Read Online The Haters by Jesse Andrews - Free Book Online Page A

has left the dance floor and is never coming back.”
    Thundergarment: “All right. That name is sort of likable, but in a coked-up way that is actually completely
un
likable. This is a punk-pop band that is the less-good version of one of those angsty bands where one of the members is famous for being something other than a musician, like an actor or a soccer player or whatever, and then
that
band is the way-less-good version of, I guess, Fall Out Boy or Imagine Dragons or whatever cokey emo thing. So basically Thundergarment is fifth-rate Blink-182.”
    The Jacobins: “Acoustic guitars . . . way too precise rhyme structures . . . uh, contrived love metaphors using like astrophysics . . . and two lead singers who are married to each other. They met at their day job at Google, which they still have. This band has apathological fear of kicking even a little bit of ass, and NPR brings them into their studio every four days.”
    The Magical Singing Boner: “Ugh.”
    What The . . . ?!: “Okay. I do like this name, but we can never use it, because it can only belong to a band that sucks. Because the unnecessarily elaborate punctuation means this is a band pretending to be way more experimental and interesting than it actually is. At heart, this is a disco band that’s ashamed of itself. So it’s got like harpsichords and tablas and, I don’t know, a bass clarinet. But that is all a smoke screen for entry-level disco. Or like prog disco. It wouldn’t be a bad name except that it dooms you to being terrible forever.”
    Ramos Wahl & Doolittle: “Stoner organ trio, dropped out of Juilliard, now they open for Phish, none of their songs has words or is shorter than ten minutes, and a decade from now they’ll have given up music completely and instead be a pickle company.”
    The Magical Singing Dick Surplus: “Great. Ash Ramos Three it is.”
    By 5 A.M. the sun was starting to come up and Corey was asleep. Ash and I left him in the car at a rest stop and committed what would be the first of many irresponsible food purchases. We bought a twenty-four-pack of Coke, a twenty-four-pack of Mountain Dew, and family-size bags of every varietal of Airheads,Skittles, Doritos, and Dale’s, an off-brand potato chip whose flavors were just REGULAR, ONION, CELERY, and BEEF. I made an effort to get stuff without nuts in it, because Corey is fatally allergic to certain kinds of nut, and I was pretty sure Corey had left his EpiPen in Shippensburg.
    The CELERY chips were my favorite. The BEEF chips had a taste that I would categorize as like a locker room, but for dogs.
    Back at the car, I stacked everything on top of Corey’s sleeping body, hoping he would wake up and freak out. But he just opened his eyes, nodded at us in a strangely authoritative way, and closed them again.
    I offered to drive and Ash accepted.
    â€œAre you guys gay,” she said when we were a few miles down the road.
    â€œWhat?” I said. “Are
we
gay? No. Of course not.”
    â€œFuck you ‘of course not,’” she said. “I get to ask if you’re gay. You act like you’re married. And you talk about your dicks a lot.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, act like we’re married.”
    â€œYou do a lot of married-couple-type bickering. It’s like you guys are sick of each other but can’t escape.”
    It felt wrong to say that he’s like my brother, or basically we’re each other’s dog. Or to say, in ninth grade a kid slide-tackled me pretty hard during pickup soccer and I started crying and Corey decided to go bananas and get way up in that kid’s face for messing with the jazz band rhythm section, making crazy eyes and bellowing that that kid was about to have a
big
motherfucking problem, and it probably should have been weirdbetween us afterward, like I was a woman who got mugged in an alley and he was Batman, but