Chapter 6: The First Bad Night

July 2002, Costa Mesa, California

They packed up in ten minutes.

That was the new thing. Until now, packing up had meant the instruments going down the stairs and the drums fitting into the trunk on the umpteenth try, with Roxy sitting on a couple of cases. Now there was a cardboard box as well, forty-one shirts inside, neatly folded, the name on the front, and a shoebox with forty-three CDs, and on top of the two boxes, Nova's notebook.

Roxy went in the bleach shirt. Nova remarked quietly that it was pretty beat up, Roxy confirmed once more that it was the best one, and with that the subject was closed.

"Do we need a table?" Cayde asked from the doorway.

"The place is bound to have one," Nova said.

It didn't.

The place wasn't the usual club. It was a bar at the far end of Harbor, where the owner was trying out a live night because the back room stood empty anyway. It was a big room. People used to go there to dance once; there was parquet on the floor, and in the middle of the room a pillar covered in mirror tiles that made everyone think it shouldn't be there. The stage was pallets with carpet thrown over them. The PA was two speakers on two stands and a mixer the sound guy had brought from his own car.

That the room was bigger than the crowd would fill, nobody said. It could only be seen. From the dimensions.

There were ten of them.

Exactly ten. Vex counted during the second song, because during the second song there was already time. Three had drifted over from the bar with their beers and stayed by the door so they could drift back. Two BMX kids from the park who had come by bike and brought the bikes inside, because there was nowhere to lock them. Brandi and a friend of hers Nova didn't know. The sound guy. The owner, in the doorway, arms crossed. And a man sitting alone at the edge of the room on a chair turned to face the wall, who didn't look up from his beer.

The sound was bad. The room was big, the PA was small, and everything they played came back half a second later off the back wall, a little quieter, a little dirtier, like a second band trying to play the same thing after them. After the first song Cayde glanced back at Roxy, Roxy nodded, and from there on they played without listening to the echo.

Because they played well.

That was the strangest part. Roxy tapped it in, three, twenty-one, and the tap landed. The seven songs went the way they did on the better nights: Cayde's solo was clean, Nova didn't miss, and on the third song Vex looked out into the room the way he did in full rooms, straight ahead, above the mirror-tiled pillar, to where people's eyes should have been.

Except now there was parquet.

After the fourth song, in the quiet while Cayde tuned, the man at the edge of the room looked up from his beer.

"Heard this one before, guys."

He didn't shout it. He wasn't angry either. He said it the way someone states a tired fact to the next table over. Then he went back to his beer.

Vex stopped. For a second, no more. The mic was in his hand, and in his head there were three things he could say, and all three were funny. Now and then a joke opens a door that people can come in through. There was no door here. Here there was a big empty dance floor, and a man who had probably told the truth.

He didn't answer. Roxy tapped, and they tore into the fifth.

After the seventh, seven people clapped. Vex counted that too.

The owner came over, shook all four of their hands, said they'd been good, and meant it, you could see that. Then he brought a crate of beer out from behind the bar and set it on the edge of the pallet.

"Can we put our stuff out?" Nova asked.

"Sure. Where do you want it?"

There was no table. There was a pool table in the corner of the room under a cover. They took the cover off and laid eight shirts out on the green felt, fanned, and a row of CDs. Nova set the notebook on the rail. Roxy stood next to it in the bleach shirt, so there'd be someone to show what it looked like on.

They stood there for forty minutes.

The three from the bar went back to the bar. The two kids checked out the shirts, asked how much, and when Nova told them, nodded and said next time. They wheeled the bikes out. Brandi's friend picked up a shirt, unfolded it, looked at the front, looked at the back, and put it down. He folded it neatly; that had to be counted in his favor.

Brandi didn't buy one. Brandi didn't even look at the shirts, only at Nova.

Nova didn't look back.

The man at the edge of the room had left at some point. Nobody saw when.

After a while Nova folded the eight shirts, put them back in the box, Cayde picked up both boxes, and they carried them out to the car. The crate of beer too. The owner called after them from the door to come back sometime, and he meant that as well.

They drove home on Harbor, at eleven.

Vex drove. Nova sat beside him with the notebook in her lap. In the back, Roxy and Cayde, the box on Cayde's lap, because the drums were in the trunk and it fit nowhere else. The radio was on, low, somebody else's band, a song all four of them knew and none of them liked.

Nobody said it had been bad.

"At least the beer's cold," Roxy said.

That was true. The crate was at her feet, and Roxy opened one and passed it forward to Nova, who didn't take it, so she gave it to Cayde, who did.

The sodium lights peered in through the window one by one, and one by one moved on. Nova watched the notebook while the light of one of them passed over it. Then she opened it, found the page, and in the empty line under where she'd written "how much" the month before, she wrote a number. She didn't say it out loud. She closed the notebook.

Vex saw it from the corner of his eye. He didn't ask.

They were at a red light at the corner of Wilson when Cayde spoke. Not to them, more to the box in his lap.

"You know what's really shit about tonight?"

Nobody asked. Not Roxy, because she had her head against the window and was either asleep or pretending. Not Nova, because she was holding the notebook in both hands and staring into it as if it were a rewritten book of the Bible. Not Vex, because he was watching the light.

"We weren't even the ones who were bad."

The light turned green. Vex pulled away.

Nobody answered. Not because there was nothing to say. Because all three of them were thinking the same thing: that this could happen too, that a night could be shit and not because of them. So only Cayde said it, and Cayde could be written off as tired.

In the rearview mirror Vex saw Cayde drumming his fingers on the lid of the box. Not to the radio. To something else, something he didn't know.

Harbor had never been this long.

In the morning the box stood in the middle of the living room, where Cayde had put it down.

Nobody unpacked it. The notebook was on top, closed. The crate of beer was in the kitchen, seven bottles missing, and nobody remembered who had drunk the seventh.

Vex, coffee in hand, stopped over the box. He looked at it for a while, then stepped over it and sat down on the couch.

On the transformer at the corner of Harbor, the poster was still up. The fifty-year-old paste was holding it. That stayed.