A few days before our show at Arlene’s Grocery, Ellesse swallowed her tongue ring in her sleep. At least, that was her theory. I watched her reflection, lips open wide, tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth, assessing the damage. At the next sink, I scrubbed at the big black Xs the bouncer had Sharpied onto the backs of my hands. I’d sweated enough during our set opening for Feverish that they’d faded to gray but I needed them gone. Ellesse’s Xs were already down the drain, along with the phone number of Liam Sherwin, Feverish’s frontman. Now that the digits were saved to her contacts, there was no need to keep them on her skin.
“The boys in the band asked if we want to hang out later,” Ellesse had whispered to me, Caro, and Azali during soundcheck. Ever since we’d booked this gig—our biggest one yet—Ellesse had almost exclusively referred to the members of Feverish as “the boys in the band.” I wondered if that made us “the girls in the band” to them. I was pretty sure the answer was no. I was also pretty sure that Feverish hadn’t heard of us till a couple weeks ago when we were added onto tonight’s bill.
Our rhythm section had to go home right after the show—Azali because she was taking the SATs tomorrow, Caro because she had a “date” with her long-distance girlfriend she’d met on Tumblr and nowhere else—so it would just be me and Ellesse hanging out with the boys in the band. And it was just me and Ellesse in the bathroom, where she was using her pinky to prod at the hole in her tongue web where the ring had been.
“I can’t believe I lost it,” Ellesse sighed. “I paid a whole fifty bucks for that thing.” She’d had a ring in her nose since seventh grade and had been on the pill since ninth. Her parents were the kind who knew that we were spiking our Diet Cokes with vodka when we slept over, and that when we said we were going for a walk in Riverside Park, it meant we’d come back stoned in half an hour. There was no point in going behind their backs or trying to shock them, so when Ellesse paid some woman on St. Marks to shove a needle through the underside of her tongue at the beginning of junior year, I wondered what the point was in getting a piercing that nobody could see, but I didn’t say anything about it.
That sort of thing wouldn’t fly with my parents, who I’d begged to even let me play the occasional out-of-town gig. I was a working musician getting hands-on experience in the industry, I’d argued, it would make my college applications stand out.
“We’re putting a lot of trust in you, Shira,” my mom warned me. “If I hear about any funny business, or if your rock ’n roll lifestyle starts to get in the way of your schoolwork, we’re pulling the plug.” I stifled a laugh at “funny business” and “rock ’n roll lifestyle,” nodding solemnly as I promised to stay safe and sober, keep my grades up, and call every night. She handed me two twenties “for emergencies” and I slipped them into my wallet next to the fake ID that said I was twenty-two years old and from Rhode Island. We’d gotten a group discount from Ellesse’s brother’s guy on Canal Street. My mother didn’t need to know about that.
Sometimes I wondered if Ellesse would still be friends with me, Caro, and Azali if it weren’t for our band, The Misses. I’d come up with the name when we formed at the beginning of sophomore year. I liked that it sounded like “The Missus” but was actually the plural of “Miss”—four girls married to the music. Part convent, part coven.
Ellesse moved on from her ringless tongue web and was now blotting a tissue with dark burgundy lipstick. Bleached hair sprouted from her grown-out roots and hung around her pale, angular face. Her sunken, gray-blue eyes were lined inky black.
“By the way, you sounded great on ‘Two Dollars’ tonight,” I told her. “I wish I could sing like you.”
She waved away my compliment like stray smoke. “Please! Your voice is so much prettier than mine,” she exclaimed. It felt like an insult. I didn’t want to sound pretty, I wanted to sound like a girl who’d seen things. “I wish I could hit those high notes,” she added. Ellesse’s voice was huskier and more weathered than mine. I could bark into the mic, get all bratty and pissy, but Ellesse could mumble and moan like she didn’t care what anyone thought but knew they’d listen anyway. She sang like she knew what she was capable of. Sometimes a noise would escape from my mouth that erupted from a part of me I didn’t recognize. I’d walk offstage feeling like a fraud, keeping captive a voice that didn’t match the rest of me, a voice I was too cowardly to deserve. When I was onstage there wasn’t any difference between who I was and who I wanted to be. But I couldn’t bring her with me when it was time to go back to being my regular self. With Ellesse, there was no separation. She was the same everywhere.
“What’s up Arlene’s, we’re The Misses, we’re from here,” Ellesse had deadpanned when we took the stage a couple hours ago, prompting Azali to go ahead with the, “5, 6, 7, 8!” and me to launch into “Riverside.” Almost immediately, I’m singing the chorus and there’s no time to register the shock of all the kids below us screaming the words right back. Everything that follows is shapeless, as always. I could tell you what I think I see or hear when we’re onstage, try to describe the way Azali reigns over the kit like a cloud of controlled chaos, ready to go from a light shower to a sky-swallowing thunderstorm at a moment’s notice, or how Caro mugs stonefaced and bobs her head while thumping out basslines. I could tell you that Ellesse and I sing songs about boys we want to kiss and boys we want to kick in the teeth, about parents and teachers who’ll never understand us, about dyeing our hair in the bathroom sink and dying—what we think it would feel like. But everything else gets lost and so do I. No brain. No body. I’m made of pure noise.
When I first started taking guitar lessons in fifth grade, the strings cutting into my fingers made me cry. I toughened up by pressing my fingertips down even harder, daring the strings to brand them forever. I got into the habit of rubbing my fingertips together when I was bored in class, proud of my calluses. Soon I could push the business end of a safety pin a millimeter into the tip of my middle finger and feel nothing. Now, when I hung the guitar across myself it feels like an extension of me. I never knew what to do with my hands anyway.
The set persisted. I followed Ellesse’s refrain on “Mermaid Parade” with a guitar solo. We slowed things down and she harmonized with me on “Lilith.” We closed with “Fools,” one of the first songs I ever wrote. I howled the outro with my eyes closed and I didn’t open them until Ellesse announced, “Feverish are up next, we’re The Misses, thank you so much!”
Like us, Feverish were from New York and met in high school, which was long enough ago for them to be—24? 25? After our set, the guitarist, Nick White, looked me right in the eyes, clapped my sweaty shoulder, and said, “That was fucking sick!” We met each other halfway through the cramped, dark corridor that led onto the stage, my band and his walking in opposite directions like two kiddie soccer teams high-fiving and congratulating each other on a good game. Once back in the audience, I looked over my shoulder and scanned the room for my parents, who’d mentioned earlier that they might come to tonight’s show. The lights had beamed so bright and so direct during our performance that I couldn’t make out any faces beyond the ones lining the lip of the stage. I couldn’t see much from here in the crowd either, just a sea of heads bobbing about, elbowing into the good spots. The room smelled like beer and sweat and crushed velvet. The air seemed to hum, hot and full of dust particles and guitar feedback.
Nick gripped the neck of his guitar with his left hand and struck the strings with the pick in his right. The opening riff of “Telephone Booth” peeled from his fingers through the tangle of cables and made a mad dash out of the amp. Ellesse leaned over and whisper-shouted in my ear, “Nick thinks you’re hot! Liam told me!” Her voice was mostly drowned out by the audience shrieking and Liam spitting the first verse into the mic, but I chose to believe what I’d heard. I swayed along, knocking sweaty shoulders with strangers as the boys in the band washed the room in a hot, metallic sheen.
Each member of Feverish looked like he was in a different band. Mackie the drummer was a pale-faced punk who’d buzzed his hair to the scalp and hacked the sleeves off his shirt to show off the tattoos that covered his arms. Blake the bassist’s jeans, t-shirt, and flannel hung off his skinny frame about three sizes too big—very Lower East Side skater boy, very Kids. Liam didn’t have a great voice, but he did have the cocky frontman swagger required to pull off wearing an all-white outfit—white sneakers, white jeans, white button-down. Nick was a bit preppy for my taste—blue collar folded over the neckline of his navy sweater; damp sandy blond hair with visible comb tracks, like his mom had swept it into place for picture day—but his faded jeans, dirty shoes, and bloodshot eyes made up for it. He pressed his lips to the mic, vocalizing backup as Liam leaned into the crowd, the mic stand slanted over our heads and Liam hovering above it. Nick’s hand slid up and down the frets, his face fixed in a bored scowl. I thought about his breath condensing on the mic, his lips wet when it evaporated back to him. I kept trying to see if he was looking at me, but I was well below his line of sight. I’d just been up there, I knew the drill. You’re not gonna find the faces you’re searching for in the crowd. It’s best not to look down.
“Do I look okay?” I asked Ellesse in the bathroom. I should’ve asked earlier. Her hand was already on the heavily graffitied door. I had asked earlier, but that was before I’d tucked and then untucked my shirt, put on too much lipgloss and rubbed most of it off, and tried my best to fix my dark hair in a way that hid the few once-pink now faded to dishwater blonde streaks toward the back—remnants of a Friday night in Ellesse’s bathroom with a forty and a box of Manic Panic.
“You look hot as fuck, like Nick said,” she reassured me. “Now c’mon, let’s go to the greenroom.” Ellesse grabbed my hand and we made our way over there. She didn’t knock, just pushed the door open.
Blake the bassist eyed us from his place on the musty green velvet armchair in the corner. “Where’s the rest of the Baby-Sitters Club?”
I looked to Ellesse, hoping she’d find a way to excuse the two of us before we could face further humiliation. Instead, she grabbed two beers from the case in the middle of the floor, sat down on the tacky rose-printed couch, and replied, “The Baby-Sitters Club? That’s fucking gay.”
It was a dumb comeback, but the boys in the band laughed. Blake put his hands up. “I’m not gay, I just thought it might be past your bedtimes. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay though. Actually, that was pretty fucking homophobic of you,” he said, feigning sincerity.
Ellesse shrugged and smiled, happy to be playing by the rules of their game. She used the bottle opener on her keys to crack open the two beers and handed one to me. It was room temperature and tasted like dirty rainwater, but I downed half of it in two gulps and sat down next to her on the couch. Nick settled in next to me. Blake and the rest of the boys were presumably still riffing and “no homo”-ing, but I wasn’t paying them any attention, because Nick’s knee was pressed against mine.
“We’re gonna step out for a smoke,” Liam announced. Ellesse, Blake, and Mackie all followed him. I thought I should as well, but Ellesse pushed me back down on the couch with one hand. She looked at me knowingly, tilting her head toward Nick, who offered the other boys a halfhearted wave and remained beside me as they filed out of the greenroom.
“You don’t smoke?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
He shrugged. “I’m trying to quit. Do you?”
“Sometimes.” I wondered if he could tell that I was lying. “Great set, by the way.”
Nick gave me a sheepish smile. “It’s nice to be back in the city. Tour gets tiring.”
“How long are you guys in town for?”
“We’re heading to Connecticut tomorrow. Some college show. After that we’re opening for Cloud Crush in Boston. Do you know them?”
“The name rings a bell,” I lied. “Should I check them out?”
“Probably not. They’re kinda lame. And the gig’s in fucking Boston.”
“What’s wrong with Boston?”
“Boston sucks. You’ve never been?”
“I went a few months ago to visit colleges.” Regret set in as soon as the words left my mouth.
Nick finished his beer and placed the empty bottle on the floor. “So you’re going to college next year?”
I thought about lying, but decided against it. He already knew I was still in high school, how much sway could a year have in his decision whether to kiss me tonight? “Two years. I’m a junior.”
“What about your band?”
“We’re all juniors.”
“No, I mean how are you guys gonna tour if you go to college?” I couldn’t say I hadn’t thought about it, but I knew that they were looking at colleges too, some of them across the country. The Misses never talked about breaking up, but we seemed to have an unspoken pact that we’d call it quits when we graduated. That, or time ceased to exist when we were playing together. Sound swallowed up the future.
“I’m thinking of going solo.” I’d never said that out loud before, but it still sounded rehearsed. I cleared my throat and turned toward him, shifting my body closer to his. “Did you ever want to go to college?”
“My parents wanted me to. I told them I was taking a gap year and then I just stayed on my gap year forever. I’m crashing with them while I’m back in New York.”
“You don’t have your own place?”
“I’m kinda between apartments right now. My lease ended right before we went on tour.” I couldn’t tell if my question offended him. “So, you’re starting a solo career?”
“I’ve got some songs I’ve written that I haven’t brought to any of our sessions. I’m not sure if they feel like Misses songs, so maybe those’ll just be for me.” I imagined Nick on the road, hanging a lazy arm out the window of the van, collapsing unshowered onto a motel bed or a friend’s couch, making bleary eye contact with his bandmates over gas station coffee. I wondered if he ever got sick of them, or if he didn't know what to do without them once he got back home.
I’m not sure how long I spent staring before Nick turned toward me, placed a hand on my cheek, and pulled my face into his. I mirrored him, feeling his stubble underneath my clammy palm. He smelled like rubbing alcohol and kissed more confidently than a high school boy—like he knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it. His lips parted mine and I felt his tongue fill my mouth, warm and rubbery. My hammering heart descended through my stomach as I felt one of Nick’s hands move from my face to my neck to my collarbone. His other slid up my thigh toward the frayed raw hem of my skirt, only the thin black nylon of my tights separating skin and skin. He bit down on my lower lip and dug his nails into my leg, hard enough to make me wonder which would bleed first.
I pictured myself older, taller, and on tour—in the van, onstage. It was hard not to put The Misses there too. I remembered being eleven and getting a solo in youth choir—“Dream A Little Dream” in my white button-down blouse, black velvet skirt, and character shoes. It was the only time I’d ever sung in front of an audience without my bandmates, years before we’d met. I wasn’t sure I’d know how to do it by myself again, if I’d feel alone up there, or if I’d feel free.
