Gone Bad by Lesley Choyce

Author:Lesley Choyce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Violence
Publisher: Lorimer
Published: 2011-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Around school, kids talked about the band and about our only live performance that had lasted for all of four songs. And it was like everybody was waiting for us to do something big.

I woke up one Saturday morning feeling lonely and hungry. I immediately went over to Kelsey’s thinking I could bum a decent breakfast. Kelsey’s father was off playing golf and her mom was sleeping in, so she seemed to enjoy my company. I asked her if she’d mind making me some eggs and maybe a dozen pieces of bacon.

“Sure,” she said. “No problem.” She took a whole pack of raw bacon out of the fridge, slipped it out of the wrapper and said, “Hold out your hands.”

I was thinking she was going to hand me a plate but instead she handed me this big greasy wad of bacon.

“You like it raw, don’t you?” she said. “You said you wanted eggs too?”

“No thanks,” I said, putting the bacon back in its wrapper and wiping my hands off on the tablecloth. “I’ll just make myself some toast.”

That’s when Kelsey opened up the Chronicle Herald and discovered our good fortune. A story on page eight said that a bunch of parents had declared our music to be “insulting, obscene, and dangerous.” Three sweeter words had never found their way into the English language. These good-hearted, upstanding adults called themselves Parents for Musical Morality.

According to some lady named Mary Montgomery, “The Condom Song” showed a “serious lack of respect for authority and promoted promiscuity in teenagers.” Mrs. Montgomery had heard her fourteen-year-old daughter listening to the song on the Internet. And Mrs. Morality Montgomery proceeded to go through the roof. She found an ally in the form of Richard Garber, another parent whose son had been warped out of his morality by our music and was forever damaged because he had listened to the lyrics of “Downtown Dangerous.”

“It’s censorship again,” Kelsey said. “They can’t do this.”

“Of course they can,” I said, spraying fragments of toast around the room as I talked. “If people like to hate our music, it means we must be doing something right.”

“How come the paper didn’t ask us to comment?”

“Kelsey, don’t get so serious about this. It’s just a bunch of old geeks with hormonal deficiency trying to stop us from having fun.”

“Yeah, but they’re also trying to censor us.”

“Let ’em. Kids love anything their parents say is bad for them.”

“Yeah, but the Parents for Musical Morality are going to be on our case whatever we do. And they’re going to try to have CKDU’s broadcasting licence revoked.”

“I’ll bust their legs,” I said.

“You always revert to being a caveman when you’re upset, don’t you?” Kelsey never knew when I was joking. But then neither did I.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing a good brain transplant wouldn’t cure,” she said. The way she said it really ticked me off. I was getting tired of Kelsey putting me down all the time. She still couldn’t accept me for who I was, and that really bugged me.

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