“Stop. Stop. STOP.”
Patrick raises his sticks. He grabs a shivering cymbal between two fingers. Their hiss dies away in the oily air of his parents’ garage. “What?”
“The beat there,” I say. “It changes time signature. It’s one six-eight measure and then a seven-eight one.”
“And then it switches back?”
“Yes. It’s one-two one-two-three one-two—”
“I know what seven-eight time is.”
“Then why aren’t you playing it?”
Patrick’s knuckles whiten. “Dude, if I hadn’t heard this song for the first time four minutes ago . . .”
“Whoa.” Jezz speaks up. “Anders, why don’t you just play it again?”
I let out a loud sigh.
“I don’t need to hear it again,” says Patrick before I can even start. “I need the chance to freaking think for a second before I can pull a perfect drum line out of my—”
“Okay, okay,” says Jezz loudly. “Someday we’ll be able to read each other’s minds, and then geniuses like Anders won’t have to feel so tortured and misunderstood. But until then, we’ll just have to deal. So let’s try it again.”
“All right.” I pry my fingers off the neck of the guitar.
I need to get this song out. It’s been pounding through my body since last night, tripping up my heartbeat with its rhythm. I need to hear it outside of my own head, ringing against the walls of Patrick’s garage. I need to be part of it. I need to bring it to life.
I also need not to be an ass.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
“Just play the chorus again.” Jezz positions his hands on the bass.
I move through it again, more slowly, speaking the words in rhythm.
Come out come out wherever you are
Come out and play
Crawl out crawl out whatever you are
You win you win
I give in
Jezz finds the bass line. He thrums softly along. “It’s creepy, dude.”
“Of course it’s creepy,” says Patrick from behind the drum set. “Everything we play is creepy.”
“Hey! You know what we should do?” Jezz gives a little hop, and his floppy blond hair slides down over one eye. “We should write one giant, sappy, totally cliché love ballad. Like, slow-dance-at-prom, end-of-the-movie ballad. We should wait until the crowd is going crazy, like, after ‘Superhero,’ and then we should just slide into this love song and watch their heads explode.”
Patrick’s hard face snaps apart with a grin. “No. We should write a polka. We can become the world’s only polka-metal band.” He starts tapping out a three-four beat on the snare. Oom-pa-pa. Oom-pa-pa.
“You mean the world’s first polka-metal band.” Jezz adds a bass line. “We’ll start a trend.”
Patrick laughs. “Dude. We’ll be huge in Germany.”
I start to smile, strumming a G chord. “Ach, Hedwig, I love ya. . . .”
Jezz hoots. “Dere’s no one above ya. . . .”
“You’re better than Blutwurst und Bier.”
Patrick cracks up.
The laugh warms the air. There’s more laughter from the backyard, where Mac and Lee and Ellie are sprawled on the lawn furniture. Some other kids, people I don’t even know, are lounging around on the lawn. We always leave the garage door shut during band practice, but we open the door to the Murrays’ backyard, so whoever’s out there can listen.
People started showing up to our practices about three years ago, when we went from mediocre to almost good. Now they come every day. At first having them there felt flattering. It made us show off, made us work a little harder. Now it also makes me tired. I have to keep on the face, keep up the act.
Someone is always watching.
And I sound paranoid.
“Perfect,” says Jezz. “We’ve got our polka-metal prom ballad. Now we sit back and watch the money roll in.”
I pull my phone out of my pocket and check the time. “We should get back on track.”
“What do you want to do?” asks Patrick. He plays a quick, tapping roll on the drum’s metal edge.
“We need to do ‘Come Out and Play’ again. I want to do it at the Crow’s Nest tomorrow.”
“What?” Patrick’s sticks stop. “We’ve got three new songs already.”
“Three out of fifteen isn’t that many.”
“We won’t be ready.”
“We will if we practice enough now.”
“Dude.” Patrick scrubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. “This is, like, sweatshop music. You keep cranking out the songs, and we keep assembling the pieces.”
“I have to,” I say. “Or they just pile up, and it’s—” I flick at the strings with my fingernails. “Okay. Fine. Whatever. We’ll just play old stuff.”
“I’m not saying I want to just play old stuff.”
Jezz flops down on an overturned crate, settling in for the long haul.
“I’d rather play stuff we’ve actually polished. Stuff that’s decent,” Patrick finishes.
“Play ‘Blood Money’!” shouts Ellie’s voice from the backyard.
“We haven’t done that one in forever,” Jezz points out.
“Do we really want to play stuff we’ve already done a thousand times?” I ask the guys. “That’s like watching the same TV show over and over and over.”
Jezz shrugs. “People do that.”
“Stoners do that.”
“Dude, stoners are people, too.”
“Let’s just play a decent mix of old and new stuff then,” Patrick says, twirling a stick through three fingers. “Four new songs. Max.”
“Or you could do some of the new songs on your own, Anders,” says Jezz. His tone is light, but I feel the air turn cold again. “Much simpler.”
I look down at the greasy cement floor. Seeds from the backyard’s drooping birch tree are scattered everywhere, like tiny bread crumbs. “No,” I say. “One solo song is enough. More than enough.”
Jezz slides off the crate. “Is the writer from the Tribune going to be there?”
I keep looking at the floor. There’s a grease stain the shape of a huge hoofprint just to the left of my foot. “I think so.”
“All the more reason for us to keep the new stuff pared down,” says Jezz.
“All the more reason for Anders to do more solos,” says Patrick. “That’s why they’re coming anyway. Right?”
“That’s not why,” I say. But I’m not sure he even hears me.
“Come on,” Jezz tells Patrick. “Anders might be an obsessive-compulsive weirdo, but he’s not an asshole.”
“I didn’t say he was,” says Patrick. He taps both feet impatiently on the pedals. The big drum pounds like a racer’s heart. “I just think he likes being in the spotlight.”
Now I look straight into Patrick’s eyes. “I don’t care about the spotlight.”
Patrick’s mouth curls.
“I don’t.” A lie. He knows it. “I just wanted to be good at this.” I shake the guitar on its strap. “I don’t care about the rest.”
“Sure,” says Patrick.
“I don’t.” I’m lying to both of us now. Without recognition, what proof do you have that you’re any good? And I need that. I need to know it. “I’m not in this for some kind of fifteen-minute, freak-show fame,” I say loudly. “It’s not about me. It’s about us. It’s about our music.” Then, because Patrick is still glaring at me, I go on. “Look. I just got a call from S&A Management. They were practically begging me to meet with them. And I turned them down.”
Shit.
I hadn’t meant to tell them this. I’d planned to keep it secret. I hadn’t meant to throw it out like this, in the middle of an argument, like gas on a bonfire. And I know, by the way both the guys are turning toward me, that I’ve made a huge mistake.
“What?” Jezz is saying. “S&A Artist Management? Like, that agency in the Cities? You turned them down?”
“They wanted to meet with you?” Patrick says softly.
“They wanted us.” I meet Jezz’s eyes. I can’t even look at Patrick now. “They’ve heard us play. I guess they sent a scout once, and we didn’t even know. They wanted to get to us before anybody else could.”
“And you turned them down?” Jezz says again.
Ellie and Lee and Mac have gotten up and gathered at the open back door. Their faces peer in at us, watching. Christ. Even this has to be a performance.
“You guys.” I rake my sweaty hands through my hair. “S&A is small stuff. Little, local stuff. We are going to be big. There is big stuff on its way. I promise you.”
Because I am going to get everything I want. Everything. Just like someone else promised me, months and months ago, that night behind the Crow’s Nest.
“You didn’t even ask us,” Patrick speaks up. His voice is dangerously low. “You just made the call. On your own.”
“We all said we’d wait until we were done with school. Right?” I’m getting louder now. “That’s what we said.”
“Well . . . yeah,” says Jezz. “But there’s only, like, a month and a half left. And it’s S&A.”
“Right. It’s S&A. We can do better.”
“Who cares what we can do?” Patrick’s voice cuts in.
I look back at him.
Patrick’s forearms are like bridge cables. Years of high-speed metal drumming will do that to a guy. The cables twist as he turns the drumsticks slowly around in his hands. “This isn’t about us. You didn’t even ask us. This is all about you.”
I can’t answer. He’s right. And I’m caught.
“But we’re here, too,” says Patrick. He’s still speaking in that strange, low, calm voice I’ve only heard him use once or twice before—and once was right before he turned around and punched a redneck jackass named Kev Burr in the face. “We were going to do this together. Take a year. See what happens. But if you make all the calls, and you mess up, you pull us down with you.”
“It’s true, Anders,” says Jezz. His voice is lighter than Patrick’s, but there’s a seriousness in it I don’t even recognize. “Maybe that was our chance. We shouldn’t just throw it away. I mean, this is Greenwood. You work at the plastics factory, you work for the mill, or you get the hell out.” He shrugs, giving a lopsided smile. “I thought we were getting the hell out.”
“We are.” My hands are starting to shake. “I swear. We are.”
Patrick sets his sticks on the head of a drum. They make a papery thud. “Why are we doing this, Thorson?” he asks. “Why are we practicing every single day? Why are you staying up all night writing songs and losing your mind when we can’t instantly learn them? Why are we doing two goddamn shows a week for free?” His voice is getting stronger. “Why are we even a band? If you’re not all in, why don’t we just shut the garage doors and play some Mastodon songs? Hell, why don’t we just play some Halo? Why are we doing any of this?”
I stare back at Patrick. I’m breathing hard. Words boil inside me.
If I’m all in? He has no idea.
He has no idea how much I want this. The music. The shows. The fans. I want the people in the blur beyond the edge of the stage screaming the words along with me. I want the weight of this guitar in my hands, the strap on my shoulder, Jezz to my left, Patrick behind me, both of them building the layers of sound that I can stand on and sing. I want bigger things than S&A. Bigger things than Minnesota. I want the world to know who we are. I want to be the best. I want to know I’m the best. I want it so much that it scares me.
So much that it’s dangerous.
“I am all in,” I say, in a voice that barely sounds like mine. “I’m . . .”
And then, instead of even trying to finish the sentence, I’m storming out of the Murrays’ garage. I’m stuffing Yvonne into the passenger seat of the battered white car. I’m gunning the motor, and I’m screaming off down the street, toward the only place I can think of to go.