“Ball,” Savitri said, and we all ducked as a runaway ball ricocheted into the crowd.
Whoever thought it up, the dodgeball scheme had side benefits. After the second day of the tournament, the teams started having their own theme songs, as team members riffled through their music collections to find tunes that would get them riled up. And this was where we discovered a real cultural gap: Music that was popular on one world was completely unheard of on another. The kids from Khartoum were listening to chango-soca, the ones from Rus were deep into groundthump and so on. Yes, they all had good beats, and you could dance to them, but if you want to get someone wild-eyed and frothy, all you have to do is suggest that your favorite music was better than theirs. People were whipping out their PDAs and queuing up their songs to make their points.
And thus began the Great Magellan Music War: All of us networked our PDAs together and furiously started making playlists of our favorite music to show how our music was indisputably the best music ever. In a very short time I was exposed to not just chango-soca and groundthump but also kill-drill, drone, haploid, happy dance (ironically named, as it turned out), smear, nuevopop, tone, classic tone, Erie stomp, doowa capella, shaker and some really whacked-out stuff alleged to be waltz but critically missing three-quarter time or indeed any recognizable time signature at all as far as I could tell. I listened to it all with a fair mind, then told all their proponents I pitied them because they had never been exposed to Huckleberry Sound, and sent out a playlist of my own.
“So you make your music by strangling cats,” Magdy said, as he listened to “Delhi Morning,” one of my favorite songs, with me, Gretchen and Enzo.
“That’s sitar, you monkey,” I said.
“‘Sitar’ being the Huckleberry word for ‘strangled cats,’” Magdy said.
I turned to Enzo. “Help me out here,” I said.
“I’m going to have to go with the cat strangling theory,” Enzo said.
I smacked him on the arm. “I thought you were my friend.”
“I was,” Enzo said. “But now I know how you treat your pets.”
“Listen!” Magdy said. The sitar part had just risen out of the mix and was suspended, heartbreakingly, over the bridge of the song. “Annnd right there is when the cat died. Admit it, Zo?.”
“Gretchen?” I looked over to my last, best friend, who would always defend me against Philistines.
Gretchen looked over to me. “That poor cat,” she said, and then laughed. Then Magdy grabbed the PDA and pulled up some horrible shaker noise.
For the record, “Delhi Morning” does not sound like strangled cats. It really doesn’t. They were all tone-deaf or something. Particularly Magdy.
Tone-deaf or not, however, the four of us were ending up spending a lot of time together. While Enzo and I were doing our slow, amused sizing up of each other, Gretchen and Magdy alternated between being interested in each other and trying to see just how low they could cut each other down verbally. Although you know how these things go. One probably led to the other and vice-versa. And I’m guessing hormones counted for a lot; both of them were good-looking examples of blossoming adolescence, which I think is the best way to put it. They both seemed willing to put up with a lot from each other in exchange for gawking and some light groping, which to be fair to Magdy was not entirely one-sided on his part, if Gretchen’s reports were to be believed.
As for Enzo and me, well, this is how we were getting along:
“I made you something,” I said, handing him my PDA.
“You made me a PDA,” he said. “I always wanted one.”
“Goof,” I said. Of course he had a PDA; we all did. We would hardly be teens without them. “No, click on the movie file.”
He did, and watched for a few moments. Then he cocked his head at me. “So, is the whole thing shots of me getting hit in the head with a dodgeball?” he asked.
“Of course not,” I said. “Some of them are of you getting hit in other places.” I took the PDA and ran my finger along the fast-forward strip on the video player. “See, look,” I said, showing him the groin shot he took earlier in the day.
“Oh, great,” he said.
“You’re cute when you collapse in aching misery,” I said.
“I’m glad you think so,” he said, clearly not as enthused as I was.
“Let’s watch it again,” I said. “This time in slow motion.”
“Let’s not,” Enzo said. “It’s a painful memory. I had plans for those things one day.”
I felt a blush coming on, and fought it back with sarcasm. “Poor Enzo,” I said. “Poor squeaky-voiced Enzo.”
“Your sympathy is overwhelming,” he said. “I think you like watching me get abused. You could offer up some advice instead.”
“Move faster,” I said. “Try not to get hit so much.”
“You’re helpful,” he said.
“There,” I said, pressing the send button on the PDA. “It’s in your queue now. So you can treasure it always.”