Loud is How I Love You (7 page)

There’s no question the beat brothers will be spooked by the whole situation. They’ll stop seeing Soft as a whole unit and they’ll see Bean and I as some kind of power block, like they’re just our backup and we’re really not that kind of band. The thing about Stars on the Floor is that it’s not my band. It’s not anyone’s band. It belongs to all four of us. We all count the same in the cave, and nobody is replaceable. That’s what we always say, that’s what we’ve always said. What we have together, the give-and-take between the four of us when we’re writing, when we’re playing and planning, really works, and I don’t want to mess with that chemistry. It’s too good. It’s a rare thing among bands, worth protecting. Luckily, Bean agrees.

We’re lingering at my front door and Travis isn’t coming in, and he’s not going out with all of us tonight. He’s got to get this paper done because he has to work tomorrow and his mom comes Monday, and I’ve kept him from doing any work today. He’ll probably be up all night working on it now, and I actually do feel bad about that.

“I don’t,” he says. “I feel fucking fantastic about it.”

I look up expectantly and I realize I’m waiting for him to kiss me good-bye, like this is something we do now. He smiles down and puts his lips to mine and tells me to call him when I get home tonight so he knows I got home okay. I nod, and this is new, too, this calling him when I get in. And what strikes me is that it’s new but immediately feels normal.

“What
is
this thing we’re doing?” I whisper. I’m not sure I mean to say it out loud, because I am pretty nervous to put an actual label to it. “I don’t even know what to call it.”

He touches his lips to mine again, all soft and sweet.

“Just call it awesome,” he says. “We’ll figure the rest out as we go.”

“So, are you and Travis an official power couple now?” Jeff asks. “Are you pulling a Kim and Thurston here?”

I love Jeff. He’s never, ever one for subtlety. He has the downstairs back room and his boyfriend, Adam, practically lives with us, too. Sonia and I call them our two dads because they’re both three years older than we are and they cook all the time so there’s always brownies, leftover potpies, and stuff like that around. Last Christmas Eve when I came home from Mom’s, they’d gone out and bought a last-minute Christmas tree from the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and decorated it with strings of popcorn and construction paper and yarn ornaments they made on the spot. Anyway, Jeff and Adam have both been bugging me about Travis for at least a year, so when Jeff catches us kissing on the front stairs, he’s absolutely thrilled.

“We’re just exclusively doing it,” I say. I’m standing in front of my closet and Jeff and Sonia are sitting on my bed, helping me pick out an outfit for Rock and Roll Bowling tonight.

“What does that even mean?” Sonia asks.

“It means we’re only fucking each other, not anyone else.”

“Come on, Emmy. Do you think I’m stupid?” she says.

“No?” I’m not sure how much clearer I can be. “We’re bandmates, just as we’ve always been.”

“Are you in love?” Jeff asks. “Because you should be by now.”

My mouth sort of hangs open like I’m going to answer, but “no” doesn’t feel exactly true, and “yes” feels psychotic. I shrug like an idiot instead.

“Don’t you think he’s in love with you?” Sonia asks.

“Yes,” Jeff answers. “Obviously.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I say.

“Well, what did he say about it?” Sonia asks.

“He didn’t say ‘I love you,’” I say.

“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you,” Jeff says.

“Fine, if I have to define it, I guess right now it’s sort of like bandmates with benefits.”

“That sounds complicated,” Sonia says.

“No, no, it’s very simple,” I say. “Everything stays the same, but with sex.”

They stare at me, kindly. I can tell Jeff wants to pat me on the head and bring me a plate of cookies and some herbal tea. Instead he gets up, moves me out of the way, and pulls a top, a sweater, and a pair of jeans from the closet and lays them on the bed for me.

“Please don’t say anything to anyone,” I tell them both. “We’re not telling the beat brothers yet.”

“Why not?” Sonia asks.

“Because . . . it’s complicated.”

“Like I said?” she says.

“Fine, have it your way.”

They both go to get ready for tonight and I undress and I know this is weird, but I just stand there and stare in the mirror at my ass. Looking at Travis’s name scrawled in that thick, black Sharpie ink makes me want to crawl right back into his lap and stay there all night while he writes his paper. All week. All year. All . . . hmm.

I feel something snap awake inside of me. Something that feels like it’s about to threaten everything.

The beat brothers come over at eight. Jeff, Sonia, and I climb into the back of Cole’s old Crown Victoria, and I feel like a complete asshole keeping this secret from Joey and Cole now. I feel guilty, like I’ve done something wrong. But have I?

Now I’m back at war with myself, mad at myself for being impulsive and not thinking things through because my brain is far too clouded with all things Travis. If Travis was any other guy not in Soft, it wouldn’t matter. I could be obsessively crushing and having fun, but it’s him and I can’t, and I can’t sort it out. I am a healthy twenty-one-year-old female singer in a band, and I am not single because nobody wants to date me. Getting some isn’t my problem. Why can’t I just get some with somebody else who isn’t going to cause all this drama in my life?

“You’re quiet tonight, Emmy,” Cole says, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “Still hungover from pukefest?”

“Yep,” I say. “Totally.”

“Vodka seltzer and Advil,” Joey says. “Always does the trick.”

If drinking Joey’s dog-hair remedy would make me stop wanting Travis, with the way I’m freaking out right now, I
might just opt to stay drunk for a week. But I’m sure it would have the opposite effect.

The conversation switches quickly over to band business, which is inevitable when more than one member of Soft is present. Sonia is used to this, she’s practically our accountant. Cole got a call today from Rex, the bassist from the Corporate Secret down in Baltimore. They had a last-minute cancellation on a big show they’re doing for a Spring Fair after-party at Johns Hopkins with Vampires and Assassins with a guarantee of two hundred fifty dollars and a live broadcast over WJHU. The show is on Wednesday night. It’s late notice, but can we do it? Travis is already in. Cole called him before he came to pick us up. He’s working the morning shift at the Jiffy Lube on Wednesday and we don’t need to load in until seven thirty. His first class on Thursday isn’t until one in the afternoon.

Now, I have an exam in Modern Novel on Thursday at eight a.m. Joey and Cole say no big deal, we’ll leave right after the show. I can sleep in the van on the way home and go to my exam in the morning, no trouble. It’s Modern Novel, and you don’t study for Modern Novel. You read novels, and I’ve already read ahead by two books in that class, so I’m not worried about needing to hit the books. I am worried, however, about the fact that my professor is a cocksucker and he gave me an entire letter grade off my paper on Zora Neale Hurston because I turned it in an hour late. An hour! I get straight As in my English classes. I have to for my scholarship. On this paper he gave me a fucking B before he even read it.

That was last month when we were driving back from Boston after playing with Saltback and the Twin Sisters. We drove all fucking night in a blizzard so I could turn that damned paper in, but we got stuck in traffic at six thirty in the morning in New York on Interstate 95, of course, and I missed class. I ran to Professor Mortenson’s office with my paper as soon as I got back, and he didn’t give one shit about my ordeal.

“You should have turned it in early if you had plans to be out of town,” he said.

I would have, I explained. I did the paper before I left but I was planning to be in class so I didn’t think I needed to.

“You’ll think ahead next time,” he said. “I don’t ever accept late papers—I’m doing you a favor.”

A favor? There is no way he’s going to let me make up this exam if I miss it for a show. No way.

But I won’t miss it, Cole and Joey assure me. Baltimore is only two and a half hours from New Brunswick. It’s practically Philadelphia. And a chance to be broadcast live over WJHU?

Of fucking course we’ll do it.

***

Billy Broadband organizes Rock and Roll Bowling out at Carolier Lanes in North Brunswick, usually on a whim, whenever
he feels like we need a family get-together. He’s like the Cub Scout leader of the New Brunswick music scene and pulls together a lot of outings like these. Sometimes it’s bowling, sometimes it’s mini golf. Sometimes it’s a barbecue at someone’s house or a punk rock stampede on the boardwalk down at Seaside Heights. He’s also the one who urges us all to “support the scene outside the scene,” and you can just about guarantee if you’re playing Brownies or Arlene’s Grocery in New York, or the Khyber in Philadelphia, Billy Broadband will be there along with a decent handful of New Brunswick scenesters.

Billy is at the top of the phone chain, and he usually calls George or Dom or Millie and they set things in motion. Tonight there are about thirty of us who descend on the bowling alley. We all converge in the parking lot and what a sight we are, a mix of black-rimmed glasses and cardigans over hip, ironic T-shirts, tattoos of all different varieties (Sonia’s birdcage is my favorite), rockabilly hair and retro boots, punk rockers with eighty-five piercings, stoners in flannel shirts, leather jackets, mohawks, and goth rockers in all the eyeliner, being eyed by drunk guys in bona fide bowling shirts and families out for wholesome fun who look at us like we’re some kind of angry drug-addled, moralless mob of fuckers. We love that.

We all storm the counter and line up the assorted combat boots and Converse high-tops and exchange them for clown shoes and then follow Billy like a long row of baby ducks to six lanes we command at the front of the bowling alley, near the entrance. I don’t know what the staff were thinking putting us here, must not be worried about first impressions I guess.

The beat brothers and Jeff, Sonia, and I are a team against Vagaboss and Hanna Octane. Hanna is a single-woman folk-punk act, just her and her pink Mexican Stratocaster and seventeen different effects pedals which she’s willing to run straight to the fucking board! (Don’t mind me, I’m a gear snob and a guitar without an amp is like a mouth without a tongue to me.) Her guitar tone makes me want to drown myself in a bathtub, but she’s got an amazing voice, and even if every song she writes is about being dumped, she’s otherwise a very sweet person. She’s a bleached-white-blonde Courtney Love clone in terms of her style, though less fucked up than that and much nicer. But she is a little weird. When she talks, she uses this sort of haughty, affected, superior tone of voice, but she’ll be talking about things like her favorite color marshmallow peeps. I don’t know how old she is. Sometimes, I know it’s mean, but we all try to guess. She could literally be anywhere from fifteen to thirty-five years old for all we know in terms of how she looks. But she doesn’t go to school, she has no job. Nobody seems to have any idea what she does for money. There’s no way she makes a living on music, she doesn’t play enough and she doesn’t even have a single out. She lives over in Somerset with some people nobody seems to know. But like a lot of us strays, she’s part of this scene because when Billy calls, she shows up. To be in this club, the bar is really pretty low. You don’t have to be a musician. All you have to do is show up, wherever we all are, whether it’s Carolier or the Melody or the Dead End. Just show up and don’t be a dick. But you can even be a dick as long as you have an excuse.

Tonight, our motley crew is also joined by Scoob, the doorman at the Court Tavern. Scoob and Billy are a team with Matt and Julia from Circle Time in the lane next to us. They’re playing against Fester, who is joined by Molly, and I’m fairly sure now that Molly and George are banging, and if they’re not, they will be soon. There’s something in the way George’s
mohawk perks up when Molly enters the room. When they see me, they give me a knowing smile and I give them wide, worried eyes. I worry all night George is going to say something about Travis to take the piss out of me. George embodies all that is terrible and wonderful about older brothers, so I have a reason to be worried here.

The great thing about Rock and Roll Bowling is that we’re all here doing something most of us really suck at, instead of in the clubs doing what most of us are pretty good at. It’s like this level-playing-field jackassery. Once you add a few pitchers of beer and the concerned parents rushing their innocent children past us before our rowdy, heathen presence can make too indelible an impression, you have entertainment for all, especially when George leads the entire group in an a cappella rendition of “The Soul Slayer” by Slow Life, which is really the rally cry of the New Brunswick music scene. We all join in and sing it like it’s our anthem, like we’re the dwarves singing in Bilbo’s hobbit hole right before we go off after the dragon, and endure the angry stares of nearby bowlers who just have no idea what they’re in for tonight.

For the entire first hour we’re here throwing gutter balls and splits, I can’t even look Millie in the eye. I have no idea how I’m here bowling with her and keeping this all inside. I’m trying to act normal and it’s all good, and then I remember what I was doing a few hours ago, who with, and the irrefutable proof on my ass that something is definitely going on between me and Travis. Whenever I remember that I’ve got his name written across my ass, I break apart inside. I really do. I try to tamp down the anxious feeling of wanting to be with him right this very minute and the worse feeling of knowing I won’t see him later and that he’s working all day tomorrow, so at best I’ll see him around dinner tomorrow night, and then his mom comes, and oh shit. Oh shit. It’s the feeling of waiting for someone, anyone, to bring up his name so I have an excuse to talk about him, and worrying that someone will bring up his name and I’ll have to act like it’s all normal and I don’t know if I can. And then when Millie does bring him up, I still talk about him like he’s all mine.

“Bean is home working on a paper,” I say.

“I thought he was going to finish that up today so he could come out tonight.” She pouts adorably. “What a stinker.”

“Yeah,” I say, feeling the irritable bowel syndrome I don’t actually have beginning to flare.

“Let’s call him and give him hell,” she suggests, pointing over at the pay phone by the front door. “For going back on his word.”

“Um.”

“Emmy, come with me to the girls’ room.” Sonia tries to rescue me. “I need to doll up if I have any chance of making out with Cole tonight.”

“You’re trying to hook up with Cole?” I ask her, temporarily distracted, completely unsure if I even approve of this. Luckily, Cole is too busy bowling an actual decent game to pay any attention to us. Cole is like my brother and Sonia is my
best friend and housemate. If they hook up and it doesn’t pan out and it gets awkward, well? Then what? Just call me Love’s Executioner, I guess. Sonia tilts her head in the direction of the bathroom, smiles at my stupidity, and tugs me by the arm.

“I’ll come with,” Millie says. “I need to put on lip gloss before I call Travis. It makes me talk sexy.”

Oh, fuck.

When Millie goes with me and Sonia to the bathroom, she asks specifically if Travis said anything to me about her, and I lie and say no because I can’t exactly tell her the truth, can I? First of all, I’m an asshole but not that much of an asshole. I don’t want to hurt her feelings. Second of all, I have known that she’s been into Travis for a while, and then I jumped all over his dick like I owned it, despite basically telling her there was nothing going on between us. And that’s shitty of me, I understand, but all I can say in my defense is that I suck. And that I’m really confused right now with intensely wanting Travis when part of me still believes it’s a big mistake that’s going to lead to disaster.