I relaxed a little. This boy was dirt poor. There wasn't any kind of rich person who'd go to that much trouble to trick me.
"Those all your drums... um, buckets?" he asked, staring at the duffel bags.
"Don't take up much space, do they?" I said. But really I hadn't brought everything, not for the first time. No sense hauling forty-two pounds of gear if all these kids wanted was a drum machine with dreadlocks.
"Must be easier to carry than a real set."
I nodded. I've never carried a real drum set, but it seemed like it would be hard.
He counted up to seventy-five, which seemed to clean his pockets out. I felt a little bad about my eighty-dollar trick, and my feet started tapping.
"Um, there's one thing," he said, shouldering his guitar and screwing up his face, nervous and flickering again. He was kind of cute, all uncomfortable like this. I felt myself worrying about him, like a kid walking down the street with one shoelace untied.
"What is it?" I said.
"It'd be better if you didn't mention the money to Pearl."
"Who's Pearl?"
"She's the..." He frowned. "Just don't mention it to anyone, I guess. Okay?"
"Fine with me." I shrugged. "Money's the same, whoever gives it to you."
"Yeah, I guess it is." He nodded, his face serious like I'd said something profound instead of simply logical. That was the point of money, after all: crisp and clean or wrinkled or disintegrated into quarters - a dollar was always worth a hundred cents.
We headed on in.
Upstairs was like every practice room: distracting. Four walls and a ceiling of undulating foam, the pattern shimmering in the corners of my vision. The disconcerting tangle of cables on the floor. The stillness hovering around us, the air robbed of echoes.
The small girl with eyeglasses took over, introducing me to everyone.
"This is Zahler. He plays guitar." The big burly dog-boy smiled broadly. He hadn't wanted to pay me, I remembered.
"And Minerva. It's her first time too. She's going to sing for us."
The junkie girl took off her dark glasses for two seconds, squinting in the fluorescent lights, and smiled at me. She was wearing a long black velvet dress, as shiny as the streets after it rains, a tangle of necklaces, and dangling earrings. Her long black nails glistened, dazzling me like the undulating ceiling.
"She's a singer?" I asked. "Huh... I'd have figured she was a roadie."
They all laughed at my joke, except for Minerva, whose smile curled tighter. Her teeth sent a little shiver toward me. I touched my forehead three times, blinked one eye, then the other to still the air.
"And I'm Pearl: keyboards," the other girl said. "You're Alana, right?"
"Alana Ray. One name," I said, my voice tremulous from Minerva's stare.
"Cool," she said. "Hyphenated?"
I grinned. I'd known the little rich girl was going to ask that. It bugs some people, me having two first names that are invisibly stuck together.
"No. Carbonated. Just a little bubble of air."
No one laughed, but no one ever does. That joke was just for me.
Setup was quick. The boys just had to plug in and tune, and Pearl had only one small keyboard. She balanced it on the room's mixing console, where she could control everyone else's sound. The junkie girl adjusted her microphone stand higher, then fiddled with the light switches, her movements still jerky and insectlike. Even though she was still wearing those dark glasses, she turned down the lights till I could hardly see.
I didn't complain, though. Her glare had made me shiver once already.
I set up in one corner, two walls of foam padding at my back, twenty-one paint buckets arranged before me, the stacks growing taller from right to left, one to six buckets high. (S6 = 21)
I pulled out six contact microphones, my own mixer and effects boxes, and went to work. I don't like rehearsal spaces or recording studios as much as the open air - but at least I can bring my own echoes.
Pearl watched me clip the mikes to my stacks of plastic, run their cables into the mixer, then route them out through the effects.
"Paint cans, huh?" she asked.
"Paint buckets," I corrected, and saw Moz smile for the first time.
"Uh, sure. How many channels you need?" she asked, fingering the sliders on the mixing board. "Six? Twelve?"
"Just two. Left and right." I handed her the cables.
Pearl frowned as I turned away from her. This way, she couldn't control my mix from her board. It was like she wanted me to give her my eggs, my cheese, and my chives all in separate bowls. But instead I was handing her the whole omelet, cooked just the way I liked it.
She didn't argue, though, and I saw that Moz was still grinning.
"Everybody ready?" Pearl asked. Everyone was.
Minerva swallowed and walked up to grasp her mike with one pale hand. The other held a notebook, which I could see was open to a page of chaos, like the handwriting of the unluckiest kids back at my special school.
Moz just nodded, not looking up at Pearl, flicking his cords around on the floor with one toe.
The burly boy (whose name I'd already forgotten; should have written it down) was the only one who smiled. He leaned his head down to stare closely at his strings, setting his fingers carefully. Then, concentrating hard, he began to play. It was a simple riff, thick and dirty.
Pearl did something on the board, and the sound softened.
I listened for a moment, then tuned my echoes to ninety-two beats per minute. Moz started playing, high and fast. I thought it was a strange way to start, too complicated, like a guitar solo bursting out of nowhere. But then Pearl entered, playing a gossamer melody that wrapped a shape around what he was doing.
I listened for a while, not sure what to do. I had a lot of choices. Something simple and lazy, to give the music more backbone? Or should I swing the beat, a little off-kilter, to loosen it up? Or follow Moz's superquick fluttering, like rain against the roof?
I always relished this moment, right before starting to play. It was the one time my fingers didn't tremble or drum against my knees, when I could hold my hands out steady. No reason to hurry.
Also, I didn't want to make a mistake. There was something fragile about this music, as if it would fly apart if pushed in the wrong direction. Pearl, Moz, and the other boy thought they knew one another already, but they didn't yet.