Free The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham

friends. What’s wrongwith me? you thought, and tried not to think, all the time. You worried that there was some fundamental thing that might be missing, some difference between you and other girls that was just now starting to show itself but that would become more and more apparent as you grew up, like the progressive divergence of two nearly parallel, but not parallel, lines.
    VON BRUYLING
    Once, though, a boy did say something to you.
    “Any time you want it, I can give it to you.”
    He was older, a ninth-grader (the school went up only through ninth grade), someone whose voice had changed, who shaved. He said it to you in a low voice, coming up behind you on the stairs and smoothly passing you before you were sure you’d actually heard him.
    But you did hear him. His name was von Bruyling. You hadn’t liked him, even before he muttered to you on the stairs—he wasn’t nice, he wasn’t smart. You got that what he’d said had been a joke. A mean joke. You, he was implying, were the last person who would ever want it, and the last person he’d ever want to give it to.
    Still, sometimes after that when you were home lying on your bed, with the door shut and your hand between your legs, you thought of von Bruyling’s stupid face, and his low voice growling those words over and over.
    THE STRING BASS
    Another embarrassment: to play an instrument that looked like you. They’d assigned it to you, or you to it, in your old public school, because you were tall and strong and could physically handle it. Now you were stuck with it. String bass players were rare, so you’d won a scholarship to take lessons at a conservatory. Your mother, almost maniacally proud of what she had decided must be prodigious musical talent, drove you there every Saturday. The string bass lay across the backseat, its neck and scroll sticking out through the open car window; you wished for a tree growing a little too close to the road, or the sudden press of a tunnel wall. The bass decapitated; you and your mother safe; but your mother somehow knocked sensible, agreeing to let you quit.
    Your bass teacher loathed you for loathing the instrument. Every lesson was the same: you would plunk out a few notes, and he would stop you. “Did you practice?”
    “Some,” you would say.
    “You have to practice.”
    “I know.”
    Practicing was the most boring thing you had ever done. Plunk plunk plunk (rest). Plunk plunk plunk (rest). That was pretty much how the string-bass part went in every piece of music your teacher assigned you. He was right, you never practiced.
    Then one afternoon at school, a boy came up to you and said, “I hear you play the bass.”
    “Yeah,” you said, wary. You weren’t expecting another von Bruyling incident—this kid was younger, and he seemednice—but you had found that in this school humiliation lurked everywhere and jumped out when you forgot to look for it.
    “Because I’m putting together a rock band,” the boy, whose name was Henderson, went on.
    So then you were the bass player in a rock band.
    During the whole time you were in it, the band played only one number, over and over, a song called “Groovin’ with Mr. Bloe”—which, in turn, at least the way your band played it, had only one phrase of music, repeated over and over. The bass part went: plunk plunk-plunk-plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk plunk; and so could not claim to be much more interesting than the bass parts your conservatory teacher assigned you. But playing in a rock band felt strange and glamorous, out of character for you. Upstairs in your room you practiced “Groovin’ with Mr. Bloe” with a diligence and fastidious musicality that would have made your conservatory teacher cry if he had ever had the chance to see it.
    After a few weeks you made up your own words to “Mr. Bloe”—an incantation for Henderson to fall in love with you—and sang them softly in your room while you practiced, and silently whenever you