The Taming of the Drew Read Online Free

a blush crawling up my face. I held the long black instrument case tight against my chest, hiding behind it, feeling the metal flip-buckle digging into my breastbone. My eyes even started to sting. Did he think I was a fool? “You heard me — I don’t do naked.”
    “You’re right. Sorry,” he muttered. “But you’re not taking another step until you hear me out.”
    This was way more emotion than we usually had hanging in the air between us. Usually I did stuff and Tio trotted along. He’d never before thumped me, yanked me and rapped me, all in a few minutes. It didn’t really hurt that much, but still. What it actually hurt was my feelings.  
    Tio had the humungo camera still clutched in his left hand. He shoved his right fist in his new cargo pants. No one in our group ever mentioned the fact that Tio still bought his clothes in the boys department. Thinking about it made me a little less angry with him.  
    “Viola’s probably already waiting. Say what you got to say.”
    He pulled some folded papers out of his thigh pocket. “Look, I grabbed these from the Legacy Campus News files. Some are confidential tips. Some are stories that got printed in the school paper.” He clearly wasn’t giving me the camera until I read the pages.
    I could feel time ticking away as I took them. The distant roar of the school stadium rose and ebbed. The game between the Legacy Lemurs and the Cal B-team was going to end soon, I could feel it down to my bone.  
    My trombone, that is. When you play for a marching band, you get a sense for these things. It’s like you can feel the tide shifting in the deafening sound all around you, so you stand, clear your spit valve, and start paying attention — otherwise you miss the downbeat for playing the team off the field.
    And then the school’s newspaper’s headlines in my hand caught my eye. Celebrity Senior Involved in Drunken Brawl. Pac-10 Comes Calling. The Pit- Bull Named To Parade’s High School All-America List. Legacy Probation Extended for The Dog — Will He Ever Get Out Of The Pound?  
    “You see that one?” Tio extended a shaky finger to hand-written sheet sticking out underneath the others, where the words “Dog’s homecoming date complains about aggressive behavior” were written. “There’s more. ‘From all such devils, the Good Lord deliver us.’”
    “You’re doing it again,” I said. Whenever Tio gets really stressed, he involuntarily spouts lines from Shakespeare. Instead of Tourette’s syndrome, our group calls what Tio does Bard-ette’s syndrome. When no Hostiles are around, we have some code phrases to help Tio rein it in — “stop with the verbal ‘Spears” was our best, because saying it seemed to help him snap out of it. The whole thing started in Middle School.  
    Tio was the Target. There were so many reasons for it. First, well, there’s the fact that puberty passed him by. Second, his name, Lucentio, came from Shakespeare, which I personally thought was an unforgivable crime committed against him by his English-major parents. Finally, there was the Shakespeare obsession. Tio used to read and re-read Shakespeare obsessively.  
    Why Shakespeare — other than the name connection, that is? Shakespeare probably gave Tio some smart ways to answer his middle school tormenters — the old writer-dude always was handy with an insult guaranteed to impress your adversary. If, that is, your adversaries wore codpieces and neck-ruffs. Tiny Tio had faith, though, so he read and re-read Shakespeare like there was a mystical answer buried in the plays. But then the words burrowed so deep in Tio’s mind, he sort of lost control of them. Things popped out. His mom saved up for months and got him a few visits with a therapist, who said that Tio’s Bard-ette’s syndrome would go away on its own eventually. Tio himself always says, hey, at least I didn’t get obsessed with quoting Harry Potter.
    “This guy — the Dog — isn’t allowed to kill