by JL Bryan
“We have guests coming,” Jason said. “A ton of people are here already.”
“How many did you invite?” Mitch asked.
“Maybe ten. But I told them to bring friends. And it looks like they all brought three or four.”
“What?” Mitch stood up behind his keyboard. “That’s too many. We only need fifteen or twenty.”
“Hi!” Wendy and her friends approached Mitch. “You’re Mitch, right?”
“Mick.”
“Mick!” the three girls exclaimed.
“Can we get a pic with you?” Wendy asked.
“I guess.” Mitch looked confused.
The girls gathered in around him, putting their arms around them, then took pictures with their phones, acting excited, as if they’d met an actual rock star.
People started flooding in through the front door. They swarmed Mitch and Jason, demanding to hear music.
“Wait, wait,” Mitch said. “Everybody, we’re still getting set up here.”
The crowd grumbled.
“We came to hear the band!” one guy shouted.
“Just wait!” Mitch said.
“Come on, play!” a girl yelled, and the crowd voiced their agreement with her.
“Half the band isn’t even here yet!” Mitch said. He was looking agitated at the swelling crowd that filled his house.
“Play something!” another guy yelled.
“Jason,” Mitch said, “Can you give them a guitar solo or something?”
“Do it!” Wendy yelled. She was grasping Mitch’s hand tight, while Mitch tried to pull away.
“Okay, whatever.” Jason opened his guitar case, and he jumped when a number of people cheered and clapped. It seemed ridiculous that they could be reacting so strongly to a band nobody had heard of even two days earlier. Especially when the band was just a group of kids from their own town. It was unreal, and a little scary.
Jason sat down on the couch, and girls pushed their way in all around him, sitting beside him, behind him on the couch back, and all around his feet. They stared at him expectantly.
“So, here’s something I like to warm up with,” Jason said.
“Yeah, warm up!” one girl shouted.
“Warm up!” another added.
“Hurry!”
“You have to give me a little space,” Jason said, but nobody backed up. He drew his pick across all six strings, filling the air with sound, and the whole crowd seemed to sigh and relax.
He played “Learning to Fly” by Tom Petty, one of the first songs he’d learned on guitar. The people around him cheered at a volume that made Jason’s ears ring.
“Sing!” a girl yelled from the back of the crowd.
“I don’t really sing,” Jason said. “Our singer’s on the way here.”
“Sing anyway!” a guy shouted.
“Um, I’ll try…” Jason sang the first line haltingly, but then the words starting pouring out of his mouth with no effort. The guitar vibrations seemed to strengthen his singing voice, making it sound almost decent. The crowd joined in and sang along with him, and the girls around him leaned in closer, as if they went to going to gang up and smother him. Tadd was circling around, getting footage of Jason and the crowd.
The guitar grew warm in his hands, and the air grew thick and hot, like there wasn’t enough oxygen for all the people packed into the room. Still, he kept singing with no trouble.
Then Erin walked into the room. Unfortunately, she was with her boyfriend Zach.
Jason stopped playing and stood up, struggling to find some fresh air to breathe.
“There’s our singer!” Jason said. “So she’ll be singing from now on. This is the end of the part where I sing.”
The crowd turned and gasped, then closed in around Erin. The guys seemed particularly interested in getting close to her.
“Sing!” somebody yelled.
“Yeah, sing a song for us!”
“You’re so pretty!”
“You really are!”
“I love you!”
Zach gaped at all the dopey-eyed fanboys congregated around his girlfriend. Jason took more than a little pleasure in his discomfort.
Erin approached Mitch. Zach followed, trying to elbow guys out of his way while maintaining his photo-perfect smile.
“This is a huge crowd!” Erin said to Mitch, speaking loudly over the chattering, excited mob. “Where did they all come from?”
Mitch pointed to Jason. “He invited them.”
“Very impressive, Jason!” Erin called, while Jason tried to ease his way past adoring fans to reach the other band members.
“I only called a few people.”
“What about all the people outside?” Erin asked. “Where are they going to listen?”
“There’s more outside?” Mitch looked horrified.
“Like a hundred people,” Erin said.
“My mom’s going to kill me.” Mitch looked like he wanted to bang his head against something.
“We should open the windows and turn on the ceiling fans,” Jason said. “It’s going to get really hot in here.”
The crowd cheered at his words, which he hardly expected. Guests hurried to open up the windows, as if Jason had given an order and they were obedient servants. The breeze from outside cooled things down a little. People were already crowded outside the windows, and they applauded when then windows opened.
“This is crazy,” Erin said.
“Did all these people really come to see you?” Zach said. “Maybe we should get out of here. This is weird.”
“Hey, hands off!” Dred shouted. She’d entered the room, and she used both her drumsticks to beat back the reaching hands of admiring fans. “Where did all these people come from, Mitch?”
“Mick. This is our fan base! Like ‘em?”
“I don’t know.” Dred whacked a hand from her sleeve with the end of a drumstick. She pushed forward until she was standing in front of her drum kit. “Who moved my drums?”
“We were running out of time.”
“And who’s this guy?” She jabbed a drumstick at Tadd, who was following her with the camera. He barely dodged it.
“Tadd’s shooting the video,” Jason said.
“I know you said you didn’t want this, but I brought it out just in case.” Mitch handed the little fairy drum to Dred, who scowled at it for a second, then put it aside on the tchotchke shelf, among porcelain cats and glass angels.
“Don’t need it,” Dred said. Then she crossed her arms and stared at a freshman girl who sat on the stool behind the drum kit, gazing in admiration at Mitch. “Hey, shove off, creampuff!”
The girl jumped, looked at Dred and the sticks in her hands, and scurried off, though she couldn’t go far in the dense crowd.
“Hey, everybody?” Mitch said, waving his arms. “If you could just back up a step or two, we can get warmed up here.”
“Come on, make room for the band!” Tadd said, waving his camera. “And me! Lots of room for me!”
“Hey, what’s the band called, anyway?” a girl asked Mitch.
“Yeah, what’s it called? What’s it called?” more girls asked, grabbing at Mitch’s hand and arm.
“We’re the Assorted Zebras,” Mitch said.
“That’s a great name!”
“Awesome name!”
“The Assorted Zebras! I love it so much!” the first girl said, leaning close to Mitch and gazing at his chin.
“Well, we call it that because the zebra can’t be tamed,” Mitch said. “You can’t ride a zebra, or make it pull a plow, or anything. The zebra is the Mick Jagger of the equine world. If you look into the history of sub-Saharan Africa, you’ll find that the wildness of the zebra as compared to the horse was actually a major economic setback for thousands of years—”
“Just play already!” a guy shouted.
The crowd closed in tighter around the band.
Mitch played a few notes on the keyboard, and the crowd quieted a bit.
Jason strummed his guitar, and Erin took out her harmonica and warmed it up. Jason didn’t need to touch his golden tuning pegs—the instruments tuned to each other automatically, and an electric resonance crackled through the room.
“Okay, everybody, thanks for coming out!” Erin shouted. “We are the Assorted Zebras.”
The crowd applauded.
“I guess we’ll start with ‘Cinderella Night,’” Erin said. “That’s the one from the video you all saw.”
The crowd cheered like it was an old favorite.
Dred tapped out a four-count, and then the rest of the band jumped in. As before, the sound was powerful with the three magic instruments working together. Jason felt alternating chills and blasts of heat rushing up his spine. His hands became very loose and relaxed, and the guitar strings almost seemed to bend up to meet his fingertips and his pick, as if the guitar were eager to make music.
The crowd thrashed to the song, screaming along with Erin’s lyrics. It sounded like they’d all memorized the words.
The music worked its magic on Jason, too, so that soon he thought of nothing, but lost himself in the playing.
At the end of the song, the crowd applauded and cheered and stomped. The people gathered at the windows pounded their hands against the screens and window frames.
“Go easy on my house!” Mitch shouted. Then he pointed at a group of senior guys across the room, who were opening brown bottles. “Hey, no beer! I’m serious!”
The guys toasted Mitch as though he’d greeted them.
“Okay, here’s a song I wrote for my boyfriend Zach here.” Erin touched Zach’s shoulder, and he gave the crowd an annoyed half-smile.
Erin sang, and the crowd went wild. They were dancing everywhere: on the coffee table, the stairs, up against the walls, knocking down the framed pictures. Mitch shook his head, but he kept playing. He slowly closed his eyes, and it looked like he was getting lost in the music like Jason.
Jason smiled and closed his eyes, too, letting the song direct his hands and fingers. Playing the guitar was effortless. He somehow never missed a beat, never got a chord wrong, but it felt like all he was doing was listening and letting the music flow through him.
Erin moved on to “Remember,” which had everybody crying and holding each other by the final verse.
“Okay, sorry, let’s pick things up a little,” Erin said, wiping tears from her face. She played the opening for “Roller Coaster” on her harmonica. It was a much faster song and at least sounded upbeat, unless you listened too closely to the lyrics about being thrown around by your emotions.
Jason and Mitch played along, but there was no drumbeat. Jason looked back at Dred, and she was swaying as if hypnotized by the music, her eyes closing.
“Dred!” he said in a loud stage whisper. “Dred, wake up!”
“Huh?” Dred’s eyes fluttered open, but they had a blank, empty look. She gazed around the room, then saw the drumsticks in her hand. “Oh! Sorry.” She started tapping the rhythm.
A pair of uniformed police officers elbowed their way into the crowd. One of them pointed to the kids drinking beer, and both the cops started in that direction. Jason looked at Mitch, then Erin, but they were both deep into the music, their eyes closed.
The drumbeat stopped—then resumed, but stronger and deeper than before. Jason looked back.
Dred had placed the little fairy drum in her lap and started hitting it with her fingertips. It grew larger as she played, and the sound became more thunderous.
It swelled into a full-size snare drum, inscribed everywhere with fairy runes, with some kind of animal hide stretched taut across the top.
Jason looked back at the two cops, but they’d both joined in the dancing, their eyes closed, drawn into the music like everyone else. Jason smiled.
Dred stopped playing long enough to lift the original snare drum from her kit and toss it aside like a piece of garbage. She replaced it with the fairy drum. She resumed playing, and the drum kit slowly changed. As with Mitch’s keyboard set-up, the fairy instrument seemed to infect the other instruments. The two toms slowly shifted form until they resembled the fairy drum, wooden with runes. The cymbal and hi-hat turned to gold. Finally, the big bass drum shifted its appearance, too.
On the front of the bass drum, a hieroglyphic image of zebras appeared. The zebras were animated, and they ran faster as Dred accelerated the tempo. Words appeared above the moving images like twisting smoke: THE ASSORTED ZEBRAS.
The crowd cheered at the special effects. Jason felt his guitar grow hot. With all four instruments playing together, a kind of magical haze seemed to fall over the room, charging the air with energy. The dancing audience synced up with each other so that they appeared almost choreographed.
Jason felt the crowd’s growing energy course through him like fire.
Erin lowered her harmonica and sang new lyrics he’d never heard before. His fingers played a tune that matched it perfectly.
Let tonight last forever
Capture my sound and song
Share it with your world
Pass the song along…
As if Erin’s words were a spell, everybody took out their phones and began recording the show.
There is no pain
We’ll always stay young
Forget your past
And the days to come…
Erin’s new song was like a lullaby for the mind. The words and music filled Jason with a deep, warm bliss, blanking out his mind.
Erin reached the end of her verses and starting playing harmonica again. Dred’s drumming grew faster and faster—bass, toms, cymbals, snare, all somehow ringing out at once. Her eyes seemed to glow with a kind of mania as her hands and drumsticks flew everywhere. Sweat soaked the kerchief tied to her head and drenched all of her clothes.
Jason, Erin, and Mitch gave up trying to follow her. They surrendered, letting Dred tear off into a wild, loud, crashing drum solo.
The floor rumbled under their feet. Each time Dred hit the cymbal, a window shattered, or a porcelain cat exploded with a sound like a gunshot.
The house shook as Dred’s tempo accelerated to an inhuman speed. Deep cracks spread up the walls. Puffs of plaster rained down from the ceiling—but she didn’t stop playing, nobody stopped dancing, and the rest of the band was just as enthralled as the audience.
The house shuddered like it was caught in an earthquake. The stairway railing splintered and broke into pieces. Light fixtures and lamps blew out, and the ceiling fan swung wildly. The plaster ceiling cracked and fell in big chunks.
As Dred hit her crescendo, the entire house bucked and heaved, seeming to lift up from the ground—and then with a final crashing sound, the interior walls came tumbling down, exposing the wooden frame of the house and all the pipes and wiring.
Dred threw her sticks at her snare drum, where they bounced off and whirled away through the air.
There was a long beat of silence.
Then the entire crowd erupted, cheering and screaming their heads off, clapping and stomping and banging their fists on everything in sight. It was deafening.
It lasted several minutes. When the crowd finally died down, Erin said, “Thanks for coming everyone! We’re the Assorted Zebras. Good night!”
Mitch and Dred stood up and joined Jason and Erin in a bow, and the applause reignited.
“Did you get all that?” Mitch asked Tadd.
“Oh, yeah,” Tadd said quietly, shaking his head. “We got it all.”
“Come on, let’s mix the video on my desktop. I want this uploaded tonight!” Mitch led the way upstairs, past confused-looking kids who crowded the steps.
Dred sat down, leaned against the wall, and closed her eyes in exhaustion.
Jason and Erin looked at each while little bits of the house continued to drop around them.
“Uh…do you think Mitch noticed what happened to his house?” Erin asked.
“I’m pretty sure he’ll pick up on it eventually,” Ja
son said.
“That was completely wild!” Zach grabbed Erin and gave her a long kiss. “I didn’t know you could really sing.”
“I told you,” Erin said. “You don’t listen.”
“Let’s get out of this place before it falls on our heads,” Zach said. “We should all get going, for safety.”
Dred groaned.
“Do you need some water, Dred?” Jason asked.
Dred raised a finger without opening her eyes. Jason took it as a “yes.”
“It actually might be dangerous here,” Erin said, looking at the exposed ribs of the house, the deteriorating ceiling. “Maybe we should go.”
The crowd was dispersing. Clumps of quiet, exhausted, confused-looking kids wandered outside, not talking very much. The two cops were among them, their eyes drooping as if they would keel over asleep any second. Jason remembered the kids who’d been brought down to Faerie for the night so the fairies could drain their energy with music.
“Wait a second.” Jason hurried into the kitchen, which looked like it had been struck by a tornado. The cabinets sagged forward from the walls with their doors hanging open. The dishes inside had crashed all over the counter and floor. Two large cracks, each more than an inch wide, ran all the way across the floor, breaking it into three uneven levels.
Jason stepped carefully to the counter. He found a plastic cup, shook fragments of coffee mug out of it, and filled it with cool water.
By the time he returned to the living room and handed the water to Dred, Zach and Erin were stepping out the front door. The rest of the guests were leaving, too, with dazed, zombie-like looks on their faces.
“Hey, wait, Erin.” Jason ran after her. “Why don’t you stay? We can look at Tadd’s video.”
“I’m really just worried about this house collapsing,” Erin pointed to the sagging, broken ceiling overhead. “We should go
“We have to meet Gustav and Muppet Boy at the coffee shop, like, thirty minutes ago,” Zach said.
“Just stay here,” Jason said.
“Um…” Erin looked at the broken ceiling and walls again, then at her boyfriend.
