Battle of the Bands

by Eric Smith

  “Friday’s going to be my last day before I head out on maternity leave,” she tells me, gathering her dark hair into a stubby tail at the back of her neck and fanning herself with a stack of file folders. “You guys are going to have a sub for the rest of the year, but I feel like you and I have been making some pretty good progress together, and I don’t want us to lose that. Ms. Cherry runs a study group of her own after school a couple of times a week. I spoke to her and she’s happy to have you join. She and I are teaching from the same syllabus, so the transition should be pretty easy.”

  “Oh,” I say, “sure, that’d be great.” I like Ms. Saeed, but I’ve had enough extra help in my academic career to know that one study group is basically the same as another. “Thanks a lot.”

  I say goodbye to Ms. Saeed and head toward the cafeteria, rounding the corner toward the hallway where the junior lockers are — and coming within centimeters of crashing right into Gigi. She’s wearing overalls and a black-and-white-striped tank top, and in the moment before she rearranges her face into a mask of cool indifference I swear it looks like she might be about to burst into tears.

  “Shit,” I say, which feels like an understatement. Gigi doesn’t say anything at all.

  My mom is leaning against the kitchen counter in her scrubs when I get home from band practice that afternoon. “I picked up dinner,” she says, nodding at a bag from the rotisserie chicken place near our apartment. “How was your day?”

  “It was fine.” I pop up on my tiptoes to peek inside, pulling out a tub of potato wedges and another of the maple carrots she knows are my favorite. “What about you?”

  My phone vibrates in my pocket as she’s telling me a story about a woman who nearly delivered triplets in the hospital’s south elevator; I wait until she’s done to fish it out, hoping in spite of myself for a text from Gigi. Instead it’s just a link from Josh, a Spotify playlist of his own creation full of Steely Dan and Kenny Loggins. “Inspiration!” he’s titled it, along with a string of boat emojis.

  I frown. It’s not that I don’t like Josh’s mixes — the opposite, in fact; there’s a whole folder of them saved to my hard drive dating back to fifth grade — but there was a tiny part of me that thought our weird eye contact in the hallway this morning might mean something had finally jangled loose between Gigi and me. We haven’t talked at all since the night of our gig at Franco’s sister’s thirteenth birthday, two dozen sweaty middle schoolers wobbling around the decaying roller rink on the edge of town. This was back when Josh was going for a new wave sound, all of us wearing matching sunglasses and dressed in itchy thrift-store sweaters. It wasn’t my favorite of our musical incarnations by a long shot; still, I thought everything was going fine until Gigi walked off the stage halfway through the set and marched directly for the exit.

  I startled, my hands hovering uselessly above my keyboard. Josh gaped. Only Franco kept on playing, oblivious, his eyes closed behind his shades as he banged cheerfully away on the drums.

  By the time I made it outside, Gigi was nowhere. Where’d you go??? I texted, standing in the rainy April parking lot. I was still wearing my silly plastic sunglasses. Are you okay??

  Three dots appeared, disappeared, came back again. I’m fine, she told me finally. I’ll explain later.

  Only she didn’t.

  In the three weeks since then, I’ve tried everything I can think of to get her to talk to me: waiting at her locker; dropping by her after-school job as a checker at Stop & Shop; texting her the full lyrics to Celine Dion’s “Where Does My Heart Beat Now,” our favorite corny ’90s ballad, one line at a time. I even messaged her on Instagram like she was some social media influencer I was pursuing for a brand partnership and not a person whose retainer was shoved into the glove compartment of my car at this very moment. The girl is a brick wall.

  I have no idea what I did wrong.

  Now my mom nudges me with one sneakered foot, eyeing me over her waxy cup of Diet Coke. “Everything okay?” she asks, and I nod like a reflex. My mom has raised me on her own since I was four, when my parents got divorced and my dad moved back to Michigan; she works twelve-hour shifts as a labor and delivery nurse and does home health care on her days off just to keep me in piano lessons and SAT prep. The last thing she needs is me whining at her over dinner because my friend is being mean to me. I’m seventeen, not seven.

  I offer to do the dishes after dinner, and once they’re all drying on the rack, I head into my room and lie down on my bed, scrolling idly through Josh’s playlist. I tap the triangle to listen and close my eyes.

  When Ms. Saeed said “study group,” I was picturing half a dozen people, but when I walk into Ms. Cherry’s classroom the following Tuesday after eighth period, it’s actually just Hot Pete Gardello sitting with his notebook open at a desk in the front row.

  “Hey, Elisa,” he says, lifting a casual hand in greeting, and I blink at the sound of my name. Hot Pete Gardello and I do not run in the same circles by any stretch of the imagination. He’s junior class president and co-captain of the baseball team, the star of an often talked-about talent show skit in which he gamely lampooned his own popularity like a famous actor hosting Saturday Night Live.

  Also, as his name might suggest, he’s hot.

  “Um, hey,” I say, taking a seat two rows over from him. He’s wearing perfectly broken-in jeans and a heathery blue T-shirt that makes his eyes look Photoshop bright. I stare at his Adam’s apple for a second before I realize I’m doing it, watching the muscles in his throat move as he swallows. Pete Gardello is the kind of person who makes you want to gaze.

  Tutoring with Ms. Cherry is basically the same as working with Ms. Saeed, as predicted, although occasionally Ms. Saeed and I would talk about The Bachelor and Ms. Cherry does not strike me as someone who watches. We spend an hour on reading comp and this week’s vocabulary unit before wrapping up at four-thirty; Hot Pete Gardello and I head down the hallway, not walking together so much as silently going to the same place side by side. I keep waiting for him to speed up, but he matches my stride until we get to the parking lot, when he throws another wave in my direction. “See you later, Elisa,” he says.

  Our cars are two of the only ones left by now, parked on opposite sides of the student lot. I’m just rolling my windows down — it’s nice today, the rustle of summer coming up in the trees — when I hear the telltale scraping sound of a dying battery echoing across the concrete. I crane my neck to peer in the direction of his shiny black Jeep, and there it is again.

  “Everything okay?” I call across the lot.

  “Uh, yeah!” Hot Pete Gardello hollers back, waving an all good here hand out his driver-side window. Then, just as I’m about to turn the key in the engine: “I might have left my lights on this morning, I guess.”

  I meet my own eyes in the rearview mirror, barely able to keep from laughing at the absurdity of it. In the second before I remember I can’t tell Gigi about this, I think she’s going to die when she hears. “You need a jump?”

  Hot Pete Gardello pokes his head out the window. “You know how to do that?”

  I can’t resist making a face. “Why, because I’m a girl?”

  “No, because I don’t.”

  “Oh.” That surprises me: it feels like Hot Pete Gardello should have been born with all necessary life skills already preprogrammed into his brain, though I guess maybe part of being popular is that you never have to learn how to do certain things for yourself because someone will always want to help you. Case in point: “Well,” I say, “I can show you if you want.”

  I pull into the empty spot beside him before climbing out of the driver’s seat and opening the trunk, pushing aside a jack, some emergency flares, a first aid kit, a case of bottled water, and a box of thirty-six nut bars from Costco before fishing out a set of jumper cables. “Wow,” Hot Pete Gardello says, getting out of the Jeep and peering over my shoulder.

  I cringe. “We take emergency preparedness very seriously in my family
.”

  “I see that.”

  I have him pop his hood and I clip the cables between his engine and mine; in the second before I push the thought from my mind, it occurs to me that it kind of looks like our cars are holding hands. I turn my key in the ignition, smiling reflexively as his engine rumbles to life; Hot Pete Gardello smiles back, a quick white grin that makes me feel very flustered. “Look at that,” he says. “You’re a magician.”

  “Hardly,” I manage, feeling myself blush. “Anyway, I should go. I’ve got band practice.”

  “You guys doing the Battle?” he asks. “What’s the name of your band?”

  I can’t help but wince. “Evelyn Nosebleed.”

  His eyebrows twitch. “That’s . . . evocative.”

  “Yeah.” I nod grimly. “My friend Josh read something online that said your ideal band name is your grandmother’s name plus the last thing you went to the ER for.”

  “Your friend Josh went to the ER for a nosebleed?”

  “He has a delicate system,” I say automatically. “Anyway, it made more sense when we were punk.”

  “What are you now?”

  That stops me for a moment. I think of Josh and his yacht rock playlist, of my long string of unreturned texts to Gigi. “You know,” I say slowly, “that’s a really good question.”

  Hot Pete Gardello nods. “Well,” he says, “thanks again for the jump.”

  “Anytime,” I tell him, then get into my car and pull out of the parking lot. When I glance in the rearview mirror, I see that he’s still standing by his driver-side door, watching me go.

  The rest of the week passes like that: Gigi avoids me in the hallway. My mom picks up butter chicken for dinner. I sneak glances at Josh during practice, watching as he chews his bottom lip while he tunes his guitar.

  Thursday after school, there’s a note on Ms. Cherry’s door that says she left early to get an emergency root canal, so I head out to the parking lot and find Hot Pete Gardello standing against the retaining wall with what looks like a Juul hanging out of his mouth. “Hey, Elisa,” he calls.

  “Okay.” I shake my head before I quite know I’m going to do it. “I have to ask. How do you know my name?”

  Hot Pete Gardello looks at me a little strangely. “I mean, we have tutoring together,” he points out. “And you jumped my car?”

  “No, I know,” I clarify, feeling more than a little foolish. “But, like, you knew it before that, too.”

  Hot Pete Gardello shrugs. “I know everybody’s name,” he says, like he’s the vice principal of Raritan River High School or one of those local politicians who are always standing outside Stop & Shop passing out pamphlets. I guess he basically is.

  “Fair enough,” I concede grudgingly. Then, squinting at the Juul: “Are you vaping?”

  “What? No.” He takes it out of his mouth, and I realize it’s the butt end of a candy cane, red and white stripes bright in the afternoon sun.

  “You realize it’s May.”

  “I do, yes.” He smiles sheepishly, like I’ve caught him at something way more illicit than off-season sugar consumption. “I buy like twenty boxes every year when they go on sale after Christmas and ration them out until Thanksgiving.”

  Something about him spending all year hoarding such an obviously bad and useless candy makes me like him more. “Really?”

  He nods. “I ripped through my stash this year, though. I’m almost out.”

  “Can’t you get them online?”

  “Of course you can,” he says, “but that ruins the experience. You have to buy them in person at a store or they don’t taste right.” He crunches the end of the candy cane between his molars. “Are you hungry?” he asks.

  “For candy canes?”

  He shakes his head. “For pizza.”

  That stops me. “Seriously?”

  “I never joke about pizza,” he deadpans, and I have to admit, he doesn’t seem to be. “And you’ve got tutoring time to kill, right?”

  “Um,” I say, tipping my head for the sound of the catch, hearing nothing. “Sure.”

  I follow him to the pizza place around the corner from school where the normally grouchy guys behind the counter greet him like he’s the mayor, sliding two slices of pepperoni into the brick oven before he even orders. “Can I ask you something?” I say as we slip into a booth by the window. “What are you even doing in tutoring?”

  Hot Pete Gardello smirks at me across the melamine table. “You’re really blunt, huh?”

  I feel myself blush. “Just with you, apparently.” It’s true; something about the absurdity of him talking to me at all makes me brave, like when halfway through a dream it suddenly occurs to you that nothing is real and you can do whatever you want. “I’m serious, though. I mean, I know why I’m in tutoring.”

  “Why are you in tutoring?” He raises his eyebrows.

  “Dyslexia,” I explain, folding my floppy slice of pizza in half and taking a bite. “Like, a lot of dyslexia.”

  That makes him laugh. “Great quantities of dyslexia?”

  “Tons.”

  “Heaps.”

  “Scads,” I say, “which is a vocabulary word I know on account of all my many years of tutoring.” I shrug. “I think it’s why I like music so much, actually. Like, I can’t always read things right, but I can always hear them.” I glance out the window for a moment, embarrassed at having said so much. “Anyway. You’re smart, is what I’m saying.”

  “You’re smart,” he counters. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d still be sitting in the lot at school with a dead battery.”

  I shake my head. “Somebody would have come along to bail you out like five minutes later,” I predict. “I just got there first.”

  “Maybe,” he admits, taking a sip of his soda. “I bombed my SATs.”

  I think he’s exaggerating — it’s hard to imagine anything bad happening to Hot Pete Gardello — but when he tells me his score, my eyes widen. “Don’t you get that many points just for writing your name?” I can’t help but ask.

  “That’s a myth, actually,” he informs me. “Anyway, Ms. Cherry offered to help me out.”

  “Ms. Cherry offered to tutor you for your SATs?”

  “She really likes baseball,” he says with a shrug.

  “Of course she does.” I shake my head. “What happened?”

  “With the SATs?” Hot Pete Gardello shrugs again. “I choked, I don’t know.” He leans his head back, a tiny nick visible on his throat where he must have cut himself shaving, then sits upright again. “This is going to make me sound like a total boner, but sometimes it’s like people have all these expectations for me, you know? And I guess I just kind of cracked under them a little bit.”

  “You’re right,” I tell him, plucking a piece of pepperoni off my pizza and popping it into my mouth. “That does make you sound like a total boner.”

  Hot Pete Gardello grins.

  Gigi is sitting on the front stoop of my apartment building when I get home that afternoon, the sun catching the pink streaks woven through her long black braid. Gigi was the only member of Evelyn Nosebleed who could conceivably be a rock star in this dimension without completely changing both her look and her personality. “We need to talk,” she announces.

  “Oh, now you want to talk to me?” I’m aiming for snotty, but it comes out strangled. Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent my entire life trying to be cool or aloof, but in the end I’m always about as subtle as a golden retriever, my feelings perpetually obvious in the wagging of my tail.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” she says, standing up and wiping her palms on the seat of her jeans — she’s nervous, I realize, and it satisfies me in some small mean way. “I can explain.”

  “Can you?”

  Gigi’s dark eyes narrow. “I mean, if you’ll let me talk, maybe.”

  “Why should I?” I ask, bristling — forgetting for a moment that this is all I’ve wanted since that day outside the roller rink. “You’ve been perfect
ly happy to shit all over me all this time, but now, suddenly —”

  “That is not what I’ve been doing!” she bursts out. “Like, come on, Elisa. Do you really think I liked not talking to you for a month?”

  “How should I know?” I counter, loudly enough that a man walking his dog glances over at us curiously. “Seriously, what conclusion should I have drawn when you just unilaterally decided to —”

  “You’re my best friend, Elisa!” Gigi makes a face like I’m being difficult on purpose. “You know that. I just . . . handled this badly, okay?”

  Something about the way she says it has me standing very still. “Handled what badly?” I ask.

  Gigi blows a breath out, sitting down on the stoop again and flopping forward, resting her forehead on her knees for a moment before finally looking back up at me. “So that night at Franco’s sister’s party,” she begins, her voice so quiet I have to strain to hear her. “Remember how Josh asked me to help him carry a bunch of shit in from his car right before we went on?”

  “Sure,” I say slowly, though in truth I was only half paying attention; I’d been scrutinizing the girl who worked behind the skate rental counter, trying to figure out if Josh had been flirting with her as we’d been setting up. She’d had a lip ring, I remember. I’d wondered for a moment if maybe I should get one, too.

  “Well,” Gigi says, sounding miserable, “I went out there with him, and all of a sudden he started randomly saying all this stuff to me.”

  I frown. “What kind of stuff?”

  She hesitates. “I mean . . . nice stuff,” she says finally, shrugging a little; she isn’t quite meeting my eye. “And he kissed me.”

  I can feel all the air whoosh out of me at once. “He kissed you?” I repeat.

  “I had no idea he was going to do it,” she clarifies quickly, holding both hands out like she’s trying to physically shore me up. “I mean, obviously I would never have —”

  “No, of course not,” I say, visions of Harvey Weinstein and Woody Allen and that guy from the Today show filling my head. “I know you wouldn’t.” Holy crap, is Josh a sex pervert? Does he just go around, like, forcing himself on unsuspecting people? Do we need to tell an adult? “So you quit the band and totally ditched me because Josh kissed you and you didn’t want him to?”