Audrey hated every second she was kissing Xander but it went on for way more seconds than she wanted to admit. His tongue tasted like smoke mostly but also metal somehow and it wasn't as bad as she expected but it wasn't exactly good either. It had all been Xander's idea, she was pretty sure. Renee all draped over the filthy black leather couch, her hand so far up Alex's thigh Audrey expected her to ask him to turn his head and cough. Renee would have known Xander wouldn't take that well.

So it was Xander's fault and Renee's fault and probably also Shawn's fault because Hannah Is a Palindrome was going way longer than any opening band should go. There are only so many things you can do in a urine-scented "dressing room" while a shitty opening act takes up all your stage time.

The kiss lasted long enough that Audrey got bored and opened her eyes and saw that Xander's eyes were also open and pointed in the direction of Renee and Alex. Renee was pointedly not watching, but Alex couldn't help himself. His eyes were on his brother even as Renee's thumb brushed his zipper.

Audrey broke the kiss, and a single thread of saliva hung between her lips and Xander's for a semiquaver. Like a strand from a spiderweb - so gross. Audrey had no idea why everybody thought spiderwebs were cool, when they came straight out of a spider's butthole. Here's something that came out of the worst part of the worst animal, look how beautiful it is! Predictably, Xander had spiderwebs tattooed all over his milk-pale skin.

"That was, uh...nice," Xander said. Shut up, idiot. Shut up shut up shut up. Out front HIaP were playing their terrible cover of "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out." Shawn, like every boy Audrey had ever made out with, thought he could sing like Morrissey. He couldn't. She had no doubt Xander suffered from the same delusion. It's good to know what your type is, so you can at least pretend that not avoiding them is inevitable.

"There Is a Light" ended in some sadly intentional feedback and some even sadder applause. "That's our cue," Audrey said. "Where's our fucking drummer?"

She didn't even know why she asked, because even money said their fucking drummer was where he always was, i.e. four Jack & gingers deep at the bar, hitting on girls ten years younger than him. That's how she met him in the first place, and thank god Joanie had been there to keep her from making the worst mistake of her life, though maybe asking Patrick to join the band had actually been an even worse idea. If only Joanie was here tonight to keep her tongue out of Xander's mouth.

Audrey grabbed her Precision and walked out to the stage. Shawn was packing up his guitar, a black Rickenbacker of which he was inordinately proud, telling anyone who seemed even halfway interested that it's the exact same guitar Johnny Marr uses. But if Shawn couldn't sing like Morrissey, he definitely couldn't play like Marr, so it might as well have been made by fucking Fisher-Price. At least then if you wound it up it could play "Pop Goes the Weasel."

Shawn nodded in Audrey's direction as he snapped his case shut. "How'd we sound?" Audrey pretended not to hear him, focusing like a fucking laser on tuning her low E. "Whatever," he said, and walked offstage toward the bar, where this short Asian girl was waiting for him. Even over the roar of "Immigrant Song" on the PA, Audrey could hear her shout "You guys were awesome!" Audrey just tuned the shit out of that E string.

Audrey felt a hand on the small of her back and flinched away. "It's just me," said Xander, but that didn't make it any better. He didn't move his hand. "Hey, Patrick!" he yelled. "Get your ass up here!"

Patrick flung himself out of a knot of girls at the end of the bar, knocking over a stool in the process. "Shit," he said. One of the girls picked it up for him, giggling. He knocked back the drink in his right hand, then the one in his left, then took a running start and leapt up onto the stage. "Aaa-AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!" he wailed along with Robert Plant. Part of Audrey wanted to wail too. She loved Zeppelin but wouldn't allow herself to admit it, because of dudes like Patrick. Who said rampaging Viking hordes had to be so macho? She and Joanie used to scream that song, blasting down the back road to the Carmike to see 12 Monkeys or whatever, dudes of all ages at the theatre just openly gawking at Joanie, regardless of their girlfriend/wife/daughter situation. Joanie ignored it, too deliberately, but Audrey would get pissed for her, staring right back at the guys, sometimes a bird fully extended, until they shifted their eyes a foot and a half down, saw her and guiltily turned away. Joanie never acknowledged these encounters, but Audrey liked to believe she was grateful for her tiny bodyguard. After graduation they were psyched to go to college together, but once they got to campus things were different - better, even, in some ways - and after that first Halloween they just didn't need each other anymore.

"Doo doo doo, ba ba ba, Valhalla I am coming," slurred Patrick as he took his seat behind the drums. Audrey lowered her microphone to face height and scanned the room. Decent crowd for a Thursday before classes have even started - probably newly-arrived freshmen, testing out their fake IDs, hoping to score some ambient cool from the bar where Politiks played their first gigs. Sorry, kids, thought Audrey. That was fifteen years ago. Now we're all you've got. Though of course she and Joanie had done the same thing last August, sneaking into the men's room to find all the graffiti from the "White Rain" video. She'd even seen Stephen Brick around town a few times, high as a kite and smelling like he hadn't bathed in weeks.

"You ready?" Alex asked. Audrey nodded. Alex and Xander leaned into their mics and said, in eerie unison, "Hello. We're the BabyShakers." Three claps from the crowd, distinct enough to count, and a sad, solitary "woo." The 'Shakers didn't have fans, per se, but Audrey recognized a couple of regulars. She'd realized early on that, for a certain type of guy, a woman who played the bass was a top-tier fantasy object. She always wondered why, specifically, it was the bass that did it for these guys - never the guitar or drums; her initial theories focused on the size of the bass relative to the size of the girl playing it (like in the barely-legal porn she had caught the twins watching, where the girl is always comparing the dude's dick to her own forearm) but then she saw this band with a woman guitarist just shredding to an audience of dudes who couldn't care less, and she realized that guys got off on the assumed incompetence of the girl bass player, the bass being the easiest instrument and therefore the one most likely to be handed to some dumb chick who couldn't even read music. Dudes didn't want some axe goddess; they wanted somebody they could feel superior to. Your "Valhalla I am coming" types weren't looking for a shield-maiden to charge into battle alongside them; they were just looking for a maid. Eventually they even got tired of that and looked for someone content to just watch them; see for example Shawn with his hand on the Asian girl's ass at the bar.

Patrick yelled "One two three four!" and started whaling away at his toms while Audrey laid down a Dealian eighth-note chug. Even Audrey had to admit, Patrick had some chops - way more than her and the twins' rudimentary skills required. If he had any drive or ambition at all, he could hook up with one of the half-dozen or so bands in town with actual prospects (any one of whom should be happy to pull a Pete Best on their current soft-ass drummer for someone with Patrick's talent), maybe start touring - Patrick could afford to spend three weeks in a van, he didn't have classes to go to - and within a year we'd see him in the Buzz Bin. A year after that, dead from a heroin overdose, probably, but that's the price you pay for Valhalla.

Or fuck, why was Audrey fantasy-managing Patrick's career? The dumb asshole had probably already tried to get in with one of the good bands and managed to piss them all off. That's why he was a BabyShaker. He was here as a cautionary example, in case Audrey ever thought about giving up college for the music scene. There's the "scene," not even 30 and already as leathery and skeletal as Iggy Pop. Take a good look at the scene.

No, Audrey knew this wasn't her future. This was her checking a box, getting something out of her system. Someday she'd be looking at photos with her kids and come across a blurry image of herself on stage, in her fishnets and her shellacked black hair, and her kids would say "Mom, is that you?" and she'd feel a warm satisfaction. See, your mom was cool once. She'd love it then even if she didn't love it now. Even if she had to share the stage with Renee and Shawn, brought up to play rudimentary piano and even more rudimentary guitar on "Needles in the Camel's Eye," the only cover the 'Shakers knew.

The twins profess to worship Eno, though you know for a fact they've never even listened to The Joshua Tree all the way through, much less Fear of Music or the Berlin Trilogy. If you said "Here come the warm jets" to them, you'd get nothing but blank stares. They only know "Needles" because they heard Elf Power cover it when you took that weekend trip to Athens last year, and because it only has four chords. This is why the planned"Back to School Covers Show" is just a "Back to School Show." Those two dummies tried to lean into their whole Jack Skellington vibe by learning "Jack's Lament," but as soon as they realized it had two different time signatures they just gave up.

The 'Shakers ended with "Dollhouse Blues" as usual, Alex and Xander facing each other, their hands millimeters away from each other as they slashed away at the chords in the coda. Basically the guitars were the only thing keeping this from being a full-on mutual masturbation session, and you just knew these two had done that at least once. Nothing good's going to happen when a narcissist has a twin.

Audrey plonged away at the low string, moving from E to A and back again, watching out of the corner of her eye for Xander and Alex to break eye contact and move back to their mics, signaling the final chorus. Sometimes they'd stay locked on each other like this for five minutes, maybe more, truly testing the patience of everyone in the room, both offstage and on. Tonight it looked like they were settling in for a real marathon.

Audrey scanned the room, her left hand robotically fretting the E string every four beats. The kids looked disappointed. This wasn't what they wanted. Get used to it now, Audrey thought. On the plaid couch at the back of the room, Shawn's tongue was in the Asian girl's mouth. Get fucking used to it.

Something on the other side of the room caught Audrey's eye. She looked toward the front door and saw a lanky figure step through, barely clearing the door frame. The figure was just an angular silhouette at first but then it stepped forward and caught the light from the lamp behind the bar. It was Joanie. She looked dirty, sooty somehow, and Audrey briefly had the absurd vision of Joanie as Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. But then Audrey saw that Joanie's eyes were black, bottomless and shimmering, and Joanie opened her mouth and screamed.