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  “Sorry, Kallie,” she whispered in her downbeat manner.

  “It’s okay,” I said. And for a second I really felt like it was.

  “What happened?” I turned to Jamie.

  She shifted uncomfortably, and Dolly spoke for her.

  “That bitch ran off with our rent money and jumped ship to tour with Weedhead. I heard she hooked up with Morgan, the guitarist.”

  I looked at Jamie. She was positively stricken.

  “Oh, Jamie,” I began, but she shushed me with a wave of her hand.

  Weedhead was Fractured’s main rival, even though the two bands could hardly be compared, in my opinion.

  “Whatever,” Jamie said. “Good riddance.” But it was obviously painful for her.

  “Yeah,” LeeLee said, then hesitated. “Although…we do have this tour coming up, and now we don’t have a singer. I really don’t want to give up on that.”

  Jelly nodded. “Me neither,” she said.

  “What are we supposed to do?” asked Jamie. “Where are we going to find someone who knows all the songs and can fill in on short notice?”

  As if on cue, all eyes in the group instantly turned to me. I stared at them, dumb to their intent for a moment, and then realization dawned on me.

  “Whoa. No. Oh, no, no, no.” As I protested, they all inched toward me like they were going to envelop me in a mass of desperate punk rocker.

  “Kallie,” said Dolly in her sweetest tone, “think about this. You know it’s perfect.”

  I could tell by her eyes that she was getting excited.

  Jamie nodded. “This could work, Kallie.”

  “But…but I’m not a singer,” I explained. “I can’t sing.”

  “That’s not true,” said Jamie. “I’ve heard you sing along to our tracks in the car countless times, and you have a great voice. You actually have a prettier voice than Cindi ever did. And don’t try to say you don’t know the songs, because we all know you do. Hell, you might know them better than we do.”

  They all nodded, really getting into the idea now.

  “Yeah,” said LeeLee. “Plus, we love you!”

  I laughed at her sweet remark, but I shook my head.

  “Even if I can carry a tune, I can’t be a lead singer. I don’t know how to do that. I’m not…loud enough,” I said.

  I didn’t know what else to say or how to say it. I had often daydreamed about being onstage with the band, imagining how exhilarating it would feel to express myself to so many people at once. But I’d never actually thought I could do it. I was no Courtney Love, Kathleen Hanna, Grace Slick, no idol you could name.

  “Well,” said Jamie, “the only way to know for sure is to try.”

  “Great idea,” said Dolly. “I’ll tune up.”

  “Wait. What?” I asked as the girls scattered to their various instruments in the main room.

  “Jamie,” I hissed, getting angry. “What the hell?”

  “What?” she asked innocently.

  “I can’t do this. Not in front of everyone! I don’t know what to do.”

  “Kallie, chill out. Besides, everyone’s going home soon anyway. It’ll just be us. Here, have some liquid courage.” She reached over and cracked a beer and handed it to me.

  I wasn’t much of a drinker, mainly because it tends to make me sick and also because I kind of had a problem with it when I was younger. But at the moment I felt I needed it. I grabbed the beer from her and took a long gulp. Then another.

  “Whoa, easy,” said Jamie.

  Defiantly, I tilted my head back and drained the bottle. When I finished I grabbed another. I already felt a little looser.

  “You can do this,” Jamie said. “You know the lyrics, the changes, the structure. Hell, you helped to write some of these songs, Kallie.”

  It was true. I often gave Jamie sheets of lyrics and poems to use for the band’s songs.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I never thought I’d be singing them.”

  Just then I heard LeeLee pluck the low string on her bass, and the sound filled the store with a deep resonance that seemed to cut right through me.

  I watched the girls with their various instruments, swiftly plugging in patch cords, using electronic tuners, switching on pedals, adjusting gain and volume and getting ready.

  I watched as Jamie sat behind her drum kit, rapped her snare and tapped her foot against her kick pedal.

  “Kallie,” Jamie called, motioning with her drumstick. “You’re up.”

  She pointed to a position in the center of the group, where a single microphone stood gleaming on its stand.

  I walked over as if in a daze. I had never been in this position before, my back to the band and looking outward. It felt powerful to have my friends with all their electric power and energy standing behind me and backing me up.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “Hang on,” said Dolly. She leaned over and switched on the PA.

  The sound in front of me changed, and I realized it was the monitor at my feet picking up the ambient noise near the mic. It hovered in front of my face.

  “Give it a try,” said LeeLee. “Just say something so we can check your levels.”

  “Um,” I said and then jumped when I heard my disembodied voice echo around the room.

  Dolly fiddled with the controls.

  “Again,” LeeLee said, encouraging me.

  “Hi,” I said shyly, and my voice came back to me louder than before. Dolly must have turned it up.

  “We’ll have to keep her cranked for now,” said Dolly to Jamie. “She’s probably mic-shy.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, away from the microphone.

  Dolly walked up to me with her guitar slung over her shoulder. It afforded her a sexy swagger that I had always envied. She gently pushed me closer to the mic.

  “Grab it,” she said and placed my hand on the mic. “You have to swallow the thing.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Get lost.”

  “No, seriously, Kallie. You need to get really close, so that you’re touching it with your lips, and then you need to really push your air out. Everyone has a hard time at first, before they get used to it. The ones who can’t get past it have a permanent case of the mic-shies.”

  “You got to give it everything, okay?” said Jamie. “Really let it rip. Loud.”

  LIVE LOUD.

  My dad’s note came back to me in my mind. Well, I was pretty sure this wasn’t what he had meant, but it definitely applied. Besides, Dad had always wanted to pursue music as a career.

  “Kallie?” Jamie said softy. “You okay?”

  I shook my head as if to clear it. “Yeah,” I said, this time into the microphone, and my voice came back to me like an affirmation.

  Then I had a moment of inspiration. “Hey, how do I make my voice echo more? You know, like my name.”

  Dolly laughed. “You do already have a pretty kick-ass rock name, Miss Echo, but what you are referring to is reverb, and it’s an effect that we can play around with later. For now, let’s focus on the basics, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling a little more relaxed. The two beers I’d downed had helped things, I was sure.

  “Let’s start with ‘Misery,’” said Jamie.

  I waved her off. “No,” I said. “I don’t want to do that one right now. I don’t want to feel like an imitator. Can’t we just, um, jam?”

  “She’s right,” said Dolly. “She’s got to find her own voice.”

  The others agreed.

  “Okay,” said Jamie. “I’ll start a rhythm and we’ll find a groove. You come in with something when you get a feel for it, okay?”

  I nodded and then cracked another beer. I was getting drunk, but I didn’t care. I needed the courage, and it made me feel safer to have something besides the microphone in my hand.

  Jamie kicked off, starting out with a slow, groovy beat, and then LeeLee joined in with a dark, melodic bass line that I could feel in my back molar
s. Man, being so close to the monitors and the amps was intense. Dolly picked up on the notes LeeLee was playing with a bluesy chord progression, and soon I found myself swaying to the tune as Jelly accented the burgeoning song with her keys. It was like I could almost see the invisible colors the music created.

  I started thinking about my dad again, how young he was when he died, how painful it must have been for him to leave this world. To leave me. In the final days before he passed, when he was too weak to do anything except lie in his bed at the hospice, and his body had swelled up and his skin had cracked open, he had tried so hard to be brave.

  As I stood at the microphone, I tried to breathe through the ache in my throat, and I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. The music was haunting, sad, dirgelike, and it was the kind of music I imagined being played at some Dark Ages funeral. I opened my mouth, not sure what might come out, not sure what I was going to sing.

  I screamed.

  It scared me at first—the sound and its ferocity, its desperation. And it felt good. So I screamed again, louder. And again, until I was screaming along with the music. Eventually my screams gave way to syllables that formed into a kind of wild, grief-stricken poem. I had always been good at making up poems on the fly.

  I couldn’t feel anything except the music and my own voice leaving my body. I wasn’t Kallie anymore. I wasn’t sure who I was exactly. I was someone who was tuned into the divine vibration of music. That magic place in between the notes and the melody. The sheer volume of my voice shocked me. I sang my heart out.

  After a while I began to calm, the tempo slowed, and the song—or whatever it was we had just created—churned out its final notes.

  Then…silence.

  I was buzzing all over. My body, my head. My throat was sore from screaming, and my lungs felt as though they had had the best workout of my life. With trembling hands I released the microphone stand and unfurled my fists. I hadn’t realized I’d been clenching it so hard. I was covered in sweat, even though I hadn’t been dancing or even moving much. I shivered and looked around at the girls, seeing them as if for the first time. They were staring at me, awestruck and maybe a little concerned.

  “Well,” said Dolly, breaking the silence. “One thing is for sure. We are gonna have to turn her way down.”

  “No shit!” said LeeLee, wide-eyed. “I’ve never heard anything like that before.”

  “It was…” began Jelly. “Crazy,” she said finally.

  I looked to Jamie, who could always be counted on to tell me the truth. She was staring at me with a look I had never seen before. It was like she was seeing me for the first time too—and liked what she saw.

  “Jamie,” I said tentatively. “What do you think?” My voice was back to sounding like me—regular, quiet Kallie.

  “Kalliope Echo,” said Jamie. “Welcome to the band.”

  Everyone whooped, and I couldn’t help but grin.

  “Does this mean I get to go on tour?” I asked.

  “Of course,” said Dolly. “You’re our front woman.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because I won’t have anywhere to live pretty soon.”

  That kind of killed the good cheer among the group for a minute as they all realized my situation.

  “But there’s a problem,” said Jelly in typical downer fashion. “We can’t be Fractured anymore. We have to change the name. Make a fresh start. New singer, new music, new name.”

  All the others nodded in agreement.

  “Any ideas, Kallie?” asked Jamie.

  I shrugged. I didn’t care. I was just happy to be in the band.

  “I know,” said Dolly. “The perfect name. We should call ourselves Misery Girl, after Kallie. She came along and saved us with that crazy voice. It’s an awesome name too.”

  “I like it,” said Jamie. “All in favor?”

  LeeLee and Jelly approved. Here I was, taking on the role of lead singer, and now the band was going to be named after me too. What if I let them all down?

  As if she could read my mind, Jamie reassured me yet again. “What do you have to lose, Kallie? Without you, there is no band and no tour anyway. Let’s try, okay?”

  I looked at my friends. I saw their expectant faces and the belief they had in me.

  “Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s try.”

  As they hooted and hollered, I tried to contain my joy but couldn’t. I laughed and celebrated along with them. Despite the rough start, it ended up being a pretty great birthday. I had started with nothing and then gained a band. My band. Misery Girl.

  Chapter Three

  Jamie wanted to jam night and day. I didn’t really have anything else to do anyhow. I would go over to the store every morning, and when Jamie dropped me off at my soon-to-be-ex-house every night, I would stumble in, scrape something to eat from the near-bare pantry and fall into bed. I had no time for laundry or daily chores.

  One morning I could barely stand the smell of all of the clothes I picked up, so I raided my dad’s closet. He had a faded purple Hendrix shirt that I loved. As I reached for it, a note fluttered down from the top shelf like a yellow, stiff-winged butterfly. As always, when I found echoes from my dad, my heart leaped with excitement. On the paper was a drawing of a star. And my dad’s chicken-scratch handwriting:

  Kallie, did you know that deep in space there is a giant star named Lucy? It is a crystallized diamond, actually floating out there in space. Isn’t that neat? I told your mother this once too, when I proposed. I used my grandmother’s ring. Did I ever show that to you? I can’t remember. It’s yours now. It’s in the spot.

  Dad

  That was it. A diamond ring? No, he most certainly had not ever told me about that or shown me it. Maybe it was a delusion. Just before he died, he’d told me all kinds of tall tales that were certain to be pure fantasy, like having been at Woodstock or having met Eric Clapton. He was too young for any of that, after all.

  Where was the spot he was talking about? We didn’t have a “spot” in our house. Or did we? I sort of remembered him showing me some old letters once that he kept up on the top shelf with the books in the living room. Maybe it was there?

  I ran out and grabbed the step stool. I had packed up a lot of the books already, but there were still so many to do, and I hadn’t gotten to the ones up high yet. Just as I was about to dismiss the shelf and all the stuffy college literature anthologies on it, my fingers happened to brush against cool metal. A hexagonal tin. It was an old tea tin. I carefully lifted it down and sat with it on the floor.

  Just then I heard Jamie pull up outside and lay on the horn. I ignored her. My fingers trembled around the rim of the tin. I almost didn’t dare open it, but I had to. Carefully I flipped up the lid. Inside were a lot of yellowed envelopes and slips of paper. I took the first one off the top. It was a piece of cereal box, and it had three words written on it in shaky script:

  I LOVE YOU

  That’s all it said. I knew it was from my dad to me and that he must have written it during his final days at home. I felt tears starting and hastily brushed them away when I heard Jamie come up to the door.

  “Hey, Kallie,” she called. “You better not still be asleep.” She opened the door into the little room and saw me sitting there crying, with the tin in my lap.

  “Echoes?” she asked.

  I nodded and sniffled a reply. “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Have you had breakfast?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Come on then,” she said. “I’m taking you for pancakes.”

  I closed the tin, vowing to go through it carefully later, and placed it back up on the shelf. I took the piece of cardboard and placed it in my pocket. That one I would carry with me. I never wanted to let that one go.

  Over breakfast Jamie was unusually quiet. There was something odd about her demeanor, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I thought maybe she was nervous about the tour. We had all been working so hard, and she’d been planning the logistics w
ith military precision. I had been worried she was getting obsessed.

  “Kallie,” she said after a while. “I have something to tell you.”

  The way she spoke sent chills up my spine. Instantly I had images of her telling me that she, too, was dying of cancer or that she was leaving me in some other way. I felt panic rise in my chest.

  Noting my expression, she reached out a hand to reassure me. “It’s not bad,” she said. “Well, maybe it could be, depending on how you feel about it.”

  “What is it, Jamie?” I asked.

  “I’m…I’m transitioning,” she said and looked down at her hands.

  At first I didn’t know what to say, like my brain didn’t compute, and then I understood. Jamie, my Jamie, was going to be male. And when I understood that, it seemed like the most natural thing in the entire world.

  “Okay,” I said, thinking there was more.

  “What do you think?” she asked nervously.

  “I think that’s…I mean…I think it’s great if you’re happy.”

  “Yeah, I am,” she said. “It feels good to finally be who I have always been inside. It’s still a little confusing though, and the hormones kind of make me feel strange.”

  “Hormones? Wow, I didn’t realize you had gotten that far.” Something dawned on me. “Are you changing your name? Do you want me to refer to you as he?”

  “No, and yes,” Jamie answered. “I’m still going to go by Jamie. That’s cool. But I want to be a he—I am a he,” he corrected himself.

  “I’m proud of you, you know. That takes guts. I don’t know if I could ever be so brave.”

  “Thanks, Kallie. It means a lot coming from one of the bravest people I know.”

  I smiled at him. “Are we going to cry now? Have a Hallmark moment?”

  Jamie laughed. “I’m a dude. I don’t cry, remember?”

  “Not if you’re Robert Smith, you don’t.”

  “Ah, a Cure reference. Nice.”

  And just like that we slipped back into our easy rapport. There wasn’t a person on earth I felt more comfortable around than Jamie, and I felt honored that he had told me his news.