Five Flavors of Dumb by Antony John Page A

emphasis on “aspiring.” Tash saw Kallie removing a guitar from her case and muttered a phrase that seemed to consist entirely of expletives, while Kallie smiled as if it were the most delightful coincidence in the world.
    Josh sidled up and grinned at me, presumably to reassure me that this was all for the best. I even believed it until he wrapped an arm around Kallie’s shoulders, easing her toward him like he was claiming her. Meanwhile Kallie ran her fingers along a broken guitar string, seemingly unaware of his attention.
    “Guess this is a bad time to say I don’t have any spare strings, right?” she asked no one in particular.
    Josh squeezed Kallie’s shoulders playfully and nodded in Tash’s direction. “Don’t worry, Tash has spares. Can you fix this, Tash?”
    Tash glared at Kallie, no doubt thinking of several better uses for a steel string. I contemplated asking Will to bail Kallie out instead, but then I realized that his bass guitar strings wouldn’t work.
    “I only have one spare set,” Tash huffed.
    Josh produced a five-dollar bill like so much spare change he’d found in the folds of his pocket. “You can get yourself another, right?”
    Tash hesitated, but she took Kallie’s battered guitar, wound the string around the nut, and tuned it methodically. Then she tried tuning the neighboring string as well, which instantly snapped. She gazed at her dwindling supply of spare strings and shook her head.
    “Have you ever tuned this?”
    “Of course,” insisted Kallie.
    “With what? A tuning fork?”
    “No. I only play by myself, so I just tune the upper strings to the lowest.”
    Tash threw up her hands in surrender. “Okay, I’m done. I’m not going to sit here and replace every single string.”
    Josh dug into his pocket and retrieved five more five-dollar bills. “Just get on with it, Tash.”
    He meant it to end the discussion right there, but instead all eyes were drawn to the wad of notes he dangled like a carrot inches from Tash’s face. Even Will looked up, his face creased like he’d just detected a nasty odor, or maybe in distaste at his brother’s flaunting the family wealth in public.
    Tash paused again, but it was just for show. It was clear she’d do it, and was privately hoping that every single one of the strings snapped before she was done.
    Which they almost did. Twenty-five minutes later, Kallie had four new guitar strings, Tash had twenty dollars, Josh had his arm surgically attached to Kallie’s shoulder, and Dumb had significantly less than two hours to learn a new song and discover they had just been reinvented as a soft rock band.
    “ What ?” Tash exploded.
    “Soft rock,” I repeated. “If we can learn this song today, we’ll be heard on KSFT-FM, and interviewed live too.” (Okay, so I was getting ahead of myself, but I figured if it all fell through I’d be out of a job anyway, so it hardly mattered. After all, there were only twelve more days until my month was up.) “It’ll be serious exposure, the kind we can use to get Dumb’s music heard on other stations, maybe even get us paying gigs.”
    I knew I had Josh at “exposure.” At “paying,” I had Tash too. I never knew when I had Will, so I just discounted him completely. Then I looked at Kallie—she was technically a member too now, hard as that was to believe—and she smiled back vacantly, which was perfect. Then I signaled to Ed to get started, which he did after an annoyed glance at his watch.
    For the next hour and a half I watched with morbid fascination as Kallie tried to coordinate her playing with Tash, Will seemed to slip in and out of consciousness, and Josh sang “I’ll stay with you / We’ll see this through” like he was dry heaving. By the time it was all over, Ed looked exhausted, Kallie seemed to be having second thoughts about joining us, and I’d discovered that my least favorite song in the whole wide world was the one I wrote myself.

CHAPTER 20
    If I’d thought