Battle of the Bands

by Eric Smith

  “Yeah, we know,” Parker scoffed. “You’ve only said it a hundred times.”

  “Do you know, though? Because sometimes it feels like you’ve forgotten.”

  He leveled his gaze at me, eyes narrowing. Tension shivered between us as he mumbled, “I’m not the only one who’s forgotten some things.”

  “Guys, chill out. I really think we all just need a break,” Diego said. “We’ve been working really hard. After a good sleep, we can come at it fresh and ready tomorrow. We know this.”

  He was right. It was probably dark outside by now, and my body was depleted, aching for rest. But even as I considered stopping, I had a vision — not of the show but of after, in the studio, the rest of the guys having knocked out their parts in single takes while I kept screwing up, stopping, frazzled, having to start over. I remembered Douglas, that freshman we’d auditioned, and felt a pang of regret for having judged him so harshly, because I knew how he must have felt.

  I also refused to become him.

  “No.” I shook my head. “Not until we nail this song. All of us.”

  The guys groaned, their resentment grating through my chest. When had I become the bad guy? They had to know I was doing this for them. For us. After we won, I told myself, everything would be better.

  I turned back around, placed my mouth directly above the microphone. My voice reverberated through the curtain of humid air when I said, “Again.”

  The night of the Battle, we arrived early for sound check, then split off until the show. The guys wanted to grab some food, but I could never eat anything before a gig, let alone a giant, greasy cheeseburger. I was too torn up with nerves already. Everything depended on our performance tonight, and as the singer, so much of that pressure rested on me. So I decided to take a break and go home. We agreed to meet back up at five thirty.

  And then it was five thirty-five. Five forty. I hunched against the far wall of the theater’s backstage area and shot off another text to Parker and Diego: Where are you guys?? I stared at the string of unanswered texts until my screen clicked off, then shoved my phone back in my pocket. Around me, the room buzzed with excitement. Lilly, the stage manager, rushed from group to group, checking off bands, getting the lineup in order. A guy with a ukulele wove his way through the crowd, strumming some summery song that didn’t make sense, and every few seconds, my eyes caught the pop of a camera’s flash as Raven, the show’s designated photographer, snapped pictures. But really, the only other person standing alone was Steven, the kid who’d transferred here at the start of the year. As far as I could tell, he didn’t have many friends. I considered striding up to him, saying something light and witty, just so neither one of us had to handle the frenzy alone. My feet stayed rooted to the scuffed wood floor.

  “The Greatest Place, there you are,” Lilly announced, suddenly in front of me. She made a mark on her clipboard. “To confirm, you’re playing second, right after Rock Your Mouth. That should be at approximately six seventeen, but if we’re adding in an extra few minutes for potential technical difficulties, then it will most likely be at six nineteen. Either way, I’ll need you on your mark by six ten.”

  “Six ten,” I echoed, only half listening to what she said. I worried my lucky guitar pick between my fingers, rubbing the worn-down impression of what used to say The Greatest Place Is Here. Diego had ordered them before our very first show: the Battle of the Bands three years ago.

  “Mina,” Lilly said, drawing out the sound of my name. She stared at me, concern plain on her face. “Where’s the rest of your band?”

  I slid my phone out of my pocket. Still no answer.

  “They went out for food, but they should be back any second,” I said to Lilly. Simultaneously, I typed: We need to be ready at 6:10. Are you almost here???

  She tapped her pen against her clipboard. “Please find them. As soon as possible. We’re on a really tight schedule tonight.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll go look.”

  “And then come right back,” she stressed.

  I knew that Parker and Diego would never be late to a show — especially not one this important — but in my chest, I felt a low rumble of fear. What if something happened to them? I thought as I snaked through the throng of kids backstage and out into the hallway. I curved past our lockers, the bathrooms, the crowded corridor in front of the ticket booth, but couldn’t find them anywhere. What if they’d gotten into an accident? What if they were hurt?

  Mind reeling, I rushed through the front doors and out into the parking lot. Overhead, the sun was setting, lighting the sky in a blaze of pink and tangerine. I scanned the rows of cars and was relieved to see Jeremy’s beat-up green Explorer. The relief dissipated when I spotted the three of them lingering around a group of other people I didn’t know.

  “Guys, what the hell?” I called, frustration billowing behind me as I strode toward them. “Do none of you have your phones? You were supposed to meet me backstage twenty minutes ago.”

  Jeremy mumbled something to the group. A laugh ruffled through them.

  “We’re here,” said Parker, breaking off to meet me. “Chill out, Mom.” He rattled around the ice in the bottom of his soda cup, then slurped up the little bit of liquid remaining.

  Diego glanced at his phone. “I guess we got distracted. But we don’t go on until six seventeen or something, right? We’ve still got time.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said through gritted teeth. “We need to be professional. Lilly wants us backstage.”

  Jeremy cocked a smile. “Come on, Mina. It’s just a high school battle of the bands.”

  Parker chuckled in agreement and shook his cup again. Diego didn’t say anything, but I saw his mouth twist, some set of emotions warring within him.

  “You guys don’t really believe that,” I said. It was a statement, not a question. Nobody responded. A few moments of strained silence stretched between us until somewhere behind me, one of the auditorium’s back doors must have opened, and a crunch of distortion spilled into the parking lot.

  The show was about to start.

  Lilly was going to be pissed.

  “The studio time,” I reminded them. “Our EP. This is everything we’ve been working toward.”

  “Tell her,” Parker said.

  “Not now,” Diego answered.

  “Tell me what?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Never mind. We can talk about it later.”

  “What?” I demanded.

  Diego frowned, lips flattening into a thin line. Parker watched him. Jeremy scratched at the chipped wood of his drumstick.

  “I got into Princeton,” Diego said.

  Out of all the things I imagined he might say, I hadn’t expected this. Princeton — a place Parker and I hadn’t applied because we never would have gotten in. And we didn’t apply anywhere else in New Jersey, either. Staying in our home state was never part of the plan.

  “You didn’t tell us you were applying to Princeton,” I said, fully aware that this was not the right response.

  Diego toed some loose gravel, nailed his eyes there. “It was kind of a last-minute thing. And I only found out a week ago.”

  “I’m happy for you.” Recovering, I slapped on what I hoped was a breezy smile. “It’s not what we were expecting, but we can totally make it work. Princeton isn’t that far from New York. If Parker and I both get into schools in the city —”

  Diego looked up then, but not at me. His eyes found Parker.

  “There’s something else,” I said, reading it on their faces.

  I watched as Jeremy shoved his twitching hands into his pockets. Next to him, Parker sighed, as though already exhausted by our conversation. “Diego’s going to Princeton. I want to go to the University of Washington. And you? You’re always talking about the English program at San Francisco State. That author you really like teaches there, right?”

  “But —” I shook my head. My thoughts were swimming. “What about everything we’ve been thro
ugh? Everything we planned? We all agreed, the band comes first.”

  “How do you expect us to be a band if we’re scattered across the country like that?”

  “The Postal Service did it,” I said, referencing an old electro-indie band I’d found through my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist some time ago, and who’d famously recorded their hit album by sending tracks back and forth in the mail. I’d turned Parker and Diego on to them, too, enormously proud to have found the album first — prouder still when they instantly loved it as much as I did.

  But none of that love, that collective spark we’d felt listening to their poppy beats seep through my speakers, was present now. Instead, Parker looked at me sadly. “We’re not the Postal Service, Mina.”

  “Well, yeah, of course not. We can’t just copy them. And obviously, email would be way easier than —”

  “I mean,” Parker interrupted, “that we’ve been talking. And we just want to have fun for the rest of the year.”

  Out past the parking lot, brakes hissed. A horn blared. I waited, heart plummeting, for the shattering sound of a crash that didn’t happen. “What are you talking about?”

  Jeremy angled his body away from us. “Maybe I should leave,” he mumbled.

  “No,” Parker and I both snapped.

  Jeremy stiffened, then sank back into his stance. I should have delighted in how uncomfortable he appeared — finally, I had an effect on him! — but all I felt was sick.

  “What I’m saying,” Parker went on, “is that we don’t want to do this anymore. At some point you got way too serious, and our band stopped being fun. You stopped being fun.”

  I turned to Diego, desperate for some other explanation, but he still wouldn’t look at me. “It hasn’t been fun for a while,” he said to the ground.

  The worst part of that moment was the fact that I couldn’t argue. It hadn’t been fun for me lately, either. But that was only a temporary symptom — a necessary sacrifice for a much greater goal. They had to have known that. The Greatest Place meant everything to me. It was everything. Wasn’t it everything to them?

  Around me, the parking lot tilted. I was standing still, simultaneously careening, and realization slammed into me like a fist: the extra practices, the “jam” sessions. The way the mood always seemed to shift as soon as I entered the room. It all made sense now.

  A laugh clawed its way out of my mouth, and my eyes turned hot, burning. “So let me get this straight,” I said, voice sharp as a blade. “You’re breaking up with me. For him.”

  Diego: “It’s not like that.”

  Parker: “We didn’t want it to go down like this.”

  Diego: “We were going to tell you after the show.”

  Don’t cry, I demanded. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. But in my head, as I worked the pieces together, the worst betrayal was just beginning to unfurl.

  This year, we could have won. I truly believed that. And though I wanted to leave now, to turn away before I allowed them to see me crumbling into a million pieces, I couldn’t. I needed to know.

  “So what would have happened if we had won? The EP, the recording session . . . what would have happened to them?”

  Three sets of eyes stayed averted, their collective pity the only answer I needed.

  They would have taken the studio time without me.

  Beneath the dim lights of backstage, I hunted through the clutter of empty bags and guitar cases, but I couldn’t see anything, let alone the small black purse holding my car keys. Why the fuck did it have to be so dark back here? My eyes blurred with tears. I could hardly breathe. Applause thundered through the auditorium, and I thought it might crack me wide open. It wasn’t just the fact that my band broke up on the most important night of the year, either. In a handful of minutes, my whole life had imploded. Suddenly, I didn’t know where I’d sit at lunch. I didn’t know what I would do after school, or on weekends. I didn’t know if my only real friendships would overcome this, or if, in a few months, we’d simply move to separate quadrants of the country. And there, on top of it all: I didn’t know how to be in any other band. I didn’t know if anyone else would even want me.

  The sound of power chords pealed through the speakers, followed by a raw, rasping voice. I sank into the detritus of everyone’s instruments and realized I’d never been so completely alone.

  “Mina, thank God,” Lilly said, appearing above me. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Rock Your Mouth just went on. You’re up next.”

  I brushed the backs of my hands against my cheeks, but it was useless. I was clearly crying. She had clearly seen.

  She knelt down. “Hey, what’s going on?”

  “We’re not playing,” I said.

  Her lips parted in a tiny oval. “What do you mean? You play every year.”

  How many times, in the coming days, would I stumble into this same conversation? What could I possibly say? I thought about the guitar pick in my pocket, about how luck was a figment of my imagination. About how maybe best friends were, too.

  “I’m — I’m really sorry, okay? I need to go.” And then I was up, out the door, barreling into the harsh glare of the hallway, searching for somewhere to wait out the show. I rounded a corner. Another band, giddy with anticipation of their set, strode toward me. I spotted Sindy, with her shock of pink hair, from physics class, and spun around again, hoping she didn’t see me.

  But in my rush to avoid her, I rammed my shoulder into someone else.

  “Shit. Sorry.” I reached out, trying to steady the girl across from me as my vision slowly focused. She looked vaguely familiar: thick, dark hair curling around her shoulders and worn-out Chuck Taylors. I recalled seeing her around school, or maybe at a show. Not onstage, though; in my memories, her face was cast in shadows.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” Her gaze shifted, disoriented, around the hallway before settling on me, and then it instantly sharpened. “Are you okay?”

  Maybe it was because she was a stranger to me, or because the answer was obvious, or because I’d been pretending in so many ways for so long that I simply couldn’t anymore. Whatever the reason, I slumped back against the row of lockers and said, “No. I’m really, really not.”

  For a moment, we stood in silence. I could feel her watching me. Waiting. But when I didn’t elaborate, she spoke again. “You know, if we’re being completely honest here, I’m not really okay, either.”

  She leaned into the space next to me. Her expression, I saw now, was eager yet nervous, as though she’d been standing on the precipice of something monumental before I smacked her out of it. “I think I have stage fright,” she continued, “except it’s not, like, sweet little butterflies fluttering around in my stomach.” Her fingers danced through the air before hardening into tight, violent fists. “Instead, it feels like my insides are being ravaged by a horde of hysterical hummingbirds. No, a horde of hysterical blood-hungry hummingbirds. Hysterical blood-hungry hummingbirds with a personal vendetta.” Finally, her hands relaxed and fell to her sides. “As you can probably tell, I’ve never done this before.”

  I pushed away the disturbing image of carnivorous hummingbirds and asked, “Done what?”

  “Played. In front of people.”

  A small smile lifted the corner of my mouth. “In the interest of complete honesty,” I said, “it is pretty terrifying. I want to throw up every single time I do it.”

  “Oh. Well.” The girl crossed her arms, as though unable to stay still. “Check mark on that one.”

  “But,” I added, “once you’re out there . . .” I dragged down a deep breath and closed my eyes, conjuring the feeling. The blaze of spotlights on my skin. The sway of an almost invisible crowd. That moment, in the center of every song, when I forgot, even if only for an instant, whatever insecurities usually encompassed me, and there was no worthy or unworthy, no expectations, no frauds. Nothing but the music, and the music was everyt
hing.

  I opened my eyes to a water-stained ceiling tile. I said, “It’s the greatest feeling in the world.”

  Next to me, I heard a relieved sigh. “I figured it might feel something like that, once the nausea part was out of the way.”

  “You’re going to be great,” I told her. “Promise.”

  “And what about you? What time do you go on?”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  Confusion creased a line between her eyebrows. “But I saw your band on the lineup.”

  “You know my band?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I know all the bands. My ex is in Raging Mice, and I . . .” She trailed off, began chewing the edge of her thumbnail, and suddenly, I remembered exactly where I’d seen her. At Bean and Ballad, parked with a notebook in the back corner behind the merch table, seeming somehow both purposeful and distracted. I’d assumed she was one of those dutiful girlfriends who supported her boyfriend’s music even though she didn’t personally care for it and had brought along the weekend’s homework to complete while he was busy backstage. Now, though, the memory shifted, details carving new pathways in my brain. I zoomed in on her worn composition book, the disintegrating spine sealed lovingly with colorful washi tape. The way she tapped her pen against her cheekbone in what I had thought, even then, was deliberately 3/4 time. I had almost asked her about it, but then she started writing again and the lights dimmed for someone’s set and I figured the beat was my own projection, something I’d imagined.

  But I hadn’t. Of course I hadn’t.

  “Let’s just say I went to a lot of shows over the past year,” she finished.

  “Meaning you got stuck in the back watching everyone else perform when really you should have been up there all along?”

  Her mouth quirked up. “I suppose you could say that.”

  “Well, good for you. Seriously. Some people don’t have the courage to get up there, and sitting on the sidelines really freaking sucks.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” she agreed through a laugh. Then: “I’m Amina, by the way.”

  “Mina,” I said. “We’ve got so much in common, even our names sound alike.”