Free Rock Star by Adrian Chamberlain

Chapter One
    After school I walk up the front steps of our house and head straight for the kitchen. I’m starving. There’s a peanut butter jar on the counter. But sure enough, someone’s used it all up. Empty. That puts me in a bad mood.
    There’s almost nothing in the fridge. Some stuff that looks like dog food in a Tupperware container. Milk. Old celery. I grab the celery and take a bite. Ugh. All wilty and squishy. So I bend over and gob it into the garbage bin. This is disgusting and weirdly satisfying at the same time.
    I’m still bent over the garbage when Dad calls me into the living room.
    “Duncan!” he yells. “Duncan!”
    You’d think I was twelve or something, not fifteen. I’m in grade ten.
    School’s not my favorite thing, to tell you the truth. Mostly it’s boring. Some days I even hate it.
    But one thing I do like is the school band. I play bass guitar. Sure, the songs are pretty lame. What do you expect from a big orchestra, with clarinets and French horns and all that stuff? But playing bass guitar is pretty cool.
    It’s just me and Dad now. I don’t have brothers and sisters or anything. Mom died two years ago. She had cancer. It was quick. One day she sat down with me to tell me. She’d been sick for a while, and the doctors thought it was something else at first. I forget what. But then they figured out it was cancer. Six weeks later, she was dead.
    “Duncan McCann! Can you come in here for a second?”
    I stop gagging and stand there, motionless, like a video on pause. I thought the house was empty. Something in Dad’s voice sounds different. I remain still. I’ve got a pretty good imagination. If I pretend something, I can even forget what I was doing before. Five seconds go by. Then I walk into the living room. There’s this blond lady sitting on the couch with Dad. Weird. Unbelievable. And Dad looks kind of nervous or something. Even though he’s smiling.
    “Duncan, I’d like to introduce you to Terry. She’s a friend of mine,” says Dad.
    “Hey, Duncan,” the lady says. She’s smiling. She’s taller than Mom was. And sort of all-right-looking for an older lady. Dad’s fifty. And Terry’s probably forty or something. She’s wearing a leather jacket. Mom would never have worn a leather jacket. Not in a million years.
    “Hi,” I say. I’m still holding my backpack. I drop it on the wood floor. It weighs a ton and makes a loud noise, like a kick drum.
    “Yes. So anyway, Duncan. You’ll be seeing a bit of Terry around the house. I mean, we’re…well, seeing each other. She and I.”
    I was getting it now. Dad has a girlfriend. This lady. She smiles and holds out her hand.
    “Okay,” I say, shaking her hand. Then I pick up my pack and run upstairs to my room. I slam the door. I fall on my bed, face into my pillow, which sort of smells like corn chips. I’m not crying. I mean, I’m fifteen years old now. I’m not crying, but I feel like it.
    After a while, I turn over. My face is still hot, but I feel better. I look around and—this may sound dumb—but I pretend I’m all alone on a desert island. Like I’m washed up on the beach, waking up with the tropical sun beating on my back. Then I look up. The walls of my room are mostly covered with posters of bands. I’m crazy about music. There’s one of Death Cab for Cutie. An old Beastie Boys poster.
    There’s also a painting on the wall that my mom made. It’s of a cabin by Shawnigan Lake. We once rented it for two weeks one summer. I was ten. That was my best summer. We swam in the lake almost every day. When I dived down, I could see green shafts of sunlight underwater. After swimming, me and my friend Jason would go to the corner store to buy candy. We walked in the dirt beside the road. Brown powdery dust squished up between my toes. Sounds dumb now, but back then I thought that was the greatest.
    I’ve got Mom’s beat-up old record player on my desk. I’ve got all her records too. She liked the Beatles