Battle of the Bands

by Eric Smith

  “Cool,” he says.

  I take the sparklers out of my pocket and grab the duct tape in the corner that’s always there for emergencies. I tie the twenty sparklers onto the hook and make sure they’re as tight as possible. (I want to make a statement, not burn the place to the ground.) I look across the stage and see Sarah. She can probably see me if she looks hard enough, or knows to look, but she doesn’t. Probably still cursing me out.

  The lights turn on and Mr. Bolivar goes onstage, beaming at the audience. The judges walk up to join him.

  “All right, ladies and gentlemen, let’s give it up for all of the competitors! Wasn’t it an amazing show?”

  Applause, whistles, shouts. I want to pay attention, but I can’t. The rope in my hands feels heavy, and my heart is racing. Now that the stage lights are fully on, if we take a step, we’ll be illuminated. We crowd around the pole, arms touching, trying to be — ironically — as small and invisible as possible.

  “In third place we have . . . Breakfast of Champions!” Leon, Gita, Sophia, and Beckett run onstage and holler. Leon does a rather suggestive pose, and Gita waves to someone in the audience.

  “In second place we have . . . Megan Talley!” Knew it. Megan runs onstage and bows. She grins at someone in the audience. Probably Steven. I try to shake the feeling away.

  “And in first place in this year’s Battle of the Bands we have . . .”

  “Now,” I whisper. “Light them.” Vincent gets out a lighter and lights each sparkler in one swift movement. Without another thought, I pull on the rope so the group of sparklers flies high over the stage. A trail of smoke and dots of light float behind the ball of bursting sparkles. It lights up the stage just as Safe & Sound is announced the winner.

  I look up and laugh, feeling a weight leave my chest. I feel . . . free . . . like my thoughts and worries and blocks I put on myself are all escaping. I’m glimmering. The world is glimmering. Rodney and Raven from Safe & Sound hug in wild excitement, celebrating their moment just as I celebrate mine.

  Mr. Bolivar looks up and freezes, clearly not knowing what to do. Does he interrupt their moment? Does he find the culprits? He smiles, nervously, and shakes more hands. Then he sees me. His eyes lock on mine. I look across the stage and see Sarah gaping at me, shaking her head. She’s disappointed, and angry I’m busted. But I’ll take it.

  As Safe & Sound walk offstage to properly celebrate their win, and as the crowd starts to leave, I find myself walking onstage. To my stage. The one I’m always behind, and never on. Just as quickly as the stage lit up, it dies down, the sparklers fizzing out. I turn around and look at the dwindling audience. Instinctively I look for Steven, but I don’t see him. He’s probably celebrating with Megan. But honestly, that doesn’t matter. Because here I am.

  Vincent, too, is onstage with me, looking straight into the audience at a girl staring back at him. His sister? They smile at each other.

  I give him a second, and then say, “Let’s go.” I lead the way out — back through the stagecraft room, past the office, and through the drama room’s door, out into the night. It’s dark out, and despite it being dark backstage, my eyes still take a second to adjust. There are some kids running from across the way and I swear they’re howling.

  “That was pretty cool. You’re going to get in trouble, aren’t you?” Vincent asks.

  “Yeah, definitely. I don’t know. It’s okay.”

  And it is. So many emotions bubble inside me, I don’t know what to do or say. I did something amazing, something completely outrageous. I did it. I just want to scream, but instead I hug Vincent and let out a loud “Ha.”

  “What’re you doing next weekend?” I ask.

  “I dunno,” he says, giving me a smile I hadn’t seen all night.

  In the background I can hear it — music. But who? No bands are left. Still, with the music playing fast and hard behind us, life feels a little perfect.

  Music can set the world on fire.

  And tonight, for a brief moment, so did I.

  An unspoken rule of the Sisterhood of Light and Sound (SOLAS) was that all chitchat during setup for a show was to be as arbitrary and unconnected to the task at hand as possible, a sort of conversational Look, Ma, no hands, to signal blasé confidence. They adhered to this convention while prepping the stage for the Raritan River High School Battle of the Bands.

  “Wait, you thought he was Laura Linney’s husband?” Hailey asked, her incredulity momentarily halting her mic-cord winding.

  Katrina fiddled with a malcontent mic stand. “This cockeyed turd has erectile dysfunction,” she muttered to herself. Then back to Hailey: “He is her husband. That’s why she doesn’t cheat with Karl even though his abs look like a wooden muffin tin.”

  Hailey gave Katrina a skeptical look.

  Katrina returned the look. “You think Laura Linney was afraid to cheat on her brother?”

  “Why are you assuming that cheating has anything to do with anything? Sometimes people just change their mind about boning.”

  “By the way, do you love that they landed on the name Karl for the sexiest dude in the movie?”

  “‘This was the hunkiest name we could imagine. Karl.’”

  “Instead of, like, Jaxby or Falkyn.”

  They both laughed.

  Hailey was about to say Chadward, but stopped short as Sarah strode purposefully up the aisle toward the stage, clipboard under one arm. The roll of gaffer’s tape and holster with multitool festooning her belt slapped at her sides, making a sound like the head of staff in an English manor house clapping crisply for everyone to come to attention.

  Katrina and Hailey did just that.

  “What’s with that cord?” Sarah asked.

  “It’s fritzing out,” Hailey said.

  “That’s drum mic three.” Sarah clutched her clipboard to her chest and beat a tattoo on it with her fingers, as though to remind Hailey what a drum was. Sarah really loved her clipboard. It wasn’t a normal clipboard made out of that sort of vague cardboard with a creaky, tarnished guillotine-like clip. It was clear plexiglass — sleek and modern — its gleaming silver bar clip with an ergonomic little swoop in the middle for ease of gripping. An Apple sticker adorned the top left corner. In the top right corner, a sticker of her father’s band: Arthur Crow and the Condemned.

  Sarah was rightfully proud of them, even though their iconic ’80s post-punk goth-rock status brought her little social cachet at their Post Malone– and Lizzo-fixated school. Her father was one of the most famous people in New Brunswick, New Jersey — a far cry from his relatively lesser celebrity in Los Angeles, where they’d lived until a couple years prior, when Sarah’s stepmother, a native New Brunswickian, decided she needed to be near her ailing parents.

  “I know.” Hailey pointed at the tape tag with drum mic 3 written in Sarah’s architectural handwriting.

  “It was vocal mic three that was janky.”

  “Oops. I rock.” Hailey made sure to say I rock instead of I’m sorry, which Sarah mandated because young women were expected to apologize too much.

  “Put that one back, get a new cord from the navy blue bin — not the cerulean bin — label it, pull the janky cord, toss it in my solder pile.”

  Katrina made a final adjustment to the mic stand. “Speaking of which, Brenner has a bum jack on his guitar. It was cutting out during sound check.”

  Sarah opened her mouth to speak.

  Katrina headed her off. “Yes, I checked it with another cord. Two, actually.”

  Sarah came as close to smiling as she ever did during preshow. She loved profound competence above all else. “Hey, you two might just pull this off without me next year. Tell Brenner to see me in the sound booth in twenty minutes. I gotta heat up my soldering iron. Did I tell you my dad got me a new one for tour?”

  Katrina and Hailey swapped a quick Uh oh, now we have to feign excitement over a soldering iron glance.

  “What kind?” Hailey asked.

  “Hex
acon Therm-O-Trac,” Sarah said, with casual humility.

  “Wow,” Katrina and Hailey said simultaneously. Sarah was often lacking at reading sarcasm, but they still strived for as much earnestness as possible.

  “Hey, in Love Actually, is the guy who Laura Linney visits in the care facility her husband or her brother?” Katrina asked.

  Sarah was already back to studying her clipboard with furrowed brow, but she didn’t hesitate or look up. “Brother. Obviously. Hey, when Rock Your Mouth is on, will one of you slyly turn the volume down on the guitar amp and I’ll goose the guitar in the monitor so he won’t notice? His stage volume is a pain in the ovaries.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Katrina said. “No, but listen. He moved to England with her. She calls him ‘darling.’”

  “Siblings move together,” Sarah said. “When my dad first moved to the US from Australia, his brother came with.”

  “And you can call your brother ‘darling,’” Hailey said. “Beckett and I call each other ‘loverpants.’” Mentioning her and her twin sister’s mutual pet name gave Hailey a twinge in the solar plexus. It always feels wrong to refer to one of the private rituals you share with someone you love when you’re on the outs with them.

  “Then why won’t she bone Karl?!” Katrina practically shouted, turning a few heads in the bustling auditorium. “If Beck was going bonkers and you had a chance to bone a cool hunk named Karl —”

  “Never use the phrase ‘a cool hunk named Karl’ ever again; it stresses me out,” Hailey said. “And it depends on when. If Beck were freaking out right now, I’d let her and still bone Karl.”

  “Twin drama?” Sarah asked.

  Hailey sighed. “Not speaking at the moment.”

  “You okay?” Katrina asked.

  “Fine.”

  Hailey wasn’t, though. She wasn’t lying when she said that she and Beckett weren’t speaking at the moment. But what she left unsaid (because saying it felt like peeling off a scab) was that she and Beckett hadn’t been speaking for a lot of moments. In fact, they hadn’t talked much all year, since their grinding and agonizing drift apart upon arriving at their new school and finding themselves on unequal social footing. At this point, Hailey couldn’t remember if the wedge between her and Beckett was the not-talking or whether the not-talking was because of the distancing.

  It didn’t really matter. The reasons for an estrangement never matter as much as the end result, which is a lot of pain. The slow alienations hurt most of all because you can’t trace them back to a single, possibly reparable mistake. Instead, they seem like something inevitable — a larger failure.

  And it heaped insult on injury when Beckett started joining bands late in the school year without so much as hinting that Miss Somewhere, their band, should play the Battle of the Bands. If she had, Hailey would have instantly swallowed her pride and met her halfway by explicitly suggesting it. But no olive branch of a hint? No pride swallowing.

  The auditorium began filling with a trickle of groups of two to four people.

  Sarah checked her phone. “Okay, showtime in twenty-five. Should we go do the Ritual?”

  “This’ll be SOLAS’s final Ritual together,” Hailey said, with the mournful air of someone thinking about yet another way their life was shrinking.

  “I’m just gonna go tell Brenner to meet us in the sound booth in, like, ten. See you guys up there,” Katrina said. She strode away.

  Once Katrina had left earshot, Hailey extended an open palm to Sarah. “Pay up.”

  Sarah folded her arms. “What?”

  “You know what.”

  “I said she’d be chill and you said zero chill?”

  “I remember well.”

  “So.”

  “So pay up,” Hailey said.

  “Dude, she was chill.”

  “In what universe was that chill behavior?”

  Sarah repositioned a mic in front of one of the amps approximately one millimeter. “She was like, ‘Brenner has a bad jack, I’ll tell him to meet us in the sound booth.’ That’s reasonably chill behavior, especially for her.”

  “That’s just it: I’m not at all sure he really has a bum jack,” Hailey said.

  “And also the Earth is flat and vaccines cause autism, right?”

  “You notice any cutting out during sound check?”

  “No, but —”

  “Me neither. She’s planting evidence.”

  “But. I was going to say that I was distracted resetting drum levels because Beckett is like a different human being with every band,” Sarah said.

  “It’s what makes her a great drummer.”

  “She kicks ass. It’s just, if you’re gonna have the same drummer in four bands, consistency would be nice.”

  Hailey knelt and positioned a piece of gaffer’s tape over a mic cord on the floor. “What would have been nice is if she’d made time in her busy schedule for her own sister, but whatevs. We need to revisit why you owe me ten bucks.”

  “Oh, do tell.”

  “So Katrina invents a problem with Brenner’s guitar —”

  “Says you.”

  “So Katrina invents a problem with Brenner’s guitar. And then who oh-so-casually offers to go fetch BrenBren to sort the fake issue?”

  “Well, here’s where your argument falls apart because I literally told Katrina to go fetch Bren Muffin.”

  “No, here’s where I’ve gained the upper hand because Katrina knew that you couldn’t be bothered to fetch Kylie Brenner yourself, so the most logical person to delegate to would be the person standing right in front of you. Who was Katrina, thus allowing her to maintain her paper-thin facade of chillness.”

  “No, here’s where I’ve bested you —” Sarah said.

  “Bested me?”

  “Yes, bested you, because you posit a world that Katrina Garza moves through like a chess grandmaster, thinking thirty moves ahead, all in the service of bagging Brenmo.”

  Hailey looked at Sarah.

  “Brenmo, like Venmo,” Sarah said.

  “Yes.”

  “You were staring at me blankly.”

  “I was giving you my You’re pretending not to know the truth, but you’re gradually putting things together look,” Hailey said.

  “That’s a lot to hang on a single, frankly pretty inexpressive look.”

  “Ten bucks.”

  Sarah checked the time. “We better go do the Ritual.”

  Brenner’s back was turned, and he was noodling on his guitar, the unamplified Strat sounding pale and thin — rather like him. Katrina thought he resembled David Bowie. He did inasmuch as both he and David Bowie were terrestrial, bipedal, bilaterally symmetric, carbon-based, mammalian life-forms. At any lesser level of abstraction, the comparison crumbled.

  “Hey,” Katrina said after taking a deep breath and smoothing her midnight-blue hair.

  Brenner spun, narrowly missing the bridge of her nose with his headstock. “Hey.”

  Katrina affected a schoolmarmish voice and wagged her finger. “Now, careful with that contraption, mister; you’ll put someone’s eye out, so. A Christmas Story? No? It’s fine. Anyway. What?” I’m referencing yet another Christmas movie within a fifteen-minute span?

  “I didn’t say anything . . . just, ‘Hey.’ Also, I heard it was a BB gun in Christmas Story.”

  “Have you not seen it?!”

  “Nope.”

  Be cool, don’t go too big. Stick the landing. “Well . . . you . . . big old . . . piece of shit.”

  Brenner looked at Katrina like she just sneezed in his mouth. “Wow.”

  “. . . is what my friends and I call each other . . . as a term of endearment,” Katrina quickly added, her face incandescing a baboon’s-ass vermillion. Her laugh sounded like a vibrating cell phone chittering across a glass coffee table.

  “Oh.”

  “So. Nervous to play?”

  Brenner shrugged. “Sorta.”

  “I’m not saying you should be.” Don’t do
weird voices. Don’t do weird voices. Don’t do — “But,” Katrina began, in what might generously be called a British accent, “I’m also not saying you shouldn’t be. Just be the right level of nervous. Or, actually, don’t be anything. Just . . . be. Live, laugh, love.”

  Brenner stared. “What’s —”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is that from something?”

  “No. It’s just a thing moms who like boxed wine say.”

  “I thought it was from another movie I hadn’t seen.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t wanna look like a big old piece of shit again.”

  Katrina laughed. This time it sounded like a spoon caught in a garbage disposal. “Yeah, no. No. No no no. No.”

  “You’re running sound, right?”

  “And lights.”

  “I thought I saw you setting up for sound check.”

  He noticed me! British accent again: “That’s little old me, innit. I’m just a little sound-checking bird, innit, mate.”

  “Are you, like, a drama kid? You seem like one.”

  “Uh.”

  “I meant it as a compliment.”

  Since humankind’s adoption of symbolic language, there has not been a more devastating compliment than being told you seem like a drama kid.

  “Oh. Thanks? But no. I’m on crew.”

  “Cool. So, did you want to tell me something?” Brenner asked.

  I’m busted. He knows. I don’t know how, but he knows. “Like . . . what?” Katrina asked.

  Brenner eyed her strangely. “Like . . . do you need me to sound-check again or something?”

  “Oh!” Whew! “Yeah, you had a short in your jack.” She pointed at his guitar.

  “I didn’t notice —”

  “Yeah. Short in the jack. I heard it while you were sound-checking.” Don’t. Don’t do it. “Guess it’s better than having a jack in your shorts, am I right?”

  Brenner’s forehead wrinkled.

  Katrina’s face grew hot(ter). “Like masturb —”

  “You think I would crank off in my shorts at a battle of the bands?”