Battle of the Bands

by Eric Smith

  “I —” Gigi looks surprised. “No, Elisa.” She shakes her head. “I quit the band and totally ditched you because Josh kissed me and I did want him to.”

  The summer after third grade, my mom and I went on vacation to Los Angeles to visit her college friend Christine and an earthquake happened while we were in the hotel room. I still remember the rumble of it under my feet, the whole building shaking violently: my mom grabbing me with one arm, still wearing her towel, our suitcases falling down off the luggage racks and spilling their contents across the carpet. Only the generic hotel art stayed where it was above the headboards, and it wasn’t until way later that I realized it was nailed to the wall for exactly this eventuality: to remain fixed in place while everything around it shifted.

  “Oh,” I finally say.

  “Nothing else happened,” Gigi promises immediately. “I would never do that to you. I haven’t even talked to him since then. I haven’t talked to anybody since then, except Franco.”

  I whirl on her. “Franco knows?”

  Gigi frowns. “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters!” It makes me want to rip my own skin off, actually, the idea of all three of them having this information all this time and me walking around like a total joke thinking some random girl named Nicole or the roller skate rental clerk was all that was keeping Josh and me from eventually living happily ever after. That it was only a matter of time until he finally realized — until he finally saw —

  “I’ve gotta go,” I hear myself say, shaking my head and brushing past her, fumbling with my key.

  “Elisa, wait.”

  “I can’t talk about this right now. I have to learn how to make the Beatles sound like a band you would listen to while you did cocaine on a boat.”

  “What?” Gigi asks, but her voice barely carries. I’m already on the other side of the door.

  “Okay, hear me out,” Josh says when he strolls into Franco’s backyard ten minutes late for practice, instead of hello or how are you guys or anything to suggest he isn’t the center of the entire universe. “I’m thinking maybe we ought to go in a different direction.”

  Franco looks up from his drum kit, frowning warily. “Wait,” he says. “Now? Dude, it’s three days until the Battle.”

  “I know, I know,” Josh says, that manic gleam in his eye. “But I just think that without a sax player we’re not really committing to the aesthetic anyway, so maybe we should just go ahead and —”

  “No,” I hear myself say.

  Josh blinks, looking over suddenly like he hadn’t even realized I was here. “No?”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?” he asks slowly. He sounds so surprised that I laugh out loud. I realize all at once that in twelve years of friendship this might actually be the first time I’ve ever turned him down for anything; the thought of it fills me with a jagged, clanging anger, the sound of it louder and louder until finally it’s all I can hear. I’m sick of going along with whatever harebrained whim he has in the moment that he has it. I’m sick of acting like he’s some creative genius the rest of us have to tiptoe around. Most of all I’m sick of standing behind my keyboard waiting for him to notice me, like a song he knows so well it doesn’t even register anymore. I’m sick of all of it. “I mean no, Josh. Franco’s right: the Battle is in three days. This isn’t the time to just —”

  “You haven’t even heard what I’m going to say.”

  “I don’t need to,” I snap. “I don’t care if it’s grunge or big band or Russian opera —”

  “It’s not any of those things, actually.”

  “I don’t care! I’m saying it’s a ridiculous idea, Josh, and you’re ridiculous for having it, and if you want to do it so bad, you might as well just beg Gigi to come back and play for you instead because I’m done.”

  All at once Josh’s eyes narrow. Behind the drums, Franco gets very still. “Is this about Gigi?” Josh asks, and his voice is so quiet.

  “What? No!” I sound shrill even to myself, loud and panicky, a CD skipping in my mom’s ancient car. I have to get out of here. I have to hit pause. “But she got one thing right, that’s for sure.” I yank the cord out of the back of my keyboard. “I quit.”

  The next day seeps by in a miserable blur. I’ve alienated every single one of my friends, so I spend lunch in the library, scrolling through my phone for something to listen to that doesn’t remind me of anyone or anything. I’m useless in tutoring, the letters rearranging themselves in front of my eyes. “Sorry,” I say finally, dropping my pen onto the desk with a clatter. “I’m stupid, I guess.”

  Once Ms. Cherry lets us go for the day, I all but run out of her classroom, but Hot Pete Gardello catches up with me in the parking lot. “Hey,” he calls, footsteps quick on the concrete behind me. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I assure him, cheeks burning as I dig my car keys out of my backpack. The last thing I want is to have a meltdown in front of Hot Pete Gardello, of all people. “Long day, that’s all.”

  “Are you sure?” he asks. “I mean, you seem like you’re . . . maybe not fine.”

  What Hot Pete Gardello knows or doesn’t know about how I seem — or why he cares — is beyond me. “Okay, enough,” I blurt. “Like, quite seriously, what do you think you’re doing?”

  He frowns. “What do you mean?”

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” I demand. “Buying me pizza. Asking how I am. If it’s because I fixed your busted car that day, we’re, like, more than even at this point.”

  Hot Pete Gardello looks at me for a minute, an expression on his face I don’t quite recognize. “It’s not because you fixed my car,” he finally says.

  “Then why?”

  His mouth does something that isn’t a smile — a twitch, uncertain, there and gone again. “I thought it was pretty obvious.”

  I blink at him. “What?”

  “Elisa,” he murmurs, and it sounds like a sigh. “Come on.”

  Is he saying —?

  I mean, it definitely sounds like —

  Doesn’t it?

  I shake my head, trying to clear the sudden buzzing. It’s like everything I thought I understood about the world has turned inside out on itself in the last twenty-four hours: Gigi. Josh. Hot Pete Gardello. Nothing is actually what it looks like to me. It’s like I have dyslexia about the entire world.

  “I should go,” I hear myself say.

  Hot Pete Gardello shakes his head. “Elisa,” he starts. “Can we just —”

  “Um, not right now,” I interrupt. There’s a part of me that knows I can’t keep on doing this, careening around with my hands clamped over my ears; still, I push past him and reach for the car door. “I’m sorry.” I gun the engine and peel out of the parking lot, turning up the radio until it’s all I can hear.

  My mom picks up Thai food on her way home that night, the two of us standing in the kitchen over plastic tubs of noodles and green curry with rice. “Want to know something funny?” she asks, pouring me some iced tea from the plastic jug in the fridge and handing it over just before my eyes start to water. “Your teacher was one of my patients today.”

  “She was?” I ask once I’ve gulped half the glass. The truth is I haven’t thought about Ms. Saeed since she went out on maternity leave, and it makes me feel a little bad now, although I can’t imagine she’s thought about me, either. “Was she okay?”

  “I was her nurse, wasn’t I?” My mom smiles. “She had a little girl.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Isn’t it a HIPAA violation for you to be telling me that?”

  “Cute. She told me to say hello to you, actually. And to make sure you were going to tutoring.”

  “What? No, she didn’t.” I frown. “Really?”

  My mom nods. “She said you’ve worked way too hard to give up now.”

  She says it so casually, catching an errant bean sprout between her chopsticks; I don’t know why that, of everything that’s happened recent
ly, is what makes me burst into tears. “The noodles are spicy,” I insist, even as my mom drops her dinner and wraps her arms around me, surrounding me with the freesia smell of her deodorant and the antibacterial soap they use at the hospital.

  “I know,” she murmurs softly, and hums a quiet tune into my hair.

  I spend a long time in my room that night, plucking out idle chords on the keyboard and humming to myself under my breath. I think of Gigi trying to protect me from the way she was feeling. I think of Ms. Saeed and her baby asleep in the hospital across town. I think of Hot Pete Gardello at the pizza place, the way he handed me a napkin from the dispenser before taking one for himself, and finally I pick up my phone.

  “I think I have a plan for the Battle,” I tell Josh when he answers, because I know he’ll hear the I’m sorry behind it. He picked up on the very first ring. “Meet you at Franco’s after school tomorrow?”

  “Always,” he says, no hesitation in his voice at all. “I’ll be there.”

  I nod even though he can’t see me. “I might be a tiny bit later than usual,” I warn him. “I just have to make one stop first.”

  We play second to last at the Battle, all of us lurking around the gym sizing up the other acts until it’s finally our turn to go on. “You ready?” Josh asks me, reaching for my hand and squeezing as the lights go down.

  I squeeze back, a dozen years of friendship tucked between our sweaty palms. “You bet.”

  We start out with a straightforward, slightly snoozy cover, making it all the way through the first verse before cutting off abruptly, Franco knocking his drumsticks together as we start again, way faster this time. I grin as the crowd starts to shift in their seats, nodding along as they realize what we’re doing: switching up the arrangement at every break, careening from punk to jazz to bluegrass to, yes, yacht rock. “I love it,” Josh said when I suggested playing the song in a bunch of different styles. “It’s a gamble, but a smart one. It’s weird, but it works.”

  It’s mixed up, in a good way.

  I spy Gigi in the crowd, the swirling lights bouncing off the pink in her hair; I catch her eye and smile in a way I hope will cut through all the noise. She raises both hands in response, reaching out across the auditorium in my direction. The drums thump, steady, deep in the base of my spine.

  Once we’re done, I hang out with Franco at the back of the auditorium for a while, watching the last band play. I spy Josh talking to Gigi, then take a deep breath and turn away. Out in the lobby I find Hot Pete Gardello with a cluster of his equally hot friends, their laughter loud and rowdy; I’m expecting him to ignore me, but instead he peels away. “Hey,” he says to me, hands tucked deep into his pockets. “Nice job up there.”

  “Thanks,” I tell him. Then, reaching into my backpack: “Did you know there’s a Christmas-themed store up in Plainfield?” I ask.

  Pete tilts his head to the side for a moment, reaching out and taking the candy cane from my outstretched hand. “I did not,” he says.

  He smiles then, slow and steady. It looks like my favorite song.

  Last summer, DeeDee and I went to the Commoners concert. It was outside, and it was hot as hell. Like a fucking sauna. Everybody was sweating and looking anxious and miserable. We stared at the stage — plain and industrial — knowing that soon, soon, it would be transformed into a little slice of heaven.

  “This is gonna be cool as fuck!” DeeDee told me. Her eyes glimmered with excitement — and with her typical over-the-top eye makeup. DeeDee always looked like some kind of glam rock star from the ’80s. Makeup like David Bowie, take-no-shit attitude like Joan Jett. She took a long drink from a beer and passed it to me.

  I took a sip and handed it back to her. Dee liked to drink, but me, not so much.

  “You happy, little brother?” she asked.

  She’d sprung for the tickets by working a ton of overtime at Atomic Records. It was my birthday gift. She’d driven us there, and even though I’d had to drive us home because Dee was drunk, it was the best night of my life.

  Robert Patrick Riley played for four hours straight. No bullshit talking between songs. No tales of this or that. No fucking breaks. That guy played from one song right into the next seamlessly. The sound of his voice, that hypnotic guitar reverberating even in so much open space, moved through each one of us like something holy.

  I always get lost in the music. But that night, it felt like I was the music. Like I was being born into the universe, note by note, floating freely everywhere.

  Robert Patrick Riley stood center stage like some kind of mythical creature in the mist of so many smoke machines. I hardly noticed anything else. Except every once in a while, DeeDee and I would look over at each other at the exact same time and we’d laugh like neither of us could believe how fucking amazing this was.

  Then came the last song, sad and beautiful, like a poem. The stage flared with a bunch of little fires that slowly, perfectly, fizzled into darkness and left the crowd breathless.

  It was magical.

  I remember thinking how lucky I was to have a sister like Dee who did shit like this. Who knew it was hard for me to interact with people, who beat up Sam Tillner when I was in sixth grade and she was in eighth for calling me a “poor brown weirdo freak!” Who basically made me not worry about making friends because she’d be my best friend, she’d do the talking, she’d make friends enough for both of us.

  She’d be my bridge to the rest of the world.

  That’s my sister. Or at least that was my sister.

  I never thought of that bridge collapsing.

  Or how stranded I’d feel when it did.

  The bell rings, and I’m headed out of English class when Ms. Cherry gestures for me to come over to her. She waits as I pull off my hoodie, take off my headphones.

  “Where’s your essay, Vinnie?” she asks as they slip down around my neck.

  I shrug. “Forgot.”

  Ms. Cherry takes a deep breath. “Vinnie, you haven’t turned in the last three assignments. Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah . . . I’m just . . . slacking off, I guess,” I say, forcing a small laugh. But both my excuse and my laugh sound fake and stupid to me.

  Ms. Cherry stares at me, analyzing me the way she analyzes the books and poems and short stories we read in class. “Okay,” she says finally. “But I want to see you get back on track.” The bell rings and I look toward the door, but Ms. Cherry isn’t done yet and another class doesn’t trickle into her room.

  “Listen, I don’t like to see my students fail. I want to see you all succeed. So I’m going to give you another chance to write this essay, but it better be good.”

  “Thanks, Ms. Cherry,” I tell her, relieved. I grab my headphones to put them back on, but Ms. Cherry stops me.

  “Hold on. There’s one more thing.” She eyes my headphones. “You seem more far away lately. And I’d like to see you get out of yourself a little, Vinnie. Out of that little world you encapsulate yourself in.”

  I clear my throat and hold on to my headphones, sensing she might take them away right there and then. “I need my music, Ms. Cherry,” I say.

  “Oh, I know. Music is beautiful. It’s really poetry.” She smiles like she gets it. “I’m not telling you to forget about music. I’m just telling you to use it to find your people.”

  I suddenly feel a little pathetic and wish I could sink into my hoodie and disappear. Part of me wants to tell Ms. Cherry I had my people. DeeDee and her friends and all those people at the underground concerts DeeDee would take me to with free tickets courtesy of the record store were my people. Those bands were my people.

  But I don’t say anything.

  Ms. Cherry points to a poster on the wall of her classroom.

  I laugh, relieved that what she’s suggesting is funny enough it prevents me from getting all emotional right there in front of Ms. Cherry.

  “Battle of the Bands? Are you serious? Come on, Miss. I’m not in a band. I don’t even play an ins
trument.”

  “I’m not saying you have to perform. I’m sure they already have their acts lined up. But I know for a fact they could use some help behind the scenes. I’ll even throw in some extra credit.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

  “Why?” she asks gently. “Do you have other activities? Younger siblings to take care of after school? Responsibilities when you get home?”

  Ouch. Ms. Cherry really just called me out like that. I picture myself on my bed, listening to music. “Not exactly,” I say, knowing that even if I tried to lie, Ms. Cherry would see right through it.

  I stare at the poster. Battle of the Bands. Anxiousness tightens my chest.

  “I mean, who do I even talk to . . . ?”

  Ms. Cherry smiles. “Don’t you worry about that! I’ve got all the information you need. A student of mine is mostly running this thing and she’s pretty stressed out.” Ms. Cherry chuckles. “She could use some help. So, is it a yes?”

  “I guess.”

  She nods approvingly and scribbles something on a pass. “Perfect. So after school today, go to the theater and find a girl named Lilly. She’s in my last class of the day, so I’ll tell her to expect you.” She hands me the pass. “This will be good for you, Vinnie. You’ll see.”

  “Sure . . .” I say and slip my headphones back on, back into the heavy drums and guitar of the Commoners, the haunting voice and lyrics of Robert Patrick Riley. I walk the empty halls, both comforted and saddened by the solitude.

  Later that day, my feet and stomach feel full of lead as I walk to the school theater. I turn up the volume on my phone and music blasts louder into my headphones, calming my anxiety for a minute. I stop and brace myself outside the doors of the theater before finally stepping inside.

  Inside are a bunch of people I don’t know scurrying around like ants. I watch as some guy yells at some other guy, as more people come in and out, as instruments in big black cases and amps are dragged in. I let the music in my ears calm the uneasiness I always feel around people.