Battle of the Bands

by Eric Smith

  And to think it’s the same studio offering up recording time for whoever wins. I do not want to be in there with whoever is behind the board. They might recognize me. And when me and the guys were there, we didn’t sound like people anymore.

  But this. This girl here. She sounds so real.

  Funny, my desire to sound real has left me living this fake life. I’m perfectly aware of the irony in all of that. Not telling anyone too much about myself. Steering clear of social media. Dyeing my hair, growing out the weak amount of scruff on my face, like some kind of badly drawn villain in a comic book or Law & Order episode. My hair is light brown these days instead of black, and that, combined with the scruff and the nonprescription glasses, make for a solid Clark-Kent-only-brown-and-slightly-more-emo disguise, I guess. Trying so very hard not to be seen for who I am. Everything about me washed away after my face became way too recognizable at my old school, where all my friends —

  No.

  Where all my bandmates went. They’re not friends anymore. Friends call. They return texts. They don’t unfollow you across all of social media and stop responding to your emails, when it’s you who made them.

  I hear some harried footsteps behind me and turn to see Ken, the shock of pink in his thick black hair bobbing as he runs, a look of concern on his face. We’ve been friends since before the Field Notes took off, connecting at local shows, back when the band played in small cafés and little venues. And now he’s my partner in whatever this band is that we’re trying to start. Acoustic duo?

  He’s the only one here who knows who I am.

  Well, at least I thought so.

  He bends over, his hands on his knees, and raises a single finger in the air as he tries to catch his breath. His eyebrow piercing catches a glint in the dim backstage lights.

  He clears his throat and looks up at me, worry all over his face.

  “Steve —” he sputters out.

  “I can’t do this.” I shake my head, the words just tumbling out as that girl keeps singing my song in the background, the strumming of her guitar gorgeous and familiar. I’m not sure what’s worse — that she’s playing the hit song I wrote that’s gone on to make my former best friends famous without me, my name just a dead link on the group’s Wikipedia page, or that she’s playing and singing it better than I ever could. Every breathy note, every strum . . . it feels like a punch in the stomach. But a punch that I miss, for some reason.

  A nostalgia punch? I don’t know.

  Ken’s never made a big deal out of it, out of me. He’s joked that once we record some of our songs, people will notice me, that music blogs like IndieTrash and message boards will run with the whole “ex-songwriter of the Field Notes” thing, but I don’t know. I really don’t think anyone will care. I hope they won’t, anyway.

  Under the radar is safe. It’s cozy.

  “I just . . . I don’t think I can do it.” I swallow.

  “Dude, no one here even knows who you are.”

  He says this with such brutal finality that I feel like I might collapse in on myself like the star that I’m not. Anymore, that is. I turn back to the girl, the song nearly over, and I catch a sob in the back of my throat that surprises me. I put a hand up to my chest, worried that the strangled sound could be heard across the stage. Ken grabs my shoulder and I shrug him off.

  “Hey, sorry,” he says. “That came off a little —”

  “Yeah, it did,” I snap. The song is winding down, and the girl strums a final chord, singing the last lines of the song, my song, in the utter silence of the theater. I can hear my own heartbeat, hear the sound of Ken breathing gently next to me. I watch as she closes her eyes, holding that final note, her voice a hum that vibrates across the walls and over my skin. There’s a beat of quiet in the theater as she looks up and opens her eyes, looking toward the audience, that flash of green illuminated by the pale fading stage lights.

  And the applause is fierce and loud and rolls like thunder.

  I see several students jump to their feet, screaming and cheering. Someone shouts, “Yeah, Megan!” and I’m pretty sure I hear several others yelling something similar. Megan. A teacher brushes by me a little too roughly, thunking against my guitar case, the guitar inside making a loud musical thud as his leg knocks into it. It takes me a second to realize it’s one of the music teachers, one who is consistently correcting and prodding at me in his class, and it has taken everything within the fiber of my being to not do the whole Don’t you know who I am? thing to him.

  I mean, I know I’m no one right now. But I was.

  He doesn’t even turn around to apologize, just pushes ahead. He says something inaudible to Megan before taking the microphone, and her face lights up under whatever compliment he hands out.

  “Let’s give it up for Megan Talley, everyone!” Mr. Bolivar says, gesturing toward her proudly. He’s beaming, and the house lights go up with an audible snap. Both he and Megan wince for a second and continue waving to everyone as the applause starts to quiet down. I can make out the judges now, sitting in the front. There’s that guy who goes here and works at Atomic Records, who I swear seems to actually hate music. The vice principal, some social media influencer I’ve never heard of, and . . .

  My heart hammers in my chest.

  Melissa Nuvel. From the band You Try Smiling. She has her feet kicked up on the table and is just beaming at the stage, her smile like a second spotlight.

  She glances toward the curtains, and for a minute, I think she sees me as a bit of light reflects off her thick, chunky black plastic glasses. I don’t think any of the other judges know who I am, but she sure as hell will.

  She helped produce the Field Notes’ first EP, the one that got us signed. She worked with our songs when we were bickering over them in the studio. Smoothing out the choruses, the verses . . . I know I’ve seen her on countless “one-hit wonder” lists and articles, but behind the scenes, she works with a lot of musicians. Like how the dude who wrote that “Closing Time” song writes for Adele, Phantogram, and the Chicks.

  “Tough act to follow,” Mr. Bolivar says to scattered laughter.

  “Oh, to hell with this,” I mutter, turning to walk away.

  Ken presses a hand to my chest. “Come on, man. Don’t bail.”

  I sigh and glance at my guitar case. It’s peppered with logos of bands we played with during our rise up, first playing in small venues that made us buy our own tickets, then headlining at medium-size clubs, with groups I loved opening for us. There they were, on the case. All Time Low. State Champs. Sleepaway. The Wonder Years. Boys Behaving Badly. Yours Truly. The Echo Screen reunion. That acoustic show with the Rocket Summer that felt like a dream. Why did I bring this case? All these memories now like battle scars.

  “Next up we have . . . the musical stylings of . . .” Mr. Bolivar squints at the postcard in his hand and looks over at me and Ken.

  “Once Br —” Ken starts.

  “Once Bitten!” Mr. Bolivar exclaims, and motions for us to join him, smiling as though he didn’t just rename our duo after that awful old vampire movie.

  Ken groans, and then looks over at me, his gaze expectant.

  Anxiety fills me. It would be so easy just to walk in the other direction, walk away from the music. The Field Notes guys did it to me, just turned, leaving me to my own devices. Toiling alone.

  “Hey,” he says. “You coming?”

  I look down at my guitar case again and exhale through my teeth. I pluck out my guitar, gripping it around the neck, the metal strings digging into my fingers. It’s the same guitar I recorded that EP with, the same guitar that came with me on that first little tour, played all those shows, that ended up getting us signed . . . It’s nothing special. A hundred-dollar Yamaha electric guitar with a rosewood edge, and a white plastic fretboard that’s scuffed to all hell. Older than me by a decade, bought at a pawnshop in Newark with some birthday money when I was twelve.

  Nothing special, but special to me.

/>   I could have let it go when everything happened. Thrown it away. Tossed it in the basement of my dad’s house, brought it back to that pawnshop. Lord knows I have plenty of other guitars around the house, for when the mood strikes. But it’s like an old friend that I lost touch with, and there’s something strangely comforting in just knowing it’s around. Maybe that’s why I brought it instead of any others.

  Part of me still wants to be here.

  I walk with Ken onto the stage, a smattering of applause following. I see the judges, and I can’t help but zero in on Melissa. My mind flits back and forth to the last time I was on a stage, with the roar of an audience in front of me, to those moments in the studio with her, fussing over the songs that would make them famous. My feet squeak a little against the dark amber wood on the stage, bits of white tape stuck here and there. The last stage with the boys, it was dark gray and scratched to the point you could see the layers of past paint jobs beneath it, from the hundreds, if not thousands of people who had graced it. This stage . . . it’s too clean. It hasn’t seen things.

  I’ve seen things.

  An audience of a thousand. Camera flashes like lightning. Stadium amps the size of people and people with personalities the size of stadiums.

  I grab the stool Megan had been sitting on and move it away from the microphone, and Ken takes the mic, standing in front of it. The stage darkens, and a spotlight shines down on Ken. I think about Hailey and her friends up there in the loft, fussing over lighting and soundboards, working their magic. I try to scoot away a little from the beam. A few people in the audience notice and chuckle, and Ken reaches out and drags the stool with me on it closer to him. The audience laughs, and I glare at him.

  He smiles down at me and then looks out to the audience, holding the microphone.

  “Hi, we’re Once Bright.” He glances off to the side of the stage, and I look over to see Mr. Bolivar shrug. Ken turns back to the crowd. “And we hope —”

  But I can’t hear anything else he’s saying.

  Because there she is.

  Standing right up front, looking right at me, and I swear, even in the dimly lit theater, I can see those emerald eyes looking up at me. How did she get here so fast? Did she just stash her guitar on the wings of the stage and run into the audience? Now that she’s no longer in profile, I can see that her hair is buzzed along one side, the rest cut short. She’s wearing a dark jean jacket littered with enamel pins that I can’t make out. But she looks up at the stage at me in a way that would be impossible at a show with the old band, the house lights blinding us from the people right in front of us.

  I give her a quick nod, and her eyes flit away from mine before looking back up at me. She’s smiling, and then I watch as the expressions on her face shift and change, from what felt like a flirty glance to a dawning realization and confusion.

  She’s seeing me for the first time. Really seeing me.

  And she knows.

  Someone here at this school sees me — someone other than Ken knows the truth about me — and it sends a shock through my system. I don’t think I’m ready for this. I’m not sure I can live up to whatever expectations she might have, if she even has any.

  I still have the music in me someplace. I know I do. But I don’t think it’s here, on this stage right now. And it’s in that moment, being seen for who I really am — someone forgotten, someone cast aside, someone who was so damn close — that I’m just frozen.

  “Hey. Steve.” Ken motions.

  “I . . . I can’t . . .” I manage.

  I look down at the strings. New. Not snapped like they were just a few months ago. Before Ken brought up this duo idea. He had the voice, but he couldn’t play. He knew I could play. He saw us open for the Spark & the Fire two years ago, owned our EP. The one Melissa Nuvel helped us with, the self-released recording we’d tossed up on Bandcamp and Spotify, before the labels came knocking. The one I recorded on. Not the new EP without me, not the album that’s absolutely everywhere.

  The practices and songwriting sessions were long and fun. I grew calluses on my fingers again. I felt happy.

  “Steve?” Ken tries again. The silence that looms ahead of us, in the audience of my classmates, feels heavy and thick. I hear some soft muttering and the shuffling of feet. I catch the judges looking at one another.

  And then I hear a boo.

  Then another.

  They sound like a thunderstorm in my head. There’s this part of me that knows it’s just a few jerks, people who are inconsequential to me, to Ken, to anyone here. Probably just came to the Battle of the Bands for a laugh. But this other piece of me knows that deep down, maybe I deserve this. Maybe I don’t belong here, maybe I already had my shot, and this is a space someone else should have been in. And maybe I should put this guitar away and find the music somewhere else, someday down the line when —

  “Shut up!”

  I look back into the audience, and my eyes flit down to the green-eyed folk singer with a half-shaved head and an unearthly voice.

  The girl.

  Megan.

  “All of you, shut up!” As she shouts, a hush falls over the theater. She holds a power over them, the same power she had when she was singing. And I wonder, who is this girl? I mean, I’ve seen her before in the halls, but I never saw anything that would explain this hold she has over the crowd. Then again, I’m not exactly someone in touch with school gossip.

  She looks back up at me.

  “Play,” she says, loudly and forcefully.

  “Play!” she shouts when I continue to sit frozen, and she looks around to the people sitting near her.

  “Play, play, play . . .” It starts with Megan and her friends and quickly takes over, flowing over the theater, until it becomes a roar echoing from the back near the doors. I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I look up at Ken, who is a blur, my eyes full of tears now.

  “Hey,” he says. “You okay?”

  Play.

  “I just . . .”

  Play.

  “I forgot. I forgot how much I love this. I miss it.”

  Play.

  He squeezes my shoulder and gives me a shake.

  Play.

  “Then show them,” he says.

  Play.

  And so I do.

  I hit a power chord on the electric guitar, the crunch loud and glorious, and launch into one of the songs we’ve been working on since winter break. Megan cheers, and everyone else joins in, the sound swelling up around me as though it could lift me up from this stage.

  I turn to Ken, who is beaming at me. He nods and grabs the mic, the song starting with him singing a low hum that builds into him bursting into the opening verse. He stomps his foot and pulls a little tambourine out from behind his back, keeping an impossible drumlike rhythm while he sings, and the cheers grow louder. It’s a remarkable talent, and he handles it like Aaron Gillespie of Underoath or, if my dad were drawing comparisons, Karen Carpenter.

  The song, and our little duo really, is a bit like Dashboard Confessional mashed together with Shawn Mendes, some emo and pop blended in one. We’d talked about adding an actual drummer, but Ken’s brilliant way of keeping rhythm with his stomps and tambourine . . . it’s just unlike anything I’ve ever seen. He sings, his honeyed voice full of melancholy and joy and things you can’t describe, and I watch as the eyes in the audience shift to him, gripped by the magic he’s conducting up here. Melissa looks right up at him, her eyes wide. I don’t know if we’ll win, but I’m not sure I really want us to. Maybe something will happen for him after all of this.

  Maybe he’ll leave.

  Maybe . . . I’ve found the music only to lose it again, to be left behind again.

  He hits the tambourine hard and smiles at me, lost in this moment, and I shake my head as I keep playing. He won’t. He wouldn’t. It’s in the way he loves the music, in the way he loves his friends. How he showed up for me when things went south, expecting nothing. How he’s been there since the s
tart. How he’s never pushed me to tell people who I am, who I was, even though that might mean a bump of fame for him.

  However small all that might be.

  It shows how big a person he is.

  I keep playing along, the power chords crunching during the verses, full chords thrumming over the chorus. I even have a little solo, but as Ken dances onstage to it, keeping rhythm, the eyes are still on him, and I love it. He shines.

  My eyes flit to Megan, and in a sea of people watching Ken, she’s still looking up at me.

  She sees me.

  Really sees me.

  And I’m glad.

  ROCK YOUR MOUTH

  Wah-wah-wah-WAH-WAH-WAH —

  Karan looked up from his phone, waiting for his eyes to adjust after staring at the blue light of his screen. A tall, grungy dude stood in front of his table, muffled sounds pouring out of his mouth like molasses and dying halfway across the loads of homemade band merchandise sitting between them. Karan pulled rolled-up bits of napkin out of his ears.

  “What?”

  “Bro, I asked how much the buttons were.”

  Karan glanced at the spread and sighed.

  “Do you mean the big I’M A CHUMP ones or the small ones that just say FARTS ’N’ MUSIC?”

  “FARTS ’N’ MUSIC, obviously.”

  “A dollar.”

  The kid pulled a dirty wad of bills out of his hoodie pocket and shoved a particularly greasy one toward Karan, waiting for him to take the dollar before grabbing a pin and fading off back into the seats.

  So, this was working a merch table. Granted, the back of a high school theater probably wasn’t the exact same experience as a real venue, but he figured a merch table was a merch table. Karan put the dollar into his very light envelope of cash and grabbed a few napkins out of the stack he’d brought with him from home. He methodically wiped his hands, and then tore two strips off a clean napkin to roll into new balls to stick right back into his ears and dampen some of the screeching currently coming off the stage. And he did mean screeching.