The show’s going to be on the Pier, down by the beach and it’s this Thursday night, starting at seven. You boys will have ten minutes.” Mrs. Johnson explained before bidding the boys farewell and taking off down the hall again.
“Dude! We’re in!” Moses exclaimed as he and Lee made their way back to their lockers to grab their bags.
“Yeah! We only have three days to get ready, though!” Lee said, leading the way out the double doors to where their bikes were tethered to a tree by a rope.
“First things first, we’d better stop down at the Pier and check out what we’re gonna be working with. We have to make this as sick as we can,” Mo went on. “School talent show or not, we might as well make it good.”
“Alright, let’s ride!”
• • •
The boys screeched to a halt at the Pier’s entrance and dismounted their bikes. The Pier, a landmark of the small seaside town, was wholly unremarkable. It was merely a giant wooden dock, reaching out some eight hundred and fifty feet into the Pacific with a railing around it’s edges. The wood making up the Pier was ancient and weathered, having stood stationary for nearly a century. The supporting beams that held up the giant structure were like great thick trees, and the ropes that bound the joints were as thick as Lee’s forearm.
As the boys reached the end of the Pier, which they had seen many times but had never actually taken the time to thoroughly explore, they noticed a single gigantic rusty pipe coming up through the floor. Upon taking a closer look, Mo’s eyes lit up as he examined what looked to be an old abandoned water pump long neglected.
“This is perfect! They’ll probably set up the stage right here, and this giant pump-lookin’ thing will be right up next to it,” Mo exclaimed, sectioning off the area with his arms. “On the way home we need to stop by City Hall quick.”
“Umm… sure, why is the pipe such a big deal?” Lee asked, puzzled, as they made their way back down the Pier to where there bikes lay. After a quick stop at City Hall Mo and Lee zigzagged their way through the streets on their bikes toward the gravel road that led out of town and along the coast northward and on to their house. It was not until they were a good ways along the gravel road that Lee again asked about the significance of the water pump.
“Dude, it’s perfect!” explained Mo, “instead of having pyrotechnics we’re gona have hydrotechnics. I just asked a city official about the old water pump and they told me that it wasn’t in use anymore. I guess they’ve been meaning to get rid of it for years now and there’s still water pent up inside of it from years and years ago. Apparently it was designed so that pressure from water being pumped can’t escape, so it’s been building up over the years.”
“Alright…” Lee replied, still in the dark but trusting in Mo’s ingenuity. “I bet EmJay will be there…” he said, changing the subject.
Mo smiled distantly as he agreed, “I bet she will.”
EmJay was Moses’ muse. He was the calmest and most collected boy to be found on the entire west coast except on occasions involving EmJay; a girl who he failed miserably at pretending not to like. EmJay was among the prettiest of the girls in the class, and shared multiple classes with Mo. She was a smaller girl, with varying shades of brown in her hair and a tan complexion from constantly being outside. The feature that held Mo’s heart in check, however, were her eyes, giant orbs of a deep greenish brown.
Mo had been in love with EmJay ever since the first day that he had seen her, but he had never gotten up the nerve to talk to her. The few times that they had talked had been initiated by her and he had been uncharacteristically shaky. He often found himself looking at her during class and was sometimes met, to his horror, by her large glowing eyes. On one hand it mortified him that she had seen him watching her but on the other it had given him hope because this meant that she was watching him as well.
Mo’s affection towards EmJay was not that of a normal fourteen year old; the sort of relationships that require sitting by each other at lunch and holding hands every once in a while. Mo, for some reason unbeknownst to him, felt a deep sense of duty and loyalty toward EmJay, who was among the kindest girls he had ever met. It was evident by her every action that she didn’t have it in her to harm even the most insignificant of insects. Her gentleness and peacefulness fascinated and compelled Moses. She was more than just a girl, she was the embodiment of something to fight for; an absolute good. She was a Pacific Ocean sunset. A comet across a silent moonlit sky.
• • •
The sun was beginning to sink more rapidly toward where it collided nightly with the sea as the boys sat among the audience of the middle school talent show. Mo and Lee laughed silently at a couple of girls who lip-synced to an outstandingly bad song by Lady Gaga and sat stone faced while a trio of boys told jokes. There was one boy, however, that sparked their attention.
An Asian boy with long hair falling across his spectacled face nervously took the stage. As he reached for the microphone he said in a timid, wobbly voice “Um… I’m Alex and I’m gonna play my violin. It’s a string tribute to ‘Sugar, We’re Going Down’.” He then proceeded to pull a violin from a case already on the stage, and promptly began to shred his bow. The rapid and edgy, yet soothing noise that Alex emitted from his instrument and the skill with which he played left both Moses’ and Lee’s mouths agape.
“Dude! Did you see that kid?!” Mo whispered excitedly to Lee as Alex exited the stage to a thunderous applause.
“We have to talk to him about helping us cover some Yellowcard songs! He’s perfect!” Lee answered, motioning for them to get up and go prepare for their two song set that was fast approaching.
As a couple of girls finished their painful rendition of “Take It Off”, Mo grabbed his guitar and climbed up onto the stage, followed closely by Lee. Knowing that their time was limited, Mo wasted no time introducing them as Lee took down the curtain that had been hiding his already-set-up drums.
“So we’re NoCal, and um…” his voice trailed off as his eyes found EmJay, sitting in the back smiling. “Um… our first song is ‘Anthem of Our Dying Day’. Get ready.”
• • •
“Wow, these guys actually sound really good…” whispered a girl as she joined her friend at the front of the pier where the crowd of students was gathered.
“Yeah!” her friend said back, her voice straining to be heard over the sound of Mo’s guitar. “They almost sound like a recording, everything’s so clear.”
The girls made their way to the front of the crowd that had formed between the chairs and the stage. As they paused they looked up to see Mo let out a surprisingly melodic scream that blended perfectly with Lee’s thunderous drumbeats.
“How old did you say these guys are? Fourteen?” the girl’s friend asked, a twinge of disbelief in her voice.
“Yeah, they’re both fourteen, the drummer was adopted from the Congo I guess,” the girl replied. “We’ll have to keep an eye on them, this is probably the best cover I’ve seen live. I think he’s been on every square foot of the stage… Holy energy!”
“Mmhmm,” her friend agreed. “Its like really dense punk rock…I like it.”
• • •
“Um… yeah,” Mo said, tossing his shaggy hair out of his face. He was met by surprised and fascinated faces, as the audience attempted to wrap their heads around what had just happened. The sun was on the brink of setting as Mo addressed the crowd. “This next one is ‘I’d Hate to Be You When People Figure Out What This Song Is About’.”
Before starting he glanced back at Lee and shot him a grin of inexplicable joy, the sort that one gets when they’re on the verge of pulling off something highly illogical. Mo sang in a low voice as he plucked lightly at his guitar, weaving his way through the introduction of the song.
As the intro ended, his eyes met with EmJay’s for a split second, enough to light a spark inside his chest. In what seemed like slow motion Lee began his drumming and Mo spun around leading with the blunt end
of his guitar, which connected squarely with the valve on the ancient water pump that was at perfect swinging level with the stage. As he connected with the pipe, two things happened instantaneously. As the rusty old metal cracked and the pressure erupted from the inside, Mo struck a chord forcefully and succinctly on his guitar, flooding the audience (which was now composed of the majority of the students in attendance standing near the stage and the adults further back away from the noise) with not only a wave of sound but an explosion of water.
Energized and ecstatic that he had managed to pull off his hydro-technical stunt, Mo played through the rest of the intro, backed by Lee who remained in perfect beat although he was grinning from ear to ear. As the sun sank into the ocean NoCal played out the rest of the song with perfection down to the final chord fading out over the ocean.
It was obvious that NoCal was set apart from the mob of young “bands” that were a dime a dozen. Rather than playing a string of interconnected chords that vaguely echoed a song Mo played with finesse, taking care to hit every note and milk every decibel of sound out of each measure. In the same way, Lee seemed to possess a natural rhythm which he channeled through his drums. He was more than just a kid banging patterns into a drum kit. He was the drums, and they were his canvas. It was obvious that both of the
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