Excerpt from ‘Fast Songs for Fast Girls’

Sixteen-year-old Mickey Gold has to start over at her aunt’s in the suburbs. She is desperate to keep details of the violent outburst that got her expelled from her New York City private school buried. As she becomes enmeshed in the local punk scene and enamored of grifter Mira, a new life where Mickey can be herself—impulsive, crass, and boy-crazy—starts to take shape. But when an old friend from the city starts paying Mickey regular weekend visits, she learns how impossible it is to repress the disturbing truth behind her breakdown.

In the excerpt below, Mickey hangs out at her cousin Ilana’s band practice.

*

Rachel’s playing is all suggestions of awkward dexterity. She holds her sticks like she’s faking it and every movement she makes toward the toms and the cymbals seems tentative then, all of a sudden, her drumming mushrooms into speedy, slanted rolls and sly polyrhythms. Katie is a real noodler, a prog-dork who fragments her guitar impulses to supplement the two-minutes-or-less songwriting ethos of the band. Gin starts stoic on the bass, but she and Katie slip into staring contests and mugging at each other as they get looser into practice. I haven’t seen either crack.

The three of them always tune up with shit like “The Edge of Seventeen” because they had a Fleetwood Mac cover band when they were in middle school, and this was their favorite warm-up. Ilana is an elastic frontwoman, and it’s usually her moment to stretch, but today she turns on the mic early.

“‘Deanna’ on three,” she says into the mic, swirling her hips as everyone else plays on.

“Rachel, can you handle this?” she trills, pointing one finger in the air. “Gin, can you handle this? Katie, can you handle this?” Two fingers up. “I don’t think they can handle this.”

When she’s got all three fingers up, the four of them become a single, thrashing entity howling about a girl who was thrown out of their school when they were in ninth grade for coming to campus, drunk and with a horde of mice in her coat pockets when she was suspended.

“They would rather hurt us than help us,” Ilana pants into the mic, practicing his stage banter.

Next weekend they have a rec center show, so they’re playing as they would live, a ceaseless wall of distortion, feedback, and mind-reading. Just one twenty-minute song made up of all their other songs that never stops and never sounds the same. I pick up on their gestures—that Katie looks up to the ceiling when she’s feeling some kind of solo is coming, that Ilana wraps her fingers around the mic clip when she’s going to ramble something deep-throated and furious between songs. Ilana is magic: pliable in the spine, defiant with her fist in the air, regularly wrapping the mic cord around her neck and limbs. By the time practice is over, she is mummified, and everyone else is having cigs while Ilana unravels herself.

When she catches her breath, she asks if they can write a song about me—Mickey at the bat. She’s asked me for weeks, ever since I moved in. But I’m not allowed to talk about it, only with Mom or a lawyer or an approved mental health professional. But it was on the news. I tell her she can write about that, but she says it’s not the same without my perspective.

“You know in your bones why a person might want to hit her best friend’s boyfriend with a baseball bat,” I tell her.

I am grateful that the public story, the side that gets to be on television and the AOL homepage, is some bland account of desire and gossip.

I don’t want to think about it, but I do a lot when I’m with these girls because I miss having girlfriends. I miss having someone who is my own best friend.

*

After practice, Ilana, Rachel, and I make a flyer for the show. I cut out a close-up of the president’s face from the New York Times and tape it to a sheet of computer paper, cross out his eyes with big, scribbly X’s and collage a picture of a bubbly, infected tongue over his derpy mouth.

We take turns writing band names around the image: Louise Wise and six others made up of people I don’t know. At the top, in big block letters, Ilana writes BANDS AGAINST BUSH 7. Rachel will get it photocopied by a boy she used to date who works at the overpriced copy shop. No one else in town will do it.

When Rachel goes home, I ask Ilana to write down the lyrics to “Deanna” for me.

She was drunk and she got nude

And you took pictures? Fuck you, dude

Got them developed in one-hour

Took them to school to wield your power

She threw her pet mice at a cop

She threw her pet mice at a cop

She threw her pet mice at a cop

Her paranoia wouldn’t stop

The whole school looks at her and laughs

We would like to feed you glass

Deanna breaks down in the halls

Suspended? It should have been your balls

She threw her pet mice at a cop

She threw her pet mice at a cop

She threw her pet mice at a cop

Her paranoia wouldn’t stop

Before she’s allowed back at our school

She comes to campus, broke the rules

Now her life has come undone

Cuz you think exploitation’s fun

The lyrics me sick with recognition. The lyrics make me want to try something new.

• 0