Beige (22 page)

“Let’s go!” she yells.

I’m confused. I can’t move.

“Katy. Now. Come.”

I don’t know why I should come with her. I don’t know what’s happened. I do know that she’s called me
Katy.
Not Beige.

“Garth, stay here for me, OK?” I say.

“Anything for you, Beige.”

I grab my stuff and I follow her out into the crowd before she can disappear from view.

We walk three blocks through the thickening crowd and I’m practically running behind her. I want to stop for kettle corn or sausage or a
papusa
or an iced tea. But I can’t. I want to know what’s happened.

“What’s going on?” I say, out of breath, finally catching up to her stride. “Aren’t you on in like fifteen minutes?”

“I kicked those bitches out.”

“What?”

“They called me a friggin’ band Nazi,” Lake says. She stops walking. She looks right at me. “I just want to be good. I don’t need them. I told them they could find a new band after the show, but they bailed.”

She sounds like a cartoon. A mad, angry cartoon. I don’t know where we are going. She sits down on the curb. She puts her head in her hands. She starts to cry. Blubbery. Sobbing. Heartbroken.

“This was my big chance,” Lake says. “This is where it was all going to start for me.”

If she were my friend, I might know what to say.

Wait a minute. Lake
is
my friend. I
do
know what to say.

I stand up.

Who am I kidding? What I have to say is crazy.

I sit back down. I look at Lake. Her shoulders are slumped. She looks defeated. She looks nothing like the Lake I know. Running away. Not singing. It’s so very . . . beige.

There can’t be two of us. I take her hand in mine.

“Come on,” I say. “You have a show to play.”

“What? Didn’t you hear me? I have no band.”

She just needs to know she can do it. I’m the only one who knows she can.

“You have your guitar,” I say.

“Play by myself?
No way.
”

“Sing all your songs stripped down, like ‘Tiny Heart.’ Like you did at Skooby’s. It sounded really good,” I say.

She shakes her head no.

“I can’t.”

“Are you scared?” I ask.

Lake looks at me.

That’s it. Lake-the-Fearless is scared. She’s not so different from me. I know all about being scared. But I also know that Lake is supposed to rock today. There’s only one thing to do. Leap to her rescue.

“I’ll sing backup.”

“Can you sing?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Probably not.”

Lake’s sobbing changes to laughter. “That’s the stupidest idea
ever,
” she says.

Then that little feeling I had of being sure just kind of pops, like a soap bubble. “Yeah, I know,” I say.

“But Beige, you’re a genius!” She jumps up and grabs me.

We run back through the street fair to the stage.

“What’s going on?” Garth asks as we whiz by.

“Keep minding the store,” I say. He salutes me.

And then Lake and I climb up on the stage.

There are a lot more people in front of us than I thought. People of all sorts. Young, old, regular, normal, punks. It’s a lot of people. I’ve never really been on stage before. I’ll be useless up here. I lied to Lake. I mean, really, who am I kidding? I can’t do this. I catch her eye. I see that she’s still scared. It’s too late to back out now. So I just nod encouragingly.

She nods back. Looking determined. She straps her guitar on and flips a switch.

“Hi, I’m Lake Suck, and this is my girl, Beige. And we’re here to rock.”

People are just kind of standing around looking at us quizzically, except Garth. Garth is standing on top of the merch table, whistling and clapping.

Oh, God. I’m going to throw up.

I look down at the set list. The first song is “Charmer Alarm.”

OK. I know it. I totally know it. I open my mouth at the right spots. It is weird, hearing my voice amplified by the microphone. Actually it confuses me, so I try to forget about the voice that is out there being amplified and concentrate on the one inside my head. Lake keeps singing but looks back over at me and flashes me a smile and waves for me to sing louder.

I’m glad she doesn’t seem nervous anymore. But I am. I’m sweating bullets.

I close my eyes for a second to situate myself. I try to listen for her guitar. It sounds almost different up on the stage. But it’s loud. OK. That’s coming from the monitor. I hear the melody. The melody that makes sense to me. I just try to remember what the other girls sang in the song. I know this. I can do this. I open my eyes and I listen for the spots that need some support. I make my voice do something just a teensy bit different at the chorus. It might not sound as good, but Lake is still singing. I hear myself in the monitor. Just breathe. Just wait. Just go. Just sing.

When I sing the words, Lake’s words, it’s like I know her a little bit better. It makes me proud of her, that she can express herself this way. It’s like everything she can’t say like a normal person she can say in a song. And we’re singing it together.

Then the song is done. Lake hits the chords to the next one.

I look down at the set list. “One, Two, Three, Whore!”

Oh, yeah. I know a good part that I can do. I can double her scream. Yeah. That’ll sound good. It’ll feel good, too.

I just keep listening for the music to tell me where to open my mouth.

Halfway through the set, I look up. I’m surprised to see the crowd sticking around. They are enjoying the show. They are clapping.

There’s this kind of energy that moves between me on the stage and the people out in the crowd. It’s a flow. I feel buzzy inside. And proud, like I’m doing something right.

I see Garth whistling from the merch booth. I see Sam Suck hooting and hollering. Trixie is in the back, smiling, kind of moving her body in time to the music with Auggie in her arms. I see The Rat standing next to her with an astonished look on his face.

We don’t sound half bad.

For the next song, I sing a little bit louder.

“Wow! Just WOW!” Garth says. “That was the baddest-ass show ever!”

“Did we sell stuff?” Lake asks.

“Yeah,” Garth says. “People just swarmed me.”

Sam Suck comes up to us to offer his congratulations.

“That has a lot of potential, I think,” he says. “Lake, I think you can go a little sparser with the guitar if you don’t have the backup band.”

“OK. OK, Dad, give me a break. I haven’t figured it out yet,” Lake says. She sounds like she’s bugged, but I know she’s not. I can tell that she’s excited. She’s thinking. She’s working it out for herself. She’s itching to keep going in this new direction. I don’t know how I can tell, except that I do.

Maybe because I feel so good.

The Rat grabs me from behind in a bear hug and swings me around.

“My, my, my, my, my!” The Rat says. “My, oh, my!”

“That was something else, Katy,” Trixie says. “I think your dad is trying to tell you that he liked it.”

The Rat just looks at me, all beaming. All smiling. All excited. I don’t want him to make a big deal out of it. He’s making me blush.

“How do you feel, kiddo?” he says.

“All right,” I say. I shrug. I withhold. I’m not ready to share just yet. I need to think for a minute. Sort out my feelings.

I still need to digest it all. I need to keep the buzz going on for a minute so I can sort it out. But I want to say,
I FELT TERRIFIC! HOLY, HOLY! WHEN I WAS ON STAGE, I FELT COMPLETELY ALIVE! DO YOU FEEL THAT?

“Cool, yeah. I could picture like a real minimal beat behind it, but you know it doesn’t need it,” The Rat says, kind of toning down his enthusiasm a bit, kind of getting that I need to reflect on what I just did up there.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything,” I say. “I was just helping Lake.”

“Right, right,” The Rat says. But he’s still beaming. “Yeah, of course, you were helping out a friend.”

A friend. Yes. Lake is my friend.

The Rat doesn’t say too much more, and I’m happy about that. I just want to feel it. I’m kind of floating around while Lake is jumping up and down with happiness.

“I wish you’d told me what you girls were up to,” Sam says. “Next time, I’ll record you off the soundboard so you can hear it.”

Next time?

Lake and I wander the booths and ride the rides and check out the crowds. There are all sorts here.
All
sorts. Dressed up in wigs. In leather. In rainbows. With colored eyebrows and shaved heads. I eat one of everything. I ride every ride. I sit on the curb.

All day I bask in the glow of the after-show. It feels so good. I didn’t know it felt this good to perform. I feel ten feet tall. I feel terrific. I feel like I can conquer the world. I buy a funky orange skirt, a skirt for the new me. Lake helps me pick it out. I feel strong and a bit cocky in an
I-am-Lake
way.

No. In an
I-am-Beige
way.

Last on the bill is Suck. I thought it was crowded earlier, but when Suck takes the stage, it is crazy.

Lake grabs my hand and pulls me all the way to the front so we lean forward on the stage. When Suck comes on, everyone starts screaming.

I watch Sam as he jumps around and pushes himself off of the monitors. I watch the bass player and The Rat on the drum riser. He’s like an animal, even more explosive than at the Fourth of July party. People are screaming the lyrics. Screaming them.

I kind of get it. I get the way they move; they are forced that way by the way the guitars chug and by the attack of the drums. You’d have to ride on the notes that way. You’d have to. I watch The Rat as he bangs away. He’s just grabbing what’s given and throwing it back out.

I close my eyes. I’m still riding the buzz from my own show. Even though the music and words sound dangerous, I know they’re not. I wouldn’t go there. I am more interested in my heart. But I am starting to understand why
they
do.

I open my eyes and see The Rat.

There’s that connection again, a string that moves from me, to him, to his drums. I relax. I let the rhythm enter me. My body starts to sway. I bob my head in time to The Rat’s drumming.

The Rat sees me in the crowd. He’s looking at me. He’s smiling at me. The crowd behind me, the kids, the middle-aged, the old around me, sing along. They jump and move around. They are moved by the music.

And, in my own way, so am I.

After returning all my books to the Los Feliz Library, I meet Garth at the Casbah. We don’t say much. We just kind of drink our coffee and stare out the window. It’s kind of hard to say anything.

“Well,” I say finally. “I should go. The Rat said we’re having a
bon voyage
dinner.”

“Cool,” he says. “I’ll walk you home.”

We walk slowly and I take in all the now-familiar sights on Sunset. I even say good-bye to that Walking Man, although he just walks right by me, too busy talking on his cell phone.

When we get to my door, Garth starts blinking like crazy.

“Are you OK?” I ask.

“I got some dust in my eye,” he says. “Stupid wind.”

But I know there’s no dust and that he’s really crying because he’s sensitive, and I like that about him. Thinking about not hanging out with Garth every day makes me get a little choked up, so I put on the vintage cat-eye sunglasses that Lake gave me as a going-away present so that anything that might come leaking out of my eyes won’t be seen.

“OK, bye, then,” I say.

“Bye, Beige.”

And then we kind of stand there. I look at the ground. Then I look at a palm tree. And then Garth pulls me in roughly for a hug. And we hug for a minute and his skateboard is kind of digging into my back and his helmet is pressing too hard against my cheek, but I don’t care. When we break apart, Garth puts his board on the ground and just skates away.

When I get up to the apartment, The Rat is MIA. I find a note on my bed that says,
Dinner, Trixie’s, 6 p.m. — Formal Wear.

One thing I know for sure: if Trixie says dress for dinner, she means really dress for dinner.

I put my new skirt on, and at first I’m not sure it’s right for me. Maybe it’s too wild. But as I check myself out in the mirror, I think I look kind of good.