Battle of the Bands

by Eric Smith

  “It should be,” Abbie says. “What do you think is going to happen when they find out about each other?”

  “We never said we were exclusive.” It hasn’t come up with Leon because he’s so self-absorbed that he probably assumes I couldn’t possibly want to be with anyone other than him, and Sindy’s too punk rock to talk about labels and commitment.

  “You’re a walking cliché!”

  “Am not.”

  Abbie’s shaking her head, giving me the same look my mom gives me four times a year when she gets my report card. “I don’t know why they call boys like you dogs. Dogs are sweet and faithful, and you are neither of those things.”

  “Hey!”

  “They should call you bunnies —”

  “Because I like carrots and have good teeth?”

  “Yeah,” Abbie says, rolling her eyes. “That’s totally why.”

  I don’t think Abbie’s being fair. It’s not like I’m having sex with either of them. Or with anyone. Yet. I’m pretty sure I’d like to have it with someone at some point — maybe — but it’s not at the top of my list of priorities. Honestly, sometimes I’m not sure it ever will be.

  “Are you going to help me or not?” I ask. “Sindy or Leon?”

  Abbie sighs as if I have asked her to provide the answer to the meaning of life through the power of interpretive dance, and she has grudgingly agreed to oblige. “Tell me one thing you like about each of them.”

  “Leon is . . . prompt.”

  “Prompt?” Abbie asks. “Is that a dig at me? Because I told you I was going to be late.”

  “He’s got nice fingernails.”

  “Wow, Dane, you are really selling this guy to me. I mean, prompt and he has nice fingernails? Where can I get a piece like him?”

  I set down my hot chocolate. “Are you going to take this seriously or not?”

  “Not if those are going to be your actual answers.”

  I scrub my face with my hands and growl loudly enough that people at the other tables look over. “Okay, fine,” I say. “Sometimes, when I watch his band play, and he’s singing, he looks right at me and I feel like I’m the only person in the room.”

  “Sometimes you are,” Abbie says, but I ignore her. Though she’s also not wrong.

  “Leon has this way of making me feel special.”

  “You are special.”

  “But with him, I feel it,” I say.

  Abbie types something into her phone, and I hope it’s not my answer because if she’s actually writing it down, I might scream. “Now do Sindy.”

  “Sindy makes me feel alive.” A smile finds its way onto my lips as I recall the last time we went out. “It’s like I’m sleepwalking through my life until I’m with her, and then I’m wide awake.”

  “Now,” Abbie says. “What do you hate about them?”

  “Pretty much everything else.”

  Abbie puts her phone away and looks me in the eye, trying on a maternal kind of stare that I don’t much care for. “What do you want?”

  “Truthfully?” I say. “Someone who wouldn’t mind playing video games with me. Someone who wants to be my player two.”

  Mr. Khatri handed me the flyer and said, “I have better things to do. You go.”

  Judging the Battle of the Bands had been Liam’s idea, and he’d signed Mr. Khatri up to be a sponsor and a judge. People are into vinyl again, but most of the kids I know listen to music on their phones. You can’t fit a record player in your pocket. The Battle of the Bands was a chance to get some exposure for the store.

  “I don’t know anything about judging a music competition,” I said.

  Mr. Khatri was busy rearranging the shelves again. Grunge, he claimed, was making a comeback, and he wanted to make sure it was closer to the front. Nobody wanted grunge to come back — I’d tried Nirvana, L7, Dinosaur Jr., and 7 Year Bitch just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything; I wasn’t — but I kept my mouth shut out of a sense of self-preservation. Mr. Khatri’s musical tastes were vast. One day he might be listening to Nipsey Hussle, the next Carly Simon or Rihanna or Marvin Gaye or the Commoners. And mocking his music would result in a history lesson that could cure an insomniac.

  “You sit and listen to the bands play, you pick the one you like best, the end. Don’t overthink it.”

  “What if I don’t like any of them?”

  Mr. Khatri shrugged. “Then vote for the band that is dressed the best, or pick the one with the name you think is funniest. I don’t know. That’s why you’re judging and not me.”

  “Way to support the local scene, Mr. K.”

  “I’m hosting the winning band’s release party,” he said. “Do you want to plan that, or do you want to spend an evening sitting on your butt listening to music?” Mr. Khatri flashed me a wry smile.

  I couldn’t even organize my bookshelves, so the idea of having to organize an entire gig was the stuff of nightmares. “Fine,” I said. “You win.”

  And that’s how I wound up judging the competition. The bands, who had probably spent a lot of hours rehearsing, deserved a judge who was a David Bowie–loving super-nerd who could spend hours talking about deep cuts from obscure bands. Instead, they got me, and the last album I listened to from beginning to end was Dance Dance! by the Wiggles when I got stuck watching the Alberts’ toddler because there was some emergency involving a hammer and a thumb and I was the only one around. Mr. Albert gave me fifty bucks, so it wasn’t a total waste.

  Anyway, how the hell am I supposed to choose between sixteen bands when I can’t choose between two?

  “Wow,” I say to Melissa Nuvel, the judge sitting on my left. “They sure do like to scream.”

  “I don’t know.” She picks up her sheet listing the band names and the order they’re playing in. “They’re not so bad.”

  Wrong. Rock Your Mouth is the first band, and I’m already bored.

  Melissa Nuvel is the lead singer of a local New Jersey band called You Try Smiling that had stumbled onto fifteen minutes of fame when one of their songs appeared on the soundtrack for a popular movie I’d never seen. Mr. Khatri told me she’d been riding the popularity of that song for a decade and that she’d pretty much show up to the opening of a bag of Doritos these days, but that we were lucky to have her.

  “The local music scene is an important part of every community.” Melissa is still talking, but I’m barely listening. “And I’m happy I can come out here and support these kids.”

  Happy? Is she serious? I resist the temptation to list everything that would be less painful than listening to sixteen bands “play” their “music.” Anyway, Melissa’s not so bad. I’ve got Vice Principal Pulley on my other side. Picture your dad. Now picture your dad with sleeves of tattoos. Now picture your dad, with his tattoo sleeves, also wearing those weird poly-cotton-blend shorts that male PE teachers frequently wear. The ones that are both a little too tight and a little too short. Now picture your tattoo-covered, indecent-shorts-wearing dad banging his head along to the screams of a band called Rock Your Mouth while taking notes with his left hand and throwing devil horns with his right.

  Whatever image you’re now holding in your mind, Pulley is so much worse. And the thing that makes it sad is that he practically begged to be here. As I look away, I catch the eye of a guy with brown hair and glasses who’s standing near the wall. He motions at Mr. Pulley with his chin and rolls his eyes. I smile, glad that I’m not the only one here to bear witness to Mr. Pulley’s shameless enthusiasm for a high school rock band, and then shift my attention away so that I don’t become some random weirdo staring at him in a story he tells his friends later.

  At the far end of the table is Claudia Ramirez. She’s a lifestyle guru, whatever that is, with a few hundred thousand followers on YouTube and Instagram. I introduced myself to her earlier, but all she said to me was “Venti, two-pump sugar-free vanilla, oat milk, one-hundred-sixty-two-degree latte. Quickly.” I don’t know who ended up making a Starbucks run, but it wasn�
��t me.

  After Rock Your Mouth finishes — and I’m so grateful they’re done — Mr. Bolivar comes out and starts telling jokes like he’s at an open mic night at a comedy club, only the jokes are terrible. “I thought the Greatest Place was up next,” I whisper to Melissa. She answers with a shrug.

  Mr. Pulley starts laughing on my other side and says, “A gummy bear! That’s hilarious.”

  Something has clearly gone wrong. Maybe the Greatest Place didn’t show or the band members developed a sudden case of food poisoning. Just when I think Mr. Bolivar can’t embarrass himself more, he finds depths of humiliation that I didn’t know existed. I’m about to say a prayer for him to develop an immediate case of laryngitis when he finally says, “Let’s give a big Narwhal welcome to Mina Wright!” Instead of a band playing two songs, we get one song from a girl with a guitar.

  Melissa smiles and bobs her head along to the music. Mina is definitely better than Mr. Bolivar.

  After Mina, the Marcia Marcia Marcias take the stage, and I do my best not to make eye contact with Sindy when she steps up to the mic. Sindy announces the name of their first song: “Nobody Nose.” It’s great that the band has a thing, but Sindy is seriously obsessed with the Bradys, and I’m not sure it’s entirely healthy. The truth is that they’re not bad — the way Xiomara harmonizes with Sindy, Maya on bass looking like she’s in her own little world, and Beckett keeping perfect time on the drums. If all their songs weren’t focused on a fifty-year-old TV sitcom, they might have stood a chance at winning.

  I try to pay attention to the set, to do the job I’m here to do, but I can’t stop thinking about the question Abbie asked: Why do I like Sindy? The thing is, going out with Sindy was an accident.

  I was waiting in line at the theater to get into the latest Star Wars movie. I was supposed to be meeting Wesley Cho. We’d been dating for a month, and he’d asked me to wait in line since he had a debate tournament that afternoon and knew he wouldn’t get there in time to score a ticket. About ten minutes before they opened the door, I got a series of texts from Wes.

  WES: Hey, I’m not gonna make it.

  WES: I’m at the theater in Hadley with my D&D group.

  WES: Also, I think we should break up.

  WES: Sorry, dude.

  “You have got to be kidding me.” Did I mention that it was freezing out and my balls were two little hailstones stuck to the side of my leg?

  “Problem?”

  This girl, who I hadn’t noticed before, was standing by me. She had pink hair and a million earrings, and I had no idea where she’d come from. But she was there and I needed to vent.

  “Yeah. This guy I was seeing just bailed on me, and then dumped me with ‘Sorry, dude.’ Who the hell does that?”

  “Ouch.”

  “I mean, I’ve been standing out here for five hours. I already bought the tickets, and I don’t even like Star Wars.”

  The girl elbowed me in the ribs. “Maybe don’t say that too loud in this crowd.” She glanced meaningfully at the Wookiee to our left, who was glaring at me.

  “Fair point.”

  “I’m Sindy.”

  “Dane.”

  The doors finally opened and the line began shuffling inside.

  “So you’re not a fan,” Sindy said, “but you’re still going to see the movie?”

  I shrugged. “I mean, I’m already here, and I paid for the tickets.”

  Without warning, Sindy snapped her fingers. “I knew I recognized you. You work at Atomic Records, right? You’re judging the Battle of the Bands in a couple of months.”

  “That’s me,” I said.

  “Right on. How’d you luck into that gig?”

  I wasn’t sure she’d believe me if I told her it was an accident predicated upon another accident. My whole life seemed to be one accident after another.

  We got through the door and I bought some popcorn and candy and a drink, and it wasn’t until I got to my seat and Sindy sat beside me that I realized she hadn’t had a ticket. That she’d let the guy who’d scanned the tickets on my phone think we were together.

  Sindy reached her hand into my popcorn during the previews just as I was reaching my hand in, and her fingers drew buttery lines across my palm. By the middle of the movie, her tongue was in my mouth, and by the end of the movie, I think we were common-law married in some states. Either way, that’s how that happened.

  Vice Principal Pulley elbows me in the ribs. “Do you think this is goth or emo?” he asks.

  The band is Chump 2.0, and I wasn’t paying attention when they introduced themselves, so I don’t know what the song they’re singing is called, but I think it’s about a girl named Mitra. Maybe. The lead singer’s kind of cute, if you’re into college guys who act like they’re still in high school. I’m not, but I’m sure there are people who are.

  “I honestly don’t know the difference,” I said.

  Pulley rubs his chin like he’s putting a lot of thought into it. “I think goths love darkness.”

  “Don’t emos?”

  “Yes,” he says. “But I think they pretend like they don’t.”

  “If you say so.” My stomach is starting to hurt because Leon’s band is up soon. Sindy expects me to vote for her band and Leon expects me to vote for his. I could always vote for neither so I don’t have to pick a side. That would be the least painful option. Of course, I’m still going to have to choose between Sindy and Leon since I can’t keep dating both of them forever. If they don’t find out about each other, Beckett might find out and tell them. I’m surprised she hasn’t already.

  My anxiety cranks up to a hundred when Chump 2.0 finishes their set and is followed by the Grants. I don’t recognize their singer, but I recognize Gwen on keyboards. We had earth science together. Or was it algebra? The lead singer steps up to the mic and says, “This is a new song.”

  “That’s Mitra,” Melissa says. “The girl Chump 2.0 sang about.”

  “How do you even know that?” I ask, but before she can reply, the Grants leap into the song. It’s all right, I guess. I’m about to zone out when Mitra yells “Heart shitter!” into the mic. It catches me off guard and snaps me out of my reverie.

  “No, ma’am,” Pulley says on my other side, sounding offended, though I’m not sure what he’s going to do about it. The audience is cheering — everyone is into the song. Besides, who hasn’t had their heart shit on — or shit out; the lyrics weren’t clear — before? I’ve never understood why people get so bent out of shape about a little profanity. The Grants could probably fake-murder someone onstage and no one would care, but scream “Heart shitter” once, and the adults in the room lose their minds.

  At the start of the second chorus, Mr. Bolivar pulls the plug, cutting off the mics and amps. Behind me, people are booing. I kind of want to give the Grants my vote for their display of sheer nerve. Maybe I will.

  Mr. Bolivar manages to quiet the crowd as Breakfast of Champions take the stage. Leon is basically sex personified, and he knows it. For him, it’s less about the music than it is about the fame. He wants to be seen and adored. The irony is that Leon’s actually got potential. If he put a tenth of the effort into practicing the music that he puts into deciding what to wear, he could be amazing.

  “Yeah, we’re Breakfast of Champions. Open up and say ahhhhhhhh!”

  Leon launches into his first song without even saying what it is, and while I recognize some of the parts where he screams, I can’t remember the title. I wish I’d brought earplugs. At least he’s pretty to look at. The funny thing is that I really didn’t like him when I first met him, and I definitely didn’t want to go out with him.

  I was at a party a couple of weeks after I’d met Sindy. We weren’t really anything yet. Sometimes we texted, and sometimes she showed up at the store right before closing and told me we were going out. I didn’t really have much say in the matter. That night she was playing a gig with the band, and Abbie had convinced me to meet her at a party. I nearly
bailed at the last minute — parties aren’t my thing — but my mom was so happy that I wouldn’t be spending my Friday night in my room that I couldn’t bear to disappoint her.

  “You’re allowed to drink if there’s alcohol there,” my mom said as I was leaving. “But no driving. And no driving with anyone else who’s been drinking.”

  “No one’s going to be drinking, Mom.” Everyone was going to be drinking.

  “If you do need a ride, call me no matter what time it is.”

  “There’s no way I’m calling my mom to pick me up from a party.”

  “You don’t have to tell them I’m your mother,” she said. “Tell them I’m an Uber driver. I don’t mind.”

  My mom’s the worst. But also the best.

  So I went to the party. I don’t even know whose party it was, but everyone from Raritan River High was there. I’d hoped to get some Abbie time so I could tell her what was going on with Sindy, but she was destroying some kids from the National Honor Society in a game of drunk Trivial Pursuit, and I didn’t want to ruin her night. I wound up outside on the patio sitting with some stoners around the firepit. I don’t smoke, but stoners always have the best snacks. This time they had s’mores.

  And then in walked Leon in cutoff shorts that exposed his pale, hairy legs, showing off his lip piercing to anyone and everyone who’d look at it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s infected.”

  “How the hell do you know?” he asked.

  I leaned forward to get a better look. “Because it’s red and crusty, and unless you’ve had collagen injected into your lip on one side only, it’s super swollen.”

  Leon touched the ring going through his lip and tried to hide his wince. “Yeah, well, you’ve got chocolate on your face.”

  “Do I?” I wiped my mouth with my sleeve, and it came away with a big glob of chocolate, which I licked off. “You should really go back to the place that pierced it for you and get a refund.”

  “Joke’s on you,” Leon said. “I did it myself.”