Battle of the Bands

by Eric Smith

  “Guess that means we’re destined to be friends.”

  Her head fell back against the locker, and as the echo of our voices faded, I could hear it again — the sound from the theater. It was faint, like a memory, and a jolt rushed straight to my heart. Any second now, the band onstage would finish, and the Greatest Place wouldn’t be there to follow. I wondered where the guys were, what they were thinking, if a scrim of sadness had settled over them or if they felt weightless, being free of me.

  “My band broke up,” I blurted. The words were heavy, like lead in my mouth. “And the finality of it, knowing that we’re never going to play another show . . . That I might never . . .” The back of my throat tightened. I could feel Amina watching me, but I kept my eyes trained on the row of lockers opposite us. In the bottom corner of number 127, someone had scratched the word loser, and I stared until the word blurred to nothing. “We were supposed to go on, like, now,” I finished.

  “So why don’t you?” she said.

  “What, just me and my one amped guitar?”

  She nodded.

  I coughed out a laugh. “No way. It would sound empty and ridiculous.”

  “I don’t think it would sound ridiculous at all.”

  I cut my eyes to her, trying to gauge whether she was serious.

  “I’ve heard your songs, Mina, and they’re great. The lyrics especially. Take ‘On the Edge of Something New.’ It’s this super catchy, upbeat, fast anthem about diving wildly into the excitement of the unknown, but it’s also imbued with so much sadness, so much loss and fear and uncertainty. It’s almost a song of mourning, when you really think about it.”

  Naturally, I had thought about it. I’d written that song shortly before Colin left, while trying to work through a hurricane of emotions I hadn’t figured out how to name. It was about how every feeling lived alongside its very opposite. It was about learning, for the first time, that bright new beginnings only existed because something else had to end.

  But no one else had ever mentioned the subtext. I don’t think Parker or Diego even noticed it.

  “You really caught all that just from hearing my song a few times?”

  She nodded, a glimmer of pride on her face. “I pay attention to that kind of stuff.”

  Right then, I felt pummeled by the unfairness of not having known Amina before tonight — the cruelty of a universe that would allow us to walk the same hallways, and stake out the same shows, without ever speaking a word. It was another mourning, a gain and a loss all at once.

  “Look, I love the way a full band sounds,” Amina said. “The pounding of drums, the way a bass line can snake into your heartbeat until you’re not sure what’s you and what’s the music. But some songs . . .” She paused, eyes focused across the hallway. I wondered if she saw the word loser, too. Either way, she shook her head and turned back to me. “Some songs don’t need all that. Some songs are actually more powerful when they’re simple, and stripped bare.”

  “But there’s a difference between raw simplicity and emptiness,” I argued.

  “Your songs aren’t empty, Mina,” she shot back. “And because I know you’re probably thinking it, neither are you.”

  From the theater came an explosion of cheers. This was it. This was our time, our set. The moment that was supposed to define our future.

  But there was no our anymore. There was only me.

  “All I’m saying,” Amina went on, “is that maybe that hollowness and the threat of background silence intruding on every note — all those things you’re afraid of — maybe they’re exactly what your songs need right now. Maybe they’re the only things you need, because they’re the only things that are true.”

  Her words ricocheted through my mind alongside a thousand worries. That I’d sound terrible. That my fingers would freeze, refusing to find the right chords. That my voice would split like a frayed wire, and without any other instruments to hide it, the sound would echo in the auditorium with such force that for the rest of the year, the Raritan River High student body would ask me how my late-stage puberty was going.

  Or, maybe, all the heartbreak and despair would seep into my sound, the emotions amplified by the candor of my one small voice, my one weepy guitar.

  Amina placed a hand on my arm, drawing me back to the moment. Our fears may have been separate, I realized, but in the end, they weren’t so different.

  Winning was no longer the point. I just wanted my voice to be heard.

  “We both deserve more than the sidelines,” she said. “Now go.”

  I wrapped her in the tightest hug I could manage, spilling a song of gratitude into her hair.

  “And if I don’t find you again before your set, good luck! You’re going to be amazing, I know it,” I said, then raced down the hallway, straight to the edge of the stage, where I found Lilly peeking around the curtain with a wince on her face. Out in the spotlight, Mr. Bolivar, the school’s music teacher and the Battle’s annual emcee, was chuckling to himself and saying, “Here’s another one for you. What do you call a bear with no teeth? Anyone? Anyone?”

  “A music teacher!” someone yelled.

  “Don’t quit your day job!” called another.

  Lilly sighed and pressed her palm against her face. I tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Put me on,” I said.

  Her expression twisted from confused to hopeful to disappointed. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. There are only a few minutes left, and anyway, you didn’t sign up as a solo act. The rules clearly state —”

  “So disqualify me,” I said. “I don’t care if I win, I just need to go out there. Come on, Lilly, please. One song.”

  As her gaze shifted from my face to the stage, I could practically see her brain working. Which would be worse: leaving Mr. Bolivar out there to tell terrible dad jokes for another few brutal minutes, or breaking the rules and letting me go on alone? Her eyes darted to the side, pausing on something — someone — past my shoulder. And just like that, her expression unfolded.

  “One song,” she repeated, reaching for her headset. Then, with a quick glance back at me, she added, “Make sure it’s a good one.”

  While Lilly spoke instructions into her mic, I dashed across backstage. I still had no idea where my purse was, but I found my battered guitar case quickly, yanked my Stratocaster from its bed. Heart clattering, I threw the strap over my shoulder, checked the tuning, and ran with my small amp back to the curtain just as Mr. Bolivar said, “Looks like our next act is making a late appearance after all.” He gestured toward where I stood in the wings. “Let’s give a big Narwhal welcome to Mina Wright!”

  Beyond the beam of the spotlight, the stage bled into the vast darkness of the auditorium. It looked infinite, the applause crashing like the swell of waves. I thought about Amina, and everyone on the sidelines, and the boys who always seemed so much bigger than us, who never worried that they weren’t enough.

  Then I stepped forward to greet them.

  “Let’s take it from the top,” I say, frowning at the orchestra room’s cluster of black metal music stands, which are bearing witness to our one last, desperately needed rehearsal. For inanimate objects, they sure feel judgy.

  “Again?” Gwen asks, an incredulous tone creeping into her normally soft-spoken voice.

  “We’re still not totally in sync,” I reply, and then look to Charlotte and Vivienne for backup. I can hear raucous whistles and applause coming from the auditorium just down the hall. Another band must have just finished their set, and from the sound of it, they’re stiff competition.

  “We’re not even the Backstreet Boys,” Charlotte says, and then gives herself a ba-dum-cha on her drum set. Gwen giggles. “Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all day. Or, at least, for the next forty-five minutes.”

  I give her a Can we get serious for a minute, please? look, and Charlotte clears her throat. “We should rehearse it again,” she says loyally.

  My eyes silently thank her and then cut ov
er to Gwen, who, as Charlotte and Vivienne both know, is the reason we’re not sounding in rhythm. Though that’s not entirely Gwen’s fault. When the rest of the band has been rehearsing together since middle school and one member has just joined a week ago, one can expect a few growing pains. Besides, I have to keep reminding myself, Gwen is doing us a favor. She’s the only one who attends Raritan River High, which is the sole reason we’re allowed to compete in its Battle of the Bands at all — far and away our biggest gig to date, with a chance to win a real recording session to boot. When Charlotte found out about the contest, she asked Gwen — her friend from church — if she’d consider playing with us on a lark. She was surprised that Gwen said yes right away, though I was less so. Charlotte, with her quick sense of humor, has a way of attracting a legion of fans; come to think of it, so does Vivienne and her effortless cool. I might be the weak point of the Grants in terms of natural charm, but I like to think I make up for it by writing most of our original songs and living up to the archetype of aloof bassist.

  I like Gwen. I really do. What I don’t like, quite honestly, is having keys in our band at all. We tried it once before and it didn’t work then . . . and I’m pretty sure it isn’t working now. Maybe it’s not even the keys themselves, more that Charlotte, Vivienne, and I are such a tight three-piece. I think the Grants are meant to be a three-piece. I mean, even the name we chose for ourselves: it’s short for the Immigrants. And even though Gwen is Chinese-American, like Charlotte, she’s third-generation, and doesn’t quite share in the bond that was forged between three tiny children from the scattered corners of China, Haiti, and Iran back in first grade ESL classes.

  Gwen doesn’t look totally convinced that we need to rehearse again, but she still dutifully places her hands on the keys in preparation for the opening chord.

  Which she doesn’t get to play because the door to the music room opens and a girl with blue dreadlocks and a camera comes walking in.

  “Hi, Raven,” Gwen says.

  “Hey, guys. Don’t mind me. I have to take some photos for the school paper. Just carry on and pretend I’m not here.” She points her camera at us and snaps a photo. I decide to do exactly as she says and ignore her, mainly because we don’t have time for socializing.

  “Ready?” I ostensibly ask the whole band, but I’m looking at Gwen. She nods.

  Except we’re interrupted again by a bang from one of the windows. A kid outside has apparently just accidentally swung his case into the window frame. A bass comes tumbling out of it, but he manages to catch it right before it hits the ground.

  Christ. At this rate, it’ll be time for our set before we acceptably get through even one of the numbers.

  Finally, Charlotte bangs her sticks together, counting us off, and we launch into the song I wrote last week. Vivienne sings, with her long braids swinging:

  “You say you’re leaving and you wait for me to fall apart

  You’re feeling big thinking you took a dump on my heart

  Two years older and you think that you’re so smart

  But the headlines scream, ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’”

  And then the chorus, which we’re all supposed to harmonize on.

  “Heart shitter!

  You’re so full of it

  Heart shitter!

  Go on and quit

  Heart shitter!

  Don’t need no babysitter

  Heart shitter!

  Damn, that sweet was bitter”

  This time I pinpoint what the problem is: the chorus doesn’t sound right with four-part harmonies. I’m trying to think about how to gently ask Gwen if she’d mind not singing at all when there’s another bang, this time on the door of the music room. It swings open and there’s a teacher standing there.

  “Mr. Bolivar!” Gwen says, the first to stop playing, though we all quickly follow suit. Raven snaps one last photo and ducks out the open door.

  “Gwen,” the teacher says, and then looks at us, clearly trying to figure out who on earth we might be. “Ladies . . .”

  Vivienne walks over to him, already tying her hair back in conjunction with her patented Let’s Charm an Adult™ smile. “Mr. Bolivar,” she says, “Gwen has told us amazing things about your music department here. Thank you so much for letting us perform at your Battle of the Bands.”

  Mr. Bolivar blinks. “I . . . Did I?”

  “You made the rule that only one member of the band has to attend the school in order to play, right?” Charlotte chimes in sweetly.

  “Oh,” Mr. Bolivar says, eyeing Gwen. “Yes, I guess those are technically the rules.”

  There’s silence for a second, and Vivienne and Charlotte both look to me. Right, my turn to suck up. “So here we are” is what I come up with. Charlotte shakes her head affectionately. I mean, she should know better than to throw it over to me when attempting subterfuge. “Your feelings are written all over your face,” Baba says to me over FaceTime whenever he’s able to get to my uncle’s house in Tehran to tap into his Internet.

  Mr. Bolivar takes in my dark, cropped hair, Joan Jett T-shirt, and black jeans that are more holes than pants now. My hair is purple, too, but it doesn’t really show unless we’re under stage lights. It looks killer under them, which is usually the only time I care about how I look, and only since it’s part and parcel of how we sound, how we come across, how we perform our music.

  “Right, well, welcome,” Mr. Bolivar says, not sounding quite convinced of what he’s saying. “But I sincerely hope what I just heard is not one of the songs you’re going to be performing at the contest.”

  “Why not?” I ask, feeling immediately defensive. I wrote the whole song in a frenzied two-hour session about fifteen minutes after Mateo sent me an Instagram DM dumping me. I really like you, Mitra, but I think this is too hard with us being at different schools. I hope you keep writing music, though. You have so much potential. ♥

  If art is all about conveying your deepest, rawest emotions to an audience and making them feel that way, too, then I think “Heart Shitter” is some of my best work.

  Mr. Bolivar looks at me as if I’ve sprouted a second head. “This is a school-sanctioned event, Ms. . . . ?”

  “Pars,” I say. “Mitra.”

  “Ms. Pars,” he finishes. “There is no profanity at a school-sanctioned event.”

  “Oh,” I say, my face falling. I hadn’t thought of that. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  I look around at my bandmates, who each look equally dumbfounded.

  “Of course, Mr. Bolivar,” Gwen says to him with a nervous smile. “We’ll adjust it.”

  “Great,” he says as a tiny brunette girl with a headset comes into the room. I’ve seen her roaming around backstage. I think she’s the stage manager.

  “Are you guys the Grants?” she asks, out of breath.

  “We are,” Charlotte says.

  “You need to be on deck backstage. You’re on in five.”

  “Sure, Lilly,” Gwen says as she follows her and Mr. Bolivar out the door.

  I hang back, staring at my real bandmates in horror. “We can’t perform the song?” I ask.

  “We can do ‘One Way or Another,’” Charlotte offers. “Or ‘Bad Reputation.’”

  “Does Gwen know those?” Vivienne asks.

  But that’s hardly the point. “Our first song is already a cover. I don’t want to do another one,” I say, even if it would be a cover of one of the two greatest songs ever written.

  “Can you . . . I don’t know, just change the words of the chorus?” Charlotte asks. “Heart . . . crapper? Or something?”

  No, I can’t just change the words of the chorus, I want to scream. There are multiple internal rhymes to consider.

  But what other option do we have?

  “Guys, seriously!” Lilly has come back, and she looks immensely stressed out. “You have to go NOW.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I mumble. “We’ll do that.”

  Lilly leads us through the unf
amiliar school into a door that opens up to the auditorium’s backstage area. I’m looking down, trying to make sure I don’t trip over the wires that snake beneath our feet, when my peripheral vision catches sight of something up on the stage, a different kind of snake altogether. One that’s tattooed on an arm that, up until last week, I’d grab on to at will, sometimes even absentmindedly tracing the inked scales while we sat on my basement floor in songwriting sessions together.

  Mateo.

  What the hell is he doing here?

  “What the hell is he doing here?” I then voice, and Charlotte, Vivienne, and Gwen turn their heads to where I’m gesturing. Charlotte’s and Vivienne’s mouths drop open.

  “Uh. Looks like he’s playing,” Vivienne says.

  And he is. At the Battle of the Bands I told him about. Is. This. For. Real?!

  “But he’s in college,” Charlotte says, plucking the words straight from my mind. “Why is he playing at a high school battle of the bands?”

  Gwen squints, looking at the trio that’s gathered on the stage. “The other two guys go to my school,” she offers. “Maybe he’s playing as a favor to them?”

  Except, as the applause dies down for their first song, Mateo is the one going up to the microphone. Mateo’s the lead singer. More like they’re playing as a favor to him.

  “This is a new song,” he says, and then his guitar bursts forth with a searing power chord progression that I recognize because it’s what he’d been working on during our final writing sesh. The lyrics, however, I don’t recognize.

  “We were young, but you were younger

  Your first taste of tongue made me a wonder

  Your moony eyes, the pedestal you built

  I can’t disguise it gave me a thrill

  But it got old as we got older

  And I got bored being a placeholder

  A cutout, an icon, an object of awe

  Nobody tells you it’s lonely as a god.”

  “Holy Karen Carpenter,” Charlotte says. “Is this . . . is this about you?” She turns to me. “And did he just refer to himself AS A GOD?!”