Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie: Dangerous Pie–No More Vacation

I sat there for a few minutes, staring at the back of Renee Albert, who’s the hottest girl in the eighth grade, trying to concentrate.

Miss Palma is always going on and on about brainstorming and lists and “prewriting,” so I started a list of truly annoying things.

Well, I’m having trouble crafting my prose.

Wow, that’s an ambitious topic!

Having any brother would be horrible, I suppose, but having my particular brother, Jeffrey, is an unrelenting nightmare.

How would you like to be King of the Planet for eight glorious years, and then suddenly get demoted to Vice-King?

And while he’s being much too cute and following me around, he also destroys all of my stuff, including my self-esteem and my sanity.

I have some rules about this: He may not PLAY the drums, he may not pretend the cymbals are shields and he is a knight, he may not hide IN the bass drum, and pretty much anyjeffrey-to-drumsticks contact is a massive no-no.

But on one fateful afternoon last year, Jeffrey threw the rules out the window.

At the clinic, during what I like to think of as the Two Glorious Minutes, Carter Beauford himself called me up front to demonstrate a double-stroke roll.

After I did it, he said I had “nice technique” and signed my sticks, right there in front of a roomful of drummers!

Pots and pans were everywhere — don’t ask me how I had somehow not noticed this on my way downstairs the first time — and Jeffrey was stirring some pretend concoction in the deepest pot of all.

I advanced toward him, with what must have been a disturbing gleam of violence in my eye.

This fiasco happened after my All-City High School Jazz Band concert last June.

Just then, Renee Albert stopped right next to us to congratulate her boyfriend (we’ll just call him Biff), a sophomore guitarist with an alarmingly perfect complexion and muscles like Barry Bonds.

Jeffrey saw Renee and started to whirl toward her — she lives around the corner from us, and I guess not even four-year-olds are immune to her charms and wiles.

Jeffrey saw Renee and started to whirl toward her — she lives around the corner from us, and I guess not even four-year-olds are immune to her charms and wiles.

Yet still, I knew I would never have time to run across town to the local zoo, steal an elephant tranquilizer gun, run back, and fire it into Jeffrey’s buttock before he could blurt out something that would mortify me and destroy my social status forever.

Yet still, I knew I would never have time to run across town to the local zoo, steal an elephant tranquilizer gun, run back, and fire it into Jeffrey’s buttock before he could blurt out something that would mortify me and destroy my social status forever.

"Let him finish, Peasant," to which Renee and my mom simultaneously turned to me and burst out, "they call you PEASANT?"

Miss Palma gave me an A on the journal entry — she called it “droll” — so I guess I actually managed to get some use out of Jeffrey’s antics before the chaos of this year started.

Miss Palma gave me an A on the journal entry — she called it “droll” — so I guess I actually managed to get some use out of Jeffrey’s antics before the chaos of this year started.

He’s an accountant, and because he sometimes works really late hours during tax season, he had the walls filled with extra insulation for warmth and soundproofing.

This came out muffled, and we must have looked confused.

So while everybody else was writing whatever the day’s journal was supposed to be, I was agonizing over the details of this math problem.

I triumphantly popped my second-to-last TicTac into my mouth and strolled out of the room, whistling “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop.”

Plus, Renee took her time walking off, too, so I had to plod along behind her.

Dad goes to work. Younger son goes to emergency room. Younger son allegedly has cancer.

It turned out that Jeffrey knew he might be pretty sick — try cauterizing a kid’s gushing nose with a heat gun without him figuring out that something is up — but didn’t understand too much about the details.

Actually, he looked like some deranged anteater, but I didn’t figure that would be the thing to tell him.

Soon the raccoons would be taking over our streets, stealing from our garbage cans, leaving eerie trails of Dinty Moore beef stew cans in their wake.

I think every group of friends has a “guy” for each different function — like the “sympathetic guy,” the “funny guy,” the “jock,” the “guy who gets picked on.”

Of course, Miss Palma had to know that I was doing something strange, because again and again I’d be writing three and four pages, supposedly about these completely impersonal topics, and then folding down all the pages one by one.

If you ask me, he could use a good, stern talking-to as well.

By now, he probably has every single nurse there wrapped around his finger, waiting on him hand and foot, rushing over to get him the remote control for his 300-channel satellite TV so he doesn’t have to exert himself.

Which made for a fun ride home, although at least she couldn’t snicker uncontrollably and bug me about my homework record at the same time.

Have you ever tried to sleep while a pint-size maniac is rattling off hundreds of detailed inquiries about the web-spinning mechanisms of the common barn spider?

After my hug, she stepped back for a moment, and I made a pretty major social blunder.

My dad gave me a sheepish look and started off slowly after her.

I could tell by the slouchy way he was walking that he didn’t exactly relish the thought of arriving at the car and facing his angry wife and sick son, but on the other hand, he certainly couldn’t just stay in the doorway because then he’d have to face me.