The piano and Marcie’s vocals started simultaneously, laying down the intro to the tune. She marveled at the sound of her own voice coming out of the radio speakers, her emotions a mixture of pride and awe. And then the tempo picked up as Jim and Steph’s guitars started to play. The drums and the bass began to pound. And then Jim’s voice issued out as well, belting out his part of the chorus. The song was so familiar to them, yet it was almost as if they were hearing it for the first time.
“It’s really true,” Marcie whispered when the tune ended and the next one—I’m the Only One by Melissa Etheridge—began to play.
“What’s really true?” asked Jim, who was still basking in the awe of hearing himself on the radio.
“They really are going to release a CD of us,” she said. “They really are going to play us on the radio.”
“You didn’t think that was true?” Jim asked. “After the three months we spent recording that CD?”
“Well ... most of me knew it was true, but there was a part of me that thought this was all just ... you know ... a pipe dream. That something would happen that would keep them from releasing it, or that this was all some kind of a scam. But now ... now I know it’s real. I’ve heard us on the radio! That really happened, didn’t it?”
“Yes, it really happened,” he said.
The doorbell rang, signaling the arrival of Jim’s mother, who, though she had been coming over on school mornings for years and had her own key, absolutely refused to just enter the house on her own when she knew Jim and Marcie were there.
“Mom’s here,” Jim said. “You better hit the road or you’ll be late for school.”
“Right,” Marcie said, picking up her purse, lunch bag, and keys. She gave Jim a quick kiss and a quick “I love you.” She started for the living room to let her mother-in-law in while simultaneously letting herself out. She then paused for a moment and looked back at her husband. “When will we start seeing money from this do you think?”
“The first royalty check will be sent out in April,” Jim reminded her. “But Jake said not to get our hopes up too high for that one. We have to pay back the advance money before we start seeing income and debut albums generally don’t start to sell in big numbers until there are two heavy airplay tunes in circulation.”
“But Jake really thinks we’re going to make some money from this?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.
“He really does,” Jim assured her. “He thinks that by the tail end of the second quarter we’ll go Gold and be heading toward Platinum.”
She nodded. “I hope Jake is right.”
“Me too,” Jim said.
As it turned out, however, Jake could not have been more wrong.
No one mentioned having heard a song by Brainwash to Jim or Marcie that day, though the tune had been played an even dozen times throughout the day on WKRO and another dozen on the two Providence hard rock stations. Jim himself heard the tune twice on his drive home from work.
The next day, however, after hearing the tune again on his commute in along I-95, two students from Jim’s fourth period English Lit class—Steve Branford and Donny Landis (members of the stoner clique, but intelligent ones who managed at least passing grades) encountered him in the hall as he was heading into the office from the parking lot.
“Yo, Mr. S!” hailed Steve, a grin on his face. “I heard your band on the radio this morning!”
“Did you?” asked Jim, feeling gratitude that someone had been listening.
“Yeah, dude!” Steve said. “It was tight! Was that really you singing?”
“Well,” Jim said, feeling absurdly prideful that this teenage stoner had appreciated the tune, “it was mostly Mrs. Scanlon on the vocals, but yeah, that was me in the choruses.”
“No kidding?” Steve said. “She’s got an awesome voice. And yours ain’t too bad either.”
“Yeah,” agreed Donny. “The tune was badass, Mr. S! Is it true that Ms. Zool was the one laying down the licks?”
“That was her on the lead guitar,” Jim confirmed. “She can shred, can’t she?”
“Who woulda thought?” Steve said.
In the administration office two of his colleagues—Kyle Bremen, who taught History, and Lynda Cole, who taught Biological Sciences—let him know that they had heard the tune played as well.
“Solid alt-rock,” Kyle, who fancied himself a music connoisseur, proclaimed. “Good guitar work from Steph and your wife’s voice is incredible.”
Lynda’s opinion was similar, though she was not as musically inclined. “It had energy and a strong beat,” she told him. “You guys really are talented.”
“We try,” Jim said humbly, feeling good about himself as he retrieved his mail from his cubicle.
It turned out that many of the students had heard Together on the radio that day, and, since Jake had given specific instructions to the music promotors that the band’s name be mentioned with each playing for the first two weeks, and since the student body had long been aware (to the chagrin of the school administrators, the PPSD board members, and the PTA movers and shakers) that Mr. Scanlon the English teacher and Miss Zool the lesbo gym teacher were both members of a rock band named Brainwash, most of them knew Jim was the male singer in the tune and Steph was the guitarist. In every class that day a group of students would make their way to his desk before the bell to tell him they had heard the tune and what they thought about it. Most were very impressed with the tune. No one told him they did not like it. He thanked all of his admirers humbly and then, once the bell rang signaling the start of class, he did his job and taught them the vagaries of the English language. Steph, he heard later, was experiencing much the same phenomenon, as was Marcie at the junior high she taught at, and Jeremy and Rick at the high schools they taught at.
By the next day, with Together airplay picking up in frequency and stretching all throughout the day on four separate Providence stations, pretty much everyone in all five band members’ schools knew about the song and the coming release of the CD. And this led to a bit of unwanted attention.
During period five, the second to last period of the school day, the black phone began to ring in Jim’s classroom. He looked at it in annoyance, as it was interrupting his lecture on the symbolism to be found in To Kill a Mockingbird. It was the phone that communicated with the administration office and was generally used to have a student report to the office for an early dismissal or something of that nature. Usually, the student in question would let him know when an early dismissal was in the works, but no one had claimed a get out of jail free status to him for this class.
“Excuse me for a minute,” he sighed, leaving the lectern and walking over to the ringing device. He picked it up and put it to his ear. “Room 237,” he said.
“Hi, Jim,” said a female voice. “Lynn here.” Lynn was the administration secretary, a woman of indeterminate age who gave the impression she had been sitting behind that desk since the days when Rhode Island had renounced its allegiance to the British Crown. The students (and more than a few of the faculty) called her Broom-Hilda, after the comic book witch, though never to her face.
“Hey, Lynn,” Jim said, carefully keeping the annoyance out of his voice (in truth, he was a little bit afraid of Broom Hilda himself). “What’s up?”
“Jeffery and Anne are requesting a meeting with you today after final period,” she said.
Jeffery Jonas was the principal of the school. Anne Borden was the assistant principal. Jim made a point to avoid dealing with them as much as possible. “They want me to stay after school?” he asked.
“They do,” she confirmed.
“Did they say what this is about?”
“They did not,” she said dryly. “They have requested you meet them in Jeffery’s office immediately after the period six bell.”