Face the Music

by Brian Weisfeld

  “Wait,” said Didi, “are you serious? You really just want to help?”

  Val shrugged. “Yeah,” she said so quietly they almost couldn’t hear her.

  “Resa?” asked Didi expectantly.

  The girls had been best friends for long enough that Resa knew what Didi wanted her to do without her having to say anything. She hooked her arm through Didi’s and pulled her to the side of the table for a private conference.

  “Are you kidding me?” Resa whispered. “You know she’s impossible to work with!”

  “So are you,” Didi teased. “But that doesn’t stop me from being your best friend.”

  “I’m being serious,” Resa replied.

  “She’s not impossible,” Didi said. “She’s just, well, assertive about her ideas—like you. And just like you, she’s got a lot of good ideas.”

  Resa pulled her blue headband down off her hairline and then readjusted it in place. “The autographed T-shirts are actually a smart idea.” She made a clicking sound on the back of her teeth as she considered. “Fine. On a trial basis.”

  Didi grinned and gave Resa’s shoulders a little, approving squeeze. Then she walked back over to the table. “Val—”

  “Just hear me out, would you?” Val was insistent. “You could get the boys to sign, like, five ahead of time, now, and have them up here. You could sell them for a lot more than the rest. You could say there’s a limited supply.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Didi said.

  “It is?” replied Val. “I mean, thanks.”

  “I have a great idea, myself,” said Didi.

  Didi grabbed a shirt from the pile on the table and handed it to Val.

  “Put it on,” she encouraged. “So people will know you’re with us.”

  Val turned to Resa, her eyes opened wide. “Seriously?”

  Resa sighed. “On a trial basis.”

  A kind of giggle started to erupt from Val’s throat, which she immediately suppressed. “Cool,” she said, trying her best to be casual. “I guess I can help. I mean, since you really need me.”

  Resa rolled her eyes. She whispered to Didi, “If she’s a disaster, I’m never doing anything nice for anyone again.”

  “That’s reasonable,” Didi joked.

  Resa turned her attention to double-checking that the credit card reader app and device on her cell phone were working properly, while Harriet ran backstage with five T-shirts to get the boys’ autographs.

  The auditorium had a real stage, with an actual—but worn—red curtain and a big backstage area to boot. There was even a Battle of the Bands staff member at the entrance to the backstage area, barring people from entering. Harriet told the man she was the Skinks’ sister and also their tour manager, but he kept shaking his head, his face expressionless.

  Just as Harriet was about to lose her cool, Joe, returning from the restroom, arrived on the scene. “She’s with the band,” he said. And just like that, Harriet was in.

  “Thanks, bro,” said Harriet. “Is it okay I’m here? I don’t want to disturb you.”

  Joe slung his arm around Harriet’s shoulders. “Relax, sis. I’m taking a break from the zone. I think it was stressing me out more than relaxing me.”

  Harriet caught sight of the yellow T-shirt Joe was wearing under his black leather jacket.

  “You’re wearing a Music Mania shirt for the show?” she asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, Mo made me agree to that before she’d hand over the loaner drum,” he said. “I don’t really care. Fashion is an illusion.”

  Harriet furrowed her brows. “Bite your tongue!”

  The backstage area was loud and crowded. Joe gave Harriet a quick tour of the competition as they passed each band.

  There was Tricky Vulture, an all-girl punk rock band, and Two Is Better Than One, a boyfriend/girlfriend folk duo. There was Smash!, a glam rock band who seemed to have more makeup on their faces than everyone in the audience combined. There was Armageddon Town, a heavy metal group. Then there was the last contender, a band with eight members, all of them lying in a circle on the floor with their eyes closed.

  “Who’re they?” Harriet asked Joe in a whisper as they walked past the group. The youngest looked about Harriet’s age, and the oldest looked as if she might be a grandmother. Every band member wore all white, and they were barefoot. Diagonally across their chests, they wore beauty pageant–style banners, which read, in blue sparkly letters, XPECTATION!

  “Ah, Xpectation!” said Joe with a wry smile. “They’re an experimental rock band from downtown.”

  “Where are their instruments?” asked Harriet.

  “They don’t have any,” said Joe. “Their whole thing is, they pick up whatever’s lying around and make music with that.”

  “I don’t want to jinx you, but looking at your competition, I think you guys have a really good shot!” Harriet said, giddy with excitement as Joe led her to the Radical Skinks’ corner of the backstage. She was surprised to find Eleanor there, adjusting the collar on Larry’s retro bowling shirt.

  “Are they a thing?” Harriet asked Joe.

  “Not officially.” Joe nodded in Larry and Eleanor’s direction. “But I mean, it sure looks like it.”

  Harriet got her brothers to autograph the T-shirts and sped back to the merch table so she could rustle up new customers. As it turned out, there was no need. The Radical Skinks’ merch table had the longest line of all the tables by far. So many customers wanted to buy T-shirts on the spot that Resa told Harriet to stop advertising and start accepting money. When Harriet reached over to give her first customer a T-shirt, Didi grabbed her hand.

  “Is your name Amelia or Didi?” she asked.

  “Resa told me to help,” protested Harriet. “Look at the line! Even Disneyland doesn’t have lines this long!”

  Didi narrowed her eyes as she considered. “Fine,” she said. “But you don’t hand over T-shirts until you have the money in the cashbox, or until the credit card reader screen says ‘confirmed’! And don’t mess up my piles!”

  “I promise,” said Harriet.

  Val was right; the autographed T-shirts sold out almost immediately. And Resa and Amelia had been right, too; most customers were in such a hurry to find a good spot to watch the show that they didn’t bother waiting for change. The buttons were a huge hit, too, with some customers buying three or four at a time.

  With ten minutes left until showtime, the Radical Skinks’ merch table still had a long line of customers. The girls were moving as quickly as they could to take money and hand out merch, and Harriet was glad they’d accepted Val’s help. She was fast and surprisingly friendly, too; way friendlier than she was in class. Her smile may have been fake, but the customers were buying it, and they were leaving with smiles on their faces, too.

  Inspired by Val’s example, Harriet decided to push her own charm into turbo gear. When the next customer stepped up, her smile was extra-strength. “Well, hello there! How can I help you?” she asked.

  Her smile was not met with a smile in response. It was Reginald.

  “Reg!” Harriet sang. “How’s it going?”

  He scowled. “Reginald. It’s Reginald.”

  “Sorry!” said Harriet. “It’s great to see you again!”

  “Uh-huh,” he grunted. He glanced over at the T-shirts. “These look a lot better than the last ones. I’ll take three. And three buttons, too.”

  “Three T-shirts, three buttons! Coming right up!” Harriet chirped. “Cash or credit?”

  Reginald handed over a credit card, and Harriet rushed it over to Resa.

  Resa shook her head. “Can’t. The credit card reader is down.”

  “What?” asked Harriet, eyes wide.

  Amelia turned in Harriet’s direction. “It’s the Wi-Fi. I just heard the people at the Tricky Vulture merch table complaining about it. No one’s able to take credit cards.”

  Harriet froze. “We need to get it back up!”

  “Right, becaus
e it’s so easy!” Resa snapped. “Forget it.” She turned abruptly and stormed off.

  “This is a disaster!” Harriet moaned, dropping her head into her hands. “We have only a few minutes left before the show starts, and a lot of these people don’t have cash!”

  “Helloooo?” called Reginald, still waiting on the other side of the table.

  Harriet spun around to face him, her mournful expression transforming instantly into a cheerful grin.

  “Can you speed it up?” Reginald asked, irritated. “I need to get a good seat.”

  “So sorry, Reg,” she said. “Can you pay in cash? We’re just having the teeniest bit of trouble with our credit card machine.”

  “No, I don’t have cash!” Reginald scrunched his nose like cash was a distasteful word.

  “You’re right,” said Harriet. “Just a sec!”

  She turned around to face Amelia, her smile dropping into a frown, like someone had pulled a lever on her mouth. She’d tried so hard to make sure everything went smoothly today, but even so, it was turning into a disaster, just like last time. “Now what do we do?”

  “Gimme a minute,” said Amelia. “I’m thinking.”

  “Well, think faster!” Harriet hissed. She wiped sweat from her brow.

  “I’ll go ask the show organizer about the Wi-Fi,” said Amelia. “I bet they can reboot it.”

  “Already done!” panted Resa, reappearing on the other side of the table. She was out of breath but smiling. “They’re restarting the router. And, in case that doesn’t work…”

  “What?” asked Harriet.

  Resa scrambled onto a folding chair and stood, cupping her hands around her mouth to be heard over the roar of the crowd. “We’re fixing the Wi-Fi, but for now we are cash only. There’s an ATM machine across the street in the deli. And don’t worry! The show isn’t starting for another ten minutes!”

  Harriet threw her arms around Resa’s calves and lifted her up. “Three cheers for Resa!” she shouted.

  “Careful!” Resa said, but she was laughing, her brown eyes twinkling.

  Harriet put Resa’s feet back down on the chair and darted over to where Reginald was waiting. “You wanna wait for the Wi-Fi, Reg, or hit up the ATM?”

  “What if you sell out of the shirts while I go get the money?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you what, Reg.” Harriet leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, “I’m not doing this for anyone else, but seeing as you’re our best customer and also how we didn’t do right by you last time, I’m gonna put three shirts and three buttons to the side for you while you go to the ATM. How’s that sound?”

  “Cool,” he said. “Skinks for”—he held four fingers up—“ever.”

  Harriet smiled and held four fingers up, too. “Skinks forever!”

  21

  The Wi-Fi never kicked back on strongly enough to run the credit card reader. That was okay, though, because the T-shirts sold out before the Battle of the Bands even started.

  Didi had the idea to start a list for back orders, taking down names and email addresses, so that the Startup Squad could get in touch when a new shipment of T-shirts came in. And Harriet had the idea to offer a 15 percent discount on back orders if people paid right then and there.

  Pretty much everyone who had cash took the discount and paid in advance.

  “And if you want to show your support for the Radical Skinks right now,” Harriet told each back-ordering fan, “we’ve got plenty of buttons for sale!”

  So they sold out of buttons by the time the show started, too.

  “I wish we’d ordered more T-shirts!” Harriet lamented as the last customer walked away from the table.

  “We couldn’t order more,” Amelia reminded her. “We needed a deposit of fifty percent up front. We barely had enough to cover this amount of T-shirts.”

  “And besides,” said Resa, “it would have been way worse to order too many T-shirts and not sell them. That way, we’d have lost money.”

  “I guess,” said Harriet. She couldn’t help but wonder if she’d done a good enough job, done everything she could to make the table a success. Things had definitely turned out better than last time—but was that really saying much?

  Didi put an arm around Harriet’s shoulder—and turned Harriet’s body toward the audience, who were waiting for the first band to start playing. The emcee had given a short introduction and announced the randomly chosen lineup (the Radical Skinks were fifth), and now Tricky Vulture was plugging in, tuning up, and getting settled.

  “Look, Harriet,” Didi said, pointing toward the crowd.

  Harriet had been so busy handing out merch and making change that she hadn’t even glanced at the growing crowd in the auditorium. The large room was chock-full, with every seat taken and tons of people leaning against the walls. It was a sea of people. But that wasn’t the most incredible part. The most incredible part was that the sea of people was midnight blue.

  It wasn’t all blue. But it mostly was. Harriet’s eyes scanned over one pair of shoulders after another, clad in Radical Skinks T-shirts. The crowd was jammed with Skinks fans, and, when Harriet’s brothers took the stage and looked out over the crowd, they’d see it. So would the judges.

  “You did good, Harry,” said Resa, giving her a playful elbow jab. “You did good.”

  Harriet smiled. “We did good. If it hadn’t been for you and your tough love, I’d probably still be pouting in bed.”

  “That’s what business associates are for,” said Resa, shrugging.

  “And friends,” Didi chimed in.

  “Five! Six! Five six seven eight!” The drummer for Tricky Vulture was hitting her drumsticks together, counting down for her band. The show was about to start.

  22

  The Radical Skinks were dazzling. The amp, which Harriet worried about the whole time, held up perfectly. Sam was a blur at the drums, darting his hands between the different parts of the drum kit so fast the human eye could hardly process it. Joe was pitch-perfect—his voice velvet, but with a ragged edge that made the crowd go wild. And Larry wasn’t exaggerating when he said the ChromaChord 3000 gave him magical musical powers. Maybe he wasn’t quite Hendrix, but he was better than he’d ever been, better than Harriet ever imagined he could be. What made their performance truly transcendent, though, was how in sync they were—as if they weren’t three separate people playing three separate instruments but one mythical musical creature with three sets of arms and legs.

  It wasn’t just the Startup Squad who thought the Radical Skinks hit a home run. The crowd in the auditorium was locked in to the Radical Skinks’ performance, cheering and clapping and singing along. When Larry played the final chord of the final song, and Sam hit the cymbals for the last time, the crowd spontaneously began to chant, “Rad Skinks! Rad Skinks! Rad Skinks!”

  When their performance was over, Harriet sizzled with excitement. “I really don’t want to jinx it, but I think they are gonna win! How could they not?”

  “They’re definitely the crowd favorite,” said Amelia. “That’s gotta count for something.”

  The Radical Skinks were a hard act to follow, so Xpectation!, which performed after them, had an uphill battle. They walked onto the stage, barefoot, with empty hands. They asked the audience for donations of items—anything, they said, absolutely anything, because there was nothing they could not make musical—and the audience obliged, tossing up candy bar wrappers, shoes, books, and even some Radical Skinks buttons. The band members distributed these “instruments,” and, after counting down from ten like NASA Mission Control, they began to sing.

  The band had no lead singer. Instead, they all sang, in unison, these words:

  “My belly rumbles

  I want a sandwich

  The time is midnight,

  The time is noon,

  The time is never.

  Are you a turkey?

  Turtles are the loneliiiiiiiiiiiiiest …

  animals.”

 
; The youngest member of the band slammed a shoe down on the stage once, twice, three times. Then, silence.

  The audience remained quiet, trying to decide if that was the song’s finale or if there’d be more. When nothing else happened, the crowd began to clap, most of them quietly, politely. There was, however, a cluster of audience members seated toward the front, dressed all in white, with white fedoras, and those people began to whoop and whistle and cheer. The fans of Xpectation! were small in number but clearly very devoted.

  “The judges will now vote,” announced the emcee. “And while we wait, we’ll be treated to a short acrobatic routine by a performer I hear is a real dynamo.” As he was speaking, two high schoolers dragged a large blue gymnastics mat to the middle of the stage. “Let’s hear it for … the Blaze!”

  Loud, pulsating techno music blared from the auditorium’s speaker system, so fast and insistent that the audience couldn’t help but clap along to the beat. After a few seconds, a girl ran full speed from the wings and executed a string of gymnastic moves Harriet did not know the names for but involved flips—forward and backward—and no-handed cartwheels and one-handed handstands and all kinds of other incredible feats that defied gravity. The girl moved so fast and her leotard was so sparkly from the golden sequins that covered it that it took a minute before Harriet recognized her.

  “Is that…” she ventured. “Val?”

  Resa leaned forward and squinted. “Holy moly,” she said. “It is.”

  Val did a final move—a backflip with no hands—and raised both arms above her head triumphantly as her chest moved rapidly up and down from her exertion.

  “Did you know she was, like, an Olympic gymnast?” asked Amelia.

  “I didn’t even know she could do a cartwheel,” marveled Harriet, shaking her head. “That girl has more tricks up her sleeve than a magician.”

  The girls clapped energetically along with the rest of the audience as Val gave a deep bow before running off the stage. The emcee returned to the microphone to say it’d be just one more minute.

  “I can’t take it,” said Harriet, hiding her face in her hands.