Rock 'n' Roll Rebel Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Ginger Rue

  Cover illustration by Amanda Haley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to:

  2395 South Huron Parkway, Suite 200, Ann Arbor, MI 48104

  www.sleepingbearpress.com

  © Sleeping Bear Press

  Printed and bound in the United States.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rue, Ginger, author.

  Title: Rock ‘n’ roll rebel / written by Ginger Rue.

  Description: Ann Arbor, MI: Sleeping Bear Press, [2016]

  Series: Tig Ripley; book 1 | Summary: Looking to propel her into the spotlight at her middle school, thirteen-year-old Tig Ripley starts an all-girl rock band with her cousin and two school friends.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016007658

  ISBN 9781585369454 (hard cover)

  ISBN 9781585369461 (paper back)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Rock groups--Fiction. | Popularity--Fiction. Middle schools--Fiction. | Schools--Fiction. | Self-perception--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.R88512 Ro 2016 | DDC [Fic]--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016007658

  For the Orbits, who never made a record or sold out a concert hall, but whose drummer is still one of my all-time favorites. I love you, Daddy!

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  On the long list of reasons why Tig Ripley shouldn’t have set out to form an all-girl rock band, probably the biggest was the fact that she couldn’t play an instrument or even sing particularly well.

  But Tig had never been one to let details interfere with her plans.

  After all, there were so many good reasons to do it—like major middle-school street cred, for one. If she were in a band—and the leader of it, no less—she’d cease to be a background extra in the drama that was Lakeview Heights Middle School. She’d become the leading lady, and girls like Regan Hoffman, with their sixth sense of exactly how many bangle bracelets to stack per arm and when to put a belt with a dress for a touch of I-just-threw-this-together—well, they’d just be gnats on an Alabama summer night. Who could compete with a girl who plays drums?

  But the real catalyst behind Tig’s interest in playing drums? Truth was, it had a lot to do with Will Mason.

  No, Will Mason wasn’t some dreamy, unattainable guy Tig barely knew but had been pining away for since he’d accidentally brushed up against her in the hall or asked to borrow a pencil. Hardly. What Will lacked in dreaminess, he more than made up for in annoyingness. One might have said Tig and Will were friends . . . except for the fact that she couldn’t stand him. They sat at the same lunch table, but that was more a function of their having the same social status (basically none) and the same circle of friends—the pretty-smart B students who could have probably made As if they cared enough to try.

  Will played drums in the school band and carried sticks in his back pocket at all times. Tig felt that Will thought this made him cool, so one day when he began teasing her about her hair, her braces, or one of the other billion things he picked on her about, she decided to set him straight.

  “Let me guess: you’re so into your music that you can’t be without your drumsticks for even a moment?” she asked. “Or do you just want everyone to know you’re a drummer because that’s, you know, such a big deal?”

  “I suppose you think you could play the drums, Antigone,” he countered.

  Tig’s first name was Greek and pronounced Ann-TIG-ah-nee, but Will liked to pronounce it AN-ti-gone, as in, “against going away.”

  “I’m sure I could if I felt like it,” Tig said.

  “Yeah, right. Girls don’t play the drums.”

  Of all the guys to get stuck next to at lunch. Will always sat at the end of the adjoining table of his best friend, Sam, so Will and Tig usually ended up elbow to elbow.

  “Um, 1960 called,” she said. “They want their male chauvinism back. What, you think girls aren’t strong enough to beat two puny little sticks against a circle? Or we’re afraid we might break a nail?”

  Will scoffed. “It’s not an issue of physical strength. It’s an issue of leadership. Drummers set the pace. The whole band depends on them for the beat.”

  “You’re actually saying a girl couldn’t lead a band?” Tig asked.

  “The truth hurts.”

  “For your information, if you can learn how to play the drums, it can’t be that hard. I could probably get in a band before you could.”

  “Maybe,” he said, trying to sound like he wasn’t riled. “It’s good business to throw a good-looking chick in a rock band. Probably get more gigs that way.”

  Although Tig was a little thrown by the “goodlooking chick” comment (did Will think she was good-looking?), she was more focused on his ridiculous arrogance. Like he knew anything about business or gigs. Did he not realize he was thirteen, like nearly everyone else in their class? “I suppose you’re speaking from your vast gigging experience in the band room, playing snare with a metronome?”

  “Haters gonna hate,” he said.

  “And furthermore, you assume that bands are made up of guys.”

  “They are.”

  “Ever hear of the Go-Go’s?”

  “I think you just made my point. The only girl band you can think of is from, like, thirty years ago. And besides, the only reason you know who they are is because you s
aw their documentary on VH1 about how they crashed and burned. Girl bands are gimmicks. They don’t work.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because girls can’t get along, period, much less keep a band together. Girls are too jealous of other girls. They can’t trust one another.”

  “Will, you’re such a doofus,” said Kyra, who’d been half listening while drinking her water.

  Somebody else at the table changed the subject, and that was that.

  Except that it wasn’t.

  Because when Tig got home, she called Big Daddy. “I want to learn how to play the drums,” she told him.

  Chapter Two

  Back in the sixties, Tig’s grandfather had been a drummer in a band called the Orbits. It was Big Daddy and his best friend, Jerry, and a couple of other guys. The lead singer had been a guy named Danny Speed. Big Daddy swore that was the singer’s real name, even though it sounded made-up. The Orbits had broken up when Big Daddy and Jerry had enlisted in the navy, and nobody knew what happened to Danny Speed, though Tig liked to think he’d been really handsome and had moved to somewhere cool, like California.

  In any case, Big Daddy hadn’t played drums in years and had sold his set decades ago. But as the oldest grandchild on her dad’s side of the family, Tig was the apple of her grandfather’s eye. So he wasted no time after Tig’s phone call and went out and bought her a respectable but reasonably priced drum set.

  They set up the drum kit in the green house, which wasn’t a greenhouse as in a place where you grow stuff, but an actual green-painted house built from cement blocks. It had been the “mother-in-law apartment” for the former owners of the house Tig shared with her parents and younger sister and brother. It had one main room, a bathroom, and a closet, and they’d used it only for storage up until that point. Tig’s mom was happy to put the drums in there instead of the main house, since Tig’s younger sibs already made enough noise for anybody.

  “It must be in the genes,” BD said when he finally got the drum kit all set up. “Going to be a drummer like your old BD!”

  Tig had stopped calling her grandfather Big Daddy a year or so ago, thinking BD sounded less babyish. “Yes, sir. Hey, BD, how long do you think it’ll be before I can play a full song? A couple of weeks, maybe?”

  BD laughed. “Maybe a little longer than that. It takes coordination. Kind of like ‘rub your head, pat your tummy.’”

  After only one lesson with BD the Monday after he assembled the drum kit, Tig was almost ready to give up. “This is way worse than trying to rub your head and pat your tummy,” she told him. “It’s more like ‘rub your head, pat your tummy, kickbox, and juggle knives.’”

  “You need a real teacher,” he said. “You’ll do better with a stranger, someone you’ll be too embarrassed to disappoint.”

  So Tig met her new drum teacher, Lee, at the local music store the following Friday afternoon. He taught her the names of each drum in the kit: the bass was the one on the floor played with her right foot, the snare was the main drum, and the others were called toms—the high tom, the middle tom, and the floor tom. The cymbals were called the ride, the crash, and the hi-hat. Lee said she would use the hi-hat most often, at least at first.

  “Everything with drums is basically looking for the booms and the chicks,” Lee told her. Tig thought it sounded like some sort of slang for “boys and girls.” But then Lee put on some music with a distinctive drumbeat: the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”

  “This is way before your time—and even way before mine, but the drum intro is great, and it’s slow enough that you can kind of pick out what’s going on,” Lee explained.

  After he played the song’s intro a few times on his phone, boosted through the speakers in the lesson room, Lee sat down and played along on his electronic drum kit. Tig noticed that the bass drum pedal seemed to be moving quite a bit, even on this kind of slow song. She couldn’t always tell which was an actual kick of the drum pedal and which were vibrations from the pedal having been kicked, but it looked cool. She couldn’t wait until she could do that. Lee handed her a drumstick and let Tig hit the snare every time there was a chick. It was fun, and Tig couldn’t help but feel pleased with herself that she could now differentiate between a boom and a chick. She felt proud to have learned something from the very first lesson. Things were a bit harder at home when she tried doing both the booms and the chicks by herself for her practice exercises, but Lee assured her it would just take some getting used to.

  He taught her all the basic drum fills—patterns played with the sticks—and flams, which were a little bit trickier because they were patterns that involved letting the stick bounce instead of deliberately hitting it.

  As frustrating as it was to practice the same fills and flams over and over and over with varying levels of success, Tig felt cool playing the drums. Powerful. Hitting the bass drum with force so that she could feel the boom all the way in her stomach went against everything she’d ever been taught about being a proper Southern young lady.

  She wondered why she hadn’t started a long time ago.

  Chapter Three

  “You’ve got to learn how to play bass,” Tig told Kyra on the phone after she’d had three once-a-week drum lessons.

  “What? Why?”

  “So you can be in my band,” Tig replied.

  “What band? When did you join a band?”

  “I didn’t. That’s why I need you to learn bass, so I can form one.”

  There was no way Tig could do something as monumental as forming a band without including Kyra. They were first cousins and had been joined at the hip since birth. Tig’s mom and Kyra’s dad were sister and brother, and the Bennett family was tight. Even when Tig and Kyra did get mad at each other, they had little choice but to make up or endure infinitely awkward family gatherings.

  “Why bass?” Kyra asked. “Why not guitar?”

  “Because bass players look cool,” Tig said. “You don’t have to really move a lot, so you get to have this kind of I’m-so-bored-with-being-a-rock-star-that-I-could-fall-asleep thing going on onstage. Totally cool.”

  The real reason Tig had chosen bass for Kyra was because Lee had told her it was the easiest instrument to choose from. “The guitar requires a sizable amount of fine motor skills, of dexterity,” Lee had said. And while Kyra was many things, dexterous wasn’t one of them. Kyra’s dad had nicknamed Kyra “Grace” when she was little because she was always running into stationary objects.

  Pretty much anybody can walk a bass line, Lee had said.

  “I don’t know,” Kyra said. “I’m not really musically inclined.”

  “Come on,” Tig replied. “Pretty much anybody can walk a bass line.” She said it as if she knew what it meant.

  “Well, it might be fun to be in a band,” Kyra said.

  “It’ll be awesome. It’s, like, we’ll, you know . . . matter.”

  “We could be popular!” Kyra’s pitch went up a full octave.

  “It’s not about that,” Tig said with a sigh. One thing Kyra and Tig did not have in common: Kyra desperately wanted to be in with the Regan Hoffman crowd, while Tig . . . Well, it was more like she wanted to prove to the Regan Hoffmans of the world how little she cared about them. She wanted to transcend them. While Kyra dreamed of sitting at Regan’s lunch table, Tig fantasized about being invited to sit at Regan’s lunch table only to refuse the invitation. That, she had tried several times to explain to Kyra, would be the height of cool, but Kyra wouldn’t buy it. She couldn’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t want to be popular.

  “So, look, are you going to do it or not?” Tig asked.

  “All right,” Kyra said. “But where are you going to get the other musicians?”

  Kyra had a point. Tig didn’t really know how she would go about finding the other band members, but she didn’t want to admit that to Kyra and make it seem like she didn’t have it all figured out.

  “Simple,” Tig said. “Auditions.”
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  “Auditions?” Kyra asked. “Where? Who? When?”

  “You forgot what, how, and why,” Tig said. “Look, I’ll put up a sign on the bulletin board in the music store. We can have a cattle call audition.”

  “At the school auditorium?”

  No way, Tig thought. She didn’t want Will or anyone else at school to know about the band until they were formed and actually good. “How about at your church building? They have a stage there.”

  “I could probably set that up, I guess,” Kyra said.

  “Then it’s settled. We’ll have auditions a week from tomorrow.”

  Chapter Four

  A week and a day later Tig and Kyra sat in the small auditorium of Kyra’s church building downtown. They both had clipboards, although neither was sure what they were supposed to do with them.

  “No one’s going to show up,” Kyra said.

  “Sure they will,” Tig said. “You’re always saying to think positively.”

  “Okay. I’m positive no one’s going to show up.”

  “Very funny,” Tig said. She was just about to start playing a game on her phone when someone walked through the doorway.

  It was a guy. A high-school guy.

  A cute high-school guy.

  With a guitar.

  “Is this the place for the auditions?” he asked. He had blond hair that fell over his forehead. He was broad-shouldered and had perfectly white, straight teeth.

  “Yes!” Kyra said. “Come right in!”

  Tig cleared her throat. “What she means is . . . this is the place for the auditions for the all-girl band.” Tig held up a copy of the flyer she’d posted in the music store.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was thinking maybe that was optional?”

  “Totally optional,” Kyra said.

  “No, it’s not,” Tig said.

  “Tig!” Kyra whispered a little too loudly. “Are you blind? He’s gorgeous!”

  “He’s also a guy,” Tig replied.

  “Precisely my point!”

  “I’m sorry,” Tig said. “But this really is for girls only. Thanks for coming, though.”

  “Worth a shot,” the guy said.

  “Call me!” Kyra yelled just as the door closed behind him.