One afternoon at rehearsal, we were sitting on the couches in the rec room. We’d been working on a few new songs and now had four to run through. Socks put on a CD by some band none of us had heard of: there was a guest vocalist on one of the tracks that he wanted me to hear. Her name was Annika. Apparently she was from Norway and did guest gigs on a bunch of different metal albums. I was curious to hear another female metal singer.
The music was mediocre, but I straightened my back and smiled to myself as I listened to the song. She wasn’t any good, allowing her voice to get carried away and dominate the song. It was almost as though she was trying to exploit her voice, to emphasize the novelty of having a female vocal in a heavy metal song, and it was annoying. I congratulated myself for not making the same mistake. Yes, it was going to be unusual for a metal band to have a female singer. But I wasn’t going to attempt to draw attention to it in the way that this Annika did. Colostomy Hag was going to succeed, or fail, on its true musical and lyrical merits, not because of the presence of females in the group.
We finished listening to the song and were still relaxing on the couches when Socks commented, “We got a pretty unusual band here, don’t you think?”
Edgar laughed. “Two girls, a black guy, and you. Yeah, I’d say it’s pretty unusual.”
“And not just that.” Socks nodded. “I mean, Rachel, you’re so much better than Annika, and she’s the most prominent girl singer in metal. You kick her ass. And Fern, you are amazing on guitar. Like, really good. And you’re going to get better and better.”
“That’s surprising?”
“Well, yeah,” Socks said. “I haven’t seen a girl play guitar as good as you, like, ever.”
One night when I was on the phone with Fern, I brought up what Socks had said. “Why do you think there aren’t more girls in metal? I mean, I can think of Marie-Lise and that Annika, but that’s it. It’s all guys.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s because guys don’t want to give girls a chance or something. Maybe they think girls don’t have the aggression to play metal. You see how surprised Socks is by the fact that I can play. Maybe guys just dismiss us, because they think we can’t fit the image or something. Or think that we can’t play. Or they hear that awful Annika and just assume that girls can’t sing metal either.”
“I think we have a really good chance to prove them all wrong,” I said. “Imagine if we play shows? Get famous? We’ll be the only band with girls in it that’s done that.”
“Except for Marie-Lise and Gurgol,” Fern agreed. “Wouldn’t it be cool to meet Marie-Lise? Talk to her and ask her what it’s been like for her in the band?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I think it’d be pretty cool to meet Balthazar Seizure. He’s such a damn amazing singer. I’d totally like to ask him a couple of things.”
She laughed. “You like him,” she teased. “You totally crush on him. You do realize you’re always talking about him, right?”
“It’s because I find him inspiring,” I said. How silly, to have a crush on a musician. So what if he was really talented and also had all that long hair and those gorgeous eyes and was so tall and handsome and . . . it was foolish to have band crushes. I giggled then, even though I knew it was ridiculous, and looked up at my poster of him. He looked back down at me, and I wondered if one day, if our band ever did anything important and got anywhere, whether or not he would be impressed by me. The whole thing was so ridiculous, but I couldn’t help it.
As summer waned I made some changes to my room, as promised by my parents and as earned by me by doing extra stupid chores around the house. It wasn’t so bad, weeding the backyard or sorting through the basement storage or whatever other pointless idea my parents dreamed up to justify giving me the money to buy black bedding and paint for my furniture. I’d just put on my headphones and focus on Balthazar’s voice while I mindlessly worked.
The duck lamp ended up in Melissa’s room.
EIGHTEEN