple slices and peanut butter. We’ll stunt our brains together and become a pair of blathering idiots.”
Deming settled in, luxuriating in the noise. Jaunty keyboards on detergent commercials bathed him in rainbow waves. The couch was a forest green plaid, its cushions smooth and shiny.
“How’s school?”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to talk to that Mrs. Lumpkin about getting you extra help in math. After dinner, let’s go over your homework.”
“I hate math,” Deming said.
“It’s not that hard. I know you can do it. You need to get over that mental block, the one that says, ‘I hate math. I’m not good at it.’ ”
“But I hate it and I’m not good at it.”
Kay picked up the peanut butter and angled her apple slice inside, scraping the sides of the plastic. “My mother believed girls were naturally bad at math. Bad at school, even. She still doesn’t really understand what I do. My father was more encouraging, but they assumed your Uncle Gary would be the one to go to college and work a respectable profession, like in accounting or pharmacy. But Gary barely graduated from high school. Now he works in a Home Depot outside of Syracuse. That’s the city I grew up in, we’ll go there for Thanksgiving. He’s been divorced twice.”
“What’s a Home Depot?”
“It’s a big store, where you buy tools. And wood.” She crunched her apple. “They were hard on Gary. Hard on both of us. You know, your father had it hard, too. He had a lot of pressure put on him at a young age. His father was a respected lawyer who wanted him to take over his law practice. Your father wanted to travel more, see the world. He got a scholarship to go to UC Berkeley, out in California. But his parents didn’t let him go. They said he had to go to Dartmouth, because that was where his father went. His only rebellion was to go into academia, instead of law. His father never forgave him for that.” Kay recrossed her feet, right over left. “Anyway. I guess what I’m saying is that you might have internalized, I mean, you might have been told that you aren’t good at math. Or even that you aren’t good at school. So you need to tell yourself, ‘Self, that’s not true.’ ”
Deming scooped a wad of peanut butter with his index finger. The soap opera switched to a commercial with bright, arching music, two children and their parents dashing toward a castle, giant animals and adults dressed like dolls skipping alongside them. Disney World, the screen said. The Magic Kingdom. Orlando, Florida.
The peanut butter dangled from his finger as he gaped at the screen. His mother had wanted to take him to Disney World.
“Do you want to go there?” Kay asked.
She could be looking at this castle right now, Tommie at her side. “No,” he said. “It’s stupid.”
“Well, thank God.”
BY OCTOBER, HE WAS a quarter of an inch taller since August, according to the growth chart Kay was marking with a pencil on the dining room wall. When he looked in the mirror his jawline seemed more pronounced, his eyebrows bushier. He didn’t know if his face was still echoed in Mama’s. He had no pictures of her, no evidence.
Roland’s mother, Ms. Lisio, worked at Carlough, too, in human resources, a phrase that confused Deming. She would leave out Food Lion brand cookies and jugs of fruit juice for Roland and him. They could have watched three hundred channels of cable TV at Roland’s house, but instead they played Grand Theft Auto 2.
After Deming showed Roland his Discman and headphones and played him Hendrix, Grand Theft Auto was abandoned. They spent a month of Sundays listening to a shoebox of cassette tapes that the deceased Roland Fuentes, Senior, had left behind. In Roland’s room, they rewound his father’s life on an old tape player, debated whether they’d rather sing or play guitar, and which was better, Ozzy solo or Black Sabbath (ever the classicist, Deming was Sabbath all the way). Roland’s parents were in their early twenties when he was born—they had met in college, moved to DC and Montreal, and somehow ended up in Ridgeborough—and Roland and Deming listened to tapes of Adam Ant, the Ramones, the Clash, AC/DC, Van Halen, the Pixies, New Order, Jane’s Addiction. From there it was hours of web searching for related bands. Each song was theirs to discover; they had been previously schooled in nothing.
“That’s so green,” Deming said, as they listened to a mixtape Roland’s mother had made for Roland’s father before Roland was born, with a collaged cover of magazine cutouts and a label that said HIGH LIFE.
“Yeah,” Roland said, “so neat.”