Boring Girls(40)

“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.