Jim felt his anger rising and he fought to keep it down. It was a struggle. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but a voluntary leave of absence would be unpaid, wouldn’t it?”
“Well, naturally,” Anne said. “But surely you will be collecting income from the release of this CD.”
“Not until April at least,” Jim said. “And only if it sells enough to cover the advance money we have already been paid.”
“Oh ... well that is unfortunate,” Anne said, “but I’m afraid we’re still going to have to insist that...”
“Hold the fort here a minute,” Steph interrupted. “I have another question about this voluntary leave of absence.”
“What is that?” Anne asked.
“Thanks to all the previous attempts of you and the board and the PTA to try to get us fired or suspended for being musicians, I’ve gotten to know our collective bargaining agreement pretty well.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Anne asked.
“A voluntary LOA is something that the admin is not required to grant. Whether or not to do it is a case-by-case basis.”
“I assure you that we will grant the LOA,” Jeffery said. “That is why we’re having this meeting.”
“Uh huh,” Steph said. “The contract also says that if the LOA is for more than a sixty-day period, the employer—that’s you two—have the option of not retaining the employee when they request to come back from the leave.”
“You don’t say?” Jim asked, shaking his head.
“We would allow you to return to your positions without loss of seniority or pay rate,” Anne said. “You have my word on that.”
“Your word?” Steph said. “You, who has tried to have us fired or suspended multiple times in the past? Who arranges to have us randomly selected to pee in a cup every September when we come off tour? We’re supposed to take your word that you’ll give us back our jobs?”
“My word is my bond,” Anne said, as if offended by the very suggestion that it wasn’t.
“Yeah,” Steph said. “I’m sure it is. All the same, however, I’m afraid I’m going to have to say no to your suggestion.”
“Me as well,” Jim said.
Anne’s face was now turning red. “You cannot say no to this,” she said. “We’re going to have to insist.”
“Oh, so then you’re not really talking about a voluntary LOA then, are you?” Jim asked. “You’re talking about a suspension without pay.”
“We would prefer to keep this thing on an informal, voluntary basis,” Anne said.
“I’m sure you would,” said Steph. “That’s because you know you don’t have a leg to stand on by trying to do this officially. You can suspend us if you want. You can do it right now, right this minute in fact. But you know that we have the right to union representation if you go official. You know that you have to have a legitimate reason for suspending us. You know that we’ll take this thing all the way to binding arbitration and that when the judge hears why we were suspended, you’ll lose and have to reinstate us with back pay for all the time we missed.”
“I know no such thing,” Anne said. “I’m asking you to think of the children and do the right thing.”
“The children, huh?” Jim said, shaking his head sadly. “Don’t you think that trying to suspend a couple of popular teachers because they put out a music CD would be more of a distraction than just leaving things be?”
“No, I do not think that at all,” she said.
“Well, I guess we aren’t going to be seeing eye to eye on this issue then,” Steph said. “In any case, my answer is no. I will not go on a voluntary LOA. If you want to suspend me, you’re going to have to do it officially.”
“My answer is no as well,” Jim said.
“You two are making a serious mistake,” Anne hissed.
Jim simply shrugged. “I’ve made them before,” he said. “Are we done here?”
“We are not done here!” Anne said. “We need to resolve this issue before you leave.”
“Then I’m afraid,” Steph told her, “that at this point I’m going to refuse to speak anymore to either of you without a union representative present.”
“Me as well,” Jim said.
The vice principal and the principal fumed a little, and blustered a little bit more, but it turned out that the meeting was over after all.
By the third week in January, Together was the most-requested song at radio stations coast to coast in the United States and Canada. The tune resonated with fans of alternative rock and traditional hard rock alike, dominating the 18-35 demographic for both males and females. The song debuted at 67 on the Billboard Hot 100 before the CD was even available for sale. And it began a rapid climb upward from there.
On January 24, the eponymous CD was released for sale across the US and Canada. Jake Kingsley, who was in charge of the Brainwash project and was monitoring things closely—as well as directing every detail of the promotion campaign that Aristocrat Records had put into play—was not expecting much in the way of CD sales at first. That would come, he figured, after the second track to be released—Steph’s What Can I Do?—started to get airplay. He figured that in the first quarter of the year they might sell fifty thousand or so if they were lucky. He was, therefore, quite surprised when Brainwash, the CD, sold more than forty thousand copies in the first week of release. It sold another twenty thousand or so by the time January turned to February.
A little research gave him a partial explanation. More than ninety percent of the first two weeks’ worth of sales were in the New England region. Brainwash had been popular in New England for years and their fans were snatching up the CD once they became aware of its availability. A little further research clarified things a bit more. Well over a third of the purchases were made by the 15 to 25-year-old demographic with the heaviest sales in the Providence region. In other words, younger people in Brainwash’s hometown were snatching up the majority of these early sales. The members of Brainwash were junior high and high school teachers at four different schools in the city’s district and had been teaching new crops of kids there for years. Their students and former students were the people who were buying the CD more than anyone.
“Out of fucking sight,” Jake muttered when he saw the market research documents and figured out what they meant.
Together, meanwhile, continued its way up the Billboard chart with a bullet and broke into the Top 10 on February 12. By the following Sunday, it was at number one, neatly booting TLC’s Creep out of the position it had held for the previous four weeks. It would stay at the top for three weeks straight before Madonna’s Take a Bow was able to displace it.
As the song became a nationwide phenomenon, album sales outside the New England region began to show the sort of upward trend that Jake had initially predicted even while the New England sales slacked off a bit. By the time Together began its slow trip back down the chart in mid-March, Brainwash had sold two hundred and ten thousand copies, almost halfway to Gold status in only two months. It was then that Jake decided to give the band he had discovered a little present. He arranged for a meeting with Miles Crawford, the head of promotions at Aristocrat.
Miles was all smiles and glad-handed cheer when Jake walked into his office that Monday morning. He could not stop gushing about the unexpected success of the Brainwash release and the CD sales they were currently enjoying. Of course, he took full credit for the success of the project, exclaiming about the professionalism, courage, and skill of his web of promoters.