Page 21 of Caught in a Storm
“Hey, Tim,” says Margot.
“Emma,” says the singer. “You’re awesome, by the way.”
“Dave,” says the bassist. “Ditto on the awesome thing. Welcome to Baltimore.”
No glam names yet—a bad sign, she thinks. “So, ‘Power Pink,’ huh? We giving ’em what they want?”
“Fuckin’ A we are,” Emma says, and she tells Tim that she’s taking lead, “obviously.” She goes to the mic, and Tim and Dave assume their positions to her right and left. Margot slides her boot into the kick drum. The light over her head makes the cymbals glow perfect and gold.
The bar has gone quiet, and Emma is looking at her, waiting. This is exactly what Nikki used to do. Ready, rock star? she’d mouthed before every Burnt Flowers performance ever, from those little clubs to cramped TV studios in skyscrapers to windy open-air festivals to jam-packed auditoriums across the country. Because everything started with Margot and her drums.
A strand of hair falls across her face, but she leaves it. Cellphones—dozens—rise up, the dots of their tiny lenses homed in on her. Margot relegates everything that isn’t the drum kit to a peripheral fog, and then she slams her sticks together four times.
“Five, six, seven, eight!”
Chapter 12
“Goddamn. I mean, goddamn. Seriously. That was…that was…shit. I’m sorry. I don’t usually swear this much. But, Margot, holy shit. Could you hear yourself up there?”
Billy isn’t articulating himself very well.
He saw Burnt Flowers years ago, from the cheap seats in Philly. Robyn surprised him with tickets, and they drove up from Baltimore. It was a solid show, but nothing like what he just witnessed.
“Power Pink” blew the roof off the Horse You Came In On. For the first thirty seconds, people stood watching, mouths open. But then there was a collective realization in which everyone remembered all at once that it’s an absolutely perfect rock song. By the time Beth climbed onto the bar to shout along with the chorus, people were dancing and jumping. Passersby gathered at the front window to look in, like, What the hell’s going on in here?
Outside now, Billy and Margot sit on a bench looking out at the Inner Harbor and eating cinnamon pretzels. Billy breathes in, tells himself to at least try to be cool and maybe speak in coherent sentences.
“That singer, Emma,” Margot says. “She was pretty good. The guys, though…”
The two men had trouble keeping up. It hardly mattered, though, because they quickly became superfluous.
Margot takes a bite of her pretzel.
“Try to get as much of the sauce as you can,” Billy says. “It’s the best part. You have to go full dunkage to really appreciate it.”
Gustavo threw in an extra cup of caramelized sugar for Margot—a reward, he said, for shaking the whole neighborhood. She sinks her pretzel as far into the little cup as it’ll go and takes another bite. “Okay, yeah,” she says. “That is pretty good.”
Some guy yells into his phone across the street. “This rocker chick lit it up at the Horse earlier!…I don’t know!…Yeah, I can’t remember her name—something weird! But she was fucking awesome!”
Margot rolls her eyes and laughs as she wipes a glob of sugar off her bottom lip.
Billy likes the way she laughs—like a kind-of laugh, like she’s trying not to. “Your name’s not that weird,” he says.
“We sounded okay, you think?” she asks.
She licks the glob of sugar, and Billy marvels at the understatement.
She sat in for five songs—four Burnt Flowers tracks and a cover of “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince. You’d never guess Margot and Emma had just met; they sounded like they’d been rehearsing for weeks. As good as the performance was, though, Billy keeps thinking about the moment it was over. As everyone applauded, Margot set her sticks down gently on the snare drum, stood up, and did a little bow. Then, probably because he was the only person there that she knew, Margot returned to her spot at the bar next to Billy.
“You’re the best drummer I’ve ever seen,” he shouted into her ear over what had quickly become a standing ovation. Beth rushed over and told Margot that she could have free Natty Boh at the bar for life. “I’ll write you an IOU and everything!” Then—with no idea what else to do—Billy held up his hand and offered his rock-and-roll crush a high five. Before slapping his palm with hers, Margot smiled at him. Like, really smiled.
A breeze blows in off the water now. “When was the last time you played in front of a crowd?”
She takes another bite. “The MTV thing.”
“Oh,” he says. “Wow. The MTV thing.”
“Mm-hm. The one and only.”
