Scott Terreto is second chair clarinet in the school band and I am first chair clarinet and that is why he hates me, I guess—saying, when he whips his Levi’s jacket off the floor after practice, in a voice so loud that everyone can hear, “You’re gonna get it, Tory Haimen,” even though Scott’s parents have more money than mine and can go to Simmond’s music shop and buy him an expensive clarinet and a steady supply of new reeds, and my parents had to get my clarinet at the second hand store, he is still full of bitterness because he is not as good as I am and inferiority rankles, I guess, and for him it’s like a constant battering of the ego with the humility stick, I guess, and that’s why he glares poison arrows across the band room with his green eyes which are actually the color of old celery, contrasting so cruelly with his straw-blonde hair and screaming red acne that one is forced to admit the plain, sad truth that Scott Terreto is not cute, and no girls, least of all Lisa Meyer, whose heavily-shampooed hair drapes the first chair in the flute section, will go out with him.

Least of all Lisa Meyer whose light lips pucker over the oblong hole of her flute and whose sweet breath condenses there on the chrome, whose eyes stray shyly in my direction when we’re playing “Westminster March,” and I wink over the music stand, and she tries not to giggle because she knows we’re going to meet behind Pizza Hut after practice to make out. I shoot a quick glance beside me and see that Scott has seen the whole subtle exchange and my glance makes him so mad he accidentally skips a cadenza and says Shit! out loud and the band teacher, Mr. Dougherty, taps his little baton for us to stop and tells Scott, in front of everyone, that he should try to have a better attitude, that he’s never going to have a crack at first chair if he doesn’t make a more positive effort, and Scott’s acned face turns even redder, but I try not to feel too bad because, I reason philosophically, that’s just life in eighth grade, you know?

But I do feel kind of bad for him anyway when all the girls in the flute section giggle and point at him and I can see he’s really embarrassed and his hand goes self-consciously to the bandage on his arm where he’s getting the long, painful series of rabies shots, which is something I know about because I was kind of responsible for Scott getting rabies in the first place because one afternoon when Lisa and I were making out in the parking lot behind Pizza Hut, we caught Scott spying on us from behind the dumpster, and when I yelled his name and started to run toward him he threw a tennis ball at me and yelled, “Tory Haimen, you suck!” then took off running before I could get to him, but he’d accidentally left his books there (his History book and his Introduction to Algebra book) and I was so PO’ed I threw them in the dumpster. Lisa said that wasn’t very nice but laughed anyway, and we were surprised the next day when Scott wasn’t at band practice and the teacher told us that he’d had to go to the hospital to begin a series of excruciating injections to counteract the rabies virus he might have contracted from a rat bite he got while playing around in a dumpster.

And the day after there was a school-wide bulletin announced in every class, which warned us kids against playing in dumpsters because we might get bitten by rats and the bulletin mentioned Scott Terreto by name and I guess that’s when everyone started calling him Rabie-Face, which I had to admit was not nice but pretty funny, and at this moment, when the whole class is laughing at him for saying Shit! out loud and being yelled at by the teacher, one of the trumpet players says, “Good goin’, Rabie-Face,” and Scott gets so mad that he throws down his new, expensive clarinet and storms out of the band room, pushing over my music stand as he blows by me hoping, I assume, that I’ll feel threatened but I don’t because Lisa looks over at me, eyes brimming with tenderness and admiration, and I feel strong in love, knowing that one day we’ll be married and have a nice apartment of our own where she’ll play flute in the kitchen and I’ll get constantly to kiss her mouth which is soft as ice cream and sweeter.