Boring Girls Read online

  “Does this mean you want to do it?” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. Fern and I exclaimed happily, clasping hands. “But,” he said, “I’d want to do it right. We need a drummer. We all need to be damn good. Metal’s not easy to play.”

  “Remember Catastrophic Enzyme?” I said. “They sucked, and they got a show opening for a big band.”

  We all laughed.

  xXx

  Once a week we would meet at the tea shop and talk. We called them “band meetings,” even though it was just the three of us. Most of the time we just chatted about silly fantasy stuff. Travelling the world, getting a tour bus, meeting celebrities. We had no drummer, we had no name, and we had no music — sort of important, right? We couldn’t move forward without those things, but the three of us got very passionate about the idea.

  I spent all my time after school going through my journals and poems, trying to piece together actual songs. Sometimes during the week Fern and Edgar would get together in Edgar’s basement and play guitar and bass. Edgar’s dad didn’t mind the noise downstairs, but Edgar worried that once we got a drummer and started actual rehearsals that it might be too loud. His dad had some amps and gear left over from his band days, so they were able to use them, but the gear was old. We had no money to get anything new, but what we had seemed to work just fine.

  Summer came and we could focus on the band full-time. Josephine and I had remained friends, and since she was going to spend most of the summer visiting relatives I didn’t have to worry about trying to politely budget time for her. I would be able to immerse myself spending time with Fern and Edgar.

  We realized that without a name for the band, there was only so much we could do. We had ideas but all of them sucked; they either sounded too funny or too clichéd, and we couldn’t settle on anything. Most of the time when we’d try to think up ideas we would just end up laughing, unable to take it seriously. Bloodbeard? Vampirate?

  One boiling July afternoon, I came into the kitchen from my bedroom to get something to snack on and my mother was on the phone with one of my aunts. One of my great uncles or someone had gotten sick, and they were chatting about his stay in the hospital. As I made myself a bowl of cereal, I half-listened to my mother’s side of the conversation.

  “Oh, he’s still on the oxygen. And they’ve got him on a colostomy bag as well. To be honest, I’m almost glad he’s in the hospital — this heat would have been too much for him. Although I can’t understand why he just doesn’t buy an air conditioner . . .”

  My mother talked on, and I carried my cereal back into my bedroom. What on earth was a colostomy bag?

  I grabbed my dictionary. Colostomy bag: a container positioned to collect feces discharged through the opening made by a colostomy.

  A quick scan of the page revealed that a colostomy was a surgical opening in the colon to bypass a diseased portion of colon and allow the passage of intestinal contents.

  Hideous — but interesting. An idea struck me, and I thought it was pretty great.

  xXx

  At the tea shop when I met Fern and Edgar that week, I smiled triumphantly. “I have an idea for the band name.”

  Both of them rolled their eyes and grinned. To be honest, I’d said that very thing a few times before, and so had they. And every idea had resulted in gales of laughter. When they’d laughed at my ideas, I’d joined in, but secretly I’d been hurt by it — I thought I’d had some pretty good ideas. But I was sure this time they’d love it.

  “All right, so what is it?” Edgar asked.

  I paused for dramatic effect. “Colostomy Hag.”

  “Colostomy Hag?” Edgar sputtered. “What the hell is that?”

  “Like, colostomy bag?” Fern said. I nodded, grinning.

  “What’s a colostomy bag?” Edgar asked.

  “When the doctors have to drain your crap out of you, because you’ve had surgery and can’t use your intestines, it gets drained into a colostomy bag,” I said.

  He thought for a second, and nodded. “That’s damn gross. And hag?”

  “Because there’s girls in the band,” I said.

  Fern started laughing. “You know what, I love it! It’s disgusting and it’s hilarious. I vote for Colostomy Hag.”

  Edgar smiled, shaking his head. “All right, I agree. It’s the best we’ve come up with.”

  “All right!” I raised my hands in the air. “We’re called Colostomy Hag!”

  xXx

  And so that’s what the band would be called. I started sketching out ideas for band logos and artwork. I was definitely getting ahead of myself, but we did need a logo. I brought my sketches to the tea shop and ran them past Edgar and Fern, and they picked out what they liked. Deciding on a name for the band definitely made things feel more official, but we knew that all of this would go nowhere without the music. And we still didn’t have a drummer. Without a drummer we couldn’t play songs. We couldn’t even rehearse until we had the full band, so all our plans were pretty much hollow.

  xXx

  It was early August when Fern and I went downtown to look around at some stores. I’d been doing more around the house so that my parents would help me make some changes to my room, and they had upped my allowance as well, so I had a bit of money. Fern and I looked in a few of the thrift stores and didn’t find anything good, so we headed to the music store.

  It had become a bit of a habit for us to browse the bulletin board by the cash register. There was rarely anything interesting: flyers for concerts we weren’t into, people selling instruments, offering piano lessons, stuff like that. I couldn’t think of a time when I’d seen anything on there that even came close to interesting, much less anything to do with heavy metal. None of us had gotten around to advertising on the board ourselves to find a drummer yet.

  That day, however, we saw a new flyer. Drummer Needs Band — influenced by DED, Gurgol, Goreceps, looking for like-minded individuals to rock with. There was a phone number listed.

  “Great!” Fern exclaimed, grabbing a pen out of her purse and writing the number down on the back of her hand.

  “‘Looking for people to rock with’?” I wrinkled my nose. “That sounds dorky.”

  “Well, it’s not like we’ve got tons of people to choose from. Let’s call him and see what he’s like,” she replied.

  She was right. The flyer seemed almost too good to be true, despite its idiotic wording. We went to a pay phone on the street. Fern put in her quarter and dialled.

  “Hi, yes,” she said shortly, “I’m calling about the flyer in Bee Music. About the drummer.” She paused, listening. I watched her face. “Yeah, we’ve got a band. Vocal, guitar, and bass. Doing original stuff.” After another pause she listed off a few bands we liked, mentioning DED and Gurgol. “We have a female vocalist, and I play guitar. So there’s two girls in the band.”

  After chatting for a few more minutes, she set up a meeting with him at the tea shop for that evening. I tried to mentally calculate whether or not Edgar would be available, while she wrapped up the call.

  Finally she hung up. “Okay, he sounded nice. His name is Socks.”

  “Socks?”

  “Yeah. He didn’t tell me his real name.”

  “That’s not a very cool nickname,” I muttered. Pairing that with the I wanna rock flyer, I wasn’t feeling very hopeful. “He’s probably a complete moron.”

  “Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Fern said. “I’m going to call Edgar and tell him to meet us tonight.”

  xXx

  The two of us met Edgar a half hour before Socks was supposed to show up. Edgar had been playing his bass all afternoon and looked pretty exhausted when he arrived and sat down.

  “I’m really glad we found somebody. The songs are shaping up and it would be nice to be able to get together and actually try to play something
,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This guy sounds like kind of a loser to me.” I explained to Edgar the way the flyer had been worded.

  “So what if he wants to rock? He sounded perfectly nice on the phone,” Fern said, lightly slapping my hand and giving me a grin. “I mean, when it comes down to it, we want to rock too, don’t we?”

  Edgar laughed. “I wonder why his name is Socks.”

  “Maybe because he stinks,” I said.

  After a little while, the bell above the tea shop door jingled, signalling the arrival, presumably, of Socks. We knew right away that it couldn’t be anyone but him. He was tall and burly, with long shaggy brown hair and a long goatee. He wore a metal shirt pulled down over his substantial belly and long black shorts. And bright white socks pulled up high on his shins.

  “Oh, wow,” Fern said.

  He scanned the room for a moment and when he caught sight of us, his face lit up and he raised his hand in greeting. “Hiya!” he said brightly, turning the heads of the other tea shop customers as he came to our table.

  We all stood up to introduce ourselves and shake his hand, and then he pulled up a chair and we all sat back down.

  “So, yeah, it’s great to meet you all,” he said. “I’ve been playing metal since I was a kid. I just got out of school and I’m looking for a band to play with, get back into it.”

  “We’re just starting out,” Edgar said.

  “You must be bass, right? Fern here told me it was two girls on guitar and vox, and a dude on bass.”

  Vox? I had to prevent myself from shuddering noticeably. I didn’t want to offend him. He did seem like a nice guy.

  “Yeah,” Edgar said, grinning. “Fern’s guitar, and Rachel does vox.”

  I smiled, probably showing too much tooth as I tried to make it as genuine as possible. “That’s right.”

  “Can you wail?” Socks said to me, very seriously.

  I hesitated as Fern and Edgar both covered their smiles and awaited my answer. “Uh, yeah, sure I can. I can wail.”

  “Well, that’s good then.” Socks sat back. “A band’s only as good as their singer, you know. And a girl singer in metal, well, that’ll be somethin’ else. Don’t come across that too often.”

  We asked him some questions about himself. He was a few years older than we were, having just graduated from high school. He was working for his father’s construction company and had been playing drums for years.

  “Why do they call you ‘Socks’?” Fern asked.

  “’Cause I always wear nice white ones,” he said, lifting his foot and pointing at the socks we had all noticed when he walked in. “Guess it’s kinda my trademark.”

  Socks invited us to his house to hear him play. He lived a short drive from downtown and had a minivan parked outside the tea shop. “You can’t have a drummer without a vehicle,” he said as we walked to the van. “Gotta have some way to carry your stuff. It’s not easy like a guitar case!”

  As we drove to his house, he chatted about how he’d been in a few bands while he was in school. “Nothing serious, of course,” he said. “Just jamming out on the weekends. Played a few gigs, really small stuff, did a battle of the bands, that kind of thing. I’m definitely looking for some serious players this time around.”

  “We haven’t rehearsed yet, we’re still writing,” Fern told him. “We have maybe five or six songs, and Rachel’s working on lyrics for them. We wanted to get a full band together before we started going through them, even though Edgar and I have been playing together.”

  “Sounds good,” Socks said, turning off the main road onto a tree-lined side street. “I’m pretty intuitive. I’ll be able to come up with some beats once we start jamming.”

  No one was home at Socks’s house, and we filed through the side door down into his basement. The ceiling was low, and we walked through the rec room to a smaller darker area. He flipped on the light switch in this smaller room, illuminating a giant drum kit.

  “Wow, double kick!” Fern said, gesturing at his two kick drums. “You can play that?”

  “I consider it to be a necessity when you’re playing metal,” he said, smiling. “So you want me to just rock out for a bit? Give you guys a show?”

  “Sure,” Edgar said.

  Socks sat down behind the kit and began to play.

  And it was pretty much decided immediately that we wanted him in the band. Any hesitations I had about him being a bit dorky went out the window. He was really, really good. Exactly what we needed. The band was finally coming together. He played complicated fills, pulled back and played steady rhythms, sped up to the point where his hands were a blur across the kit, and all without missing a beat.

  After he quit, we hung out on the couches in the rec room and chatted some more. “My parents won’t care if we want to rehearse down here on the weekends,” Socks said. “I got my van, so we can pick up your stuff and move it all in down here.”

  “Sounds good.” Fern nodded.

  “Oh, by the way, the band got a name?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Colostomy Hag.”

  Socks threw back his head and laughed. “That’s good.”

  xXx

  The sun was setting when we left Socks’s place, and since Edgar and Fern lived farther out than I did, I was the last one to be dropped off and ended up by myself with Socks in the van.

  “I’m super stoked to hear you sing, I gotta say,” he said. “I’m glad you guys gave me a call. You’re all real nice people.”

  “Yeah, hopefully this works out,” I replied. “You’re a great drummer. I’m excited to rehearse.”

  “It’ll work out. Of course it will. We just gotta jam a bit and see. Get some songs going, play some gigs.” Socks turned onto my street, and I saw Mom kneeling in the front yard wearing her floppy brimmed straw hat. I pointed at the house. “That’s my place.”

  “Is that your mom? Awesome!” He smoothly moved the van directly in front of the house, and Mom looked up from her pile of weeds. Her eyes widened as she saw Socks waving frantically at her. To my horror, as I climbed out of the passenger side, he hopped out of the van and extended his hand to my mother.

  “Hi, I’m Socks!” he announced.

  Immediately my mother’s eyes flicked down to his legs, and she nodded vaguely, as if verifying the nickname. She then took off one of her garden gloves and shook his hand, glancing at me. “I’m Rachel’s mother, Marilyn,” she said.

  “Nice to meet ya. I can’t wait to hear Rachel sing,” he said. “I’m gonna be the drummer in the band if everything works out.”

  Mom looked at me, and I smiled, lifting my shoulders. “It was nice to meet you today, Socks,” I said, hoping to get rid of him.

  “Oh, you too, Rachel,” he said, shaking my hand as well. “I’ll see you next week. Colostomy Hag . . . what a name! Looking forward to it!”

  I stood next to my mother as we watched him climb back in the van and pull away, waving at us happily through the window.

  “Rachel?” she said.

  “Let’s go inside and talk about it,” I said.

  SIXTEEN

  They sat across the table from me as if I was at a job interview. My father had no idea what had happened, so Mom filled him in.

  “I guess Rachel is starting a band,” she said.

  He looked at me, and I nodded. “Just for fun. With a few friends. Fern and Edgar, and we just met the drummer today.”

  “Socks,” Mom supplied. “They’re called . . . Colostomy Hag.”

  A loud chuckle erupted from my father, and Mom was grinning too, even though I knew they were both trying hard to be stern and serious. I smiled, and then we all laughed.

  “That’s a funny name,” Dad admitted. “What are you going to do in the band?”

  “I’m going to be the singer. I�
��ve been writing a lot of lyrics, and Fern and Edgar have been working on music. We’re going to rehearse next week.”

  I was very surprised that they hardly argued with me, beyond the usual crap about being careful. In fact, after a while of talking about how it wouldn’t mess up school in the fall, they were pretty supportive.

  “You’ve always been good with writing, and I think it’ll be great for you to have something to channel that into,” Mom said.

  Dad agreed. “I don’t mind this idea at all.”

  “It’ll be a fun hobby,” Mom said. All right. So they weren’t going to take it seriously, that was fine by me. They could look at it as a silly little project. And if they looked at it as something that I could do that would keep me off the streets and away from the dreaded booze ’n’ drugs, even better. It still irritated me that they had such little faith in me, but that was fine. Didn’t matter. We had a drummer! We were going to jam next week, and I would finally get to show them how I could wail. I laughed to myself, thinking of Socks and how ridiculous and good-natured he seemed. We had a band. I went to my bedroom and looked up at a poster of Marie-Lise. Sweat poured off her face, makeup smeared, hair flying as she clutched her bass, one booted foot braced on the stage monitor in front of her. Maybe that would be me one day.

  xXx

  I felt rejuvenated, and for the next few days I threw myself into the housework I’d been assigned. As I weeded the back garden I listened to music on my headphones, studying the vocals, noticing what I liked and disliked about different singers, and making mental notes on what to try at rehearsal. As I hung up the winter blankets from the back closet to air out on the clothesline, I fantasized about being onstage, with people screaming and cheering and knocking each other out in the mosh pit. It was fun, trying to imagine what I would wear and how I would style my hair and do my makeup. Of course I envisioned myself as being the ultimate in coolness, flanked by Fern looking gorgeous and Edgar looking tough, bounding around the stage with his dreads flying. And Socks in the back, looking mean, growling behind the drum kit.