Free Have A Little Faith In Me by Brad Vance Page B

wave of guilt swept over him for involving the Springfields in his family drama. 
    “So.”  Barrett steepled his fingers together under his chin.  “You say you’ve got seven nights locked in there, eh?”
     
    Korey gave him a leg up back into the church, then handed him the bag into which Barrett had packed blank sheet music pages and a dozen sharp pencils.  And an Audioslave t-shirt, several sizes too big for Norman, that Barrett had fished out of an enormous pile of record industry swag.
    He scrubbed at the massive altar with a vengeance, knowing his father would be back in the morning to check his work and make sure he was on schedule.  By the time he’d done another seventh of what Barrett had called his “Labor of Hercules,” it was one o’clock in the morning.  That left five hours before his father took him home to get ready for school.
    His first song.  What would it be about?  He stared at the blank page, the flip side of the sheet music, where Barrett had told him to work out his lyrics.  “Write what you know,” the man had said.
    What did he know about, what in the world did he know anything about other than…nothing.  Nothing but religion.  He sighed.  The words of so much Christian music were already ringing hollow for him.  They were so thin, so empty of deeper meaning.  Praise this, hallelujah that, the end. 
    When did he feel what they were feeling, what he used to feel when he heard that music?  When did the spirit take him?  He thought of Chris Cornell, of “Like a Stone,” of his idol, his obsession, his…savior.  He thought of the lyrics to that song, which he read over and over again, trying to unpack the meaning, trying to feel what Chris felt when he wrote it, trying to understand his soul so that when they met, Norman could say, I know what you’re singing about.
    I feel the Rapture when I hear that song.  I’m taken up when I sing along.
    His skin tingled.  That was it.  That was it!  He scribbled the words down.  He would write a song for Chris.  He would send it to Chris and he would love it.  Norman would be invited to join the band, to tour with them.  To be with Chris, all the time…
    Of course it was a ridiculous, delusional, foolish adolescent dream.  And if we didn’t have them, what the fuck would we ever accomplish in this world?
     
    That morning, he sat in the back of the class for the first time, so he could sleep.  He really didn’t give a shit if the bullies bullied or not.  Which was exactly the armor required against bullies. 
    But it wasn’t necessary – the word was out in school that he was doing penance.  All the other kids’ parents had been abuzz with it, the preacher’s son in trouble, cluck cluck around the dinner table, all of them alight with the gossip.
    All of which automatically moved him in the Great Ledger of High School Status from the “dork” column into the “cool kid” lists.  Especially because Korey made sure the other kids knew that he was a musician, who’d been caught playing “the Devil’s music.”  His status went from zero to hero, just like that.
    He slouched in his chair, his hair spiked as much like Chris’s hair as he could make it, wearing jeans and his new Audioslave t-shirt.  He’d changed into them behind the school dumpster, exchanging them in his backpack for his slacks and button-down shirt.
    He would catch up on his sleep in his next class, the math class where he’d do the assignment on the board in five minutes.  Now he doodled in his notebook as his homeroom teacher called roll.  He was drawing eyes, Chris Cornell’s eyes, over and over, trying to get them right, trying to get their clear calm beauty on paper.
    The kid next to him saw it and whispered.  “That’s awesome, man.”
    “Thanks.”
    “What’s your name?”
    He opened his mouth.  Shut it again.  Who was Norman?  Preacher’s son.  What rhymed with Norman?  Normal.  Boring normal Norman.  Norman