A Song for Bijou Read online

  Contents

  1 The Slow-Motion Thing

  2 What’s Wrong with All-Boys Schools, Pt. 1

  3 Ignoramus

  4 Cramming

  5 What’s Wrong with All-Boys Schools, Pt. 2

  6 Dolly Hits the Nail on the Head

  7 Zip Your Fly

  8 Spring Fling

  9 No Boyfriends

  10 A Little Bit Cute

  11 Rara Surprise

  12 Making the Call

  13 Haitian, Haitian, Go Back to Your Nation

  14 Project Bijou

  15 Dollar Van

  16 A Drum of My Own, Then Something Better

  17 New, Crazy Powers

  18 Our Own Gran Bwa

  19 No Drumming at the Table

  20 Alex’s “Move”

  21 Pretending to Yawn

  22 Brainstorming Masterpieces

  23 Lessons

  24 When You’re Busted, You’re Busted

  25 Honing Our Act

  26 Boys on Film

  27 Enjoy Your Dessert

  28 Gentlemen

  29 Long-Time Friends

  30 My Secret

  31 Strange Silence

  32 A Boy in My Life

  33 Preparations

  34 Musicale

  35 Last-Minute Change of Plans

  36 Why Can’t We Be Friends?

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Also by Josh Farrar

  For Tayef

  1

  The Slow-Motion Thing

  The first time I see her, following Mary Agnes Brady out of Peas n’ Pickles at 3:47 on a Wednesday afternoon in the second week of March, the slow-motion thing happens. It’s like the pause button’s been pushed on everything I see. The image—a beautiful girl with butterfly braids, snapping back the tab on a can of ginger ale—freezes for a millisecond. After the sound of the can’s sharp pop and the little breath of fizz that follows it, time stops, and I think, Who is that incredible girl?

  Then the picture comes to life again, but slowly, one frame at a time, as if an invisible thumb has pushed play without unpausing. So slowly that I don’t miss a single detail: from the mist of carbonation that sprays into the air and disappears, to the puzzled look on the girl’s face as she pulls the inch-long paper wrapper off the bent tip of the straw, to the shy smile that spreads across her face as she takes the first sip. Then she says, “Mmm,” and she licks her lips like she’s never tasted ginger ale in her life.

  Nomura and I are in a long line of kids from St. Cat’s and St. Chris’s, waiting to pay for our food, and Mary Agnes is walking out of the store backward, like a tour guide, pointing to snacks near the cash register and explaining the names, prices, and pros and cons of 3 Musketeers, Fuji apples, and Fritos. She enunciates each syllable, as if speaking to a child or someone hard of hearing. The girl doesn’t seem to mind, though. She’s paying close attention, nodding every few seconds, hungry for information.

  Her uniform is brand-new. Her shirt, its collar stiff with starch, is whiter than Mary Agnes’s, and not only because it stands out against her skin. Her red plaid skirt is brighter, too, and her patent-leather saddle shoes are as shiny as mirrors, not a scratch on them. Every piece of clothing on her looks like it was bought in the last forty-eight hours.

  As usual, Mary Agnes is talking nonstop, and the girl looks like she has to concentrate to keep up. Every time she nods, her braids do a little dance, shimmying like a grass skirt, before coming to rest. At the end of each braid sits a tiny purple bead in the shape of a butterfly. I wonder if she twists her hair into braids herself or if someone has to do it for her. I wonder whether she can sleep with the beads on. And, if she took the butterflies off, would the braids unravel?

  I don’t normally notice stuff like this. I only do when the slow-motion thing happens. Which is not something I choose or have any control of whatsoever. Someone else is controlling it. It’s like God, or somebody, is saying, Pay attention. This is important!

  Time speeds up again, although I feel like I’m still two seconds behind. “Who’s that?” I whisper to Nomura.

  He doesn’t even hear me. I have to say it twice because he’s reading something on his phone and dipping into a bag of Utz chips we haven’t paid for yet.

  “Who’s who?” he answers at last, his lips forming a round “o.” Everything about Nomura is round. His moon-shaped face, his black bowl-cut hair—even his glasses—are all circles so perfect they look like they’ve been drawn with a compass.

  “Do you want a microphone?” I whisper, praying none of the girls can hear us. Nomura is as loud as he is circular.

  Mary Agnes is still lecturing the girl. “The black girl?” he asks. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before.”

  I pay for Nomura’s chips and my Butterfinger, and Mr. Lau, the old man who owns Peas n’ Pickles, slaps my change on the counter like he’s placing a bet in a Chinese poker game. Then, a loud metal-on-Formica slap: the girls are out the door already. Too fast for me to say hello, or to do anything else that will help me meet that beautiful girl.

  “She must be new,” I say. “We would have seen her before.”

  “She’s cute,” Nomura says. “Really cute.”

  “I saw her first.”

  “Slow down, cowboy. All I said was she’s cute. But if you want to chase after her, go right ahead. She’s out of your league, and she’ll probably break your heart into a million pieces, but if that’s what you’re after, she’s all yours.”

  By the time we’re out of the store, though, the girls are past Pineapple Street, probably on their way to the subway. They’re walking in regular time, their hard-heeled shoes clicking musically against the concrete, nothing slo-mo about it. But I know that something has happened, something worth paying attention to. Something monumental.

  I need to find out who that girl is, where she came from, and why I’ve never seen her before, even though Nomura and I know, or at least know of, all forty-four girls in the seventh-and eighth-grade classes at St. Catherine’s School for Girls.

  Somehow I know that the answers to these questions are going to change my life forever.

  2

  What’s Wrong with All-Boys Schools, Pt. 1

  St. Christopher makes getting to know girls almost impossible. Well, maybe not St. Christopher himself, whoever he was. But St. Christopher’s, the school where I’ve been going for eight endless years. St. Christopher’s School for Boys in Brooklyn Heights, New York City.

  Honestly, what is the point of a boys-only school in the twenty-first century? Maybe it made sense in 1913, when this place was founded. When half the boys at St. Chris’s wanted to become monks or priests—two jobs that make you swear off girls for life—when they grew up. But now, a hundred years later, I can promise you that none of the guys I know has ever once thought about giving up girls for good just so he can serve God. And what’s so holy and spiritual about completely ignoring half the people on Earth, anyway?

  If you ask me, it’s sexist.

  Some people say that single-sex schools help kids concentrate better, but that’s crazy. I would never want to look like an idiot in front of a whole bunch of cute girls, so I would study even harder if St. Chris’s were coed. I’d memorize my entire Latin textbook (and this is a completely different subject, but where else do you have to learn Latin, except inside the walls of an all-boys school?) if it meant I had a chance to impress a room half filled with members of the fairer sex.

  I’d be way less depressed, too. Have you ever looked at the seventh- and eighth-grade classes in a boys school and seen how bummed out everyone looks? More than half my class has been at St. Chris’s since kindergarten. That includes me; my best friend, John Nomur
a; my other friend, Ira Lopez; Richard Krug; Greg Vargas; Rocky Van Sant; Trevor Zelo; and a few others, and let me tell you: we are so completely sick of one another that we are miserably depressed. And who wouldn’t be? Imagine looking at the same boring faces, day after day, for eight whole years. With the exception of Nomura and Ira, if I never saw a single one of my classmates’ ugly mugs again, I would die happy! And if they all, with the exception of Ira and Nomura, said the same thing about me, I wouldn’t blame them.

  But I’m stuck with these guys, they’re stuck with me, and we’re not even through seventh grade yet.

  Now, if half my class were girls, things would be completely different. Sure, we’d still be sick of one another after eight whole years, but starting in sixth grade, certain miraculous biological, um, changes would become noticeable in many of us, and these changes, these transformations, would make all the difference. We’d see one another with new eyes. Friendships would change and grow, romances would blossom, and like I mentioned before, we’d all be studying really hard.

  So, having girls at St. Chris’s would make us all smarter and way better prepared for high school. I guarantee it.

  3

  Ignoramus

  Thank God for the St. Catherine’s dances.

  If I had seen that incredible girl—I still don’t know her name, but Nomura and I are working on it—in sixth grade, tracking her down without blowing my cover would have been a challenge. But because of the St. Cat’s dances, I’m going to meet her, and soon. As in Saturday-night soon.

  The staff at St. Chris’s have never hosted a dance, thrown a party, or given any opportunity whatsoever for us to meet girls. But the people who run St. Cat’s, which is our sister school and is only three blocks away, think that dances are a very big deal, and they throw them three times a year. Every girl in seventh and eighth grade goes to these “St. Cathopher’s” dances, because they’re as desperate to meet boys as we are to meet them. The next one, Spring Fling, is Saturday night.

  The incredible girl will be there, because everyone will be there. And if Mary Agnes Brady has taken the girl under her wing and sees herself as the girl’s personal tour guide, there’s no way she’ll miss Spring Fling, because Mary Agnes is obsessed with the dances. She lives for them.

  At lunch on Thursday, Nomura sidesteps a kickball game in the yard and meets me in the corner next to a play structure I haven’t climbed since fifth grade. He’s got Ira with him, and Ira, as always, is shooting video. I haven’t seen him without that video cam of his for months.

  “Her name,” Nomura says, “is Bijou.”

  Bijou. Bijou, Bijou, Bijou.

  I look at Nomura, then back at Ira. “And how many people did you have to ask to find out?” Nomura’s not exactly a human Fort Knox when it comes to keeping secrets, but Ira’s another story altogether. “I don’t want people to know I’m, you know, interested.”

  “Me and Ira, that’s it,” Nomura says.

  “Ira,” I say, “you mind turning that thing off? Not every moment of our lives has to be on video. I don’t want the world knowing about this.”

  “Relax, man, my work is strictly confidential.” He clicks the camera off. “And nobody knows you like this girl. Nobody except Maricel, that is.”

  Ira has a twin sister, Maricel, at St. Cat’s, but this is the first time that their relationship’s been useful in any way. Maricel is smart, pretty, and even semipopular. She’s also friends with Mary Agnes, so she must at least know Bijou a little bit and is probably a gold mine of information.

  A little more on Ira, my second-best friend: Ira is always obsessed with something. And I do mean obsessed. When he dives into an interest, it’s headfirst into the deep end. First it was Pokémon cards, then Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and then he memorized practically every line of all seventeen Harry Potter movies. These days it’s horror: vampires, flesh-eating zombies, witches, shape-shifters, werewolves, even were-panthers, all of which are not only 100 percent fictional, but also way less interesting than the very real, fantastical creatures among us called girls. Ira couldn’t care less about girls, though. All he cares about, for now, anyway, is becoming some kind of major movie director. He’d better be careful with that camera of his. I don’t want everybody to know I like Bijou; that would ruin everything.

  “So, what kind of name is Bijou?” I ask.

  “It’s French,” Nomura says. “It means ‘jewel.’”

  “But she’s not French,” Ira says. He’s talking really, really fast. He’s so excited, he can’t spit out the words fast enough. Maybe I was wrong; does Ira Lopez care about girls after all? “She’s Haitian.”

  “Asian?” I ask.

  Nomura laughs. “No, Alex. Haitian. As in, from Haiti.”

  I look at him blankly. “Is that in Africa?”

  “No, it’s not in Africa! Do you ever watch the news?” I give him a look; he knows I don’t follow the news.

  How many guys in our class watch the news? Only one: Nomura. And he doesn’t even watch the news, he reads the New York Times, the actual physical newspaper, every morning while drinking a cup of black coffee. He brings it with him on the subway, folding it into a neat square, and sometimes he even reads it between classes. The kid is never more than ten feet away from the Times.

  “You might remember this gigantic disaster that happened in January 2010.” He looks at me like he can’t even believe he’s still friends with somebody as dumb as me. “The Haitian earthquake? Hello, calling Alex Schrader…. Is anybody in there?”

  “Three years ago? How am I supposed to remember something that happened when I was ten years old?”

  “I remember it,” Ira says. “Haiti’s an island, and the whole thing was torn to shreds. There were poor people living in tents and shacks. Crying and dying, total catastrophe.”

  “Oh that,” I say. “Yeah.” What I remember is Mom, close to tears, watching CNN in horror as the camera showed thousands of people with no homes, and how hot the place was, how completely miserable everyone seemed. Then Mom used a five-digit code to text a ten-dollar donation to the Red Cross.

  Not for one second could I believe that the beautiful girl could have had anything to do with a place like that. She looked so fresh and clean and … innocent. Not like somebody who’s been through all of that.

  “Okay, obviously I know what Haiti is,” I say, feeling the color rise to my cheeks. “I just forgot that Haitians were from Haiti. Haitian sounds exactly like Asian.”

  “What an ignoramus,” Nomura says.

  Ira giggles.

  “You’re so ignorant,” I tell Ira, “you don’t even know what ignoramus means.”

  “Do too,” Ira says. But then he shuts up, because he really doesn’t.

  “So, where is it?” I ask Nomura. “Is it near Africa at least?”

  “Have you ever heard of Cuba, white boy?” Nomura asks, getting a laugh from Ira. Nomura’s Japanese and Ira’s half Dominican, so they think it’s incredibly hilarious to call me “white boy” any time I say something stupid.

  “Yeah, dude, I’ve heard of Cuba, thank you very much.”

  “Haiti is south of Cuba,” Ira says. “But it’s right next to the Dominican. They’re on the same island … ignoramus.” Okay, so he does know the word. Big deal.

  I pretend not to hear. I don’t know much about the Dominican Republic, except that a lot of good baseball players are Dominican and that Ira isn’t one of them. He’s terrible at sports, the kind of kid who strikes out in kickball.

  “Do you know anything else about her?” I ask him. “I mean, she wasn’t in that earthquake, was she?”

  “I don’t know, but I can find out.” Ira bites his lip.

  “Awesome, Ira.” I do genuinely appreciate his help. Without Maricel’s info, I’d still be clueless. “Fantastic, in fact.”

  “Wow, Alex, you’re so into this girl, it’s almost scary,” Nomura says.

  “I’m a red-blooded adolescent male.”

  �
�You might still actually be preadolescent, dude.”

  “It doesn’t drive you half-crazy, knowing there are 243 girls only three blocks away?”

  “You’re obsessed,” Nomura says.

  “You’re more into girls than I am into horror,” Ira says.

  “That’s because girls are real and horror is lame,” I say.

  “Is not,” says Ira.

  “Seriously, Alex. It’s all you ever talk about lately.” Nomura balls up his lunch bag and tosses it with a perfect arc into a trash can.

  “We’re in seventh grade. Isn’t that normal?”

  “Maybe, but it seems like girls have completely taken over your life. Like it’s the most important thing, ever.”

  Instead of saying that girls are the most important thing ever, which they obviously are, I say, “Please, they haven’t taken over anything.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. Let’s say you were given the choice between losing us as your best friends and getting to know this girl. What would you choose?”

  “He’d choose us, obviously,” Ira says, looking at Nomura. Then to me, “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I would gladly never talk to my own sister again in exchange for a girlfriend,” I reply, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, I’m serious,” Nomura says. “Would you choose a girl over us?”

  “Of course not,” I say. “How could you ask that?” And I mean it. Nomura is my best friend. And Ira is awesome, too. I would never do anything to hurt them, even if the hottest supermodel in the world were on her knees, begging me to be her husband.

  “Are you sure?” Nomura asks. “Because when you talk about girls, you get this glazed look in your eyes, almost like one of Ira’s zombies. You’re not going to do us in, are you?”

  Ira sticks his arms out like one of the undead and pretends to take a bite of my arm flesh.

  “Knock it off,” I say. But then, seriously, “No way. Not a chance.”

  “Even for Angela Gudrun?” Ira asks, knowing that only months ago, I talked about Angela every single day—every hour of every day, in fact. My Angela fixation was probably very annoying, I admit. But that was before Bijou. And now that I’m over Angela, it seems safe to respond in my goofiest pirate accent, “Ira, if I could have but one mere day with Angela Gudrun, I’d gladly say good-bye to you and Nomura, now and forevermore!”