Free The After Girls by Leah Konen

with
way
too much distortion. The floors were dirty and the lighting dim, and the stale smell of sweat and Natty Light filled the air. Around them, the crowd of people, all twenty or so of them, looked about as bored as she was. Apart from a group of girls who must have been the Girlfriends. They banged their heads almost in perfect tandem with the three blond-haired, pock-marked boys of Death Star jumping up and down on stage. That was the thing about The Grove. It was her favorite, for sure, but they weren’t always as selective as they could be in their lineups.
    Max was standing there, arms crossed in front of him, in serious pre-show mode. He’d been nicer since her breakdown, nice for Max, at least. Carter turned to her, stuck his tongue out, and wiggled his head back and forth in a mock-Kiss tribute. She forced herself to laugh, doing a few head bangs herself. But she knew it came out as fake. She just couldn’t help it.
    River Deep didn’t go on for another hour at least.
    The Grove was the first place they’d ever played. She’d been fifteen, they’d just started the band, and she’d finally begun calling her violin a fiddle. Her hair was honey brown then, natural. Two tiny, generic holes in her ears were her only piercings. She barely even knew what makeup was, and Max was nothing to her. Just the nerdy guy in her English class who also hated Chaucer but liked Keats, and wanted to start a band. She was first-string violin in the orchestra, so it only made sense. Once they’d found Carter, the only one weird enough to try his hand at the mandolin (it still looked so strange against his stretched-out body, like it had been made for an elf or a fairy), they were set.
    That first night, they’d opened for another local band who also had no following. Astrid and Ella and a few friends of Max and Carter were the only people in attendance. And yet, Sydney had been seduced by the colored lights and the feel of the stage and the excitement of the unexpected, the not quite knowing how it would turn out, how long she should hold the end note, the happy look on the faces of her friends when they heard something that they liked, the smile Max gave her when she got the riff just right. She’d been hooked on all of it ever since.
    Astrid always loved their shows, and she especially liked their early stuff, all quiet and basic because they didn’t really know how to write. Ella saw things more practically. She thought the new stuff was better, more complex, had a greater chance of getting them into the larger festivals, but Astrid didn’t see it that way. She still had a thing for that first one that Sydney had written with Max, even though Sydney told her over and over that it was far from their best.
    Now, two years later and so much had changed, sure. She had a whole list of things that just weren’t as good and easy as they were back then. But the only thing she really wanted, the one thing that she really missed, was for Astrid to be out there in the crowd, just one more time.
    “You okay?” Carter asked, waving a hand in front of her face. “You look a little dazed. Nervous?” he asked.
    Sometimes Sydney wondered if he liked her. She wondered if things hadn’t happened with Max, whether anything would have, could have happened with Carter. Her mom had always wanted them to date. So had Ella. She supposed that there was no reason why things couldn’t happen still. But as the low lighting picked up his chocolaty eyes and the slightest smattering of freckles along his forehead, she knew for sure that they wouldn’t. Carter always did the right thing, was always so good. She never seemed to like that.
    “I’m fine,” she said, and as she did, she saw Ella and Ben walking in.
    Ella walked slowly towards her and gave her a hug, long and tight. Sydney could feel her arms shaking around her.
    “Are you okay?” Sydney asked as she looked her over. Ella was pale. She almost seemed scared. “Did something