Read Online Californium by R. Dean Johnson - Free Book Online

thoughts.”
    â€œSure,” I say.
    â€œThe tapes will help. There’s something else, though. Something I was saving until you guys seemed ready.”
    Keith leans his chin out like a dog begging for a bone. “We’re ready.”
    Treat closes his eyes. “Everybody knows guys in bands. They exist on a whole different plane.” He opens his eyes. “So we’ll start a band. A punk band.”
    Keith’s nodding. “I totally concur with Treat’s theoretical hypothesis: I don’t even know who van Doren is and I know him.”
    â€œVan Dorken,” Treat says. “That’s what everybody called him before he started Filibuster.”
    Keith says he’s heard that too. It’s kind of hard to believe, if you ask me. Not with the way everybody worships the guy. And even if it is true, I’m not van Doren. Our band that doesn’t exist isn’t Filibuster. “How will this change anything?” I say. “I’ll go from being the guy nobody notices to the guy in the band nobody’s ever heard of.”
    â€œCome on,” Keith says. “A band!”
    Treat reaches his hand out toward Keith, like,
Hold on.
“Listen, Reece.” His voice is soft like Uncle Ryan’s the time he saw me drop a fly ball and told me after the game it was okay, nobody’s perfect. “Just imagine: The next time you see that cheerleader chick walking out to her car, you say, ‘Can you give me a lift? I need to go jam with my band.’”
    Treat waits. His hair and the clothes he wears to school already make him look like the lead singer of some kind of band. Keith nods slow and serious. I’ve seen a guitar and little amp in his closet, and he said he’d had a few lessons once. It almost makes sense, and even with the two of them staring at me, I can see Astrid’s face, surprised and happy as I’m standing in front of her with some guitar clinging to my side. We’re at the curb, next to our trash cans, and I start strumming a song for her. Only, I don’t really know how a punk song starts, and now my guitar is a baseball bat. But Astrid smiles anyway and says,
Keep going, neighbor.
    â€œOkay,” I say as Astrid’s face goes away and Treat and Keith are right there, waiting. “I guess I’m in.”

Emperor of Idiots
    M e and Keith have this game we play called Berlin Wall. One time, after they’d started lighting up the soccer fields behind my house for night games, we noticed how those huge floodlights make night shadows. We bolted from the dark side of the brick bathroom building to the shadow of a pole. Then we went from the pole to the shadow of a tree, sneaking all the way to my back wall. “Who are we hiding from?” Keith said. “The East Germans,” I heard myself say, and suddenly it all became clear: The people in the park were border guards; the cinder-block wall separating my backyard from the park was the Berlin Wall. Our mission: move from one shadow to the next, staying still and waiting for the guards to look the other way, then sprint for the wall. If we got up and over fast and smooth we were safe in my backyard, West Berlin. Anything else and we were caught up in barbed wire or worse, shot.
    We haven’t told Treat about the game because we know it’skind of stupid and we’re not sure whose side he’d be on anyway. Plus, that would mean he’d know where we live and might want to come to one of our houses. How do you explain your huge friend with the bleached Mohawk to your dad when he doesn’t even like ballplayers with bushy sideburns?
    .
    Our first band meeting is Saturday morning in Treat’s room. We sit on Treat’s bed as he fires through a stack of cassette tapes and plays different songs for us. The guitars sound like low-flying planes with some guy screaming in short bursts about who knows what because the music’s so distorted.