Battle of the Bands

by Eric Smith

  “Kima is #GhostHottie?” is the first thing Rodney says when I push my way into the green room.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I whisper it, partially because I’m out of breath from running up the stairs with my guitar and all my camera gear and partially because what. Three other bands are in the green room with us, which equates to roughly a baker’s dozen people total sharing a very small space.

  “Raven, what the hell. How could you keep that from me this whole time?”

  I swallow and rub my face. I grab his hand and pull him out into the hall and I am freaking out.

  “Kima told you?”

  Rod nods.

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  I lean against the wall and slide down until I’m sitting. Rod crosses his arms and leans against the wall opposite me. A kid with a ukulele walks between us. “She said I’d been acting weird all week and that she knew something was up with me. Then she asked if I was cheating on her. With you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say again. “What?”

  “So, I couldn’t let her think I’d do that to her, you know?”

  “Obviously,” I mutter. I was still trying to catch my breath.

  “So I said that Safe & Sound was breaking up. I was still trying to avoid telling her that I was breaking up with her. I wanted to do it after Battle of the Bands because I was stressed and she was stressed and everything was a mess.”

  “So you said the band was breaking up?”

  “Yeah. But then she asked if it was your idea. And I said yes because you’ve quit the band so many times before.”

  “Hey, only twice.”

  Two people dressed in all black run between us carrying a dozen drumsticks between them.

  “Whatever. She got upset and said it was all her fault because of something she’d said to you. Then she told me about Boys Behaving Badly.”

  “Shit,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says. Then he screws his face up, and it looks like something’s hurting him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I clear my throat. I hear the crowd roaring from the auditorium, and the concrete floor is cold against my thighs. “You both seemed so happy together. I didn’t want to ruin it.”

  Rod shakes his head. “There’s always been something between us, Raven. I just wish I’d known there was something between you and her, too.” He kneels in front of me and touches my hair. I close my eyes. “Has it been awful?” he asks. “Hanging out with us all year?”

  “It wasn’t awful,” I say, and it’s true. “Sometimes my heart hurt a little. But you guys are my best friends. What was I supposed to do?”

  “I just wish I’d known,” Rod said. “Everything would have been different.”

  “Everything?” I ask. Rod looks at a bit of wall over my head. His hand is still in my hair. I wrap my fingers around his wrist and hold so tightly I can feel his leather bracelets leaving imprints on my palms. I think about relationships and threelationships and a dozen other possible, impossible things.

  “I told her about San Francisco and broke up with her last night. She hasn’t been answering any of my calls or texts since.”

  “Really? Where is she? Is she okay?” I ask.

  “No clue. I looked everywhere. I haven’t seen her all day.”

  I pull out my phone and text her: Where are you?

  Bubbles appear and disappear and appear and disappear.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” I whisper.

  “Let’s go back to the green room and go over the set list,” Rod says, and I suddenly notice that he’s put together today in a way he hasn’t been for a while. Clean dark jeans, a white T-shirt with a red X across the front, a leather jacket, and spotless red Chucks. Even though everything’s a mess, he must feel better. “We go on soon and we’ll look for Kima after.”

  We find a quiet corner of the room to try to put a bit of space between ourselves and the other bands. I tune my guitar, and Rod reads over the lyrics we added to the hook of my new song. We’ll be good. Great even. We’re ready, but I can’t stop thinking about Kima.

  “We’re singing ‘Memories’ and ‘Until Next Time,’ right?” I’m talking to Rod, but I keep looking at my phone. Still nothing.

  I tie my indigo hair up in a black headwrap and chug a bottle of water. I fold down the collar of Rod’s jacket and pick a bit of lint out of his hair. We line up in the wings and I pull out my phone. But before I can text Kima again, we hear our band name boom through the mic.

  “Welcome, Safe & Sound!”

  The stage lights are warm and bright and I’m instantly sweaty, even though all I’m wearing is a thin maxi dress. Rod steps out right behind me. He’s grinning and everybody screams. I think about him saying, Everything would have been different, and the thousands of things that could mean. I remember Kima asking, Do you ever think about the Boys Behaving Badly show? And I want to know where she is.

  I try not to think about how hot I am, or the fact that I still haven’t heard back from her. Rod is leaving to go to school thousands of miles away, and I try not to think about that, either, but the truth of how much I’ll miss him makes my throat ache. Instead, I focus on the music: the guitar in my hands, the words on my lips. We start with a song we wrote together, and we’ll end with one I wrote all on my own.

  Our voices twist and tangle with the din of the crowd and the instruments we’re playing, and we sound strong and right and real, the way we always do: a little like Leon Bridges meets the Civil Wars, like indie folk and neo soul all in one, like a song you’ve heard before but made new with something more.

  Maybe it is flavor.

  Near the end of the first song I see her. She’s right up against the stage, and her curls are pulled up in a high ponytail that cascades down either side of her face. She’s holding a camera, and it’s pointed right at me.

  I keep singing, feeling close to tears. And when I get to the line about my heart being divided, I try to tell her with my eyes and my voice that these words, this line, this whole song, is about the three of us.

  “How can a heart be split in two?” I sing. “Half loves him and half loves you. And in the end who will decide the outcome of this gorgeous divide?”

  She lowers her camera. She pulls out her phone, and I see her typing something but I just keep singing. I imagine the bubbles on my screen like they’re inside me and I let them fill me up. As I finish the song, I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. A text that I can’t check until the end of our set. The length of a lifetime.

  “Oh my God,” I say to Rod. We’re holding hands and bowing, and we’re still holding hands as we walk offstage. “Oh my God!” I scream. I climb Rod like a tree, wrapping my legs around his hips and my arms around his neck, and my sweat rubs all over him but I don’t care and he doesn’t, either.

  “Holy shit,” he says. “That was sick.”

  “You were perfect,” someone says from somewhere behind us. I hop down from where I’d attached myself to Rod because I smell clove. Even if I didn’t recognize her voice, I’d know it was Kima.

  Rod and I look at her, then we look at each other, and then Kima rushes over and wraps her arms around us like she hasn’t seen us in years.

  “You guys were fucking magic!” she says. And we laugh and hug her back, squeezing so tightly that nothing can come between us, not colleges on separate coasts, not messy, heart-splitting love, not secrets, and not even what we used to be or the infinite possibilities of what we might become now.

  I have to go take more photos, and Kima has to go get a different lens for her camera, and Rod has to go to the bathroom, so a minute later, we all part ways.

  Once I’m back on the floor, I grab a seat near the front, and being shoulder to shoulder with everyone else makes the music feel more real. Before I pull out my camera, I take out my phone.

  I have one text message. It’s from Kima.

  It says, Hi. You found me.

  I was running late. I mean, tec
hnically I was still early. Shannon said to be there by four, which meant she wouldn’t be there until four thirty, and I always like to be early just in case, and it was four fifteen when I pulled into the school parking lot, among the chaos of all the bands already loading all their gear into the auditorium. I was hoping to sneak back behind the gym without anyone spotting me, not like anyone really notices me anyway.

  I parked as far away from the madness as I could and walked around the edge of the entire parking lot, attempting to will myself invisible. I arrived at the back door of the gym at precisely four twenty and sat down next to a dumpster and waited. Shannon showed up at exactly four thirty with two of the worst human tools I had ever met. They were in my algebra class and made the most nonsensical comments all the time. Identical, unoriginal dude bros. Hot and shredded as fuck, but still . . .

  “’Sup.” One of them nodded at me.

  “Is that a sentence?” I couldn’t help myself.

  “KC!” Shannon exclaimed. We hugged. She introduced me. “This is KC, my oldest and bestest friend in the entire known universe. KC, this is David and this is Eliot. They work at Dellwood. We met on the course.” I wasn’t surprised they didn’t recognize me. I was already nervous to begin with, but now I was entering a whole new level of nervousness.

  It’s happening.

  Soon it will happen.

  Holy shit.

  “We stopped at Arby’s. You want some?” Shannon opened a bag and took out a half-eaten sandwich. One of the guys stuffed his hand into the bag and pulled out some fries.

  “No. Never. How can you eat that shit? It’s garbage.”

  “Suit yourself.” She began to inhale her leftovers. Definitely high. I mean, who eats Arby’s on purpose?

  “Are you the guy with the acid?” one of the bros asked me. Shannon shook her head.

  “No. That’s KC. She’s a virgin.” I shot Shannon a look. “No, like, she’s never done it before.” Jesus, Shannon. “The guy who’s bringing it is gonna be here any minute. KC doesn’t do drugs.”

  “I just . . . you know, never got around to it.” I have no idea why I was trying to impress them.

  Suddenly there was a loud bang just around the corner. I froze. One of the guys walked toward the noise and yelled, “Hey, are you the acid man?”

  “No, I’m the life of the party,” shouted Micah. I’d recognize his deep voice anywhere. He sounded like a radio DJ. He played bass in Shifter Focus. He came into view carrying his bass in one hand and his case in another. “Case keeps bustin’ open. Hope I didn’t fuck up the action.”

  We all waited in awkward silence for a bit, nobody looking at one another. It felt like hours, but it was probably only a couple of minutes. Then the top of the dumpster swung open and out crawled Lucy. Nobody flinched. She did stuff like that.

  “What’s the date today?” She frantically patted each of her pockets in search of something.

  “I think it’s the fifth,” I said.

  Finding what she was looking for — a hair tie — she quickly whipped her wild head of curls into a top bun that resembled an abstract ice sculpture. “Mmmm . . . Mmmm . . .” she continued. “And the month. What month is it?”

  “May?” I was suddenly unsure myself. She had a way of making you second-guess everything you knew to be true.

  “Oh, thank Christ!” She bent over and let out an exclamation of air. “Whooooo!”

  Nobody asked. We’d long learned nothing good ever came from asking Lucy anything.

  “Are you the acid guy?”

  “Curb it, Eliot!” Shannon shouted.

  “I’m Eliot,” the other guy said.

  “Curb it, David,” she corrected.

  Lucy began inspecting each of us, her right eye twitching. “Y’all wanna get inside?” Without waiting for an answer, Lucy grabbed the door handle and pulled it open. She ripped a bit of duct tape off the lock, put it in her pocket, and waved us in. The inside of the gym was typical. The school prided itself on sportsball, and they had clearly dropped a bundle on this joint. I can’t lie: walking out onto the court, I felt a combination of excitement and sadness. I imagined all the people over the years who had stood there playing to bored parents, siblings, students, and faculty. All with the same sad dream of “making it” one day. I hadn’t heard of a single person from our school ever going on to do anything even remotely notable. But being there, looking out into the darkness, I suddenly wanted the same ridiculous dream. Not a sports dream. Something else. Something to hope for, to cling to.

  Lucy made her way toward the far end of the gym and turned on the lights. They were the slow kind that took a while to fully commit to lighting up. Now I could make out the seats and the shape of the room. Both sides of bleachers were fully extended, as a game of some sort must’ve been played relatively recently. The Dellwood twins immediately started up the bleachers. Micah was trying to tune his bass by placing his ear on his instrument while plucking the strings. Shannon sat in the center of the court eating Arby’s.

  “Hey, you! Beauty queen!” Lucy shouted.

  I looked around. “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. Come help me check these locks.”

  I made my way across the court to where the main doors open into the school.

  “Let me in if it locks me out,” Lucy said, and went out.

  The doors clicked shut. She tried to open them. No dice. I let her back in.

  “Only way anyone’s getting in here is if they have a key.”

  Just then the door we initially came in through opened and a shadowy figure entered.

  “How the fuck?” Lucy muttered.

  “James!” Shannon exclaimed. She got up from the floor and hugged him. “Hey, everybody, James is here!”

  Lucy and I made our way to the door. James looked about our age, dressed in all black from head to toe, and was wearing a stocking cap. It was hard to make out the shape of him. He was drowning in his clothes. His face stared straight ahead, but his eyes moved all around the room as if studying it . . . or something. He walked to the middle of the court, his footsteps echoing in the vast room.

  “I come bearing gifts,” he calmly said as he reached into a messenger bag and pulled out a large white canister of dental floss. Everyone gathered in front of him, intrigued.

  “Are you the acid man?” David or Eliot said. Shannon elbowed him in the ribs.

  “I don’t know how to answer that,” James began, his eyes looking at each of us in turn as he spoke. “If I say yes, then that’s who I’ll be from now on and I’m not sure I’m okay with that, but if I say no, well . . . that’s not entirely truthful, because I’m supplying the LSD for the evening’s misadventures.”

  “How’d you get in here?” Lucy questioned.

  James smiled. He looked around the room for a moment, his eyes settling on me.

  “I don’t kiss and tell.” He winked.

  Who does this guy think he is?

  “Did you all bring twenty bucks?” he asked, turning his attention back to why we were all gathered here in the first place. We all reached into our pockets and produced the proper funding. “Oh, and . . .” He pulled off his stocking cap, revealing a thick head of disheveled hair, and passed the cap to Shannon, directly to his left. “Put your car keys in here. Nobody leaves until you are no longer inebriated.”

  The cap made its way around to the six of us, everyone with keys solemnly dropping them into it like an old ritual that had been enacted since the dawn of time. While this was happening, James opened the dental floss, popped the part with the floss out of the canister, and pulled out a tiny ziplock baggie filled with six hits of acid.

  “All right, I’m going to hand you one tab each. Put it on your tongue and let it sit there for as long as you can. The longer, the better. I’m not going to partake because someone has to make sure you don’t harm yourselves, and in the event you need a redirect, I’ll talk you out of the shadows and back to a place of peaceful intoxication.”

  We
all exchanged our money for drugs. Micah and the Dellwood twins took theirs immediately. Shannon was still finishing up her four-course fast-food meal. Lucy sniffed at her tab a couple times, popped it in, and then started moving her mouth side to side, eyes moving around the room the whole time. She looked like a lizard.

  I straight-up balked.

  I could feel the anxiety building within me.

  I wanted to have this experience, but I was also terrified by the unknown. More importantly I found myself intrigued by this James character. He looked like a mad scientist forty years before going mad, yet he spoke so softly and strangely eloquently. This dude is a dead ringer for Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop.

  “KC!” I heard Shannon shout. “What are you doing?”

  Everyone was looking at me. I suddenly felt self-conscious.

  “Nothing. I’m tired. It’s been a long day.” I shot a quick glance at James. He was staring at me, but not in the same way everyone else was. He was smiling. Even his eyes were smiling. His eyes were intoxicating, like two black holes that held secret kinds of sadness and had seen things.

  “Why the dental floss?” Micah asked him, causing him to look away from me. I saw a flash of a smile, quickly covered up by a shrug.

  “It’s practical. I also carry mints, mouthwash, toothpaste, a toothbrush . . . You never know what might happen. I’d rather be mistaken for an eccentric than a drug mule, should the powers that be come sniffing around based on the rapscallion attributes I emanate.”

  Still chewing, Lucy shot him a thumbs-up. Micah agreed. “I can dig it.”

  Right then I made an impulsive decision not to trip. I pretended to place the tab on my tongue, but instead I palmed it and stuffed it in the front pocket of my jeans.

  “Now what?” Shannon asked, having just placed her hit of acid on her tongue. Everyone looked at James.

  “Now,” he said, “we wait.”

  There’s a thing that happens when you totally crush out on someone. It’s like you can feel your heartbeat in every part of your body. There’s a euphoric kind of excitement mixed with sadness and terror. It’s hard to explain, but it happens in an instant and then just explodes and grows from there, consuming your every waking thought and sometimes your dreams. You can’t escape from it. It takes over and runs the controls that make you . . . you. Suddenly, you aren’t exactly the same. You’ve become a caricature of yourself, like the teenage version of a baby learning to walk and talk. None of your body parts work right, and you say the most ridiculous shit, repeatedly.