Boring Girls(67)

“Okay then.” I looked up at the ceiling, too ashamed of myself to look at my friends. “So do you guys mind waiting outside for a while?”

“Sure,” Fern said agreeably, standing up.

“If that’s what you need,” Edgar said. I could tell he was annoyed.

“We’ll pick up some cheeseburgers,” Socks said.

As they left the room, I flipped through my lyric sheets on the music stand. After the door closed, I felt like I should say something.

“Ken, er — I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be a hassle.”

“No, it’s okay,” he replied. “You know, it’s a common thing. I’m not a singer, so I don’t know what it’s like. But, I mean —that’s why the isolation booth exists, right? People don’t like having to sing in a quiet room with everybody watching.”

I didn’t even like the idea of him staying in the room, but he’d promised not to look — god, I felt so stupid, like a little kid. He asked me if I was ready to start, and I told him I was. I put on my headphones. “Blood on My Fist” began. I tried to use the music to empower myself. I couldn’t let a little thing like someone hearing me sing ruin this CD, right? I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and roared as best I could into the first verse, trying to pretend that there was no one else in the room, that I wasn’t in this room at all, that I was somewhere else completely.

xXx

It was a very long and irritating process, to be honest. I knew I could do better on some of the songs and wanted to re-record them. Sometimes I’d screw up, my voice breaking at the wrong part. At one point in the middle of a great take of “Needles and Eyes,” the others came back and knocked loudly on the door. Ken stopped the recording, talked to them quietly at the door, sent them away, and then we had to restart. I felt like the hours were slipping by. It was taking much longer than it had for the others. And my voice was starting to wear out — a totally natural thing that, naively, I had not anticipated. It was so damn hard trying to get into the mood, trying to sound into it. I wasn’t onstage, I was in a small, smelly room. My friends were annoyed at me. I wasn’t completely comfortable with Ken. I kept my eyes closed and tried to project myself somewhere cool, like onstage in front of thousands or in some music video or something, but it was really difficult. After three hours we only had half the songs done, and our time was up. Ken worked evenings, so we always had to wrap up towards late afternoon. I sat down wearily on the couch as he went and got the others, and we all convened in the room.

“We’ll have to come back again tomorrow afternoon,” Ken said, yawning and stretching his arms above his head. “We didn’t get everything done.”

“How’s it sounding?” Edgar asked.

“It’s sounding good,” he replied. “Great. Rachel’s a great singer. I’m honestly sort of surprised,” he grinned. “There aren’t many good female metal voices.”

Normally I would have scowled at such a comment, but I was too tired. Fern, sitting next to me, put her arm around me. “Yeah. She’s awesome.”

“So we’ll just need tomorrow afternoon. Rachel, if you want, just come by yourself tomorrow and we can finish it off.” I nodded in reply. “Then, once I get all her stuff recorded, I can send you guys the files and you can mix it or whatever.”

In Socks’s van on the way home, I tried to explain to them that it had been difficult for me to capture any sort of vibe, and I grudgingly apologized for needing them to leave. Everyone was nice about it. Socks reiterated what Ken had said about it being a common thing, but I still felt lousy. I didn’t want to be some spoiled singer, you know? If I was going to have a reputation I wanted it to be something else. Not spoiled. Not a princess who had to have things her way.

My voice was hoarse and shot. Was I even going to be able to do the recordings tomorrow? How long would it take to get my voice back to good shape? I felt an irritation creeping over me. My role here was different from everyone else’s. And if the band moved forward, I couldn’t see it becoming any less difficult.

xXx

That night in my room I started drawing. I drew a skeleton hanging from a noose, dangling in front of a crowd of people, a background of shadowy faces, all watching, some of them disinterested, some of the faces mocking and laughing. I gave her long black hair, like mine. I remembered our show with Heathenistic Bile, I remembered that afternoon in the studio. The skeleton was exposed and humiliated, and the faces around her were enjoying it. I remembered Fern trying to be positive and supportive of me. I drew another skeleton beneath the hanging one, this one with long white hair — the white I knew Fern wanted her hair to be — grabbing the dangling legs as if trying to support the weight of the body, to stop the skeleton from hanging. For good measure I added in a severed head, wrapped in blood-soaked cloth with only the wild eyes visible from within. The head of Holofernes. It was on the ground beside the white-haired skeleton. After I had finished sketching this out, I sat back and looked at it. You sort of couldn’t tell whether or not the Fern-skeleton was trying to help the me-skeleton by lifting her legs, supporting her weight, or if she was pulling on them, trying to speed up the process. Oh well. I sort of liked that double meaning, that confusion.