The band V
None of us saw it coming.
I certainly didn’t think he had it in him, neither did Adam T or Chris. No one in the school believed he did it, even when they ran, pressed their collective nose to the classroom window gaped, gasped and pointed as one. The mess was everywhere.
It was very clear that somebody had done something very terrible in that room. It was all over the walls.
But Adam D? Inconceivable.
Where had he been, though, that final lunchtime when the three of us were preparing for our show in the Hall? What had he been doing when we were plugging in lights, adjusting our borrowed guitar straps and decoding the manual for the VHS camcorder? Where had he been?
We found him outside the principal’s office. Wide eyes averted to the linoleum, manicured hands folded between the ironed seams of his shorts and his t-shirt covered in… In something. What was that?
Chris broke the silence.
“What’s all that mess on ya top, dude?”
Adam D looked up at us. Whatever the substance was, we could now see it was in his hair too, specks of it on his cheek. The rest of the school was pointing out smatterings of the same stuff on the posters and student projects in our room. Mostly up high.
“You know the ceiling fan in our room?” Adam whispered. We nodded, slow and synchronised. His face broke into a smirk. “I threw bananas up into it.”
We stood before him muted, our mouths wide as sideshow alley clowns. I just remember his eyes, like sunny blue lakes beneath a windy sky. All the diamonds in those tiny pools.
“I threw heaps of ’em,” he smiled, eyes dancing. “Heaps and heaps of ’em.”
Somehow my father managed to get him out on bail, perhaps in exchange for grade five completed in detention, and we finally got to rock that Hall.
We might not have known how to play those instruments, but we knew why we wanted to play them. It was written all over Adam D’s face. And in his hair. So we borrowed a wig for the show.
