by Eric Smith
“No. Lord, no! I don’t think you’d ever crank off in your shorts at such an inappropriate time. Only at an appropriate time . . . for cranking off in your shorts. Not that I’ve thought about it at all, because I haven’t. Ever. Gross.”
“I was also joking.”
“Oh.” Katrina laughed louder than was strictly necessary. “Jokes! Love them.”
“I didn’t even hear a short in my jack.”
“Yeah, it’s there. So if you wanna drop by the sound booth in ten minutes or so, we can get that fixed. The short in your jack. Not the jack in your shorts. Joke. Joking. Okay, bye.”
“If Katrina starts doing jokes and voices, it’s over,” Sarah said, positioning a wooden incense holder, threading a stick of nag champa into it, and setting a cigarette lighter beside it.
“Her jokes always come in about thirty percent hotter than they should,” Hailey agreed.
Someone knocked at the sound booth door. Sarah and Hailey quickly hushed, even though Katrina wouldn’t have felt the need to knock. Hailey answered. It was Beckett.
Hailey’s heart surged. Before Beckett could say anything, Hailey had already envisioned Beckett’s apology for the distance between them that year — accepting full blame and absolving her. She imagined her own magnanimous acceptance of said apology in which, as a gesture of reconciliation, she’d accept some of the responsibility. She’d say something like We both could have done more. She’d say —
Beckett stared at Hailey for a second with an unreadable expression, looking like she was seeking words but fumbling them.
Hailey stared back. “What? We’re getting ready for the show.” It came out sharper than she’d intended, but she wanted to hustle along Beckett’s apology so she could accept it and they could be them again.
Beckett looked taken aback, her mouth slightly open, but still said nothing.
“Did you need to tell me something?” Again, Hailey said this with a smidgen more of an edge than she’d hoped, but Beckett was trying her patience.
“I need to talk to Sarah,” Beckett finally said.
Hailey deflated and suddenly felt like crying. “She’s busy.” She tempered her tone with none of the magnanimity she’d laid in reserve to accept Beckett’s nonforthcoming apology.
“I literally see her right over your shoulder.”
“She’s busy right over my shoulder. What do you want?”
Hailey could hear Sarah behind her, still puttering away as if to say, Sorry, not getting involved.
Beckett’s voice was clenched. “Tell Sarah I wanted to use a different snare with the Marcia, Marcia, Marcias.”
Hailey folded her arms because she didn’t know what to do with her hands. “Sarah told me to tell you that we’re back-lining the drum kit and we’re not doing a new drum mix just so you can sound point-zero-four percent better with one of your nineteen bands.”
“Hailey.”
“Beck.”
“Come on.”
“I’m actually also super busy right now, so . . .”
“Can we talk for literally one second?”
“We’ve just been talking for literally one second about your sixty-third band, and now, oops, I’m all out of seconds.” Hailey said.
“Hay —” Beckett started to say, but Hailey shut the door in her face before she could finish.
“Harsh,” Sarah said.
Hailey didn’t reply but busied herself answering a text. Her heart ached.
“You aren’t in uniform, by the way.” Sarah nodded down at Hailey’s white-toed Chucks. Sarah required the wearing of all black, with all-black Chucks.
Hailey rolled her eyes and flounced over to a duffel bag in the corner, from which she removed a pair of black-toed Chucks, and sat on the floor to switch shoes.
Sarah’s face tensed. “Oh, now you’re giving me attitude? We’re going to let things fall apart in our last show together?”
Hailey exhaled loudly through her nose. “Things aren’t gonna fall apart if I have the wrong color rubber on my Chucks.” This was all Hailey needed — to get into it with Sarah at the exact same moment that she had newly reopened her festering wound with Beckett.
Sarah turned to the soundboard, but then back to Hailey. “We’ve never talked about this, have we.”
“About what?”
“You want to work in music, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So, the couple of times I’ve worked my dad’s shows before this upcoming tour, I got treated like dogshit. Dudes explaining to me the difference between an XLR input and a quarter-inch input. Guys who had been on my dad’s crew for like a week giving me their coffee orders. And I’m not even sure they didn’t know who I was. My point is that women in music have basically zero margin for error. We have to be five times as good as the men at everything just to be taken seriously. That’s why I and everyone who works with me have to be five times better. Front to back, head to toe. Everything matters. Always.”
Hailey’s and Sarah’s eyes met for a moment, and Hailey suddenly felt profound regret that this would likely be the last time they would ever work together. Sarah could be a real pain in the ass with her perfectionism. But she was on to something. And there’s something bizarrely comforting about people who care not what you think of them. It means you have no reason to question it when they show you love.
Katrina burst in. “Hey, Sarah, I passed Beckett coming here and she asked —”
“No,” Hailey said curtly.
“All righty,” Katrina said. “Glad we were able to hash that out.”
“We talked. The answer is nope.”
“Okay,” Katrina said slowly.
“Ladies, the hour is upon us,” Sarah said. She picked up the lighter next to the incense holder and lit the stick of incense.
Sarah had picked up the tradition from her dad’s former sound guy Curly, who kept a steady stream of nag champa burning during shows. Said it centered him, which allowed him to hear the mix better. To be sure, Curly also famously believed that holding in farts could cause liver damage, which may have been the true reason for the incense. Anyway.
Sarah placed the incense holder on the floor. The three encircled it and joined hands as the aromatic smoke wafted upward.
“O Great and Mysterious Goddess,” Sarah intoned in a solemn voice, “she who has given us gaffer’s tape and the SM57, let this Battle of the Bands not be a complete shit show.”
“Amen,” Hailey and Katrina murmured.
“Grant unto us patience in the face of requests for more vocals in the monitors,” Hailey said.
“Amen.”
“Guide our hands in stopping feedback,” Katrina said. “Both the sonic kind and the kind where people wanna tell you what you could improve.”
“Amen.”
“Give us the grace not to cut the mics during ukulele covers of rap songs,” Sarah said.
“Amen.”
“Deliver us from acoustic guitarists who want to plug directly into the PA,” Hailey said.
“Amen.”
Sarah paused for several moments. When she spoke, it was with greater soberness than usual for the Ritual. “Thank you, Goddess, for the Sisterhood of Light and Sound. All the good times we’ve had together. May our group text be undying.”
Katrina and Hailey were unaccustomed to such emotional nudity from Sarah.
They always went until they had nothing more to say, and then they finished out the Ritual by watching a YouTube montage of Nicolas Cage freakouts, followed by a video of “Hey Ya!” by Outkast where the song speeds up every time they say “uh” or “all right.”
This time, though, after they ran dry of things to say, they stood there quietly, holding hands in a circle. One last time.
Brenner knocked on the sound booth door at about five minutes before showtime. Sarah pretended at annoyance, but truthfully, she was glad to employ her new soldering iron. Maybe three minutes had elapsed when she sent Brenner on his way with his Squier
Strat in hand, nary a short in his jack or a jack in his shorts to be found.
With the air of a beneficent potentate, Sarah instructed Katrina to accompany Brenner to test his guitar and bring it back if there were any problems. Sarah knew there wouldn’t be. Katrina knew Sarah knew. And Katrina was grateful.
The show began.
“So. You excited for tour?” Hailey asked Sarah, over the music.
“Yeah,” Sarah said. The ambivalent timbre in her voice was unmistakable even through the cacophony. In forty-eight hours, she would be behind the soundboard at the Bowery Ballroom, watching her father hold a midsize crowd of mostly forty- and fifty-somethings in his thrall.
“Yeah?”
“It’ll be one of the longest stretches I’ve gotten to see my dad in, like, my life.”
“That’s cool. Spending time with family is important,” Hailey said wistfully.
Katrina reentered, trailing a rosy, giddy energy behind her like the sillage of a fine perfume.
The three watched the band onstage. What the musicians lacked in technique, they made up for in ebullient golden-retriever-esque enthusiasm.
Sarah nudged one of the sliders on the board approximately three atoms’ length. “I always felt like . . . my dad wasn’t mine. As if he belonged to everyone in the world more than me. There are some people who, when I tell them who my dad is, act like they want to ask me to name my top three favorite Arthur Crow and the Condemned albums, like he’s more theirs than mine because they’re bigger fans. And don’t even get me started on the goth weirdos sliding into my Insta DMs trying to get to my dad through me.”
As the Grants — a favorite of SOLAS because of their Joan Jett–esque vibe — started to play, Sarah, Katrina, and Hailey swapped glances.
“Am I hearing that lyric right?” Katrina asked.
Hailey cupped a hand to her ear. “I’m getting heart shitter.”
Katrina closed her eyes and listened intently. “Could it be hard shitter?”
“What’s a hard shitter?”
“I dunno. Like not enough dietary fiber? What’s a heart shitter?”
“Whichever it is, it’s shitter that’s really the operative part.” Hailey turned to Sarah. “Didn’t Bolivar lay down some no-cussing policy? Aren’t we supposed to cut their mics?”
Sarah leaned against the mixing board (careful not to nudge any of the sliders) and folded her arms. “Sorry, what? I didn’t hear any profanity because I was too busy.” She studied her pinky nail and nibbled at a corner.
“Aha, yes . . . I was also too busy to hear any lyrics about heart shitting,” Hailey said with a broad wink.
“Or possibly hard shitting, it’s kinda tough to tell,” Katrina said, also with an exaggerated wink.
Suddenly, the sound died. The auditorium erupted in boos and shouts of “Let them play.”
Sarah spun around. “Bolivar! So help me God, if he touched the snake . . .” she muttered as she barreled past Katrina and Hailey, out the sound booth door.
Katrina and Hailey were both abundantly aware that “snake” referred to the bundle of mic cables running from the stage to the sound booth, but Sarah had instilled in them an indelible sense of duty, and so they felt duty-bound to snicker at “if he touched the snake.”
They laughed, too, because it might be their final chance to enjoy Sarah’s offering a tossed-off double entendre while charging into action — something that had traditionally occurred with some frequency. Katrina and Hailey could never be sure if it was intentional on Sarah’s part — she played things arrow-straight — but they appreciated the ribald superhero-ness of it nonetheless.
Sarah returned, huffing and ruddy with the bright heat of recent confrontation, as the next band prepared to take the stage. She quickly consulted her mix notes and made adjustments to the board.
The show continued.
Breakfast of Champions.
I Want Your P.S.
Safe & Sound.
Shifter Focus.
Amina Aboud.
SOLAS was in the zone — each band sounded amazing. Well, that is to say: SOLAS ensured each band sounded as amazing as the musicians’ abilities permitted. But each band, regardless of musical acumen, bathed in Katrina’s artful lighting, glowed as if composed of some rare element under fluorescence.
Hailey looked out at the stage and saw Lilly, the stage manager, in the wings looking harried. Someone must have touched the curtains — the unpardonable sin in Lil’s credo. “How’s it going down there, Lil?” Hailey asked into her headset, over the din of Reckless Love.
Lil sounded at wit’s end. “Why are they all like this?”
Hailey turned to Sarah. “Why are all musicians like this?”
“Like what?” Sarah studied the soundboard.
“Annoying in a way that makes Lil ask why they’re all annoying.”
“You’re a musician. You tell me.”
“I thought growing up with a famous musician would give you some insight.”
Big Talk started up sans their normal lead singer. Sarah feigned annoyance at having to mix in a new vocalist on the fly, but she wasn’t fooling anyone — she loved the challenge. She dialed their sound in and turned back to Hailey and Katrina. “Anyway. Famous,” Sarah said, picking their conversation back up with a sad laugh. “My dad was just big enough that we had all the downsides of celebrity — like people posting pics of him looking like shit, making fun of him for moving to New Brunswick, and creepy stalkers — but none of the upsides, like him making enough money to retire from constant touring and be at his daughter’s birthday parties. Very cool level of fame.”
This was the most Sarah had ever opened up to Katrina and Hailey about anything. Katrina and Hailey had never been to her house for more than a few minutes. They’d never met her father even though both were secretly dying to.
“You know what’s funny?” Sarah continued. “I never dreamed of running sound. I got into it as a way to get my dad to take me on tour with him. I worked so hard to get good enough at it that he’d consider me. Working shitty outdoor shows and running sound at bar mitzvahs and apprenticing with sound guys who didn’t want me around. And now?” Sarah laughed ruefully. “I wish I could spend summer with my friends like a normal person and still somehow see my dad regularly. Guess we always want what we can’t have.”
A commotion from the auditorium drew their attention back to the performance. They looked in time to see Aaron, the front man of Big Talk, being pushed from the stage. Then April, their bassist, and Jess, who wasn’t even in Big Talk, started making out onstage like they were fighting for possession of a single tongue.
“Lil, are you seeing this?” Hailey said into her headset.
“What is happening?” Lilly responded. “Did they just kick out their lead singer and then start making out?”
“So badass.”
The final four bands queued up backstage. Sarah, Katrina, and Hailey, knowing that they were on the downslope of their time together, kicked their reminiscing into high gear.
They remembered the time that they were running lights and sound for the school’s production of Rent, and they caught Katrina softly singing “Six thousand twenty-two hundred four thousand minutes, four hundred fifty-two thousand moments so dear” quite earnestly to herself as she broke down the stage. “They’re just singing numbers, right?” Katrina had asked. “No, in fact, the song literally says many times that the number they’re singing is the number of minutes in a year,” Sarah explained. They laughed until they hiccuped. Hailey tried to get them to try a “surefire” cure, which was to count their hiccups until they got to ten, but after counting a couple of hiccups sequentially, they started going “Seven thousand forty-two thousand six million hiccups,” and so forth until they were worse off than before.
They remembered working an orchestra concert, during which they were so bored that Hailey suggested they try to do impressions of themselves — as in Hailey would try to do an impression of Hailey,
Katrina would try to do an impression of Katrina. It turned out that it was exceedingly difficult to impersonate one’s self — an enterprise doomed to hilarious failure. They later learned that they were heard chortling in the sound booth during a particularly quiet portion of a requiem. It was the rarest lapse of professionalism for Sarah, who took a dim view of their hijinks ever encroaching upon their work. But this one she shrugged off. “It was either that or fall asleep,” she’d said.
The more they talked, the more they realized how little time they’d had together and how few memories they’d gotten the chance to make. It seemed like many, many more until they laid them out on the table. It wasn’t nearly enough.
They were reliving the time when they were running lights and sound for an assembly and the principal got mad at the constant buzz of talking. In a huff, he’d tried to say, Hey, folks, I have people to see and things to do, but he got flustered and instead said, “Hey, folks, I have things to see and people to do,” which sent the crowd into paroxysms of glee. Sarah’s antennae visibly went up as Katrina finished her recounting of the story, tears of laughter streaming down her face.
“What?” Hailey asked.
“Where’s Lil?” Sarah craned, scanning around.
“Dunno. Why?” Hailey asked.
“Haven’t seen her for a while,” Sarah murmured.
“Want me to text her?” Katrina asked.
But Sarah was already out the door. “Gonna be a shit show without someone shepherding,” she called over her shoulder as she sprinted down toward the backstage area. She was never happy about being pulled away from Hailey and Katrina in the sound booth under the best of circumstances. And being pulled away for a second time during the final show of the Sisterhood of Light and Sound was far from the best of circumstances. But saving the day and keeping things running was what Sarah did.
The Battle of the Bands wrapped. As the winners were being announced, a mass of sputtering, blazing sparklers floated over the stage on wires, like a flaming sprite, trailing smoke and sparks behind it. The crowd gasped at the ardent spectacle.
Hailey and Katrina were no less awestruck.
“Holy shit,” Katrina said, eyes shimmering like a child’s. “That rules.”