by Mercy Brown
They stare at me, kindly. I can tell Jeff wants to pat me on the head and bring me a plate of cookies and some herbal tea. Instead he gets up, moves me out of the way, and pulls a top, a sweater, and a pair of jeans from the closet and lays them on the bed for me.
“Please don’t say anything to anyone,” I tell them both. “We’re not telling the beat brothers yet.”
“Why not?” Sonia asks.
“Because . . . it’s complicated.”
“Like I said?” she says.
“Fine, have it your way.”
They both go to get ready for tonight and I undress and I know this is weird, but I just stand there and stare in the mirror at my ass. Looking at Travis’s name scrawled in that thick, black Sharpie ink makes me want to crawl right back into his lap and stay there all night while he writes his paper. All week. All year. All . . . hmm.
I feel something snap awake inside of me. Something that feels like it’s about to threaten everything.
The beat brothers come over at eight. Jeff, Sonia, and I climb into the back of Cole’s old Crown Victoria, and I feel like a complete asshole keeping this secret from Joey and Cole now. I feel guilty, like I’ve done something wrong. But have I?
Now I’m back at war with myself, mad at myself for being impulsive and not thinking things through because my brain is far too clouded with all things Travis. If Travis was any other guy not in Soft, it wouldn’t matter. I could be obsessively crushing and having fun, but it’s him and I can’t, and I can’t sort it out. I am a healthy twenty-one-year-old female singer in a band, and I am not single because nobody wants to date me. Getting some isn’t my problem. Why can’t I just get some with somebody else who isn’t going to cause all this drama in my life?
“You’re quiet tonight, Emmy,” Cole says, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “Still hungover from pukefest?”
“Yep,” I say. “Totally.”
“Vodka seltzer and Advil,” Joey says. “Always does the trick.”
If drinking Joey’s dog-hair remedy would make me stop wanting Travis, with the way I’m freaking out right now, I might just opt to stay drunk for a week. But I’m sure it would have the opposite effect.
The conversation switches quickly over to band business, which is inevitable when more than one member of Soft is present. Sonia is used to this, she’s practically our accountant. Cole got a call today from Rex, the bassist from the Corporate Secret down in Baltimore. They had a last-minute cancellation on a big show they’re doing for a Spring Fair after-party at Johns Hopkins with Vampires and Assassins with a guarantee of two hundred fifty dollars and a live broadcast over WJHU. The show is on Wednesday night. It’s late notice, but can we do it? Travis is already in. Cole called him before he came to pick us up. He’s working the morning shift at the Jiffy Lube on Wednesday and we don’t need to load in until seven thirty. His first class on Thursday isn’t until one in the afternoon.
Now, I have an exam in Modern Novel on Thursday at eight a.m. Joey and Cole say no big deal, we’ll leave right after the show. I can sleep in the van on the way home and go to my exam in the morning, no trouble. It’s Modern Novel, and you don’t study for Modern Novel. You read novels, and I’ve already read ahead by two books in that class, so I’m not worried about needing to hit the books. I am worried, however, about the fact that my professor is a cocksucker and he gave me an entire letter grade off my paper on Zora Neale Hurston because I turned it in an hour late. An hour! I get straight As in my English classes. I have to for my scholarship. On this paper he gave me a fucking B before he even read it.
That was last month when we were driving back from Boston after playing with Saltback and the Twin Sisters. We drove all fucking night in a blizzard so I could turn that damned paper in, but we got stuck in traffic at six thirty in the morning in New York on Interstate 95, of course, and I missed class. I ran to Professor Mortenson’s office with my paper as soon as I got back, and he didn’t give one shit about my ordeal.
“You should have turned it in early if you had plans to be out of town,” he said.
I would have, I explained. I did the paper before I left but I was planning to be in class so I didn’t think I needed to.
“You’ll think ahead next time,” he said. “I don’t ever accept late papers—I’m doing you a favor.”
A favor? There is no way he’s going to let me make up this exam if I miss it for a show. No way.
But I won’t miss it, Cole and Joey assure me. Baltimore is only two and a half hours from New Brunswick. It’s practically Philadelphia. And a chance to be broadcast live over WJHU?
Of fucking course we’ll do it.
***
Billy Broadband organizes Rock and Roll Bowling out at Carolier Lanes in North Brunswick, usually on a whim, whenever he feels like we need a family get-together. He’s like the Cub Scout leader of the New Brunswick music scene and pulls together a lot of outings like these. Sometimes it’s bowling, sometimes it’s mini golf. Sometimes it’s a barbecue at someone’s house or a punk rock stampede on the boardwalk down at Seaside Heights. He’s also the one who urges us all to “support the scene outside the scene,” and you can just about guarantee if you’re playing Brownies or Arlene’s Grocery in New York, or the Khyber in Philadelphia, Billy Broadband will be there along with a decent handful of New Brunswick scenesters.
Billy is at the top of the phone chain, and he usually calls George or Dom or Millie and they set things in motion. Tonight there are about thirty of us who descend on the bowling alley. We all converge in the parking lot and what a sight we are, a mix of black-rimmed glasses and cardigans over hip, ironic T-shirts, tattoos of all different varieties (Sonia’s birdcage is my favorite), rockabilly hair and retro boots, punk rockers with eighty-five piercings, stoners in flannel shirts, leather jackets, mohawks, and goth rockers in all the eyeliner, being eyed by drunk guys in bona fide bowling shirts and families out for wholesome fun who look at us like we’re some kind of angry drug-addled, moralless mob of fuckers. We love that.
We all storm the counter and line up the assorted combat boots and Converse high-tops and exchange them for clown shoes and then follow Billy like a long row of baby ducks to six lanes we command at the front of the bowling alley, near the entrance. I don’t know what the staff were thinking putting us here, must not be worried about first impressions I guess.
The beat brothers and Jeff, Sonia, and I are a team against Vagaboss and Hanna Octane. Hanna is a single-woman folk-punk act, just her and her pink Mexican Stratocaster and seventeen different effects pedals which she’s willing to run straight to the fucking board! (Don’t mind me, I’m a gear snob and a guitar without an amp is like a mouth without a tongue to me.) Her guitar tone makes me want to drown myself in a bathtub, but she’s got an amazing voice, and even if every song she writes is about being dumped, she’s otherwise a very sweet person. She’s a bleached-white-blonde Courtney Love clone in terms of her style, though less fucked up than that and much nicer. But she is a little weird. When she talks, she uses this sort of haughty, affected, superior tone of voice, but she’ll be talking about things like her favorite color marshmallow peeps. I don’t know how old she is. Sometimes, I know it’s mean, but we all try to guess. She could literally be anywhere from fifteen to thirty-five years old for all we know in terms of how she looks. But she doesn’t go to school, she has no job. Nobody seems to have any idea what she does for money. There’s no way she makes a living on music, she doesn’t play enough and she doesn’t even have a single out. She lives over in Somerset with some people nobody seems to know. But like a lot of us strays, she’s part of this scene because when Billy calls, she shows up. To be in this club, the bar is really pretty low. You don’t have to be a musician. All you have to do is show up, wherever we all are, whether it’s Carolier or the Melody or the Dead End. Just show up and don’t be a dick. But you can even be a dick as long as y
ou have an excuse.
Tonight, our motley crew is also joined by Scoob, the doorman at the Court Tavern. Scoob and Billy are a team with Matt and Julia from Circle Time in the lane next to us. They’re playing against Fester, who is joined by Molly, and I’m fairly sure now that Molly and George are banging, and if they’re not, they will be soon. There’s something in the way George’s mohawk perks up when Molly enters the room. When they see me, they give me a knowing smile and I give them wide, worried eyes. I worry all night George is going to say something about Travis to take the piss out of me. George embodies all that is terrible and wonderful about older brothers, so I have a reason to be worried here.
The great thing about Rock and Roll Bowling is that we’re all here doing something most of us really suck at, instead of in the clubs doing what most of us are pretty good at. It’s like this level-playing-field jackassery. Once you add a few pitchers of beer and the concerned parents rushing their innocent children past us before our rowdy, heathen presence can make too indelible an impression, you have entertainment for all, especially when George leads the entire group in an a cappella rendition of “The Soul Slayer” by Slow Life, which is really the rally cry of the New Brunswick music scene. We all join in and sing it like it’s our anthem, like we’re the dwarves singing in Bilbo’s hobbit hole right before we go off after the dragon, and endure the angry stares of nearby bowlers who just have no idea what they’re in for tonight.
For the entire first hour we’re here throwing gutter balls and splits, I can’t even look Millie in the eye. I have no idea how I’m here bowling with her and keeping this all inside. I’m trying to act normal and it’s all good, and then I remember what I was doing a few hours ago, who with, and the irrefutable proof on my ass that something is definitely going on between me and Travis. Whenever I remember that I’ve got his name written across my ass, I break apart inside. I really do. I try to tamp down the anxious feeling of wanting to be with him right this very minute and the worse feeling of knowing I won’t see him later and that he’s working all day tomorrow, so at best I’ll see him around dinner tomorrow night, and then his mom comes, and oh shit. Oh shit. It’s the feeling of waiting for someone, anyone, to bring up his name so I have an excuse to talk about him, and worrying that someone will bring up his name and I’ll have to act like it’s all normal and I don’t know if I can. And then when Millie does bring him up, I still talk about him like he’s all mine.
“Bean is home working on a paper,” I say.
“I thought he was going to finish that up today so he could come out tonight.” She pouts adorably. “What a stinker.”
“Yeah,” I say, feeling the irritable bowel syndrome I don’t actually have beginning to flare.
“Let’s call him and give him hell,” she suggests, pointing over at the pay phone by the front door. “For going back on his word.”
“Um.”
“Emmy, come with me to the girls’ room.” Sonia tries to rescue me. “I need to doll up if I have any chance of making out with Cole tonight.”
“You’re trying to hook up with Cole?” I ask her, temporarily distracted, completely unsure if I even approve of this. Luckily, Cole is too busy bowling an actual decent game to pay any attention to us. Cole is like my brother and Sonia is my best friend and housemate. If they hook up and it doesn’t pan out and it gets awkward, well? Then what? Just call me Love’s Executioner, I guess. Sonia tilts her head in the direction of the bathroom, smiles at my stupidity, and tugs me by the arm.
“I’ll come with,” Millie says. “I need to put on lip gloss before I call Travis. It makes me talk sexy.”
Oh, fuck.
When Millie goes with me and Sonia to the bathroom, she asks specifically if Travis said anything to me about her, and I lie and say no because I can’t exactly tell her the truth, can I? First of all, I’m an asshole but not that much of an asshole. I don’t want to hurt her feelings. Second of all, I have known that she’s been into Travis for a while, and then I jumped all over his dick like I owned it, despite basically telling her there was nothing going on between us. And that’s shitty of me, I understand, but all I can say in my defense is that I suck. And that I’m really confused right now with intensely wanting Travis when part of me still believes it’s a big mistake that’s going to lead to disaster.
“What do you think the deal is with him?” Millie asks me. “Is he into someone else?”
“Not that I know of,” I say and try not to cringe too obviously as I see Sonia’s jaw drop right behind Millie’s back. I’m not artful at bullshit, I’m really not, but here I am trying to bullshit my way through the awkward with one of my good friends. Fuck, how did I end up in this situation again? Why?
Oh, right. That adorable, blond, mastodon-dick-swinging sex champion in my band.
Luckily (oh my God), our conversation in the ladies’ room is interrupted when Julia comes staggering in, sobbing. Sobbing like somebody just died. No matter how drunk I’ve seen Julia, not once have I seen the girl shed tears. So something really awful must be going down.
Julia lights a cigarette and asks one of us to go out and buy her two shots of anything and bring them to her posthaste. Sonia volunteers while Millie and I receive the awful news that Julia has just found out Matt has been fucking Hanna Octane behind her back for about six months. Tonight, just five minutes ago, in fact, Hanna decides she can’t handle the guilt anymore and comes right out and tells Julia while they’re ordering nachos at the damned snack bar.
Now, Hanna isn’t a terrible person, really. Well, she did fuck Matt while he was with Julia, and that’s terrible. No doubt about it. But I’m telling you, Hanna is a little weird. She’s sort of lost and you wonder sometimes whatever happened to that girl, but you can safely surmise it involved a heavy dose of hallucinogens. So you have a hard time really blaming her when her judgment is off. It often is (see also: plugging your guitar direct to the damned sound board). And we’re not some gang of bitches who are about to go out there and jump Hanna Octane. There’s no hair-pulling, cat-scratching brawl in our immediate future.
We are, however, about to go out there en masse to confront Matt because fuck him for hurting Julia Time and for fucking up the best jangle pop band in our scene.
“This is unbelievable,” Millie says. “What a douchebag Matt is! How could he?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Julia says and blows her nose into some toilet paper. Sonia comes back with two shots of Jameson. We catch her up to speed while Julia throws them back one right after the other.
“Is this the end of Circle Time?” I blurt out because I’m sensitive like that. Sonia makes a horrified-looking face at me, but both Julia and Millie are in bands and they understand that this question is akin to “Who gets the kids?”
Julia nods her head like she’s thinking hard about this one.
“I’m not giving up the fucking band,” she says. “We just put out a single and I emptied my savings in the studio last month for that. He can fucking quit.”
“But he’s the singer,” Millie says. “How will you deal with that?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll find a way,” she says.
She splashes cold water on her face, and then marches back out there like a motherfucking Viking warrior. Millie, Sonia, and I follow right behind her. She goes right up to Hanna, who’s sulking on the plastic bench, and reminds her that friends don’t fuck their friends’ boyfriends.
“That’s why I had to tell you,” she says, sniffling. “I don’t even know what’s wrong with me. I think I need a medication change.”
It’s pretty clear Matt has figured out what’s up from the way he picks his vintage leather racing jacket up off the bench and skulks over to the door. Matt is in such a hurry to get the hell out of there, he’s about to walk out with his bowling shoes still on. One of the counter workers, who we’re pretty sure is employed throug
h some community service work release program, sees him and throws his body across the glass doors like he’s a protester stopping a tank from mowing down a field of daisies. The guy will not let him out, so Matt tries to pry the guy off the door. The guy grabs Matt’s vintage racing jacket and Matt goes to hook him in the face, doesn’t even blink, but the guy blocks him like a street fighter and twists his arm behind his back.
“The shoes, dickface,” he says.
Now you have twenty guys in bowling shirts scrambling to the front door and all of Rock and Roll Bowling jumping into the scene for the face-off, and the assorted characters make for the weirdest-looking rumble I ever hope to see.
“Let’s take this to the parking lot,” a big beer-bellied dude suggests as four other bowling league members crack their knuckles.
“Let’s not,” Billy Broadband says. “I paid for another three games.”
“Seriously,” George says. “Give the damned shoes back, Matt, you dumb fucker.”
The manager comes over and threatens to call the cops if a fight breaks out, so Matt heads back over to the counter to turn in his shoes, muttering about his jacket. But then he’s stopped by Julia, who pushes her way through the crowd and grabs him by the arm.
“I’ll meet you in the van,” he says.
“You’ve been fucking Hanna Octane?” Julia says. Her voice is high-pitched and whiskey-sure.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Deny it.”
“I’m not fucking Hanna Octane.”
“I know you’re not fucking her, as in, right this moment. Have you been fucking her?”
“Let’s not do this right now,” he says. “Seriously.”
“You’re not denying it.”
“No, I’m not.”
There’s a dramatic gasp in the crowd, and it’s Billy Broadband. I’m surprised he didn’t put his hand to his brow and swoon to the ground. Even I feel like I just got my teeth knocked out. Everyone turns around to stare at Hanna, who’s sitting there on the bench with her face buried in her fingerless-gloved hands.