Really? Sam stared at the question until she knew she was taking too long to answer. As ridiculous as it was, she had to pick one.
She couldn’t honestly say she found most people to be exciting, innovative, or resourceful. Some, sure, but certainly not most. That left ‘well-intentioned’ and ‘predictable.’ Sam figured she was supposed to choose ‘well-intentioned,’ thereby proving that she was a healthy, well-balanced teenager with a positive outlook on humanity.
But she just couldn’t bring herself to ignore ‘predictable.’
People got up at the same time every day, went to the same places, had the same arguments over and over… repeated the same opinions on the same topics of conversation. There was an insufferable rhythm buried within the mind of almost every human being Samantha Prescott had ever met—a numbing monotony that had been threatening to drag her into the depths of despair for years—and if someone was actually going to ask her about it, even if it was only on a stupid test, she was damn well going to be honest.
D. Predictable.
She filled in the answer meticulously, definitively, watching her pencil go around and around, blackening the oval with more than just a small sense of satisfaction before finally moving on.
4
Daniel
Ahuge grin spread across Daniel Walker’s face as he popped his chin to the funk strains of “Too Hot to Stop” by The Bar-Kays, his shaggy blond hair swaying back and forth to the rhythmic beat of his imagination. Although the room’s mission-style architecture was about as un-funky as you could get, that wasn’t about to stop Daniel from enjoying a musical interlude, especially if the situation demanded it. And to Daniel’s mind, it usually did.
148. How hot is too hot?
As if the multiple-choice questions hadn’t been weird enough, the short answer section was downright bizarre. Number 148 had started him in on “Too Hot to Stop.” Now it was all he could do not to tap his pencil frenetically on the desk: tap tap tap tap BAP-BAP BAP-BAP BAP-BAP POW! His fingers ached to pluck out the bass line—adding a few embellishments of his own, of course.
He considered writing “When it’s too hot to stop” as his answer, but thinking about it as prose, without the music, he suddenly felt awkward, and the song faded away. He couldn’t write that on a test—not even one that didn’t count. He paused only a moment before his head was nodding again, this time with less pop and more groove, weaving to the sultry beat of “Smooth.”
Ask Santana, he wrote.
Daniel decided he liked tests that didn’t count. He liked them a lot.
Before moving on to the next question, he finished the melody all the way through in his mind, the easy rhythm of the tune perfectly matching both the title of the song and the gorgeous southern California day.
? ? ?
At lunch, the test was all anyone could talk about.
“Which color is the best color? What was that?” Daniel’s best friend, Jared, was a short, dark-haired teen with pretty-boy features and unnaturally long fingers that could fly over a bass guitar like a hummingbird’s wings.
“Please, brah. Blue’s the best color, hands down. Don’t be stupid.” The reply came from Scott, a heavyset teen with nondescript brown hair and a solid if somewhat uninventive gift for drumming.
The three of them had talked about forming a band for years, but Daniel was the only one who could really sing, and he was too shy even to play his guitar in front of most people, despite his obvious talent. Instead, they held occasional jams in Scott’s bedroom, but even these were few and far between, depending as they did on the other residents of the house feeling inclined to tolerate an hour or two of inescapable percussion—which they usually were not.
“Jared’s not stupid,” Daniel said, quick to defend his oldest friend.
“Aw, don’t mind him.” Jared flourished his hand through the air as though to sweep the comment away. “A grommet swooped his wave off the line-up this morning. He’s been in a bad mood ever since.”
“Effing kooks oughta stay on the beach where they belong.” Scott scowled at his roast beef sandwich, hardly touching it.
Daniel offered Scott a sympathetic smile, trying to snap him out of it, but Scott’s theme song for the day—Three Days Grace’s “I Hate Everything About You”—was already on a play loop. Its wailing strains threatened to make Daniel laugh as he imagined Scott behind a mic, howling out the melody in his high-pitched, off-key tenor. He dropped his head as fast as he could, hiding his smirk behind his hair.
“Hey, Daniel,” Jared said, interrupting his thoughts with a friendly punch to the shoulder. “Don’t look now, but I think Alyssa’s watching you.”
“If she’s looking over here, she’s not watching me, she’s watching you,” Daniel replied, and he laughed at his friend’s stunned expression. The shy, petite blonde had been staring love songs at Jared for weeks now. “She’s cute. You should ask her out. You two would look good together.”
Daniel looked to Scott for confirmation, but Scott said nothing. Only the barest hint of rage passed across his round, cherubic face before he could mask it, but Daniel was onto him.
Apparently, Jared wasn’t the only one who liked Alyssa Summers.
Daniel had no idea when that had happened, but underneath Scott’s neutral exterior the volatile drummer had already traded in the angst-ridden howling of Three Days Grace for the high-intensity pounding of “Platypus,” by Green Day, which echoed riotously in Daniel’s imagination, its breakneck tempo contrasting starkly against the brutal hostility of the lyrics.
“You think so?” Jared wanted to know.
“Sorry, what?”
“You think I should ask her out?” Jared tried again, sounding hopeful.
Daniel looked back and forth between Jared and Scott, The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” now locked in an epic battle of the bands against Scott’s Green Day angst. No matter what Daniel did, he was going to hurt one or the other. How had his beautiful Santana morning come to this?
“Um, hey, you know what? I just remembered I have math homework to finish before class. I’m gonna hit the library. I’ll see ya, OK?”
“Yeah, OK,” they both replied, each of them staring at Alyssa Summers with vastly different expressions.
Daniel hightailed it out of the cafeteria as fast as he could.
? ? ?
Thankfully, Daniel didn’t have to see the two boys together again for the rest of the day, but he did have one class with each of them.