prolonged analysis. Ugh. He shovelled some pasta into his mouth. It tasted good. He felt a little better. He started to relax. After all, everything was right with the world: his sister was being a total brat, his dad was cracking horrible jokes as his mum shook her head and rolled her eyes. This was his family. This was normal.
Still, as he looked around the table at the people he’d known all his life, he couldn’t suppress a feeling that things were going to change, that his life would never be the same. Something was coming that would alter the life he had known.
Brendan, would you chill? What is wrong with you? One smack with a ball and a kooky teacher and you totally lose it. Come on. He made a conscious effort to throw off his gloomy state of mind, concentrating on his father’s accounts of the strange customers he’d served that day. Usually, his father’s hilarious stories cheered him up, but the dark feelings lingered all through dinner.
The dinner ended with Brendan washing the dishes and Delia drying. He was just putting the last dish in the cupboard when his mother said, “Wow. Have you been using something new on your skin?”
“No,” Brendan replied, confused. “Why?”
His mother frowned and reached out to touch his cheek. “It just looks clearer today than usual.”
“Yeah,” Delia interjected. “Most days your face makes me want to barf, but today, I just gagged a little.”
Brendan whipped the wet dishtowel at her, but his sister ducked easily out of reach. “Too slow, Dorko!”
“Why are these people my children!” Mum sighed.
Delia laughed and ran out of the kitchen, in a hurry to get her homework done and get to her rendezvous at the rec centre.
“You need any help with anything else, Mum?” Brendan asked.
“No, you go do your homework. And your skin does look a lot better.”
Brendan felt his cheeks redden with embarrassment. He wasn’t used to compliments from girls, even if the girl in question was his mother. He went back down the hall to retrieve his books. As he passed the mirror on the wall by the coat rack, he decided to take a look to see what his mother was talking about. He leaned in close to the mirror and studied his face.
“She’s right,” Brendan whispered. The usual cluster of zits that plagued the corners of his mouth was fading. The giant angry, potential- Siamese-twin 34 pimple between his brows was half the size it had been that morning. “Wow.” Well, one thing had gone right today, even if he had absolutely no control over it. Brendan grabbed his books off the hall table before his mum saw them and went up to his room.
Brendan’s room was at the very top of the house, a converted attic that he reached via a steep set of narrow stairs that were more like a ladder than a real stairway. Brendan had begged for the room even though his mother and father had been dubious. The steep steps and his natural clumsiness were a dangerous mix. In the end, he’d prevailed. Delia was fine with him taking the attic room. She had a room with a tiny balcony to herself looking out over the street.
Brendan hoisted himself up into the room and tossed his books onto the small single bed. He stood up and immediately cracked his skull on the roof.
“Ow,” he grunted aloud, rubbing his scalp. He’d lived in this room for years and he still banged his head every day like clockwork. Shaking his head in self-disgust, he went to his desk and sat down at the computer, being careful to duck beneath the slanted wooden beams that sloped overhead. He’d cracked his skull even more lately as he had shot up a foot in the last couple of years.
The room was small and cramped. As a result, Brendan had to keep the place meticulously tidy. His sister’s room was liberally carpeted with dirty clothes and half-eaten food. Brendan had always been a neat freak. His cleaning habits gave Delia further fuel for her nerd insults, but Brendan didn’t care.
The slanted roof was plastered with movie posters, mostly sci-fi films. A small bookshelf held comic books and paperbacks. His bed was small and narrow, tucked under the eaves next to a tiny bedside table. On the table sat a combination iPod dock and clock radio. He reached over and switched on the iPod; after a few clicks, music filled the small room.
Brendan had a wide range of musical interests. At school, everyone fell into categories: punk, goth, metalheads, emo kids, euro house music fans. Everyone seemed to feel the need to lock themselves into a certain genre. For comfort, he supposed. Belonging to a group made things easier in high school.
Brendan found it funny that a school like the Robertson Davies Academy, even though it was a melting pot of nerds and misfits gathered from the four corners of the city, was still full of cliques and clans. Some were thought to be nerds by other nerds. 35 You’d think a nerd was safe to be a nerd at nerd school but no such luck. Brendan had so far managed to remain outside any group. He had banded together with Harold, Dmitri, and Kim. Together they formed their own group. He and his friends were like the ubernerds, ultranerds, and nerd untouchables.
Which made it even weirder that Kim had latched onto them. He couldn’t figure it out. Maybe she was a nerd on the inside. Kim always seemed a little exasperated with him and his friends, but she hadn’t dumped them so far. The year is young, he reminded himself.
He jumped when his father knocked on the ladder-he didn’t have a door for his room. Sitting up, he managed not to knock his head again. His father’s head and shoulders popped up through the hole in the floor.
“You ready to go?”
“Go? Go where?”
“The concert tonight. Remember? I got the free tickets.”
Brendan had forgotten. He groaned inwardly at the thought of going to see Deirdre D’Anaan at Convocation Hall. Going to see a show was the last thing he felt like doing. He’d rather just lie down and take it easy tonight after all he’d been through today. He opened his mouth to try to beg off but stopped. The picture on the poster loomed in his mind. He recalled how he had felt when he’d seen it in the bus shelter by the pizza shop: like destiny was calling.
“Let me change out of my school stuff.”
“Cool. Ten minutes in the lobby, Mr. Clair.”
^34 Brendan is exaggerating, of course, but there is one documented instance of a man growing a twin out of his forehead in Eastern Turkey. That is to say, the man was in Eastern Turkey, not his forehead. Well, to be accurate, both the man and his forehead were in Eastern Turkey. And the twin as well.
^35 Nerd is a term that first appears in the Dr. Seuss opus If I Ran the Zoo. It has come to refer to a person who passionately pursues intellectual activities, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests that are age inappropriate rather than engaging in more social or popular activities. To be judged a nerd by other nerds is a sad situation to find oneself in. There have been some pretty wonderful nerds throughout history: Socrates, Copernicus, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci. I don’t care if Galileo could carve on his snowboard: he observed that the Earth revolved around the sun, which is way cooler, if you ask me.
THE CONCERT
They walked through the chill of the autumn evening. Brendan was basking in the afterglow of his streetmeat, 36 a special treat that he and his father had picked up on the way. Soon they were standing in front of the polished wooden doors of the concert hall.
Convocation was one of Brendan’s favourite buildings on the whole university campus. As a little kid, Brendan had come here to see Christmas concerts and hear chamber music with his mother, and he always looked forward to being inside the place. The seats, already full of buzzing concert-goers, were dark and polished oak, arranged in a circular pattern around the central stage.
Brendan’s dad presented the tickets to the usher, who guided them to their seats, a bench about halfway to the stage.
As they sat, Brendan’s dad pointed at the stage. “She doesn’t have any drum kit,” he observed. “All acoustic. This should be interesting.”
Looking at the stage, Brendan took stock of the instruments. The stage was arranged in sections, each devoted to a type of instrument. One area had a number of stringed instruments: fiddles of various sizes, a mandolin, and a guitar. Next to that was a rack of small drums and percussion instruments: tabla, 37 bongos, bells,
