Sequel: Earth to Me ›
Generation Why Bother
Gainesville Rock City!
I really should have been asleep at one in the morning that next Tuesday. Because it was summer, I didn’t really pay attention to the time I was spending on the Internet, and ended up blogging on this website called Mumblr into the wee hours of the morning. It didn’t help that Tegan was doing the exact same thing and talking to me over Facenook.
On the other hand, maybe it was a good thing both of us were wide awake and screwing up our sleeping patterns. At least, that’s what I tell myself after knowing what happened next.
Suddenly, my cell phone vibrated, an incoming text appearing on the screen. Assuming it was probably my service provider telling me to get a better phone plan (I never got texts), I played it off at first and ignored it.
Then Tegan messaged me, “OMFG CHECK YOUR PHONE OSHIE, MICK TEXTED ME AND IT’S BIG.”
I reached for my candy-bar of a phone and flipped the screen up to show the keypad. The screen shining brightly in my face, there it was – a text from Mick himself, who put his number in my contact list himself “just in case,” as he had said. All of the members did it at the get-together we had recently, and for obvious reasons, it was pretty cool to me. It was like having celebrities on call. Except I never called or texted them for fear of being annoying.
Sure enough, though, in all capital letters on my tiny screen, the message from Mick read, “CODE BANANA – COME TO THE APARTMENT ASAP.”
I messaged Tegan, “ohmygod code banana was that thing andy screamed when we were brought there for the first time wasn’t it?!!?!”
She typed, “YES NOW OMFG GET OVER HERE YOU NEED TO DRIVE US.”
I pulled on a pair of dirty-but-not-smelly shorts laying on my floor, didn’t bother changing out of my tanktop, and darted out of my room to my dad’s. I knocked on his door and heard some shuffling around in there, and when he opened the door to see me wide awake, he just squinted and said, “Don’t tell me you had a nightmare and want to sleep in here, Oshie.”
“No, it’s not – that hasn’t happened since I was – that’s not what I was knocking for,” I stuttered, trying to find my train of thought. “I think the band found another guardian. So they’re asking me to go over to their apartment real quick. So I have to drive over there.”
My dad kept squinting at me like I just puked in a bowl and tried to call it soup.
“And I have to drive Tegan. And we gotta go there, like, now.”
“A veces tú me sacas el monstruo en mi,” he grumbled, still half-asleep. Then he went off muttering a few more incomprehensible Spanish words out of my understanding and then said, “Okay. Fine. Just be safe, mijo. And don’t wake me up again.”
I ignored the fact that he just said I bring out the monster in him sometimes (he only ever uses that phrase sarcastically), and instead I hugged him briefly and said I’d be safe. Something told me he wasn’t all there when he let me go. I probably wouldn’t have let me go, but whatever. When I grabbed the keys to my car and met Tegan outside on my doorstep, our night was already on the path of awesomeness.
Granted, we both looked like messes, considering the fact that we were getting pretty tired, but in our excited states of mind, neither of us cared. We even drove with the radio off; the radio waves would probably lull us to sleep or distract us from the matter at hand.
Clad in pajamas, I parked sloppily behind the apartment complex and we jetted out of my car, racing inside and getting to the elevator as quick as possible. The ride up seemed like forever. But once the doors opened, we ran faster than we could ever jog around our neighborhood, straight for their room.
Tegan pounded on the door, and seconds later, Anthony answered it, looking completely frazzled with his hair sticking up everywhere. He didn’t even greet us – he just signaled for us to come in, and once the door was closed behind us, it was like they were all holding in their screams; at once, everybody started shouting like the world was already ending.
Andy was gawking at the monitor, which was shining blindingly bright, and mumbling sentence fragments that nobody could hear; Chance was hunched over the circuit board and surfing around on the monitor, causing a bunch of random images that made no sense to me or Tegan to flail across the screen. Mick was standing in the middle of the living room, looking like he didn’t know what hit him.
Since nobody else was doing it, Anthony decided to fill us in on what we had already somewhat inferred from the “Code Banana” text: “You guys, we know where they are! The seventh and eighth guardians were found at the same time!” he exclaimed, even smiling a bit.
Tegan and I didn’t even look at each other and we asked, “Where? Who? When? Why?!” in complete unison. Tegan added, “It’s hella lucky it was two at a time again!” as well.
Letting us know he was alive and running, Andy suddenly grumbled, “Gainesville, Florida!” so loud that everybody jumped. “Of all places, they’re in the middle of batshit nowhere! When we recorded our first EP back in 2009, we flew down to Miami to our record company’s headquarters and I was stuck working at an ice-cream stand to make extra revenue – that’s the closest we’ve ever been to ‘Gator Country’ and it’s the closest I ever wanted to be to that part of Florida…”
Mick nodded with almost every point Andy made, and then he concurred, “Yeah, those people could get scary.”
Chance whipped around from looking at the monitor. “But what matters is that we’ve got seven and eight!”
“Lightning struck again at a ska show and knocked out two dudes,” Andy sighed, staring at the monitor like it would give him all the answers. All that was there at that point were two pulsing radar circles right on America’s penis – Florida.
“So we know they’re both guys?” Tegan grimaced. “Ughhh...”
“That’s all we’ve been told so far – they’re both dudes and they’re both your age. 17,” Anthony informed us, stepping towards Andy.
I guess the stars just loved coincidences.
“But this means that we can officially get our powers and it’s all gonna fall into place! It can happen at any time now,” Mick cheered.
Anthony, standing above a couch and leaning on it, folded his arms. “Granted, we don’t know a thing about these people. We don’t know their names yet, or where they’re from as far as their personal backgrounds go. But our computer has told us where they live and what hospital they’re at. We have just enough information to get to them – Andy and I are going there first thing tomorrow to talk to them just like he did with you two.”
I looked at Tegan and she had a big smile on her face like she didn’t even care if the last two guardians weren’t who she was hoping for. I couldn’t help but mimic her expression. After all the waiting, the weeks rolling by without a spark, lightning had struck everyone’s lives once again, and with a fruitful outcome.
Nobody had a pessimistic thought in their brains at the announcement of the next two, and for that, I felt a little out of place for having a brief realization that our responsibilities were about to get a lot heavier. And because of that guilt, I shoved that thought deep back in my brain and continued to celebrate the good news. I had a tendency to worry about things months in advance without thinking about the present.
So for the time being, I smiled along with everybody else, and I relished in the thought of our intergalactic problem going well.
On the other hand, maybe it was a good thing both of us were wide awake and screwing up our sleeping patterns. At least, that’s what I tell myself after knowing what happened next.
Suddenly, my cell phone vibrated, an incoming text appearing on the screen. Assuming it was probably my service provider telling me to get a better phone plan (I never got texts), I played it off at first and ignored it.
Then Tegan messaged me, “OMFG CHECK YOUR PHONE OSHIE, MICK TEXTED ME AND IT’S BIG.”
I reached for my candy-bar of a phone and flipped the screen up to show the keypad. The screen shining brightly in my face, there it was – a text from Mick himself, who put his number in my contact list himself “just in case,” as he had said. All of the members did it at the get-together we had recently, and for obvious reasons, it was pretty cool to me. It was like having celebrities on call. Except I never called or texted them for fear of being annoying.
Sure enough, though, in all capital letters on my tiny screen, the message from Mick read, “CODE BANANA – COME TO THE APARTMENT ASAP.”
I messaged Tegan, “ohmygod code banana was that thing andy screamed when we were brought there for the first time wasn’t it?!!?!”
She typed, “YES NOW OMFG GET OVER HERE YOU NEED TO DRIVE US.”
I pulled on a pair of dirty-but-not-smelly shorts laying on my floor, didn’t bother changing out of my tanktop, and darted out of my room to my dad’s. I knocked on his door and heard some shuffling around in there, and when he opened the door to see me wide awake, he just squinted and said, “Don’t tell me you had a nightmare and want to sleep in here, Oshie.”
“No, it’s not – that hasn’t happened since I was – that’s not what I was knocking for,” I stuttered, trying to find my train of thought. “I think the band found another guardian. So they’re asking me to go over to their apartment real quick. So I have to drive over there.”
My dad kept squinting at me like I just puked in a bowl and tried to call it soup.
“And I have to drive Tegan. And we gotta go there, like, now.”
“A veces tú me sacas el monstruo en mi,” he grumbled, still half-asleep. Then he went off muttering a few more incomprehensible Spanish words out of my understanding and then said, “Okay. Fine. Just be safe, mijo. And don’t wake me up again.”
I ignored the fact that he just said I bring out the monster in him sometimes (he only ever uses that phrase sarcastically), and instead I hugged him briefly and said I’d be safe. Something told me he wasn’t all there when he let me go. I probably wouldn’t have let me go, but whatever. When I grabbed the keys to my car and met Tegan outside on my doorstep, our night was already on the path of awesomeness.
Granted, we both looked like messes, considering the fact that we were getting pretty tired, but in our excited states of mind, neither of us cared. We even drove with the radio off; the radio waves would probably lull us to sleep or distract us from the matter at hand.
Clad in pajamas, I parked sloppily behind the apartment complex and we jetted out of my car, racing inside and getting to the elevator as quick as possible. The ride up seemed like forever. But once the doors opened, we ran faster than we could ever jog around our neighborhood, straight for their room.
Tegan pounded on the door, and seconds later, Anthony answered it, looking completely frazzled with his hair sticking up everywhere. He didn’t even greet us – he just signaled for us to come in, and once the door was closed behind us, it was like they were all holding in their screams; at once, everybody started shouting like the world was already ending.
Andy was gawking at the monitor, which was shining blindingly bright, and mumbling sentence fragments that nobody could hear; Chance was hunched over the circuit board and surfing around on the monitor, causing a bunch of random images that made no sense to me or Tegan to flail across the screen. Mick was standing in the middle of the living room, looking like he didn’t know what hit him.
Since nobody else was doing it, Anthony decided to fill us in on what we had already somewhat inferred from the “Code Banana” text: “You guys, we know where they are! The seventh and eighth guardians were found at the same time!” he exclaimed, even smiling a bit.
Tegan and I didn’t even look at each other and we asked, “Where? Who? When? Why?!” in complete unison. Tegan added, “It’s hella lucky it was two at a time again!” as well.
Letting us know he was alive and running, Andy suddenly grumbled, “Gainesville, Florida!” so loud that everybody jumped. “Of all places, they’re in the middle of batshit nowhere! When we recorded our first EP back in 2009, we flew down to Miami to our record company’s headquarters and I was stuck working at an ice-cream stand to make extra revenue – that’s the closest we’ve ever been to ‘Gator Country’ and it’s the closest I ever wanted to be to that part of Florida…”
Mick nodded with almost every point Andy made, and then he concurred, “Yeah, those people could get scary.”
Chance whipped around from looking at the monitor. “But what matters is that we’ve got seven and eight!”
“Lightning struck again at a ska show and knocked out two dudes,” Andy sighed, staring at the monitor like it would give him all the answers. All that was there at that point were two pulsing radar circles right on America’s penis – Florida.
“So we know they’re both guys?” Tegan grimaced. “Ughhh...”
“That’s all we’ve been told so far – they’re both dudes and they’re both your age. 17,” Anthony informed us, stepping towards Andy.
I guess the stars just loved coincidences.
“But this means that we can officially get our powers and it’s all gonna fall into place! It can happen at any time now,” Mick cheered.
Anthony, standing above a couch and leaning on it, folded his arms. “Granted, we don’t know a thing about these people. We don’t know their names yet, or where they’re from as far as their personal backgrounds go. But our computer has told us where they live and what hospital they’re at. We have just enough information to get to them – Andy and I are going there first thing tomorrow to talk to them just like he did with you two.”
I looked at Tegan and she had a big smile on her face like she didn’t even care if the last two guardians weren’t who she was hoping for. I couldn’t help but mimic her expression. After all the waiting, the weeks rolling by without a spark, lightning had struck everyone’s lives once again, and with a fruitful outcome.
Nobody had a pessimistic thought in their brains at the announcement of the next two, and for that, I felt a little out of place for having a brief realization that our responsibilities were about to get a lot heavier. And because of that guilt, I shoved that thought deep back in my brain and continued to celebrate the good news. I had a tendency to worry about things months in advance without thinking about the present.
So for the time being, I smiled along with everybody else, and I relished in the thought of our intergalactic problem going well.