Mondays - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The rest of school zipped by without much excitement, and the dismissal bell was ringing before I knew it. Mondays I had piano lessons, so I left the school behind and rode to my lesson, maybe seven blocks away. I had been playing piano for a very long time, maybe eight or nine years of formal lessons. I had had four or five teachers so far, and my current teacher, Jules, was a very interesting person. To sum him up, he’s a crazy old New Yorker Jew who got kicked out of the Einstein medical institute twice. He’s traveled the world for half his life, playing in bars. He’s been to Jerusalem, Greece, Rome, and all the great European cities.

Jules, instead of making me do classical music and scales all day (I’ve had previous experience with this; it sucks), has me playing bar tunes, jazz, and improvisation. His teaching style fitted me perfectly; I’d been practicing scales and chords with all my previous teachers. The years of memorizing chords and scales came in handy when I had to use it to play fakes at first glance. (Fakes are pieces of music that have a one-note melody and letters above it. If you look at a song book, most pieces will have guitar notes above it. C, Bmaj, E7, Gmaj9, so on. I use these to help me play the song.)

He had been teaching me some classical music too, but this was mostly exercises, not my main repertoire. My main repertoire consisted of songs like “Ain’t Misbehavin” and “You’ve got a friend in me”. It was all very fun, and they were great songs to show off and play.

But playing was only half the lesson. Truthfully, we’d spend maybe half the time going into some conversation about religion or politics. One of his quotes was, “I don’t know if there’s a God or not, but if there is, He’s a very peculiar person.” Most of the time we’ll end up discussing politics or religion. I don’t know how we got into these conversations, but they were, if nothing else, interesting.

After a while of such talk, we’d jam on the piano for a few minutes. Afterwards, he’d give me a song to work on over the week (I don’t need instruction for the simpler pieces anymore) and we’d work on something that I would need his help on.

And of course, there was always the Rhapsody. Jules and I had been long working on George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It is a beautiful piece, and I can almost play the whole concerto, take a few parts. The last few parts are extremely difficult, and Jules has always had trouble with it. Jules and I had just started the last parts.

I walked up to the door and knocked. “Come innnnn!” he said in a singsong voice. I smiled, for perhaps the first time that day, and walked in. He and another student were just finishing up. The student left and Jules told me to wait for a second while he got some sheet music from the house. The lessons were in his workshop, in front of the driveway. The workshop was right next to his house. So while he was finding today’s material, I got to improvise for a little while.

He walked back in and told me to play Rhapsody in Blue for him. I began the piece but halfway through, something stopped me. Some sort of musical theme in the piece seemed familiar. “Jules, that last part, it sounds like a theme. What is it?”

“It’s allegretto, but I’ve this theme repeats throughout the piece. It’s supposed sound suspicious.”

“What do you mean?”

“It reels the listener in, catching them in the tension. Of course, most people would just say it sound fancy, wouldn’t they?”

Afterwards, we ended up discussing musical themes for a while. Jules acted serious about a discussion, and then broke the ice with a ridiculous joke, and it was hard to keep up.

He ended up giving me a bar tune and a new small portion of Rhapsody. I rode the rest of the way home in a more cheerful mood. Jules always cheered me up.

I finally got home around 4:40. Mom and Dad weren’t home yet, but my twenty-one-year-old sister, Jessica, was on break from college and it was good to see her. After welcoming Jessica back, I grabbed some jellybeans left over from Easter and went up to my room to finish my homework. There wasn’t much, and I finished it quickly. Afterwards, Andy, Jessica, and I watched movies on the TV downstairs, which was a newly installed plasma screen with surround sound. When Mom and Dad got home, they welcomed Jessica, and then shooed us out of the house until they could get dinner. Andy and I played football out front while Jessica went out to get some milk from the grocery store. Dinner was soon ready: lamb, biscuits, salad, and potato au gratin. After dinner Andy, Jess, and I all did dishes while Mom and Dad sipped wine and discussed the day of work. Mom was a nurse and Dad was a doctor, (yeah, they met over a body) so they always had interesting patients to talk about.

After dishes, Andy and I went downstairs. He watched the history channel while I surfed the net. In a little bit, Mom and Dad called us all up to watch Two and a Half Men, followed by Heroes. After a while they sent us to bed. While brushing my teeth, I realized that something wasn’t quite right. This routine was virtually the same thing that happened every night. School didn’t seem appealing, but it at least seemed more interesting. Listening to my own description of the day, it was only school that was engaging. I kept going because it was interesting. Keeps reeling me in...

Before undressing, I set my note on my desk, the one that read Conner S. Laneson. I lay in bed thinking about the strange day. Football fights and psychology writers had worn me out. Laughing, I decided to write it all down in a little notebook. Were the staff conspirators? I highly doubted it. The half of them were morons, it’s hard to think that they created some system. I smiled. It didn’t work very well then, we were constantly having disciplinary problems.

I dozed off after a while, thinking of tomorrow.



I awoke to the sound of my alarm clock, blaring incessantly, tearing me away from sleep. This time, I decided to just get up without a struggle. I tore myself away from my warm sheets and pillows to meet the cold morning. I turned the alarm off and climbed into the shower thinking normal Tuesday thoughts: I wish I didn’t have school today. Why can’t it be Friday? Did I finish that English assignment?

Tuesdays were never as bad as Mondays, but I disliked it almost as much. I felt like there was no progress being made, that I still had to muddle through four more days. It didn’t have quite the bad vibe that Monday did, but I still didn’t like the day.

Andy was up the same time that I was, and we both went to the kitchen to find Mom cooking us eggs. After getting ready, she dropped us off at school. It was one of our better mornings.

While I was walking toward the gymnasium, John walked up to me and started talking. “Anxious?”

“No. why?”

“Because today’s judgment day.”

Oh God, I thought, I forgot. The principal would always punish us for our
actions the day after the incident. So we would get in trouble today for what happened yesterday, and probably a lot of trouble.

“Oh, crud, I didn’t even realize it. I forgot about the whole thing.”

“Yeah, you better be on your toes. I’m afraid. My grades ain’t that good, I don’t need stuff like this happening.”

John was huge, burly, strong, and fierce. I was surprised-and worried- to see him afraid of this. “What do you think will happen?”

“I don’t know, but it’s probably going to be bad for something like this.”

“Yeah...” He was right. The principal was calm yesterday, but it was the false sort of calm, the calm before a storm. Whatever was in store for today, couldn’t be good. I said a quick private prayer and entered the gym.

This time, a lot of heads did turn, even some from the teachers. At first, I was surprised, and had to think to find why. I hadn’t thought about it, but I technically started the fight. The seventh graders would surely blame the whole thing on me, and plenty of the eighth graders would resent me. But that’s not fair! I was provoked! Anybody else would’ve done the same thing in my position. But nobody was in the position that I was in, and they wouldn’t think that through before hating me. I was going to have to endure condescendence from not only the teachers, but the school as well.

Luke, though, greeted me as usual, but sensed that I was uncomfortable. “Just ignore them if they try anything. With any luck, the whole thing will blow over in a week or two. You coming to my airsoft party on Friday?”

“An airsoft party? Your mom’s letting you have an airsoft party in the midst of all this? You knocked one of the sevies to the ground!”

Luke smiled. “Yeah, but that was only because I didn’t like the little brat.
I told my mom the whole story, and she kind of understood, and sided with us. She says it’s better if we battle with play guns rather than fists. Oh yeah, we’re battling the sevies.”

“The sevies? How many of them?”

“Just the twelve boys. We might be outnumbered, but this battle is ‘fight until you surrender’, so we definitely ain’t outmatched.”

I smiled. “I’ll make it if I can.” Luke smiled too, and began contemplating the battle with John and Mark. The teams would be even, the guns split fairly, and scores settled.

Just then the principal, Mrs. Dameson, stormed into the room, glared at us, and whispered something to our teachers. My friends and I all exchanged glances, what could this mean?

We found out soon enough. The late bell rung and we headed to class. Mrs. Higgins, once the whole class was in the room, said to the class, “All the boys who were playing football yesterday, please come up to my desk.” We walked up, and she was handing out a one-hundred-problem algebra worksheet. “You will have to go to the library to do this.” We looked at her in disbelief, but she simply said, “Principal’s orders, not mine.”

We shuffled into the library, wondering what else was in store for us. As we walked in the librarian said to us, “Mrs. Dameson just called me, anyone who talks gets and extra twenty problems.” We were infuriated, but there was nothing we could do. And we couldn’t talk about it either. We glanced at each other, regretting our incident from Monday. It was going to be a long day.