Battle of the Bands

by Eric Smith

  In the hallway, Beckett looked down at her sock feet. You abandoned me first, she thought.

  “No. No, I won’t. She can apologize to me.” Hailey’s voice faded in and out; she was pacing. “But whatever. Let’s talk about something else. I can run sound this weekend if you need me to.”

  Beckett drank the cocoa in her room, and then screamed, very satisfyingly, into her pillow. And that was that, until February.

  She knew it was the saddest senior year of all time. She knew, too, that she was mourning for a whole bunch of things she didn’t want to look at too closely. No one from the Sleepyheads, Audrey or Yiyun or Blake, had texted her in months — okay, maybe she hadn’t texted them, either, but still — and when she asked Gabe, the guy next to her in AP Euro, to pass a pen, he blinked at her like she’d stepped through a rip in space-time, like she was a ghost. When she found herself looking forward to playing euchre with her mom that Friday night, maybe going all out and getting two kinds of Doritos, she knew that she needed a self-intervention.

  She drove Barry the Bug to Brunswick Square, marched directly into Hot Topic, and bought herself a new Zildjian T-shirt. (On the way out, she got cinnamon pretzel bites.) The next day, she wore it to school.

  It was like the key that unlocked everything.

  Two dudes she’d never seen before gave her fist bumps in the cafeteria and asked what kind of kit she had. Her AP English lit teacher, Mr. Zagajewski, almost made up for dress-code-shaming her on the first day by saying, “Good morning, Miss Van Halen.” And in AP Euro, Gabe kept looking at her sidelong while Mrs. Rasmussen lectured about the revolutions in France in 1848.

  Finally, Gabe leaned over and said, “Why’d your parents name you Beckett?”

  “Mother’s maiden name,” she whispered back. “Why’d your parents name you Gabe?” He opened his mouth, and she said, because she couldn’t help teasing him, “No. Stop. Because they thought you were an angel?”

  He snorted. “It’s my uncle’s name. He’s great, actually. He taught me to play bass.”

  Mrs. Rasmussen stopped writing on the whiteboard. “Mr. Gould and Miss Scibelli, do you two have a question for the whole class?”

  “No,” they chorused, and when the bell rang ten minutes later, Gabe trotted to catch up with Beckett at the door.

  “You play drums,” he said, like it was a revelation. His eyes were very, very blue.

  Beckett wished, fervently, that she had brushed her hair that morning. “I do,” she said. Something possessed her to add, “I’m really good.”

  They stopped in the hall, just outside the cafeteria doors, and he looked her full in the face and said, “I bet you are,” like they were in an actual, honest-to-God movie. “Do you wanna eat with me and my band? We’re talking about what we’re going to play for Battle of the Bands this year.”

  Beckett raised her eyebrows. “Your school has a battle of the bands?”

  “It’s your school, too. Where have you been,” he laughed, “under a rock?”

  And she had to admit that yeah, she kind of had been.

  Shifter Focus were all really nice, even if Micah blinked at her and said, “Don’t you work at Chipotle?”

  “I do,” she said.

  “Rock on,” Micah said, and Beckett gave her a weak thumbs-up, like her nights refilling the cilantro rice were punk or something. “Do you like the Police?”

  “Oh man.” Beckett sighed. “Stewart Copeland. I love Stewart Copeland.”

  Gabe grinned a little, draping his arm over the back of her chair. “I really like that vibe. Kind of like mathematical reggae? But punk? I mean, to be clear, we’re talking about the Police before Sting went all patchouli.”

  “Are we also talking about your band?”

  “Yeah,” Gabe said. “It’s what Shifter Focus wants to be. And like . . . it could be your band, too, if you wanted.” Brenner and Micah nodded along like a pair of bobbleheads with dip-dyed hair. It was actually pretty adorable. Beckett found herself unaccountably blushing. Why, Prince Charming, she thought semi-hysterically, are you asking me to the ball?

  “I’m in,” she said, and Brenner hooted, too loud, and Gabe said, “See, what did I tell you? I found a drummer!”

  Beckett felt her megawatt smile dim a bit. It was a truism, she knew, that drummers were the spotted leopards of the band world. An endangered species. (Which made guitarists and bassists like . . . seagulls, maybe, or squirrels.) Drums were expensive, and loud, and the Scibellis were the only family Beckett knew growing up who had encouraged their kid to learn. Her mom had been a drummer in college, after all.

  And her dad had played guitar. That’s how they’d met. And how Hailey had ended up with her Fender Jazzmaster. She and Beckett started writing songs together the summer they were twelve, noodling around late one night after watching Stop Making Sense with their dad. Beckett had had other projects over the years, the Sleepyheads the most serious of them by far, but she’d always thought —

  Well, she’d always thought of Miss Somewhere as her band.

  And now she had another one. By the end of the week, word had spread, and suddenly she had two. Rock Your Mouth’s drummer had graduated the year before and they were desperate. “We’re emo,” Theo told her, jogging to keep up with her as she power-walked to physics, “but, like, Jimmy Eat World emo, not screamo, though I sort of want to go in that direction —”

  Beckett needed another commitment like a hole in the head, but at the next bank of lockers she could see her twin sister staring at her, white-faced, like it was such a surprise to see Beckett talking to anyone that she might lie down and die right there. “I’m in,” Beckett said, too loud. “When’s practice?”

  Practice was Tuesday and Sunday mornings. For Rock Your Mouth, at least. She went to Gabe’s sister’s apartment to practice for Shifter Focus on Wednesdays after school — they were less serious but actually more technically proficient; the math reggae of it all wasn’t a lie — and then she started playing with the Marcia, Marcia, Marcias on Fridays when Sindy approached her in March, literal hat in hand. She quit Chipotle but kept her breakfast shifts, got her acceptance letter from Emerson College, and hung a pennant above her bed. When she wasn’t in practice, she was out at all-ages shows with Gabe, who still hadn’t kissed her, even though they talked for hours in her tiny Bug in his driveway when she went to drop him off, and sometimes she went to Denny’s with Sophia, the keyboardist from Breakfast of Champions, and they peeled apart straw wrappers and ate baskets of fries and Beckett talked about Gabe and Rock Your Mouth and how she never saw her mom anymore and everything else in the world but Hailey, like it was a hole in her heart that she had plugged with her smallest finger, like if she made one wrong move she might bleed out right there on the cracked plastic of the corner booth in New Brunswick, New Jersey, miles and miles away from home.

  But she had friends, she reminded herself. She had a life, in a way she never did before. So what if her twin sister spent dinnertime at their house texting under the table and avoiding all eye contact?

  One night in late April, after Beckett had tried, tentatively, to ask Hailey if she could help with her English presentation only to be met with a wall of silence, Beckett took herself down to the basement to pound out her frustration on her kit. It was all there — the fairy lights, the Mazzy Star poster from her dad’s old dorm room, Hailey’s guitar on its stand. Beckett stood for a moment, chewing a little on one of her sticks, and then she grabbed her laptop out of her backpack and plugged it into the speakers and from the depths of her hard drive pulled up “I Love This One,” the first song she and Hailey had ever recorded. The gauzy wail of the guitar, the brushes on the snare, Hailey’s vocals way down in the mix. Beckett turned it up louder, and louder, until she knew the song was filling the house, twisting up through the vents, to where her sister was lying in bed, pillow clutched to her chest, staring at the stick-on stars on her ceiling. She thought maybe she wanted the song to make Hailey cry, and then she tho
ught, No, I don’t want that, I want the song to tuck her in, I want it to sing her to sleep, and then Beckett was sniffling into the back of her hand and she pushed her laptop shut and stared down at her shoes until she was sure Hailey had fallen asleep.

  How did she know? They were twins.

  Some things you just knew.

  Did she imagine it, the next night, Hailey’s footsteps outside her bedroom door, middle of the night, that she maybe whispered “I’m sorry” and “How did we get here?” Beckett didn’t think so.

  When Sophia broke up with their drummer in May, Beckett knew it was just a matter of time before Breakfast of Champions asked her to play with them for Battle of the Bands, and when she did, she said yes. Why not? Well, Hailey was working sound (with her new best friends, but still), and every band Beckett said yes to meant another forced conversation with her sister about levels and mics, and it would be awkward and awful and —

  And it would be another chance to make things right.

  On the night of Battle of the Bands, as she loaded her drums into the minivan, Beckett could see her dad watching from the window, his ball cap hiding his face. He’d be in the audience later to watch the show.

  She shut the trunk and then stood there, shifting her weight, worrying her lip, before she sprinted back into the house. Sound check was in twenty minutes. Hailey was already at school; she’d taken Barry the Bug without asking. Beckett found she didn’t really mind.

  “Forget something?” her dad called as Beckett ran past him into the basement, and when she came back up with her sister’s guitar case strapped to her back, he grinned, opening the front door for her with a flourish. “That’s my Becks.”

  “Bye,” she said, kissing his cheek. “Wish me luck.” And she wasn’t sure (okay, she was pretty sure) that as she backed the minivan out of the driveway, she heard her dad holler, “Go get your girl!”

  Beckett tugged at the collar of her Zildjian shirt as she drove. Six green lights in a row. It was a good sign.

  Cecilia Montgomery was born from rock and roll.

  Okay, that’s not exactly true, but it sounds way better than “She came from the loins of two best friends who were madly in love with each other, one a rock star, the other the owner of a recording studio, and because of this she has been cursed with greatness.” Cecilia should be in love with rock and roll. After all, her mom signed and recorded some of the coolest bands of her generation, and her father played with them. She has it in her veins. The pulse of the speakers, the squeal of guitar licks, the salty-sweet lyrics are in her blood.

  But the sad and honest truth is —

  She fucking hates rock and roll. She hates most music, actually. She hates how loud it is, so loud she often comes home from her dad’s concerts with migraines. She hates the crowds. She hates how everything smells like beer and sweat, even when there isn’t any beer in the venue. She hates the years she spent hunkered back in the corner of her mom’s recording studio, asking about algebra problems between one track and the next. She hates the tabloid gossip about rock stars. She hates the radio DJs chattering about the latest scoop.

  She hates all of it.

  So why did she say yes to going to a battle of the bands tonight with Roxy Williams? She can’t even begin to understand it. The winner gets studio time with her mom’s studio and a record produced by the lead singer of the New Romantics (a.k.a. her dad), so it’s definitely the place she wants to go the least.

  “Do you think I should wear the black top or the green one?” she asks her little sister, Cherie, as she switches between the two in the mirror. They’re two years apart, but they couldn’t be more different. Cherie is outgoing, stylish, popular even. Cecilia is . . . well. She likes NPR and podcasts about the eldritch gods of Appalachia.

  “Like it matters,” Cherie replies, and then she looks up from reading IndieTrash on her phone. “Unless it’s a . . . date? Is it a date?” She abandons her magazine and sits up on Cecilia’s bed. “Please say it’s a date!”

  Cecilia bristles but doesn’t say anything.

  Her sister rolls her eyes and flops back down onto the bed. “You’re hopeless.”

  Maybe, but that isn’t anything new. What Cherie doesn’t understand is that being friends with Roxy feels like teetering on the edge of a cliff. Every day she keeps worrying that it’ll be the day Roxy realizes that being friends with her isn’t worth the hassle.

  Though somehow Roxy never does, and Cecilia can’t fathom life without her now. She tries to imagine it sometimes, but her heart hurts every time she does because there’s just a hole there where Roxy should be.

  She tries not to think about it, and she tries not to get angry when people say they’re just friends. Like it’s dismissive. Something that doesn’t mean anything, something that can be traded or borrowed or lost and never missed. But Cecilia knows that if she ever lost Roxy, she would feel it so deep in her bones she would be completely and utterly destroyed. Maybe forever.

  “Wear something cool, at least,” Cherie says as she pushes herself off of Cecilia’s bed. “I’m going out with David tonight. If you see me at the Battle, don’t say hi.”

  “I won’t know you at all,” Cecilia promises, because unlike her, Cherie is made for rock and roll. She has the whole aesthetic down — the ripped jeans, the long dark hair, the thick black eyeliner, and the walk that could command an entire venue to fall to its knees. As she leaves, their dad approaches from the stairs and scrubs Cherie’s head as she passes. She glares as she retreats into her room and closes the door.

  Their dad leans against the doorway, arms folded over his chest. His brownish-red hair is run through with gray, as is his beard, and Cecilia tragically inherited that not-red-but-not-brown hair, almost curly, as if a hairstylist had gotten lazy halfway through styling it. He nods his head back toward Cherie. “What was that about?”

  “Sisterly love,” Cecilia replies, and holds up the two shirts. “Black or green?”

  “Green.”

  She wrinkles her nose.

  “Or . . . black?”

  She turns the two shirts so she can look at them again. She doesn’t like that answer, either.

  Her dad sighs and comes into her room and puts a hand on her shoulder. She comes up to his chest, barely, because apparently the fates wanted to add insult to injury and make her his polar opposite — a short and boring daughter who doesn’t bleed rock and roll. “You’ll look great in whatever you choose. Roxy coming to pick you up?”

  “Like always.”

  “Is this a . . . ?”

  “A what?” She prickles when he waggles his eyebrows. “A date? No — God, no, we’re just friends —”

  Her father holds his hands up in defeat. “Okay, okay, sorry! Just friends.”

  She looks away, a little embarrassed. How come it sounds different when other people say it? Just friends, like it’s a barrier and not a blanket? Because being Roxy’s friend is amazing. Because Roxy is cool and funny and smart. Being Roxy’s friend should be all she should want.

  Because Roxy could never possibly feel the same way about her.

  Not ever.

  “It’s okay, Dad. She’ll be here in a little bit.”

  “Fun — she staying the night again?”

  “I think so.”

  Roxy usually stays over on the weekends. They watch silly anime abridged series, and by the time they’re tired enough for Roxy to go home, it’s already one in the morning and Roxy lives across town. It’s only common sense that she stays the night. Roxy borrows some of Cecilia’s pajamas, and they curl up in bed, but neither of them falls asleep until the sun begins to rise because they’re whispering under the covers, secret jokes and school gossip.

  Because that’s what friends do.

  She casually forgets that sometimes she wakes up with Roxy’s face burrowed into her hair.

  “All right, well, your mom told me to come up here and remind you that curfew is still midnight, and if you’re going to be a
ny later —”

  “Call you, I know.”

  He nods, and he can’t keep himself from smiling. “I’m so excited you’re going, you know? I remember my first battle of the bands like it was yesterday. First time I ever smoked a joint, or whatever you kids call it these days. Puffing the dragon? Toking the weed? Inhaling the h —”

  “Stooooop,” Cecilia begs of him, and he laughs at her pain.

  “Fine, fine. What band are you going to see?”

  “Erm, just a band.”

  “Well, obviously. Which band?”

  She winces as she says, “Rock Your Mouth.”

  His eyebrows jump up in surprise. “. . . Huh. That sure is a name.”

  “One of Roxy’s friends picked it out,” she quickly adds. “I think she has a crush on him.”

  There’s an unreadable look in Dad’s eyes, but then he sighs and scrubs her head. “Just do me a favor, okay? Have a little fun tonight.”

  “Ha, yeah. Fun.”

  “You never know! Tonight might surprise you.”

  Easy for him to say. He was born to defy everything — expectations, careers, love itself. When he had to choose between marrying the love of his life or his career, he chose both. He defied everyone who said he was ruining his career when he wrote a whole album dedicated to her, and now, sixteen years later, those songs are still on the radio.

  Too bad Cecilia hates those songs.

  Like, not hate-hates them, but whenever they come on the radio, she turns to a different station. Her entire life has been chock-full of music and concerts and recording studios and backstage passes and world tours — she should love it as much as her younger sister does. She should embrace it. She should revel in it.

  But being known as Roman Montgomery’s eldest daughter your entire life would wear on you, too.

  After he’s gone, she turns back to her mirror, still unable to decide on which shirt, and finally she just drops both and stares at her reflection with the shirt she has on — an i am an avenger T-shirt with the OG Avenger, Sasuke, on the front. Does she really want the worst night of her life to be in a Naruto T-shirt and ripped jeans?