From the other side of the bedroom wall, Tegan’s voice climbed notes of a melody, her guitar cutting strokes through each word. I resurfaced from a dream. I could see the song forming behind my eyes—black lines of music as unique as fingerprints. When she returned to the chorus, there was a rush of the familiar and the pleasure of hearing her repeat a hook I had memorized after listening to it only once.
My eyes fluttered open. I stared at the Smashing Pumpkins poster on my ceiling. It wasn’t quite life-size, but big enough that I could look straight into each band member’s eyes. I leaned off the mattress and grabbed my electric guitar. I bent my fingers back toward my wrist, recirculating blood into the joints before I twisted the volume knob on the guitar halfway. There was a steady hiss of static from the amp. I took my first big gulps of breath and let out a cry between the changing chords. When I finished, my body tingled like it did in the first seconds after a drag of a cigarette.
I heard Tegan outside my door. “Wanna play something?”
“Sure.”
She sat down on the couch with the acoustic guitar and said, “I’ve been thinking. What about calling our band Plunk?” Immediately, I knew it was right.
“Yes,” I said. “But what is it?”
We laughed.
“Well, we’re punk, but we don’t have a drummer, so we’re kind of—light punk.”
“Plunk.”
“It’s cool, right?” She smiled.
“Yeah, I like it.”
We plucked the fattest string on our guitars slowly, twisting the pegs to tune. I bit down hard between turns, anticipating the snap of the oily bronze E string winding tighter.
“Don’t break it,” said Tegan. There was no way we could afford a new package of strings. If one snapped, we had to play with a gap tooth or replace it with a less important string, which worked but sounded weird. Tegan called out names of songs we both knew. I wanted to ask her about the new song that woke me from my dream, but she bent her fingers into the shape of a power chord and began to crash through the intro to “Smurf Revolution.” I slid my thumb along the back of the guitar neck and dug my ring finger into the skinny high E string. As I plucked out short notes with my pinky, my other fingers started to burn. I dropped out as Tegan started the first verse.
“I stand alone and she knows tomorrow I will go on without her. I know the world we created is fading . . .” She held a long, raspy “Ohhh” before I joined her in unison, shifting to the chorus.
“If I hold my breath until I die, I’ll be alright.” I kept my voice slightly quieter than hers because I sometimes lost track of which part came next.
Tegan shouted through the outro, and I tried filling her pauses with the last half of the chorus melody and lyric:
“She hurts my head!”
“I’ll be alright!”
“I’ll be alright!”
When the front door of the house slammed closed, we stopped singing.
“I can hear you two screaming all the way down the street!” Mom shouted up the stairs into the hallway.
“We’re practicing!” we yelled back.
We were preparing to record our first album.
The radio broadcasting classroom at school was cluttered with pieces of audio and video equipment; hulking VHS camcorders, drawers jammed with tangled cords and adapters, and shelves of dusty VCRs. It seemed our teacher, Mr. Kim, was uncomfortable letting us girls handle the machines unchaperoned; we weren’t afforded the same freedom for our projects as the boys. In the editing bay and at the sound console, he’d often push our hands off the controls and make the desired adjustments himself. If he was too busy to copilot, he’d assign a trusted male student to ensure we didn’t “fudge anything up.”
Before his class, it had never occurred to me to learn how to operate objects more than superficially. I was impatient with technology, anxious for the result and the pleasure of what they produced more than the accomplishment of understanding how they worked. He inspired me to prove him wrong.
“This isn’t just you goofing around, right?” he asked us when we pitched the idea to record our songs for our final project.
“It’s very legit, Mr. Kim,” Tegan said.
“We’re going to use all the skills and knowledge you’ve bestowed upon us this year,” I chimed in.
He squinted at us, tapping the ends of the pen laced between his knuckles on his desk.
“Mr. Kim, you could be the one responsible for helping us make a Grammy Award–winning album,” Tegan said.
Finally, his face broke into a smile. “I knew them when . . . ,” he said. “Alright, but you have to record after school. Last time you had your guitars in here, I got a noise complaint.”
On the day of the recording, Mr. Kim had Tegan and me run a dozen black cables from the back of the mixing console through the door of the sound booth and out to the main room. We pressed microphones that looked like miniature flashlights into clips and pointed them to the front of our guitar amp. Mr. Kim showed Spencer and Christina how to set the faders on the recording console so that the squares of digital color stayed green, and not orange or red.
“Maybe we should sit? Like we do at home?” I asked Tegan, who was pulling the couches and chairs littered around the room into a semicircle around our setup.
“Just do what feels comfortable. We can always move the mics around if you want to sit,” Tegan said.
Standing with my black electric guitar on my shoulder in front of our friends and Mr. Kim, I felt a spike of jitters. The sunlight from the large second-floor window was like a too bright spotlight, and every gesture felt magnified.
“Rolling!” Christina shouted.
“Okay, we’re starting!” Tegan said into the microphone, launching into the power chords of “Liar’s Club”: “I don’t know what I want anymore. I don’t know who I want anymore. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
When she hit the chorus, I watched Mr. Kim’s face sink.
“Fuck you, fuck me / it’ll never be! FUCK YOU!” Her voice cracked into distortion and Mr. Kim walked quickly into his office and closed the door.
I saw a flurry of activity behind the glass and Christina stuck her head through the door, waving her hand at us. Spencer stepped across the room and whispered, “It’s way into the red! You’re blowing it up!” His eyes darted to the corner where Mr. Kim was hunched over his desk.
“Pull the faders down, it’s fine,” Tegan said off microphone. Spencer and Christina returned to the booth and we started the recording again.
“Instamatic” was a new song of mine, so Tegan put her guitar down and sat on the couch between our friends while I played. As soon as I began, my hand started sliding around on the frets. Hesitating about where the next chord should go, I kept glancing down, and then forgetting the lyrics. I dug my fingers into the strings during the chorus, pushing harder than I usually did at home. Leaning into the microphone, the weight of the guitar shifted from my shoulder to my left hand and I closed my eyes. “You go away, go away! And I don’t mind. You go away, go away! But I’m still fine. You lie, lie, lie, but I still miss you! You, lie, lie, lie but I still need you! It’s your mind that matters most. It’s your mind that makes you mine!”
“Woooo!” Tegan shouted at the end. “Rock star!”
“Rock star,” I said into the mic.
Afterward, we listened back to a few of the songs on the big speakers. It sounded so much better than the songs we’d recorded at home on our stereo. Mr. Kim even seemed excited that we’d pulled it off.
When we climbed into Mom’s Jeep later, Tegan and I talked over each other, recounting every minute of the recording.
“Can you take us to the mall?” Tegan asked. “We want to buy blank cassettes and make copies for everyone at school.”
“And we need a photocopier!” I said.
“For what?” Mom asked.
“For the album cover and track listing! It’ll make it more legit,” Tegan said, putting “legit” in air quotes. “We promised Mr. Kim we’d take this very seriously.”
“We’ll pay you back once we start selling them,” I added.
“Selling them to who?” Mom laughed, turning in the direction of the shopping mall.