Chapter 11

"And how are we this morning?" I asked as Tami and I walked up the hall. Robbie was standing by her locker.

"Fine. Dad drove me to school."

"And what's the reading on the bitchiness meter?"

Robbie looked slightly annoyed. "About a two. I'm good."

"You don't want to hit, kick, or strangle anyone?"

"Tony, I said I was sorry."

"It's not that. It's just that football practice has been canceled for today. You won't have a chance to work out your aggressions."

"Tami's going to be a widow if you don't lay off. It's been a week. Forgive and forget."

"Oh, I forgave you last Monday. But I have a memory like an aardvark."

"An aardvark?"

"Elephants remember a long time. Aardvarks remember forever."

Both girls gave me funny looks.

I grinned. "But the good news is, we have an appointment with Mr. McCoy after school."

"When did you set that up?"

"Let's see, the bus got here about eight minutes ago. Kevin told me about practice about six minutes ago, some kind of teacher's meeting. So about four minutes ago, Tami and I went to the office and called Mr. McCoy. Then about two minutes ago, we walked over here, and here we are.

"You're annoying," Robbie said with a smile.

"But cute."

"Too cute for your own good," Tami said from beside me.

"I know," I said and flinched as Tami punched me in one arm and Robbie the other. "Ow."

"Why do you put up with him? Robbie asked.

"I do it for humanity. If I dump him, some poor innocent girl will get stuck with him. Besides, he makes me laugh."

I suppose there are worse epitaphs.

"So what do you think?" Robbie asked as we stood outside the middle school waiting for our rides.

I squeezed Tami's hand as I looked at Robbie. "I think Mr. McCoy's right. We should e-mail ASCAP and get good information, but if it's fifty dollars a day like he thought, that could get real expensive real fast.

"Yeah, eight to ten songs, that's five hundred bucks a day."

"Twelve songs."

"Twelve?" she asked looking at me funny.

"That's what we figured when we wrote it."

"Wrote what?"

"The musical, of course," Tami said with a smile.

"You wrote an entire musical in a week?"

I grinned. "Over the weekend, actually. Tami, Traci, and the girls helped."

"And you were going to tell me, when?"

"Now."

"You wrote an entire musical over the weekend," Robbie repeated to herself.

"Well, I came up with a storyline, then all the girls helped me find songs to fit the story, then we just had to write dialog to connect the songs together."

"Twelve songs," Robbie repeated.

"Yep, though that could change. Right now we have one male and three female singing parts and one female and three male non-singing parts."

"Don't forget the angel," Tami reminded.

"Oh yeah, we have an angel that could be a boy or a girl. We don't have a song for him/her now, but we'd like one. We'll probably have to write it ourselves. We can steal somebody's music and do new lyrics.

"I still can't believe you wrote an entire musical in one weekend."

"Well, the school has to submit an entry for the contest on November third. That gives us less than two months to put everything together."

"It was nice of Mr. McCoy to say he'd help with the musicians and everything," Tami added.

"That'll help a lot," I agreed. "How many do you think we'll need?" I asked Robbie.

"How should I know? I didn't even know we had a play already."

I grinned and nodded to Tami. She took off her backpack and pulled out a sheaf of papers and handed them to Robbie.

Robbie looked down at the papers in her hand. Forty-two pages, single spaced, and that didn't include the lyrics of the songs, just the titles. "I've talked to Sally and Chad, and they're in. Toby said he'd think about it. Do we need more?"

"Well a hundred piece orchestra would be nice, but we can probably get by with three. That gives us piano, guitar and drums," I said.

"A violin would be nice, maybe a trumpet." Tami mused.

"You know, Mr. McCoy knows almost everybody in the high school and middle school. He'll have suggestions."

Tami and I nodded.

Robbie looked down at the stack of paper in her hand again as her dad drove up. "Do I get to know the name of our musical?"

Tami and I looked at each other and grinned. "Well, at the moment I'm calling it Love Stories," I said.

"And I'm calling it Work in Progress," Tami added.

"So officially, it's Untitled Project," I concluded.

"Works for me," Robbie said as she got in the car with her dad.