The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

Rajiv was upset about the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ appearance on Saturday Night Live that weekend. Lauren had watched it at Paula’s, flopped next to Paula on her bed. Lauren hated that band but didn’t say so, because Stitch and Rajiv loved them. Stitch and Rajiv talked a lot about the band’s “musicianship” and their “influences,” which Lauren knew nothing about. She did know that all their songs were about fucking—they wore barely any clothes onstage or in their videos, probably because they wanted to be ready at any time to do all the fucking they sang about—and even the songs that weren’t about fucking seemed to be them trying to prove they could write a song that wasn’t about fucking, like the cheesy ballad that Stitch and Rajiv would yell-sing down the hallways. They were big dumb naked red-faced fuck machines, except for the guitar player. John. John was the one. Sad brown eyes, ridiculous cheekbones. Paula had a picture of John smoking an emotional cigarette taped to the headboard of her bed. In the video for the cheesy ballad, John wore a Kurt Cobain outfit, cardigan and baggy grandpa trousers and a knit hat with a pom-pom on top, and maybe the outfit was like an upside-down distress flag to show everyone that John was in the wrong band and he needed out, and the outfit would look stupid on anyone else, but on John it looked cool, the same way whatever Stitch did was cool because it was Stitch who was doing it. On Saturday Night Live, John didn’t wear a shirt on the first song, but it was more like he had forgotten to wear a shirt, or he was too sad toput on a shirt, or like the lead singer had ripped off John’s shirt to force him to fake being the rebel fuck machine he soclearly was not. John hunched over his guitar on the far side of the stage, looking cold and hungry, doing the bare minimum.Falling asleep on his feet like a horse.

“John is so depressed,” Paula said. “He can’t handle the fame.” Paula talked about all her rock stars like this, like theywere her friends who confided in her, but in cryptographs through the pages of Kerrang! and Spin, and now she was gossiping about her famous pals behind their backs. She talked about Kurt Cobain’s mysterious stomach conditionlike she was his personal physician.

John did look depressed up there on the Saturday Night Live stage, but pointedly so, focused and industrious in his depression, like he was studying for the depression SATs, and thelead singer was so infuriated with him by the end of the first song that he kicked John right in the ass—flung himself tothe ground and spun around on his back and brought his knee to his chest and punched his foot forward and awp! It was like something PJ would do to Sean, except then Sean would have sat on PJ’s face and farted in vengeance. John just took it. Lauren and Paula looked at each other to confirm that the kick had really happened. Paula was taping the show, and when it went to commercial she stopped and rewound the tape so they could examine the kick, frame by wobbly frame. When the band came out for their second song, the cheesy ballad, John had put on his Kurt Cobain outfit and he was playing the familiar notes of the song’s introduction but in the wrong order, backward, slowed down, bent, in a different scale, or de-tuned, his arpeggios a vortex, a drain that his bandmates were circling, and as the song reached what should have been its apex and John, poor dear scrawny gorgeous kicked-in-the-ass John, stepped up to the mic to sing the climactic chorus that was also the title of the big hit cheesy ballad, he screwed up his face and instead of singing the words, he went, “WOOOOOOO!”

Paula burst out laughing.

Again, higher-pitched this time. “WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

John sounded like a girl, like a fan. Paula flung herself back on her bed and bicycled her legs in the air for joy and laughedsome more.

“Why did he do that?” Lauren asked Paula, but she knew why. No one knew how much power John had until he decided to use itto say no, to reject what was happening and create something anarchic and better. He said no without saying it. It was startlingand childish, and that’s why it was beautiful. At the end of the song, the lead singer glared at John like he was a swivelinghead in middle school, but it didn’t matter. It was done. They’d been in a war and the war was over and the big dumb fuckmachine had lost and John had won.

“John is so lovely,” Lauren said, and Paula WOOOOOed in agreement.

“It’s so unfair to the rest of the band,” Rajiv was saying in Tedquarters now. “What an asshole.”

“And what a choice of insult, Rajiv!” Mr. Smith said.

“But we’ll always remember that he did that,” Lauren said. “Would we be talking about them right now if John had just shownup and played like normal?”

“Like you know anything about music,” Rajiv said. “Name one song of theirs that isn’t on the new record.” Stitch stopped-dropped-and-rolled to a spot just behind Rajiv, drew his kneeto his chest, and extended his leg until his foot pressed on Rajiv’s backside.

“I just think it’s cool that he took a risk and did something crazy that we would all remember,” Lauren said. “I bet he wasscared.”

“Answer me—name one song,” Rajiv said, shimmying his ass against Stitch’s heel. Lauren was always in the witness box when Rajiv got started onmusic.

She looked at Stitch on the carpet, his foot grinding into Rajiv’s backside. Stitch screwed up his face and hit the note exactlyas Lauren could hear it in her head: “WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

The tape that Stitch had given her the night of The Man in the Moon was a copy