Just Listen(44)

"No, I'm not," I said.

"What do you call it, then?"

"Being honest."

He just looked at me for a second. Then, with a sigh, he took another bite of the sandwich. "Fine," he said, chewing. "Let's move on. What about that thrash metal song by the Lipswitches?"

"Too noisy."

"It's supposed to be noisy! It's thrash metal!"

"I wouldn't mind the noise, if there were other redeeming qualities," I told him. "It's just someone wailing at the top of their lungs."

He popped the last bit of crust into his mouth. "So no techno and no thrash metal," he said. "What's left?"

"Everything else?" I said.

"Everything else," he repeated slowly, still not convinced. "Okay, fine. How about the last song I played, the one with glockenspiel."

"The glockenspiel?"

"Yeah. By Aimee Decker. There was a stand-up bass, and some yodeling at the beginning, and then…"

"Yodeling?" I said. "Is that what that was?"

"What, now you don't like yodeling , either?"

And on and on. Sometimes, it got heated, but never to the point where I couldn't handle it. The truth was, I looked forward to my lunches with Owen, more than I ever would have admitted.

Between our discourses on early punk, big band and swing, and the questionable redeeming qualities of techno music, I was learning more and more about him. I now knew that although he'd always had a passion for music, it wasn't until his parents divorced a year and a half earlier that he'd become, to use his word, obsessed. Apparently the split had been pretty ugly, with accusations going back and forth. Music, he told me, was an escape. Everything else was ending and changing, but music was this vast resource, bottomless.

"Basically," he said one day, "when they wouldn't talk to each other, I got stuck in the middle, doing all the go-between work. And of course, it was always the other one who was terrible and inconsiderate. If I agreed, I was screwed, because someone got offended. But if I disagreed, that was taking sides, too.

There was no way to win."

"That must have been hard," I said.

"It sucked. That's when I started really getting into the music thing, all the obscure stuff. If nobody had heard it, nobody could tell me what I was supposed to think about it. There was no right and wrong there." He sat back, waving away a bee that was circling around us. "Plus, around that same time, there was this college radio station out in Phoenix that I started listening to—KXPC. There was this one guy who had a late-night shift on the weekends… he played some seriously obscure shit. Like tribal music, or seriously underground punk, or five full minutes of a faucet dripping. Stuff like that."

"A faucet dripping," I said. He nodded. "That's music?"

"Obviously not to everyone," he replied, shooting me a look. I smiled. "But that was kind of the point. It was, like, this whole uncharted territory. I started writing down the stuff he was playing, and looking for it at record stores and online. It gave me something to focus on other than all the stuff going down at home.

Plus, it came in handy when I needed to drown out the screaming downstairs."

"Really? Screaming?"

He shrugged. "It wasn't that bad. But there were definitely some freak-outs on both sides. Though, to be honest, the silence was worse."

"Worse than screaming?" I said.

"Much," he said, nodding. "I mean, at least with an argument, you know what's happening. Or have some idea. Silence is… it could be anything. It's just—"

"So freaking loud," I finished for him.

He pointed at me. "Exactly."

So Owen hated silence. Also on his list of dislikes: peanut butter (too dry), liars (self-explanatory), and people who didn't tip (delivering pizza didn't pay that well, apparently). And those were only the ones I knew about so far. Maybe it was because of his stint in Anger Management, but Owen was very open about the things that pissed him off.

"Aren't you?" he asked one day, when I pointed this out to him.

"No," I said. "I mean, I guess I am about some things."

"What makes you mad?"

Instinctively, I looked over at Sophie, who was on her bench, talking on her cell phone. Out loud I said, "Techno music."

"Ha-ha," he said. "Seriously."

"I don't know." I picked the crust of my sandwich. "My sisters, I guess. Sometimes."

"What else?"

"I can't think of anything," I said.

"Please! You're seriously saying the only thing that bugs you is siblings and a genre of music? Come on.

Are you not human?"

"Maybe," I said, "I'm just not as angry as you are."

"Nobody's as angry as I am," he replied, hardly bothered. "That's a fact. But even you have to have something that really pisses you off."

"I probably do. I just… can't think of one right this second." He rolled his eyes. "And besides, what do you mean no one's as angry as you are? What about Anger Management?"

"What about it?"