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sings?” she asked.
    “I’m working on that.”
    “Find a singer,” she said. “And get back to me.”
    She pulled a pizza out of the oven and started slicing it into pieces.
    You would not want to be that pizza.

The Fringers
    I CAN’T KEEP YOU IN SUSPENSE ABOUT THE BAND COMING TOGETHER . It did.
    The way I got this to happen was pretty much the same way I got myself to keep up an above-four-point average. I put myself out on a limb. I made sure that it mattered more than anything. I took classes that were almost too hard and I had something enormous to lose if it didn’t come together. I’m aware there are people who motivate themselves normally but this has always been my approach. Head on the chopping block.
    My father once told me that the difference between people who succeeded and those who didn’t was willingness. He wrote music because he was willing. My mother believed the opposite. She was powerless. She surrendered to the God of her understanding and He told her to work in aclothing store. Willingness had bigger plans for me. And what made a person willing? I didn’t know that.
    Something told me I could not just be someone who talked about music.
    I wrote my last column of “Perspective, People.” It was a bit of a diatribe about Fleetwood Mac, encouraging everyone to go back and discover them. In the last paragraph I announced that I was going to take a little time off to pursue my own musical aspirations with my band the Fringers, which consisted of myself, Vivien Wyler on vocals, Georgia Stone on keyboards, and Ella Tandy on drums.
    The article came out and I sat and waited in the lunchroom to be assaulted by my fellow band members.
    I had taken this approach because of something else my father once said to me. He said, “If you want to make a thing happen, say it is so, and then keep your word.”
    Viv, Gigi, and Ella found me at roughly the same time in the lunchroom and they stood around me in a semicircle of glares. The article had the desired effect. They had seen it in print and now it had to be true.
    “What are you talking about?” Gigi shrieked. She got very shrieky when anyone interrupted her carefully scheduled future plans. “We aren’t in a band.”
    “We could be, though. It’ll be good for us,” I said.
    “Good for us how?” she demanded.
    “And what us?” Viv asked. “I barely know you guys.”
    Ella just glared and chewed on a thumbnail. Because of her silence, I knew she was already adjusting to the idea. Glaring was her natural state, anyway.
    I explained. I said we didn’t have to stay together forever,but I thought we should put a band together and enter the talent show.
    “The talent show?” Viv exclaimed. “Nobody takes the talent show seriously.”
    “But the winners of their school talent shows automatically qualify for High School Band Night at the Whisky.”
    High School Band Night was a pretty well-known affair. Because we lived in L.A., teens who played in bands were taken very seriously. They were surrounded by the music industry—agents, managers, always scouring the city for the next big thing. Kids in L.A. attended High School Band Night at the Whisky the way kids in other cities attended the prom or football games.
    “What’s the upside of it?” Viv asked. “I have to have an answer because my dad always wants to know what the upside of stuff is.”
    “My parents will want to know how it’s going to look on my college résumé,” Gigi agreed.
    I looked at Ella, who was still just glaring at me, chewing on the nail.
    “What are your issues?” I asked.
    “Who says I have issues? I just don’t like finding out I’m in a band by reading it in the school paper.”
    “You told me to find a singer and get back to you. Well, I found the singer.”
    I smiled at Viv and she looked away.
    “I don’t know if I can just sing in front of people like that,” she said. “I’m used to singing in a large group.”
    “Why am I playing