Kids on Fire: A Free Excerpt From YA Novel The Arts-Angels Track 1: Drawn to You

“I don’t want to be the only Payless shoe in a building full of Pradas…”

When Gina Santiago, a thirteen year-old “Nuyorican” with rock star dreams, is accepted into the prestigious New York Academy of Arts and Talents she’s completely and totally bummed. Why? Gina got in for art—not music, like she really wanted. Plus, the school is on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (in other words, filled with rich kids) and Gina doesn’t think rice and beans mixes too well with caviar!

It’s Gina’s mother who’s all excited. She’s an artist, too, and wants her daughter to follow in her footsteps, instead of those of her father, Michael, who also had rock star dreams but died before ever achieving them.

But it’s the footsteps of her guitar hero, Angel “Wings” Dominguez, that Gina really wants to walk in. And wearing a medal of St. Michael the Archangel in honor of both her father and her idol, Gina decides to chase after that dream—even if it means battling her mother, rival guitarists, mean teachers, and snobby frenemies do it.

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

1. YOU CAN’T MAKE ME  3:24

 

The box was sitting on my bed when I got home, wrapped in gold paper and tied with a promising bow. It looked like a little gold brick glinting on top of my sky-blue bedspread.  I kicked off my high heels—just let them fly wherever, since they were killing my feet so bad—and scooped up the present.  There was no card, not even a note, but I knew it was for me.  It was my confirmation day, after all.

I had the feeling it was jewelry.  I tore it open.

I was right: It was a pendant.  A silver medal, actually, of St. Michael the Archangel. I gently tugged it out of the box by its chain and let the medal dangle before my eyes.

My teacher had told me to choose a saint’s name to add to my own for my confirmation.  I chose St. Michael.  I could write my name as Gina Isabella Michael Santiago now.

Most people figured I had chosen St. Michael in memory of my dad, Michael Santiago. And I had…mostly. But my cousin, Manny, knew the other reason.

“You’re not fooling me,” he said the minute he had found out.  “You picked that name ‘cause of Wings.”

Angel “Wings” Dominguez, the rock star, was only the best guitarist in the history of popular music and my personal hero.  He’d been my father’s, too.

“So?”  I shrugged, acting like I didn’t care that Manny had figured it out in two seconds.   “Papi wouldn’t mind,” I said.  “In fact, maybe they’re jamming in Heaven together as we speak.”

“Maybe.” Manny smirked.

“Hey, just because Papi got nowhere with his music and Angel got to be a superstar, it doesn’t mean they can’t know each other now.”

The image of my dad playing music with Angel Dominguez in Heaven made me smile. I scooped up the medal in my palm and took a better look at it.  It was pretty interesting.  It didn’t look like your typical religious medal.  It looked old—hand-carved, almost.  And its rectangular shape made it look more like a dog tag than a pendant.  “Cool,” I murmured.

Something made me flip it over.  That’s when I saw it.  The word fly was carved on the back.  Just fly, in all capital letters.  I frowned.  What was that supposed to mean?

I half tiptoed, half slid in my stocking-covered feet back out to the dining area/foyer, where my mother, uncle, aunt, and cousin were all standing around the dining room table.  We had all come back from church together so we were all still uncharacteristically dressed up.

Everyone was talking at once: my mother, as she was peeling aluminum foil off of the dishes she was going to heat up in the microwave; my Aunt Monica, as she was setting the table; my uncle, Tio Padre (he was a priest, so we called him “Uncle Father” in Spanish), as he took off his neat blazer to reveal his just-as-neat black vest; and my cousin, Manny, who was helping himself to a slice of avocado.  I wondered if any of them were actually listening to one another.

“Hey!” I yelled to try cut through the din.  Nothing.  “Hey!”  I yelled again. Finally, I bellowed it.  “HEEYYY!” It got their attention. As everyone turned to look at me, I dangled the pendant in the air.  “Who gave me this?”

My mother and uncle exchanged glances.

“Well, actually,” my uncle began.  “Um . . . ”

“I did,” my mother said. “Your uncle did, too.”

“And,” Tio Padre said, “so did your father.”

I stared at the pendant.  “What?”

My mother zapped her brother with a disapproving look and then flashed me a soft smile.  “Not exactly, mija,” she said.  She made her way over to me and gestured for me to hold up my hair so that she could fasten the chain around my neck.  “But it did belong to him, and we thought it would make a good gift for you today.”

“He’d want you to have it,” my uncle insisted.

“And what about what it says on the back?”  I let my mass of dark curls drop back down past my shoulders and turned to look questioningly at my mother.

She wrinkled her nose.  “What does it say?”

“It says ‘fly.’”

My uncle smiled.  “It means just what you think it means.  To . . . soar.  To go after your dreams.”

“Oh,” I said.  I liked that.  I rubbed the medal against my collarbone and smiled.

“Gina won’t have any problems going after her dreams when she enters the New York Academy of Arts and Talents in the fall,” my mother announced suddenly.

My mouth dropped open. “I got in?” I began to jump up and down.  “I got into NYAAT?”

“You did!  You got the scholarship!”

I shrieked and threw my arms around my mother’s neck.

“I’m so proud of you!” my mother said.

The New York Academy of Arts and Talents was a private school in Manhattan that was owned and run by professional artists.  It had once been the mansion of an old New York millionaire back in the 1800s.  In the 1970s, it had been bought by the billionaire art collector, Stanley Heiden-Murr.  He then turned it into this dream middle school/high school where kids could study art, instrumental music, vocal music (singing), dance, and drama. Before long, a bunch of artists, singers, dancers, actors, and musicians had all graduated from there—and had made it big.

Every year the school held auditions for scholarships for public school students from all over the city.  They had to.  Without a scholarship, a kid like me would never be able to attend NYAAT. I mean most of the students who went there were rich kids from Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I can’t say how talented they were, but their parents could easily afford the incredible tuition rates the school charged.  And while (like them) I had also been raised in Manhattan, I spent most of my growing up a little more north and a little more east than those kids had: Yorkville.

At first I was too afraid to apply.  There was no way I was going to be the only Payless shoe in a building full of Pradas.  Or the only plate of rice and beans in a school full of caviar and truffles.

But my mother works at one of Stanley Heiden-Murr’s art galleries—the one on 57^th—and had enrolled me in their summer art program ever since I could hold a paintbrush.  And when it was announced that the Catholic school I had been attending would be closing in the fall, my mother showed my portfolio to Stanley Heiden-Murr III, who insisted that I present it to the school and try out.   My mother was thrilled.

Me? Not so much.  The only way I would try out for the school, I told her, was if she would let me audition for their music program, because, even though my mom wants me to be an artist, I’m really a guitarist.

My mother finally broke down and let me try out for both scholarships.  And I did.  But now . . .

I could still hardly believe it.  “I got in for music?”

My mother pulled away from me.   “Mija, don’t be silly,” she said.  “For art of course.”

Joy drained out of my body and began filling in the cracks of the linoleum flooring.   “What?  Ma, are you kidding?”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart, but no.  You got a full scholarship for art.  Isn’t that wonderful, though?”

I could feel the concerned looks my uncle, aunt, and cousin were giving me.  They all knew how I felt about music.

“No, it’s not,” I said in a quiet voice.  I threw myself into the closest dining room chair.  “It’s wrong. All wrong.”

“What?” My mother asked.

I looked up at her.  “I’m not going.”

My mother clucked her tongue dismissively. “Stop being so dramatic.  You love art.”

I shook my head.  “I’m not going to NYAAT if I didn’t get in for music.”

“Gina, we’ve been over this before.”  My mother’s voice was stern.  I could tell she had forgotten there was anyone else in the room.  “We agreed that you would go to NYAAT if you were accepted, remember?”

“Yeah, but . . . ”  I had made that promise totally expecting to be accepted for music.     “They really said nothing about my music audition in the acceptance letter?” I thought I had done so well.  “Can I see it?”

My mother rolled her eyes and returned to the kitchen.  “Not now, no.”

“Why not?  It’s my letter!”

“Not right now.  It’s in a safe place.”

“I just want to see it.”

My mother pressed some buttons on the microwave.  “Another time. We’re having your confirmation party right now, remember?”  Then, tilting her head at me, she said in a voice that was probably supposed to be kind, “I’m sorry, nena, but your art audition was probably just stronger than your music audition.”

I winced.

“Besides, you already play guitar all the time as it is.  Do you really need to be doing it all day long in school, too?”

I placed my hands on my hips. “But you don’t mind if I’m drawing all day long?”

“That’s different.  Art is discipline, history, culture . . . ”

Was she kidding?  “So’s music!”

“You can get yourself a good job in the art world.”

“You mean like you?” I asked pointedly.  “As opposed to massively failing in music like Dad?”

My mother’s face hardened.  “Well, since you put it that way . . . ” she said. “Yes.”  She turned away from me.  “I don’t want you turning into your father.”

“How can I,” I blurted, “when I don’t even know what he looked like?”

“Gina . . . ” There was a tone of warning in her voice.

“Well, I don’t,” I insisted.  “If you hadn’t burned all his pictures—”

“Gina!  Don’t start with that again!”  She never wanted to talk about him.  “Now stop being such a baby and go wash your hands. It’s almost time to eat.”

With a growl of frustration I stomped off.  But instead of going to the bathroom to wash my hands I headed for my bedroom and slammed the door.

“Gina!” I hear my mother yell.

I ignored her and held my breath.

Here we go…. I thought.  I knew what was going to happen next and it did: Lava began bubbling up my veins.  There was only one thing I could do to feel better.  I grabbed my electric guitar, plugged it into its amplifier, and began tearing out a riff.  After a few minutes, the magma cooled down and I could breathe again.

Exhaling, I flopped belly-up on my bed and looked around my room.  My walls were covered with hundreds of sketches of my friends and family—as well as of strangers on trains, in parks, and sidewalk cafes—that I’d taped onto the walls like some kind of crazy wallpaper. Truth be told, I was a good artist, andparticularly good at figure drawing and portraiture.

The only portrait I could never “get” was my father’s.  I had no photo to go on—not even a memory.  Sometimes I tried to make up a face for him, thinking that if I just concentrated enough, or studied the features on my face that were different than my mother’s, that somehow I would be able come up with his.  But my face was too much like my mother’s side of the family.  It was all curves and circles.  Both my nose and my dark eyes were round, and my thick lashes and my espresso-dark hair (which my mother said was “enough for two heads”) were curly.  My body, on the other hand, was all angles, and I was pretty sure that it was just like his.  He must have been tall and gangly when he was a teen, too.

I often thought that if I could only figure out what he looked like, maybe it could help me figure out who I was, too.  But all I had to show for my efforts was the lonely, unfinished painting that had been sitting on my easel for almost two years.What I knew about my father was very little.  I knew that he had been a musician—a guitarist, just like me— and that he had tried to make it big playing in nightclubs.  I also knew that he didn’t.  That he didn’t make money.  That my parents argued about it all the time and that he kept on trying, anyway.  I knew that he slept late so that he could work nights and that he stayed out a lot.  Lastly, I knew that on one of those nights, when he was driving home on an icy road, he crashed into an eighteen-wheeler.

I wasn’t even born when it happened.  He never got to hold me—never knew I even existed.  That’s why there were no photos of him still around.  My mom had met, married, and lost him in less than a year.  When he died, she was so devastated that she destroyed almost all of his photos and clothes.

I guess it was her artistic instinct, but right before incinerating the last of it, she took some of his shirts and pictures, cut them up, and used them in a piece of art.  The mosaic hangs in my room directly across from my bed.  I know she based it on one of the photos she destroyed.  On one side there’s a figure I recognize as a younger version of my mother; on the other, my uncle.  In the middle, standing between them, is someone who is supposed to be my dad.  Only he’s made up of a collage of all the cut up photos and fabric.  He’s very abstract, like shards of stained glass, with no face, no recognizable features.  I’ve always liked it, though.  And having it directly across from my bed always kind of made me feel like he was looking out for me somehow.

I fingered the pendant of St. Michael.  I hoped my father really was looking out for me, and that somehow he’d help me to get the chance to follow my dreams as he had—but not let it end the same way.  I wanted to be more like Wings Dominguez of Mid-Flight.  When I found out he had been my dad’s favorite guitarist, he quickly became mine, too.  Even though I became a fan because of dad, I stayed a fan because he was seriously the world’s most amazing musician.

Wings had also attended the New York Academy of Art and Talent.  That was the whole reason why it had been my dream to go there, too, but now . . .  No.  I couldn’t stand getting to go to the same school that my guitar hero—and my dad’s—had attended and not getting to study music.   Just imagining all those other guitarists running around the school and following in his footsteps while I was left holding a paintbrush . . .

Words started forming in my head. I scrambled for the small spiral notebook and pen I keep on my nightstand and flipped it open to a blank page.  I strummed a few chords.  “I don’t wanna be you,” I sang.  “I don’t wanna be him . . . I just wanna do what I do, and that ain’t a sin.”

I was starting to really feel the beat.

 

You don’t gotta be right

I don’t gotta be wrong

We don’t gotta fight over this

Play the same old song

Yeah, I know you made me

But you can’t make me

Do what you do

Or be who you are

Yeah, you can’t make me

I said you can’t make me

Take up a paintbrush

and drop my guitar . . .

 

But Manny knocked on my door before I could get much further.  “Food’s ready,” he said in a tone that warned me not to keep my mother waiting any longer than I already had.   So with a sigh, I left my guitar on the bed and went back to the dining room.

Later that night I came across the biography of Angel “Wings” Dominguez playing on the music channel.

Even though I’d already seen it a million times, the moment I heard the narrator say, “He was named ‘Angel’—or ‘On-hel,’ as it’s pronounced in Spanish, but they called him ‘Wings’ because his fingers ‘flew’ over the guitar strings…” I settled down on the couch.

Five minutes into the show, my mother walked into the living room and scowled.  She picked up the remote control. “What else is on?”

“Ma!  Leave it!”

“But you must have seen this a zillion times!”

“So what?”

My mother aimed the remote at the cable box.

“Ma!  No!”

Did I mention that my mom has something against Angel Dominguez?  She can’t stand him. She says he fills my head with “unrealistic dreams just like your father.”  Sometimes, though, I think that she secretly hates how he succeeded in the music business when my dad never got anywhere.

“My novela will be on soon,” she said.

“Your novela isn’t on for another hour!”

To my surprise, she stopped fighting me. Instead, she tossed the remote aside, crossed her arms, and plopped down on the couch next to me.

I glanced at her from the corner of my eye.  What is she doing? I wondered. Is she going to stick around and make mean comments while I try to watch this?  But after a couple of minutes of her not saying anything, I was pulled right back into the story playing out on the television screen.

“Mid-Flight is arguably the greatest rock band of all time,” the narrator said, “and much of the credit for their success is due to Angel’s stylistic contributions on the lead guitar . . . ”

Luke Floyd, the band’s lead singer, suddenly appeared on the screen.  “The band first got started without him,” he told the interviewer.  “Sure, we had made some noise before he showed up.  And Auggie had a following . . . ”

Augustus Dubois had been the band’s original lead guitarist.  “But when he quit their band to join the band Bitterbean,” the narrator continued, “a shy young fan named Angel Dominguez came forward and asked to audition.”

“He was this scrawny kid,” said the voice of Timothy Yates, the drummer for Mid-Flight, as old photographs of Wings flashed on the screen.  “We’d seen him at a lot of our shows, and after a while we sort of adopted him.  We didn’t know that all along he was, like, this crazy songwriter and guitarist.  This little Mozart from El Barrio.”

The narrator continued. “With Augustus Dubois on lead guitar, Bitterbean went on to more than modest success, but from almost from the moment Wings stepped in, Mid-Flight skyrocketed to far greater fame and fortune.

“Comparisons between the two guitarists fueled a bitter rivalry between Dubois and Dominguez.  Some say it was prompted by Dubois’ jealousy of Dominguez, others that it was created by the press entirely.  Some say it was triggered by the famous Mid-Flight song, “Little Caesar,” which many believe to be about Dubois.  We may never know the truth. What we do know is that the two guitarists remained rivals for more than a decade—all the way up until Angel’s tragic death.”

Just hearing the words “tragic death” made my mind leap to what I knew of the events of that Earth Day, fourteen years ago.  Wings had become an active environmentalist by then, and needing to meet up with his band mates at a charity concert, he boarded a private plane bound for California.  He never made it.

There are actually pictures of him at the airport.  Whenever I see them, I always want to yell at him not to board the plane. As if I could shout through time.  There are pictures of his plane—video even—of the crash.  Of the fireball.  Of the twisted wreck afterwards.

I darted a glance at my mother.  This was usually the part when she pointed out that he met a similar end as my father.  She acts like music killed the both of them, and that my wanting to go into the music business was like wanting to go into something as dangerous as defusing bombs.

When she didn’t say anything I narrowed my eyes.  She definitely had something up her sleeve.  “But let us begin at the beginning,” The narrator said, drawing me back to the documentary.  With a happy sigh I sat back and let him tell me the story that I already knew by heart: How Wings had grown up in a bad neighborhood in the Bronx, how he had picked up his first guitar at the age of six, how he had won his school-wide talent contest in the sixth grade, and then earned a scholarship to The New York Academy of Art and Talent—

Uh-oh.  I suddenly understood why my mother was hanging around.

“You see that?” she blurted.  “Your hero went to NYAAT!  How can you not want to go?”

“Because he got in for music!”  I reminded her.  Butshe had a point.

Zipping my medal of St. Michael back and forth along its chain, I watched as they showed Wings sitting on the front steps of the school, then a candid shot of him playing guitar with other students in one of the music studios at the school. Finally they showed him wearing his cap and gown on graduation day.

I heard my mother’s voice echo in my brain: “How can you not go?”

I swallowed hard.  How could I not?

Click here to download the entire book: Janel Rodriguez Ferrer’s The Arts-Angels Track 1: Drawn to You>>>