I just looked at him.
“Yeah, I’m going to side with Lulu on this one,” I finally said. “Why would we do that? How would that work?”
“Hear me out,” Sam said. “Don’t you guys remember? Even you, Lulu, before you quit the band? Don’t you remember when your grandfather first made us all the instruments? We didn’t even know how to play.” He gestured toward the wall. The cubicle with all our band equipment was on the other side. He still had Betty Sue on his lap, and the chicken made a cluck. “We would sit there and talk about our first show. It was our dream. We’d sell T-shirts. We spent weeks and weeks talking about it, planning the show.” He pointed to the shirt on his own chest. “Tito,youmade this shirt. You wanted to fill it in the moment we finally got a gig.”
Tito just grunted. He apparently was back to not talking.
Sam continued. “Every eye on Earth is going to be on us tomorrow, and once it starts, what is Apex going to do, shut it all down? No, screw that. I say we keep some of the automatic defenses up so wecan at least get through two or three songs, and we do what we’ve always wanted to do. Don’t you remember ‘The Grandpa Song’? It’ll be just like that. We play until we can’t play anymore.”
And that was when I realized he had tears streaming down his face.
“Please,” he added.
“We’ve all grown up, Sam,” Lulu said. “They’re killing us. They’re coming to kill us all. Don’t you want to be with Harriet?”
“Of course I do, but I want to be with all of you, too. I want her there with us. Do you remember that time we put her on the tambourine? And you, Rosita. You filmed us for a video that one time. You can be in charge of making sure it comes out right. And, Ariceli, you and Tito clearly are in love with each other and you’re both being huge wussies about it. We have maracas if you want. Or you can be our gunner to keep bad guys away as long as you want. But it might be a better statement if you stayed on the maracas.”
We all just stared at him.
It was Rosita who next spoke.
“I think it’s a good idea,” she said. “Tito is right, and Sam is right. They’re coming, and they’re expecting this huge, massive fight. Why are we dancing on their strings? Let’s set up a live stream. We’ll use Lulu’s Real-Friends account. We’ll use Cindy and Betty Sue’s account. We’ll use the Rhythm Mafia’s Tuneage account. We’ll stream the concert once the fight starts, and between songs, I can play some of the scenes from my documentary. They think we’re all terrorists. Tito is right. We’ve been showing them all the horrible things that have happened, but I think, in the end, all that’s doing is just desensitizing them all. They haven’t been looking at who we really are. I have literally thousands of hours of video. I’ll put it all together, and if we’re not worried about bandwidth, I can upload it all. I will play scenes from my documentary between songs.”
Sam clapped his hands and pointed at Rosita. “Yes! That’s perfect because Tito always takes forever to tune!”
Axel was nodding his head. “We’ll have to talk to everyone else. We can’t really make this decision for them. But I think my grandmother would really like to see us play at least once. But if people want to fight, we need to let them. I just don’t want people to see it as us giving up.”
“They won’t,” Sam said, “especially if Rosita is playing one of her videos. It’ll be a huge fuck you to Apex and Earth.” He turned to Rosita. “Make sure you add in that video of Oliver puking on his bracelet.”
“They’re just going to shoot us while we’re playing,” Lulu said. She was still frowning.
“Us. She said ‘us,’ ” Sam said. “So you’re back in the band?” He was now pacing back and forth. “We’ll need to build a stage. Maybe we can put a cover over us like what we put over the shelters so it’ll deflect any death rays from the spaceship.”
“They’re going to shoot us,” Lulu repeated.
“They’re going to shoot us anyway,” Rosita said. “What do you think will be more impactful: a video of them shooting terrorists who are shooting back or a video of them shooting a bunch of farmers playing music?”
Lulu completely turned around in her chair now. She moved her eyes from Rosita to me back to Rosita. Her voice was now a whisper. “It seems…I don’t know…I want to go down fighting.”
“Thisisfighting,” Rosita said. “Thisis how we’ll be remembered. That was a good question, I think, that Tito asked. How do we hurt them the most? I think this is it.”
I thought of my grandmother and what she had said that day she died. I didn’t understand it at the time. I was pretty sure I’d never understood it until just now.
The closer we are to the end, the more we need to embrace our happiness.
I held up my hand. “Sam, I’m going to say something that’s going to hurt your feelings, but I think it needs to be said.”
He looked at me and grinned. “Hit me with it.”
I felt myself grinning back at him. “Our band sucks. It has always sucked. We stay together because it gives us an excuse to all hang out. You’re sure this is how you want us to be remembered?”
He started to laugh. “Of course we suck. You don’t think I don’t know that?”
“Well, you are the bass player.”
“But what about Roger?” Lulu asked. “We can’t let them nuke the peninsula. Surely, some people might survive. We can’t make that decision for them.”
“Like I said,” Roger said, “we will comply in the morning. But until then, it sounds as if we have several things to do. I will assist in the construction of a stage before I finish the preparations for my surrender.”
