The Family Fang: A Novel Read Free Page B

earnest children. “It will make you ill,” Annie sang, and Buster again echoed her. “Don’t eat that bone,” Annie said, and then, before Buster could follow her, a voice, their father’s voice, yelled out, “You’re terrible!” There was an audible gasp from the crowd, so sharp that it sounded like someone had fainted, but Annie and Buster just kept playing. “We can’t afford the bill,” Annie said, her voice cracking with fake emotion.
    “I mean, am I right, people?” their father said. “It’s awful, isn’t it?” A woman in the front of the crowd turned around and hissed, “Be quiet! Just be quiet.” At this moment, from the opposite direction, they heard their mother say, “He’s right. These kids are terrible. Boo! Learn to play your instruments. Boo!” Annie began to cry and Buster was frowning with such force that his entire face hurt. Though they had been expecting their parents to do this, it was the whole point of the performance, after all, it was not difficult for them to pretend to be hurt and embarrassed. “Would you shut the hell up?” someone yelled out, though it wasn’t clear if this was directed at the hecklers or the kids. “Keep playing, children,” someone else said. “Don’t quit your day jobs,” a voice called out, one that was not their parents’, and this caused another shout of encouragement from the audience. By the time Annie and Buster had finished the song, the crowd was almost equally split into two factions, those who wanted to save Mr. Cornelius and those who were complete and total assholes. Mr. and Mrs. Fang had warned the children that this would happen. “Even awful people can be polite for a few minutes,” their father told them. “Any longer than that and they revert to the bastards they really are.”
    With the crowd still arguing and no more songs left to play on the set list, Annie and Buster simply began to scream as loudly as they could, attacking their instruments with such violence that two strings on Annie’s guitar snapped and Buster had toppled the cymbal and was now kicking it with his left foot. Money was being tossed in their direction, scattering at their feet, but it was unclear if this was from people who were being nice or people who hated them. Finally, their father shouted, “I hope your dog dies,” and Annie, without thinking, took her guitar by the neck and pounded it into the ground, shattering it, sending shrapnel into the crowd. Buster, realizing the improvisation going on, lifted his snare drum over his head and slammed it against the bass drum, over and over. Annie and Buster then left the disarray around them and sprinted across the lawn of the park, zigging and zagging to avoid anyone who might try to follow them. When they arrived at a statue of a clamshell, they climbed inside and waited for their parents to retrieve them. “We should have kept all that money,” Buster said. “We earned it,” Annie answered. Buster removed a sliver of the guitar from Annie’s hair and they sat in silence until their mother and father returned, their father sporting an angry black eye, the smashed glasses that held the camera hanging off his face. “That was amazing,” said their mother. “The camera broke,” said Mr. Fang, his eye nearly swollen shut, “so we don’t have any footage,” but his wife waved him off, too happy to care. “This is just for the four of us,” Mrs. Fang said. Annie and Buster slowly climbed out of the clam and followed their parents as they walked to the station wagon. “You two,” Mrs. Fang said to her children, “were so incredibly awful.” She stopped walking and knelt beside them, kissing Annie and Buster on their foreheads. Mr. Fang nodded and placed his hands softly on their heads. “You really were terrible,” he said, and the children, against their will, smiled. There would be no record of this except in their memories and of the few, stunned onlookers that day, and this seemed