Blue Monday

Chapter 9 - Do I Wanna Know?

***ALEX***

The Scagliottis drive Gabe and me back down to their place, and from there we fly back home ourselves. The parents ask if we'd like to stay a little while, but we insist that we have to get back home ASAP. Mom really wants us to get back home before six tonight, for some reason. "Probably 'cause she's gonna make her special Mexican lasagna again," I'd said on the ride home, nudging Gabe and chuckling nastily.

Luca frowned sympathetically at me, while Giovanni, who'd clearly never heard the horror stories about Mom's occasionally rather experimental cooking, gave an exaggerated shudder. "That sounds like some really nasty shit," he said.

It's a testament to how cool the Scagliotti 'rents are that they didn't scold Giovanni for swearing.

So Gabe and I leave and fly back north to Spellman, only thirty miles away, but not before letting Allie, the Scagliottis' hyper-peppy little schnauzer, jump into our arms, one after the other, and lick our faces repeatedly.

"I think she might have pissed on me again," Gabe mutters at one point while we're in the air, wiping the front of his T-shirt with his sleeve. "Or is that just my sweat?" He picks up a bunch of shirt material in one hand, sniffs it, and declares it to be sweat after all. "Thank God," he adds.

"I swear, that dog..." I pause, laughing a bit, before going on to say, "She's too friendly."

"She'd be a terrible guard dog," Gabe says. "Unless anyone trying to break in is scared of yappy little ankle-biters like her."

"Yeah, then they'd try to strangle her for being so eager to get to know them," I say, frowning as I imagine it. Luca likes to complain sometimes (especially after we get back from break) about how Allie demands near-constant playtime, and when he and the rest of the family are trying to sit and watch a movie or something, she keeps running up to people with toys in her mouth, barking and begging for attention. But he loves that "little beast" (as his grandmother calls her) too much to want to be without her.

We get home just a couple of minutes before six. Surprising neither of us, Mom's not home. She doesn't show up, even after we've both spent a combined total of half an hour in the shower. So then it gets to six-thirty, and Gabe and I are both just lounging around in the living room, aimlessly flipping through channels. At one point, we find a news report about some kind of UFO sighting in Memphis, but other than that, we've got nothing to hold our interest for very long.

By the time we reach Sundance (the last channel available to us) and find nothing good on that either, Gabe turns the TV off and turns to me. "How 'bout a jam session?"

I grin at him, then lead the way upstairs to his room where the Guitar Hero equipment awaits. Unlike most teenage boys, neither Gabe nor I can actually play the guitar (or any other instrument, really) to save our lives. But we're suckers for good music, and it's good fun to pretend we can actually play along.

The one disadvantage to playing the game in Gabe's room, though, is that there's not enough room to set up the fake drum kit. I have enough space in my room, but that would mean carrying all the other stuff - the guitar, the mike, the Wii, and all the cables and stuff involved - down the hall. And, like most teenage boys, we can be hella lazy on command.

Which means one of us has to sing if we're going to both play at the same time, because there's only one guitar. We used to have two, but the second one got busted back in freshman year when I smashed it on the floor. At the time, we were playing a song by the original guitar-smashers themselves, The Who. I thought it would be cool to uphold the tradition. But, in the immortal, helping-define-my-childhood words of Lemony Snicket, "Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course."