couldn’t wait to tell Callie. They would have to practice with Zach, but there was a whole weekend to prepare. They could become professionals by then.
* * *
Sound check was a train wreck. At first Laura couldn’t hear Callie or Zach, only herself, and they played half a song before the guy in the booth’s agonized shouts overpowered Laura’s nervous determination to just muscle through. They must have all been playing at completely different speeds; she heard a moment of Callie’s amplified voice and registered how bad it sounded, how clearly she was improvising some unrelated tune rather than actually singing harmony. But then they got the levels adjusted and somehow all managed to chug through “Can I Call You?”—even beginning to have fun by the end of it, getting excited by the sound of their voices so loud and clear in the enormous empty room and prancing like horses from end to end of the enormous stage.
“It feels like we’re getting away with something. Like, is this all a joke?” Callie asked as they packed their gear away again at the end of their allotted fourteen minutes. “How is it possible that we’re playing a venue this big with no album, no single, and a set that’s five songs long?”
“We can write more songs—I mean, I’m already writing more songs,” said Laura. “This is how we get to record an album. Someone will see us tonight and make it happen.”
They clambered clumsily down off the stage, into the darkness of the cavernous empty room. There were several hours to kill before the show, too long to spend backstage, and it would have been a perfect time to get dinner if Laura hadn’t been too nervous to eat. Instead, she sat at a diner with Zach and Callie and watched them eat pancakes and burgers, listlessly sipping a Coke and nibbling the hard edge of one of Zach’s fries. The Clips had traveled separately, in a giant black van with their expensive guitars and amps. She wanted to at least see Dylan before she played. She didn’t think he would give her a pep talk or anything, but she knew that touching him for a minute would ease her fear and replace it temporarily with brainless lust. They were probably there now, unloading, sitting backstage and passing one of the ludicrously oversize blunts that Dylan rolled. It seemed almost possible that he’d forgotten that he’d arranged for the Groupies to open.
But when they got back to the dressing room, no one from the Clips was anywhere she could see. The sound guy told them with bored, irritated indifference to hurry up and get onstage, so they did. Laura looked out at a sea of studiously indifferent faces. Clearly, the crowd was just holding their places near the stage so that they wouldn’t have to push through and fight for them when the Clips came on. The music from the PA died, but the crowd didn’t stop talking. Callie and Laura stood there waiting for them to stop for a few minutes, but they still didn’t. Laura made eye contact with Callie and smiled, but Callie looked pissed-off and scared. Laura had just had a weird flash of inspiration. If they were going to be completely ignored, then this was a chance to do whatever they wanted, without trying to please anyone. She put down her guitar and picked up the toy piano that she used to plink out a solo on “I Want My Tapes Back,” and began to play that song’s opening lines on it. Callie walked over and whispered in her ear, “Um, what the fuck are you doing?”
“Who cares? It doesn’t matter, they don’t care what we do. Isn’t that kind of great?”
“No, it’s humiliating!” Callie hissed.
“Or it’s great! Let’s just sing the song and see what happens, okay?”
Callie gave her a freaked-out stare, but she sauntered back over to behind her own microphone. They started to sing “I Want My Tapes Back,” accompanied only by the plink plink of the little piano. Laura sang slower than usual, making sure every word was crisp and audible, and for once Callie was actually able to harmonize, so that they sounded funny and sweet but a little bit eerie, like a pair of creepy baby ghosts in a horror movie, singing about a high school breakup.
The chatting, indifferent audience was still louder than they were, but some people in front, at least, were turning their attention toward the stage.