Seth narrowed his eyes slyly like he was hatching a plan. “Why don’t you just use mine?”
“Your locker?” For some reason that felt way too intrusive, like I was moving in or something. “I don’t want to put you out.”
“I want you to. That way I can see you throughout the day. Besides, I don’t even use it.”
I was afraid Seth would get sick of me if I hung around him too much but having a centrally located locker would make my life a whole lot easierandsave my back from chronic strain. “Let’s see this locker of yours,” I said haughtily.
Seth smiled and handed me my backpack—he wasn’t the type to carry my books for me. I followed him to the main hallway of the first floor, prime real estate and practically the epicenter of my classes with the exception of photography, which was in the Visual Arts building. Seth told me his combo, and I got it on my second try. The inside was practically empty—just a couple of music books, an old mp3 player and headphones, and a drawing of Skull Necklace’s logo on notebook paper stuck to the inside of the metal door.
“Where’s all your stuff?”
Seth shrugged. “I have guitar, recording, and graphic design. The other classes I just borrow a book when I need one.” He stuffed the mp3 player in his pocket and hooked the cans around his neck. “Here, it’s all yours.”
It felt a little like Christmas morning. I unzipped my backpack and started to carefully arrange everything according to the order of my classes. Seth watched me with an amused expression. “What?” I asked with a smile.
“I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be a dork.”
I glared at him and he pinched my ass. Surprisingly I didn’t mind the PDA. People had started picking up on the two of us being a thing. He posted a lot on Instagram, and I’d begun to make regular appearances in his feed. Practically the whole school followed him, even his haters, which Seth calledlovers in denial.His friends accepted me without question, and even in the wider concentric circles of our high school, people seemed pretty chill about it. We were an arts magnet high school, so in some ways, everyone was trying to one-up each other by being more outrageous. The most shocking thing about Seth and I was probably that I was a freshman, and as Seth put it, a dork.
I finished packing away my stuff and found that I hardly needed my backpack at all. I rolled it up and tucked it in the back. “I feel so naked.”
“Free yourself from the shackles of the machine, my young Padawan.”
There were other changes to come, I soon discovered. Seth and Mitchell inducted me into their school of rock on our rides to and from school. Some days they’d take a longer route in order to finish a song or a bitchin’ guitar solo. I was always running to make it to my first-period class on time.
They took me through the history of rock ‘n’ roll with an academic-like attention, beginning with the classic jazz and blues artists—Muddy Waters, Lead Belly, Robert Johnson, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, then on through the big bands—which Seth wanted to skip, but Mitchell insisted on, then into Motown, Doo-wop, Swing, the Rockabilly era—Elvis, Johnny Cash, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and some that I’d never even heard of before. The ladies too—Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell… rare versions recorded in backrooms, limited-edition B-sides; the more obscure, the better.
The only thing I’d ever seen Mitchell take a stand on, in fact, was his musical preferences. For instance, Mitchell thought Elvis was campy and not very talented as a musician or a performer. Mitchell hated the way he crooned and his voice, which he thought was put-on and fake all the way down to his over-the-top Mississippi accent. Mitchell especially hated how everyone thought his songs were so original when they were actually stolen from the blues masters, to which Seth always countered, “just like Led Zeppelin,” which started a whole other argument from Mitchell about how Led Zeppelinchanged the face of rock and roll as we know it.
Seth, however, loved Elvis and especially loved watching old recordings of his performances. He said he used to impersonate Elvis when he was little. It was one of his mom’s party tricks, to trot Seth out and have him perform in front of her friends. Seth loved the limelight, and I sensed from that and other conversations that it was one of the few ways he got his mother’s attention, by singing and dancing or doing other outrageous things.
It definitely explained Seth’s affinity for all things rhinestone and the fact that he, himself, owned a Bedazzler and was known to glamorize all manner of clothing and accessories with plastic jewels and metallic studs.
Often Mitchell and Seth spent half the time arguing about what artist we were going to listen to next, and after every album—they called them albums, not playlists—they’d go over what was happening culturally or in the artists’ personal lives to influence their music, along with random bits of trivia. If Seth applied the same attention he gave to his music to his studies, I had no doubt he’d have straight A’s.
But I didn’t talk to Seth about his lack of academic focus.
One day I asked Seth why he was devoting so much attention to my musical education, and he said, “Our band’s number one groupie has to know what’s good in order to properly venerate us for our magnificence.”
“And you’re the authority on what’s good?” I teased.
Seth gave me a look that told me the answer was obvious.
The other thing Seth started doing was giving or loaning me his clothes, including a couple of pairs of his old jeans he insisted I wear instead of my ironed Dockers. “They show off your ass better,” he said. If I mentioned a band or a song that I liked, it just so happened that Seth had one of their concert T-shirts—he was something of a collector of band shirts. We were about three weeks into our official relationship when it suddenly occurred to me.
“You’re trying to make me cool,” I said to him. We were in his bedroom, and Seth was going through his drawers pulling out some old T-shirts and tossing them on the bed. He’d said he had too many and wanted to get rid of some.
Seth looked at me sideways without turning all the way. This epiphany hit me so hard and all at once that I felt foolish for not picking up on it sooner. “You really do think I’m a dork.” Seth had definitely teased me about it, but I didn’t actually think he believed it. It kind of hurt my feelings.
Seth sighed and shook his head. “You’re not a dork, Hiroku. You’re one of the coolest kids I know. It’s just…” He looked at me with so much sympathy. “You look like your mom dresses you.”
I glanced down at my button-up shirt and blue jeans. My mom didn’t dress me, but she did buy my clothes.
“I mean, what are those?” He squinted at my pants. “Wranglers?”
I got really quiet at that. And embarrassed. I began to think about other things Seth had done, like tell me to untuck my shirt or suggest I do something different with my hair, lose the belt and let my pants hang a little lower.
“Don’t be mad.” Seth came over and laid both hands on my shoulders.
