34
Lillian
I hope no one knows why I’m so distracted tonight. Cyprus might, but if she does, she’s kind enough not to mention it. I’d die of embarrassment even more than I did when the emcee read our bio or when I made the mistake that messed up our first song.
I avoid eye contact with Sasha. At least they don’t have a clue. Of all the ways I want them to feel toward me, pitying is not one of them. Which they would, if they knew about yesterday.
35
Sasha
For Cyprus, she’s doing too many things at once. The keyboard and bass and samples and occasional backup vocals. She’s the one who screws up initially.
Before the showcase, she was noting who the people in the room were. Such and such knows so and so, they produced this person, this person manages this band. All that must be in the success-driven parts of her mind too. She’s got two phones set up taking A- and B-roll. I’m taking video for her too, though eventually I stop. We both know she’s not going to be using any of it.
For Quinn, it probably started at school today. He gets a lot of shit from a few people at school. Not most, but a few. I can’t imagine my presence helps, since I’m visually a bit less low-key. This afternoon, some guy I won’t honor with a name was harassing him.
Quinn takes the clown approach to shrugging things off, while I take the time-honored tuning-out strategy. I’ve got practice ignoring what people are yelling at me. I pretend I’m onstage and I’m focused on hitting the high notes, or I’m being moved through a crowd and I’m about to enter the insulated silence of a limo.
I pretend I’m wearing my helmet.
This guy used a slur for Quinn that I won’t repeat. Quinn made a quip, but my ability to tune it out broke. I stood up so fast I knocked a chair over. People were calling for a scene, and for that second, I forgot that I needed to stay out of trouble. I was scared to be who I am in the world.
I grew up with Augustus — someone whose fear blended angry and could leap straight to eruption. Responsible for dents in walls and wrecked gear. I looked up to him for a long time and learned to see the ways he acted as toughness. Like the rest of it, I’m trying to shed that.
I unclenched my fists. I’m not that kind of fighter. Augustus was enough fighter for two people. My plan didn’t go past getting between this guy and my friend. Then a teacher was there. Things defused. She told me and Quinn to settle down, not the person who started it.
Quinn prefers to sit behind a drum kit. He’s most comfortable with people only noticing him when he’s making them laugh and then letting the attention slide away. He didn’t need me to leap to his defense. With all eyes on us, I could see his claustrophobia.
We went for a walk. The air was crisp in a way it never is where I’m from.
Quinn kept checking if I was okay rather than letting me check on him, and I didn’t press him for his feelings. He says he’s dealt with this for his whole life, starting long before he came out. I know it’s true.
Lillian uses the term intersectionality. For example, being trans and gay and having brown skin. Quinn experiences triggers and dangers that never reach Lillian or me.
Quinn didn’t use that word. He said sometimes people hate you from four different angles. Terminology is more Lillian’s domain.
In the end, one result is that Quinn’s head isn’t in the game at the showcase. He’s a little shaky and has no panache this evening. It’ll be back, just not right now.
For Lillian, she hates losing at anything, even pool and racing games, but I don’t think that’s all of it. I heard the band talk about the showcase, and she insisted on doing the hardest song first. At the end of the set, I see Cyprus and Quinn trying to apologize to her. Lillian gestures that the blame is on her. I’m sure the others are quick to say she didn’t let the band down. I imagine, like Cyprus, the lost opportunity will hurt Lillian, but not as much as the fact that Wavelength didn’t make good music. And not as much as believing she didn’t take care of her friends.
Lillian missed the incident at school, which is probably for the best, because when she heard about it, she made a big pitch for firebombing the guy’s car. At least slashing his tires. Every now and again she’d mention another idea without context.
“Sugar in his gas tank?”
“No, Lillian.”
“What happens if we plug the exhaust?”
None of us knew anything about cars, even Cyprus and I, who own them (though mine is still at the beach house, so I don’t mention it). We agreed that retaliation would probably make him lash out at someone else. Which is to say Quinn, Cyprus and I agreed, and Lillian begrudgingly promised not to crawl under his car and start drilling holes in things.
Lillian’s brother, Jasper, who’s on the basketball team with the asshole, has vowed to never play a good pass to him again. Lillian mimed strangling me when I suggested that her and her brother sounded kind of similar. But she looked pleased to have rubbed off on him.
I think there are other things too, lurking outside the periphery of what Lillian likes to bring up. Sometimes she’s panicked, though from what I know of her, she seemed more preoccupied than anything else during the set.
Emelia’s absence would be enough to account for the whole state of the performance. It’s a huge hole musically — the drive of an actual bass player and a layer of vocal sound that I can imagine filling out their sound, lifting all the emotions of their songs. But there’s also a gap whenever someone mentions her name. Nobody seems to quite know what to say.
And this place has a growing fatigue about it. From the third act on, you can see musicians realize they’re not good enough or right enough or being listened to carefully enough. And the industry people know, once again, they’re not discovering anyone. They know the business doesn’t have the same potential it once did, and nobody’s getting a big record deal.
No one’s in the mood to stick around for the other performers, so I meet Wavelength out back to help load the gear. It’s that awkward time of day where evening and energy are too spent to do anything else, but it’s not late. Like stepping out of a movie theater too early.
We haven’t even finished loading up the station wagon when Lillian announces that there’s no practice tomorrow.
Quinn leans against Cyprus’s car wearily.
“Yeah, I was going to suggest that.”
“Did your band ever play like that?”
Cyprus asks me.
Yes, we did. I wish I could tell her, because it’d make her feel better. She’s a fan, so she probably already knows about it.
Admirer, in Madrid, in front of sixty thousand people. Normally, if Augustus or I messed up (and it was very rare), the other one could smooth things over.
Our adoring audience would laugh away a lot, let us restart a song, sing part of a song if one of us forgot a line. Even if we were playing passionlessly, we put on a good show. Fans deserve that regardless of how you feel any given night, and if you stop believing that, you should quit the business.
That night, no one was picking up the pieces.
There were mistakes and technical glitches and a weather delay. We couldn’t get in sync, culminating in Augustus transitioning to the wrong song at a crucial moment. I decided to follow along instead of catching it, but Augustus realized this was a bad moment to be winging it and stopped. He tried to make it a joke, something for the audience to feel close to us about, while I was still going for the song.
Then all the pyrotechnics went off at entirely the wrong time, no big musical moment. Every time we set those off, it cost an obscene, disgusting amount of money, and that night the sequence started as the song fizzled out.
I turned to watch the display with the audience, hoping to make a moment out of it. Augustus left the stage.
Later, he claimed there’d been a missed cue and he only left the stage because he thought we were right before an encore. LucSee, who opened for us on that tour, told me he flipped a table, put his foot through an amp, and asked her if she wanted to get out of there. Then he said what was the point of her being such a slut and stormed off when she said she didn’t want to go anywhere with him. She said he apologized later, as if that fixed it.
“We had some pretty rough shows,”
I say to my friends.
“Like how it was tonight, just nothing settling right and nobody in the right space to fix it. Also, I once fell into the drum kit and got all tangled up.”
“Please say there’s video,”
says Cyprus.
“Like Alexander Ash that one time on the All My Love tour. Have you seen that?”
That was the exact time.
I say.
“Everyone compared it to Admirer when I did it.”
The strongest lies are the ones you play closest to your chest.
“I should hope it’s been censored,”
says Quinn.
“Potential damage to drums isn’t something to laugh about.”
Lillian slides her guitar case into the trunk and slams it shut.
“What about potential damage to Sasha?”
“They’re still standing here,”
says Quinn.
“The drums, though, who knows?”
“The drums survived,”
I say.
“The video, scrubbed from all platforms. All our recordings too. My guitarist wanted to become an actor, so she had anything potentially embarrassing about her taken down.”
“But you kept a secret backup of everything and we can watch it?”
asks Cyprus hopefully.
“I did not.”
This pattern of digging a hole for myself and clawing my way back out is unsustainable.
Cyprus sighs.
“That was the last hope of rescuing tonight. I’ve got a family thing, and I think I’ve stalled as long as I reasonably can.”
Another band leaves early, looking defeated. By the time it’s done, there will hardly be anybody left. At least Wavelength played close to the start.
In the car, I check if Quinn wants to do anything tonight. He says a bit of space would be good. That he might watch a movie with his dad, which seems like a safe space for him to recharge for tomorrow.
“I’d watch a movie too if you want to come over, Sasha,”
says Lillian from the front seat. She’d claimed shotgun with conviction. Even in a low moment, she takes control of the music, rewinding the cassette so we start from the beginning of the B-side.
When we drop Quinn off, he leans back through the window and says to me.
“You should play us some of your songs sometime. I’d say we aren’t judgmental, but Lillian …”
Lillian twists in the front seat.
“Okay, have you heard yourself complain about drummers in music videos?”
Quinn’s already halfway up the front walk, mouthin.
“I can’t hear what you’re saying”
at Lillian.