Emergency Band Meeting (Mandatory)

The rehearsal space smelled like old beer mats and somebody else’s sweat, which was about right for a Tuesday in a unit behind a tyre shop in Camden. Bess shouldered the door open with her drum bag, catching the edge of it on the same bit of carpet that had been peeling up since November. She kicked it flat without looking. Three years of muscle memory for a building that wasn’t even theirs.

The room was already wrong. Tracy had arranged the folding chairs in a semicircle facing the whiteboard, and the whiteboard had been wiped clean of last week’s setlist notes and replaced with a single heading in blue marker: EMERGENCY MEETING — MANDATORY ATTENDANCE — NO EXCEPTIONS. Underlined twice. Each chair had a printed booklet on it. Bess picked up the nearest one, fanned the pages with her thumb. Fourteen pages. Stapled. With a contents page.

“You’re early,” Tracy said from behind the mixing desk, where she was labelling XLR cables with a Brother P-Touch. She didn’t look up. “That’s a first.”

“Got bored of staring at me ceiling.” Bess dropped her drum bag against the back wall and flipped to page two of the booklet. Section 1.1: Unauthorised Modification of Arranged Compositions. “Trace. What the fuck is this.”

“It’s an agenda.”

“It’s fourteen pages.”

“Thirteen and a half, if you discount the appendix.” Tracy clicked the P-Touch and peeled off a label. She pressed it onto the cable with her thumbnail, smoothing it flat with the kind of care a surgeon would reserve for sutures. “I couldn’t get it under ten without losing the subsection structure.”

Bess watched Tracy’s hands. The P-Touch was steady. The label was straight. But when Tracy set the labeller down to reach for the next cable, her fingers twitched against the desk surface, a quick involuntary flex before she picked the tool back up. Steady again. The twitch happened a second time when she reached for a fresh tape cartridge. Bess filed it and said nothing.

“So what’s the emergency, then? We get dropped? Soph finally snort something off the wrong table? What.”

Tracy finally looked at her. Brown eyes, flat and serious, the kind of expression that had earned Tracy the nickname ‘The Headmistress’ among their crew. “Someone,” she said, “changed two chords in the bridge of ‘Glitter Bomb’ without submitting a revision request through the proper channels.”

Bess stared at her.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Two chords.”

“Two chords. In the bridge. Bars forty-three through forty-six. The original progression is F sharp minor to A major to D major to E major. Someone has been playing F sharp minor to A major to B minor to E major. Consistently. For the last three rehearsals.”

Bess felt something shift in her chest. A small, private alarm. She kept her face exactly where it was — bored, half-annoyed, the default mask she wore when Tracy got like this. She turned to page four of the agenda. Section 2.3: Protocol for Harmonic Adjustments.

“There’s a protocol for harmonic adjustments,” Bess read aloud.

“Since January.”

“Since January.”

“I circulated it.”

“Did you.”

“Page eleven. Email chain. I copied everyone.”

Bess flipped to page eleven. There was indeed a screenshot of an email, with Tracy’s address at the top and the subject line RE: REVISED CREATIVE WORKFLOW — ACTION REQUIRED. The timestamp read January 14th. Bess did not remember this email. She was fairly certain nobody remembered this email.

The door banged open and Soph blew in like a weather system, rainbow hair catching the strip light, combat boots loud on the concrete. She was mid-sentence before she was fully through the door.

“—and I told him, I told him, if he thinks I’m wearing that mesh top for a matinee he can shove it up his—— what’s this?” She picked up a booklet, turned it upside down, turned it back. “Is this a test?”

“It’s an agenda,” Tracy said.

“It’s got a contents page, Trace.”

“All professional documents have a contents page.”

“We’re a punk band, not a law firm.”

Bess watched Soph drop into a chair and immediately start doodling on the cover of her booklet, drawing a stick figure with a guitar and comically large genitals. Soph did this when she was restless. Soph was always restless. But her gray eyes kept flicking to the whiteboard, and Bess could see her jaw working the way it did when she was chewing on something she hadn’t said yet.

Ruby arrived seventeen minutes late, which was early for Ruby. She moved through the door the way she moved through most of life: slowly, with a faint smile and no particular urgency. Her bass case dragged behind her on its wheels. She smelled like cheap weed and the vanilla body spray she used to cover up cheap weed, and her eyes had that soft, half-lidded quality that meant she’d been smoking on the bus.

“Yo,” Ruby said, and lowered herself into a chair with the controlled descent of someone who had thought very carefully about the physics of sitting down.

“You’re stoned,” Tracy said.

“I’m relaxed.” Ruby picked up the booklet, held it at arm’s length, squinted at it. “This got pictures?”

“It’s an agenda, Ruby.”

“Agendas don’t got pictures?”

“This one doesn’t have pictures.”

“That’s a shame.” Ruby put the booklet down on the chair next to her and used it as a coaster for her phone. “I’d have paid attention if it had pictures.”

Bess almost smiled. Almost. She was too busy watching Tracy’s hands. The P-Touch was back in them, labelling a cable that Bess was fairly certain had already been labelled last week. Tracy’s thumbnail pressed the label flat. Pressed it again. Pressed it a third time. The label was not going anywhere. Tracy pressed it a fourth time.

“Where’s Kristy?” Soph asked, feet up on the chair in front of her, doodling intensified.

“Outside,” Tracy said. “She’ll be in.”

“Doing what?”

Tracy didn’t answer. Bess knew what, because she’d passed the corridor on the way in. Kristy was leaning against the wall by the sound booth, her pink sidecut freshly tousled, laughing at something the sound engineer — Dan, twenty-six, recently single, unfortunate beard — had said. Kristy’s hand was on his arm. She did this. She stood in doorways and touched men’s arms and laughed and it was never quite clear whether she was genuinely interested or whether she was performing a one-woman show called Anything But This Room.

“We’re starting without her,” Tracy said, and clicked the P-Touch one final time.

Bess sat down. She crossed her arms. She uncrossed them. She picked up the agenda and turned to the section on ‘Glitter Bomb’ — page seven, Section 4.1: Incident Report — and there it was. Two audio files had been attached as QR codes. One labelled REFERENCE (ORIGINAL ARRANGEMENT) and one labelled EVIDENCE (UNAUTHORISED VERSION). Tracy had made QR codes. Tracy had uploaded audio evidence to a cloud server and generated QR codes for a fourteen-page agenda about two chords in a bridge of a song that was, at best, their fourth-best song.

Bess’s stomach did something she didn’t appreciate.

She knew those chords. She knew them because she’d played them. Three rehearsals ago, maybe four, during the bridge of ‘Glitter Bomb,’ she’d shifted the ride pattern and dropped a fill that landed wrong against the D major. The D major had felt stale to her, felt like a holdover from a draft that had been written two years ago when they were still figuring out what the band sounded like. She’d played through the fill and heard, in her head, what a B minor would do underneath it — darken the bridge, give it weight, make the E major resolution feel earned instead of perfunctory. She’d mentioned it to nobody. She’d played it quietly in the mix, low enough that maybe nobody would notice, and then a little louder the next rehearsal, and a little louder the one after that.

Tracy had noticed. Tracy had been sitting at the keyboards with her back to the drum riser and she had heard two changed chords buried under a ride cymbal and a snare fill, and she had gone home and printed fourteen pages about it.

Bess looked up from the agenda. Tracy was standing at the whiteboard now, uncapping a fresh marker, drawing a table with columns headed DATE, REHEARSAL NUMBER, and OBSERVED DEVIATION. Her hands were steady on the marker. The marker was steady because her hands were on it. Bess understood the arithmetic of that now.

“Tracy,” Bess said.

“The first documented instance was March ninth,” Tracy said, writing the date in neat block capitals. “Second instance, March sixteenth. Third——”

“Tracy.”

“——March twenty-third, which was Tuesday of last week, at approximately——”

“Tracy.”

Tracy stopped. Marker hovering. She didn’t turn around.

“It was me,” Bess said.

The room went the kind of quiet that only happens when four people stop pretending they weren’t all thinking the same thing. Soph’s pen stopped moving. Ruby’s head tilted. Even the buzzing of the strip light overhead seemed to wait.

Tracy turned. She looked at Bess. The marker was still in her hand, and her grip on it was the steadiest thing in the room.

“I know,” Tracy said.

“You knew?” Soph swung her legs off the chair. “You knew and you still printed——how many pages is this?”

“Thirteen and a half.”

“Thirteen and a half pages! For two chords! That Bess changed! That we’ve been playing for weeks and nobody died from!”

“The issue isn’t the chords,” Tracy said. She set the marker down on the whiteboard tray. Set it down carefully. Parallel to the edge. “The issue is process.”

“The issue is process,” Soph repeated, in a voice that was doing air quotes with its tone.

“Yes.”

“We’re in a punk band, Tracy.”

“Yes, Soph, I’m aware of what genre of music we——”

“In a punk band. In a room above a tyre shop. And you’ve made us QR codes.”

Bess stood up. Not fast, not dramatic, just the motion of a woman who’d been sitting too long on a folding chair that was digging into the back of her thighs. She picked up the agenda. She held it. Fourteen pages — thirteen and a half — of Tracy’s neat formatting, Tracy’s subsections, Tracy’s QR codes and incident dates and protocol references. She could feel the weight of the staples.

“I changed the chords because the D major was dead,” Bess said. Quiet. Direct. The way she said everything that mattered. “It’s been dead since we recorded the demo. The B minor gives the bridge somewhere to go. Makes the E feel like it means something instead of just landing there because that’s what it always did.”

Tracy’s jaw tightened. Bess watched the muscle in it work, the clench and release. Tracy was not a big woman. She was short and sharp-featured and she ran the band the way she ran everything in her life: with the complete and immovable conviction that if she did not hold every thread, everything would unravel. She was usually right about this. That was the worst part.

“You didn’t submit a revision request,” Tracy said.

“No.”

“You didn’t consult the arrangement document.”

“Didn’t know there was one.”

“Page eleven. January email.”

“I don’t read your emails, Trace. Nobody reads your emails. They’re four thousand words long and they’ve got bullet points.”

Tracy flinched. It was small — a contraction around the eyes, a tightening of the mouth — and it was gone before anyone else in the room would have clocked it. Bess clocked it. Bess always clocked it, because Bess had been watching Tracy hold this band together with both hands and her teeth for three years, and she knew what Tracy looked like when something got through.

The door opened. Kristy drifted in smelling of someone else’s aftershave, her blue eyes scanning the room with the quick tactical awareness of a woman who had spent enough of her life reading tension to know when a room was full of it.

“Did I miss anything?” Kristy said, smiling.

Nobody answered her. She sat down next to Ruby, who handed her the booklet. Kristy looked at it. Looked at the whiteboard. Looked at Tracy’s marker line and Bess’s set jaw. She put the booklet down on her lap and didn’t say anything else.

Tracy picked the marker back up. Her hand was steady because the marker was in it.

“We’ll proceed to Section 5,” she said. “Disciplinary Framework.”

“You’ve got a disciplinary framework?” Soph was on her feet now, booklet in one hand, doodle-covered cover facing the room. “For a punk band?”

“It’s a graduated response system. Verbal warning, written warning, creative review——”

“A creative review! Like a performance review! For artists!”

Ruby raised one hand, slowly, like she was in a classroom she wasn’t sure she’d enrolled in. “Can I say something?”

“No,” Tracy and Soph said at the same time.

Bess set the agenda down on her chair. She walked to the drum riser. She sat behind her kit, not to play, just to have somewhere to put herself that wasn’t a folding chair in a semicircle facing a whiteboard. The stool was cold. The ride cymbal caught the strip light and threw a disc of glare across the ceiling.

She looked at Tracy. Tracy looked at her. The room hummed with the specific energy of five women who loved each other and were about to prove it badly.

“Play the bridge,” Bess said.

Tracy blinked. “What?”

“Play the bridge. On the keyboard. The original chords. Play the D major.”

“I’m not going to——”

“Play it, Trace. Then play the B minor. And tell me which one sounds like a song.”

Tracy’s fingers curled at her sides. The marker was on the whiteboard tray. Her hands were empty and they were shaking, a fine tremor in both of them, visible in the strip light, and she shoved them into the pockets of her jacket before anyone else could see.

Bess saw.

“We’re not playing anything,” Tracy said. “We’re in a meeting.”

“We’re in a room with instruments,” Bess said. “That’s what the room is for.”

Tracy’s mouth opened. Closed. She pulled her hands deeper into her pockets. The agenda sat on five chairs, its staples catching light, its QR codes pointing to cloud-stored evidence of two changed chords in a song about heartbreak and cheap mascara.

“Section 5.2,” Tracy said, and her voice was steady even if nothing else was. “Grounds for Written Warning.”

Soph threw her booklet at the whiteboard. It bounced off the tray and the marker rolled to the floor. Nobody picked it up.

Soph’s booklet hit the whiteboard with a sound like a pigeon flying into a window. The marker rolled under the drum riser. The agenda lay across five chairs with its QR codes pointing to documents nobody would ever read on purpose, and Tracy stood there with her hands buried in her jacket like she was hiding stolen goods.

The room held three seconds of perfect silence.

“Right,” Soph said. “That’s had it. I’m chairing this meeting now.”

“You can’t chair the meeting,” Tracy said. “I called the meeting. I set the agenda. There’s a structure—”

“Agenda item one: stuff it.” Soph grabbed the whiteboard marker from the floor — she had to crawl halfway under the drum riser to get it, and her rainbow hair swept through a puddle of something that was either spilled beer or spilled energy drink, and honestly the rehearsal space floor had never been a place for a woman with standards. She came back up with the marker clamped between her teeth, hauled herself onto the folding table at the front of the room, and crossed her legs underneath her. The table wobbled. A stack of Tracy’s printed appendices slid off the edge and fanned across the lino.

Tracy’s left eye twitched.

“Item two,” Soph said, pulling the marker from her mouth. She wrote on the whiteboard in huge letters, pressing hard enough that the marker squeaked: WHO DIED AND MADE U BOSS. She underlined it twice. “Open floor.”

Bess, sitting behind her kit with her sticks across her knees, let out a single sharp laugh that sounded like a snare hit. Ruby was lying on the floor between two guitar cases with her eyes half-closed, and she raised one hand in slow approval. Kristy had migrated to the corner again where Dave the sound engineer was pretending to coil cables, and Kristy was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and her pink sidecut falling across one eye, watching the room like a chess match she hadn’t decided which side of yet.

“This is not—” Tracy pulled her hands from her pockets, seemed to realize she’d done it, and crossed her arms instead. “This isn’t how meetings work.”

“Right, yeah, your meetings. Your meetings.” Soph swung her legs against the table edge, heels thunking the wood. “Where do I start. Oh, I know.” She held up one finger. “Last October. Leeds. The sock incident.”

Bess groaned.

“Tracy told Ruby she couldn’t wear orange socks on stage because they clashed with the stage lighting design.” Soph turned to the room with her arms spread wide, a game show host revealing the prize. “Stage lighting design. We’re a punk band. We had four PAR cans and a desk lamp someone had gaffer-taped to a mic stand.”

“I never said desk lamp,” Tracy said.

“It was a desk lamp, Trace. Bess, was that a desk lamp?”

“Desk lamp,” Bess confirmed. She spun a drumstick between her fingers. “Halogen. From Wilko.”

“From Wilko,” Soph repeated, savoring each syllable. She wrote DESK LAMP on the whiteboard and underlined it. “The manager of Sparklemax dictated sock colour under a Wilko desk lamp. This is where we are. This is what our lives have become.”

Ruby spoke from the floor without opening her eyes. “She told me orange was a confidence colour. Said it’d make me look too relaxed.”

“You are too relaxed,” Tracy said.

“And whose fault is that? I was born this way, babe. Came out the womb chilled.”

Soph was on a roll now, the energy building in her chest the way it did before a gig, that loose electric feeling where she could say anything and the crowd would follow. She could feel the room pulling toward her, the gravity shifting from Tracy’s clipboard to Soph’s table. It felt good. It felt like the old days, before agendas and sub-clauses and appendices, when they’d been five girls in a garage making noise because noise was better than silence.

“Setlists,” Soph said, holding up a second finger. “Setlist order. Tracy picks the setlist. Tracy picks the order. Tracy picks which song opens, which song closes, which song goes in the middle, what key we play it in, whether Soph is allowed to talk between songs—”

“I never said allowed—”

“Page nine.” Soph grabbed one of the fallen agenda booklets and flipped it open. “‘Front-of-house interaction: recommended duration thirty seconds, maximum forty-five, approved topics: band name, city name, next single.’ Approved topics. I need approval to say hello to Bristol.”

Tracy’s mouth thinned. “There were complaints about the Swindon show. You talked for four minutes about a dog you’d seen at the service station.”

“That dog was brilliant, Tracy. That dog had more stage presence than half the support acts we’ve had. And you know what, the crowd loved it. They loved the dog. You know what they didn’t love? When you cut me off by starting the click track early because I’d exceeded my forty-five-second dog window.”

The room was laughing. Even Bess was grinning behind her kit, that rare full grin she saved for moments when someone else was doing the fighting for her. Ruby had sat up cross-legged on the floor, her eyes reddened at the edges, a lazy smile on her face.

Soph fed on it. The laughter was fuel and she was burning through it fast.

“But you know what the best one is? The absolute best one?” Soph leaned forward on the table, both palms flat on the surface. “Setlist for the Manchester show last month. I’m not allowed to open with ‘Glitter Bomb’ anymore. Remember that? ‘Glitter Bomb,’ the song that got us signed, the song that has a million streams, the song they play on the radio. Tracy moved it to slot six. Between two songs nobody knows. Because the data—”

“The streaming analytics showed—”

"—the data said we should bury our biggest song in the middle of the set because it ‘peaked audience energy too early.’ " Soph stared at Tracy. “You moved our hit to slot six because a spreadsheet told you people would get tired of enjoying themselves.”

Tracy uncrossed her arms. Her hands were doing the thing again, that restless twitch at her sides, and she grabbed the back of the nearest chair and gripped it. “Manchester was a strategic decision based on retention metrics and—”

“It was you telling us what to do because you like telling us what to do.” Soph’s voice had dropped. The grin was still on her face but it had thinned, gone sharp at the edges. “That’s what this is. All of it. The agenda, the QR codes, the sock policy. You’re not managing a band, Tracy. You’re running a personality cult with a rhythm section.”

Nobody laughed.

The silence sat in the room like a fifth person.

Tracy’s knuckles went white on the chair. “I’m keeping this band functional—”

“You’re keeping this band in a box.” Soph was off the table now, standing, and she was shorter than Tracy but she was louder and right now that mattered more. “I’m the singer. I’m the one standing at the front. I’m the one with the mic and the crowd and the—”

“And there it is.” Tracy’s voice went cold. Flat. Controlled in a way that was worse than shouting. “There’s the real agenda item. Soph thinks she should run the band because Soph stands at the front.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You’ve thought it since we started. Since day one. The singer’s the star, the rest of you are backup. That’s what you believe, isn’t it?”

Soph opened her mouth. Nothing came out. That loose electric feeling from before had curdled into something hot and tight in her stomach, something she couldn’t joke away, and she hated Tracy for finding it and pulling it out in front of everyone.

“I never said I should run anything,” Soph said. “I said you don’t get to run everything.”

“Name one decision I’ve made that wasn’t in the band’s interest.”

“Sock colour,” Bess said from behind the kit. She hadn’t moved. She was watching the room with those green eyes, steady, her sticks resting across her thighs.

“That’s not—” Tracy started.

“Setlist order,” Kristy said from the corner. Everyone turned. Kristy was still leaning against the wall, her arms still crossed, her blue eye visible through the pink curtain of hair. She hadn’t moved either, but her voice carried that low Russian drawl that made every word sound like it had been considered for a long time before leaving her mouth. “Key changes. Merch designs. Press photos. The font on the poster. The font, Tracy. You made us change the font.”

“The font was illegible—”

“It was a punk font. It was supposed to be illegible. That’s the whole point of punk fonts.”

Kristy held Tracy’s gaze for three full seconds. Then she turned back to Dave the sound engineer and said something quiet that made Dave laugh and look at the floor.

Soph felt the room shift. Kristy hadn’t said much. Kristy never said much. But that was the thing about Kristy’s silence: when she finally opened her mouth, it meant she’d been thinking about it for weeks.

Tracy seemed to feel it too. Her grip on the chair shifted and she pulled herself taller, that short frame straightening like she was bracing against wind. “Every single decision I have made has been to keep this band alive. You think labels look at five girls who can’t agree on a font and think investment? They want structure. They want a point of contact. They want someone who’ll—”

“Oi.” Ruby’s voice came lazy and slow from the floor. “What’s a creative input waiver?”

The room went still again, differently this time.

Tracy’s face did something complicated. “What?”

“Creative input waiver.” Ruby was examining her own fingernails with great interest. “You know. The thing you made me sign. Last year. After the Brighton show. You said it was a formality, label stuff, boring paperwork, sign here please, there’s a good girl.” She looked up. “I was high, Tracy. I was very high. I signed it because you told me it was boring and I wanted to go get a kebab.”

Tracy let go of the chair.

“What’s a creative input waiver?” Soph said.

“It’s—” Tracy started.

“What does it say?”

“It’s a standard document that—”

“Ruby.” Soph turned. “What did you sign?”

Ruby scratched her nose. “Dunno. Didn’t read it. Wanted a kebab.” She said this with no particular shame, the same way she might have reported the weather. “But I remember the title because it had the word ‘waiver’ in it and I thought that was funny. Waiver. Waver. Like waves. I thought it was about the sea.”

“It’s not about the sea,” Tracy said, and her voice had lost its cold flatness. What replaced it was something smaller, something defensive, something that knew it had been caught. “It’s a formal acknowledgment that creative decisions rest with the band’s management structure. It’s standard. Lots of bands—”

“Lots of bands make their bass player secretly sign away creative input?” Bess stood up. The drumsticks clattered to the floor. “Since when do we have a management structure that requires waivers?”

“Since I’ve been the one handling every single piece of admin, every contract, every rider, every—”

“Since when does that mean you get waivers from us?”

Tracy’s hands were shaking again. She could feel them and she couldn’t stop them and she couldn’t put them in her pockets because everyone was looking at her hands now, everyone could see, and the agenda was scattered across the floor and the whiteboard said WHO DIED AND MADE U BOSS in thick black marker that would take solvent to remove.

Soph looked at Tracy’s hands. She looked at Tracy’s face, that face she’d known for years, that stubborn angular face with its Irish-Japanese set to the jaw, and she felt the anger in her chest meet something else underneath it. Something that recognized what it was looking at. She didn’t want to recognize it. Recognition would make this harder and this was already hard enough.

“When did you print all this?” Soph said, quieter now.

Tracy didn’t answer.

“Tracy. When did you print fourteen pages about two chords?”

“Last night.” Tracy’s voice came out thin. “Two in the morning. I couldn’t sleep.”

The room held its breath. Ruby sat cross-legged on the floor, no longer smiling. Bess stood behind her kit with her hands empty at her sides. Kristy had gone still in her corner, no longer talking to Dave, her attention fixed on the short woman by the chair.

Soph climbed off the table. She picked up one of the agenda booklets from the floor and held it in both hands. Fourteen pages. Single-sided. Color-coded headers. A contents page with actual page numbers. QR codes linking to cloud-stored evidence about two changed chords in a song about heartbreak and cheap mascara, and this had been printed at two in the morning by a woman who couldn’t sleep.

“This isn’t about the chords,” Soph said.

Tracy’s jaw tightened. Her eyes were bright and wet and furious about it. “Section 5.2,” she said. “Grounds for Written Warning.”

Nobody answered her. The booklet sat in Soph’s hands, heavy with paper and staples and something that couldn’t be named in a meeting because meetings required language and language required a box and Tracy had spent years building boxes for things that didn’t fit in boxes.

Soph set the booklet on the table. She didn’t throw it this time. She set it down with the kind of care that was worse than throwing it, because it meant she’d stopped being angry enough to throw things, and what was underneath the anger was too big and too honest for a room with a Wilko desk lamp and a whiteboard full of accusations.

“We should talk about whatever this actually is,” Soph said. “Not 5.2. Not the chords. Not the socks.”

Tracy’s chin lifted. “This is what it actually is.”

“Bollocks,” Bess said from behind the kit. One word. Final.

Tracy flinched.

The rehearsal room emptied the way rock bands empty rooms: in stages, with noise, without consensus. Soph left first, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the whiteboard. Ruby followed, not slamming anything, trailing smoke from a joint she’d lit on the way out as though the meeting had been a particularly boring support slot. Bess packed her sticks into her bag with sharp, military motions, zipped it, and looked at Tracy for a long three seconds before shouldering past without a word.

Kristy stayed.

She’d been sitting on the arm of the sofa near the sound desk for the last twenty minutes of the argument, legs crossed, phone in her lap, saying nothing. The sound engineer she’d been flirting with earlier had gone home. The room had that post-gig hum of nothing, all the energy spent and only the debris left. Kristy watched Tracy collect the scattered copies of the agenda from the table, stacking them with her fingertips as though the pages might contaminate her. Fourteen pages times five copies. Tracy squared the edges against the tabletop, tapped them once, and placed them in the recycling bin. Then she took them out of the recycling bin, smoothed the top page, and put them back in again.

Kristy knew what control looked like when it was breaking. She’d watched her mother reorganise the kitchen cupboards three times in the week before the doctors gave the diagnosis, back in Minsk, back when Kristy was seventeen and still called Katsiaryna. Her mother had labelled every jar. She had alphabetised the spices. She had bought a clipboard. The clipboard had a spreadsheet on it. The spreadsheet was for meal planning. Nobody needed a meal-planning spreadsheet when there were two weeks of chemotherapy left and everyone in the apartment knew it.

You didn’t need a fourteen-page agenda for two changed chords, either.

Tracy moved to the cable box by the amp stack. She crouched, began coiling XLR leads that had been coiled five minutes ago. Kristy could see the spiral marks where the cable ties had pressed into the rubber. These cables were packed. These cables had been packed since last Thursday’s session. Tracy was unpacking them to repack them, her fingers working the loops with the same automatic precision she used for chord shapes, and her shoulders had that specific rigidity that meant she was either about to cry or about to start another argument, and Kristy decided she’d rather find out which than sit on the sofa arm pretending to check her phone.

“Those are already coiled,” Kristy said. Her accent sat heavier when she wasn’t performing for anyone. The Russian consonants came back. The careful English polish dropped away.

Tracy didn’t turn around. “The crossover on this one is wrong. You coil from the male end, not the female. Everyone in this band coils from the female end and it twists the shielding.”

“Tray.”

“I’ve told Ruby a hundred times. She does this thing where she—” Tracy’s hands stopped moving on the cable. She was still crouching, still facing the amp stack, still not looking at Kristy. The cable hung limp between her fingers. “She does this over-under thing but she starts from the wrong end and it’s—” She stopped.

Kristy stood up. She crossed the room in four steps, her boots loud on the concrete floor, and crouched beside Tracy. Not touching. Close enough that Tracy could feel the warmth of her, close enough that the blue of Tracy’s hair caught the strip light and Kristy could see the split ends that Tracy would never admit to having. Tracy’s hands were shaking. Not dramatically, not the way they’d shaken during the meeting when she’d gripped the agenda like a life raft. This was smaller. A fine tremor, the kind you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it, running through her fingers and into the cable she was holding.

“You didn’t come here to coil cables,” Kristy said.

Tracy dropped the cable. She stood up, too fast, and her knee cracked. She winced and pressed her palm against the amp stack to steady herself. Her eyes were dry. That was the worst part. She wasn’t crying. She was standing there with dry eyes and a jaw set so tight Kristy could see the muscle ticking in her cheek, and the dry eyes were worse than tears because tears would have meant the pressure had found a release valve, and Tracy’s pressure had no valve. Tracy’s pressure had a fourteen-page agenda and a creative input waiver and a whiteboard full of clauses, and none of it was letting anything out. It was all holding everything in.

“The meeting was necessary,” Tracy said. Her voice had that flat manager tone, the one she used when she was emailing promoters, the one that made her sound like she’d been raised in a boardroom instead of a council estate in Cork. “We can’t have unauthorised changes to the setlist. It undermines the brand cohesion and—”

“Tray.” Kristy stayed crouching. She looked up at Tracy from below, which felt strange, because Kristy was used to looking at Tracy from across a room where Tracy stood behind a mic stand and managed everything. From down here, Tracy looked shorter. Tracy looked twenty-three and tired and scared, and Kristy’s chest did something complicated and painful that she ignored because ignoring complicated painful things was how you survived losing your family and your country and your language all in the same year.

Tracy’s mouth opened. Closed. She pressed her lips together. The muscle in her cheek ticked again. “Marcus called,” she said.

Marcus. The A&R rep from Deadwave Records. Kristy knew the name because Tracy said it the way you’d say the name of a doctor who’d ordered a second scan. Carefully. With weight. Kristy had met Marcus once, at the showcase gig in Camden last March. He wore a jacket that cost more than their van and shook hands like he was doing you a favour.

“When?” Kristy asked.

“Tuesday.” Tracy picked up a capo from the amp stack and turned it over in her fingers. Clicked it open. Clicked it shut. Open. Shut. The small mechanical sound was the only thing in the room besides the strip light’s electrical hum. “He said the label’s reviewing the roster. End of quarter. He said they want bands with a clear leadership structure. He said—” Tracy clicked the capo shut one more time and held it closed, her knuckle white. “He said five-piece bands without a defined frontperson or manager tend to look ‘unfocused’ to the marketing team. His word. Unfocused.”

Kristy stood up slowly. She took the capo out of Tracy’s hand, and Tracy let her, which was the thing that told Kristy everything. Tracy didn’t let go of things. Tracy held on. Tracy controlled and managed and organised and filed, and she did not let people take objects out of her hands during conversations about object-taking.

“So you printed fourteen pages,” Kristy said.

“I needed to show structure. If they’re watching, if they’re reviewing, I needed—” Tracy’s voice cracked on the last word. One crack, small, immediately sealed. She cleared her throat. “I needed it to look like someone was in charge. Like we weren’t just five girls mucking about in a rehearsal space arguing about chords.”

“We are five girls mucking about in a rehearsal space arguing about chords.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it.”

Kristy set the capo down on the amp. She turned and looked at the whiteboard, still covered in Tracy’s handwriting. Agenda items, numbered. Sub-clauses. The word MUTINY in Soph’s scrawl, underlined twice. Someone had drawn a crude picture of a sock next to item 7.3. The whiteboard looked like the inside of Tracy’s head: everything categorised, everything filed, everything given a number and a section and a box, and underneath all of it the thing that didn’t fit in any box, the thing that made Tracy’s hands shake and her voice crack and her eyes stay dry because crying would be unprofessional and Tracy Sparklemax was nothing if not professional.

Kristy walked to the guitar stands by the back wall. She picked up Tracy’s rhythm guitar, a battered Fender Jaguar in seafoam green that had been Tracy’s since she was sixteen, since before the band, since before Ireland felt like home. The neck had a chip near the third fret from the time Soph had knocked it off its stand at a gig in Birmingham. Tracy had been furious for three days and then never mentioned it again.

“What are you doing?” Tracy asked. Her voice had lost the manager tone. What was left was thinner, younger, more Cork than she’d have wanted anyone to hear.

Kristy slung the guitar strap over her shoulder. The Jag was heavier than her own guitar, set up differently, strung with a slightly thicker gauge. She found the pick taped to the headstock, peeled it off. She stood in front of Tracy, who was still leaning against the amp stack with her arms crossed, and she played the opening four bars of ‘Glitter Bomb.’

The original chords. The ones from the demo, from the first recording, from before any of this. C sharp minor to A, the bridge holding on the E, the change that Bess had altered sitting in at the fifth bar. Kristy played it the old way, then stopped. She looked at Tracy.

“Play the new one,” Tracy said. Her voice was quiet.

Kristy shifted her hand. Bess’s change. The A slid to a B instead of holding, and the progression opened up, lifted, did the thing that Bess had heard in her head while sitting behind the kit at two in the morning, the thing that made the bridge breathe. It wasn’t better or worse. It was different. It was Bess.

Tracy winced. A full-body flinch, shoulders drawing in, eyes closing for a half-second. Then her mouth did something that wasn’t a smile and wasn’t a grimace and lived in the space between, and it settled into something softer, and the muscle in her cheek stopped ticking.

“It sounds good,” Tracy said. The words came out like they cost her something. “It sounds—” She stopped. She uncrossed her arms. Crossed them again. “I know it sounds good. I knew it sounded good when she did it. That’s not the point. The point was that she didn’t—”

“Ask permission.”

“Tell anyone. Run it past the group. Fill out a change request. Anything.”

Kristy played the B chord again, let it ring. The sustain filled the room, bounced off the concrete walls. “Some things don’t fit in a form, Tray.”

Tracy looked at the guitar, at Kristy’s fingers on the fretboard, at the chipped paint near the third fret. Her eyes were still dry. But something behind them had shifted, a door opening a crack, not all the way, just enough to let in a sliver of whatever was on the other side of the fourteen pages and the clauses and the capo clicking open and shut.

“I don’t know how to do this without controlling it,” Tracy said. “I don’t know what I am in this band if I’m not the one holding it together.”

“You’re the one who booked the rehearsal space for next Thursday.”

“That’s literally my job.”

“And you’re the one who remembered Kristy’s birthday last year when nobody else did.”

“You’re Kristy.”

“You know what I mean.” Kristy took the guitar off and set it back on the stand. She laid it down gently, the way you’d lay down something that belonged to someone you cared about. “You’re the one who stays after everyone leaves and coils cables that don’t need coiling because you can’t stand the idea of this place being messy, because messy means falling apart.”

Tracy said nothing.

Kristy’s phone buzzed in her back pocket. She pulled it out, glanced at the screen. The group chat. Bess. A single word, no punctuation, no emoji, no context. The way Bess communicated when she’d decided something and was giving the rest of them the courtesy of pretending they had a choice.

pub?

Kristy held the phone up so Tracy could see it. Tracy looked at the screen. Looked at it for a long time. Her fingers moved to her own phone, sitting on the amp stack next to the capo. She picked it up. Unlocked it. Opened the keyboard. Her thumbs hovered over the letters.

She typed something. Kristy couldn’t see what. Tracy’s thumb moved to the send button, rested on it, and stayed there. Her screen dimmed. She tapped it back to life. The message sat in the text field, unsent, and Tracy read it again, and her jaw tightened, and she deleted one word, and then another, and then she deleted the whole thing and locked the phone and set it face-down on the amp stack.

“I should finish packing,” Tracy said.

Kristy nodded. She picked up her own bag from the sofa, slung it over her shoulder. She walked to the door. She stopped in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and looked back at Tracy, who had already crouched down beside the cable box and was coiling the XLR lead from the male end this time.

“Tray.”

“Hm.”

“You’re not holding us together. We’re holding each other. You just get to label the boxes.”

Tracy’s hands stopped on the cable. She didn’t look up. Her shoulders rose and fell once, a breath that went deeper than her lungs. She picked up the cable again and kept coiling.

Kristy left. The door clicked shut behind her. The rehearsal room hummed. The strip light buzzed. Tracy’s phone sat face-down on the amp stack, and on its screen, in the dark, the cursor blinked in an empty text field, waiting for words that hadn’t been written yet and might never be. She picked up another cable. She coiled it from the male end. She put it in the box. She took it out. She coiled it again.

The whiteboard watched her with its clauses and its sub-sections and Soph’s drawing of a sock, and the seafoam Jaguar watched from its stand, and the room held the ghost of a B chord ringing against concrete walls, and Tracy Sparklemax stayed in the rehearsal room alone, packing cables that didn’t need packing, because the alternative was standing still, and standing still meant feeling, and feeling meant admitting that the thing she was most afraid of wasn’t the label or the roster review or Marcus and his expensive jacket.

The thing she was most afraid of was that they didn’t need her.

And the thing she was most afraid of after that was that they did, but not in the way she’d taught herself to be needed.