Free September Girls by Bennett Madison

really know what any of that stuff is anyway. I saw you at Kristle’s party, right?”
    “Probably,” she said. “I was there. But I’ve been told that we all look the same. So it could have been someone else, too.”
    “I’m Sam,” I said.
    “Taffany,” she said with a hurried smile, turning to fuss with a rag over a bunch of glasses. “So what are you singing tonight?”
    “I don’t sing.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Oh, sure,” she said. “One of those .” And she slid a big book across the bar to me. The song list. “Everyone sings here,” she said. “Even me. And I really don’t sing, all right? Just remember— no ‘Kokomo.’ ”
    I shrugged and started looking through the book, but I had barely made it through the first page (10,000 Maniacs; 3 Doors Down; 4 Non Blondes; 5th Dimension, The) when there was a screech of feedback and then a voice over the PA. “Jeff? Do we have Jeff here? Let’s get Jeff up here to start the night off with a bang!” I groaned, registering a rustling in the corner of the room, and then my brother was bounding through the crowd to the makeshift stage near the back. I swiveled my stool around to see a leathery guy with a tidal wave of gray hair handing him the microphone. Jeff was clutching a frozen drink with a pink umbrella in his free hand and he began to pogo maniacally, sloshing it everywhere, until the host raised a warning finger at him. Chastened, Jeff lifted his drink to the crowd and the microphone to his mouth.
    “Who here believes ?” he asked breathily. There was a smattering of unenthusiastic applause. “This one’s for my little brother!” he shouted, and then, more quietly, added, offhand, “Who could believe a little more. In something—I don’t really know what.” At that, he launched into an earnest, caterwauling rendition of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
    “Of course,” I heard Taffany mutter. “Just once in my life I want one of these assholes to surprise me by singing something other than ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.’”
    “That’s my brother,” I said apologetically.
    Taffany looked sympathetic.
    I glanced down at the beer in my hands and tried to focus in on it, hoping that it would suddenly develop a new fascinating aspect to distract me. The alternative—paying attention to my brother’s performance—was too unbearable to contemplate. But as hard as I stared, the beer remained boring. When Jeff was at the part of that song that he had decided called for earsplitting screeching, Taffany winced and slid me another Bud even though the first one was only half-empty.
    “Your brother does this a lot, huh?” she asked as he was doing his post-performance victory lap, high-fiving everyone in the audience who could be bullied into it. “I guess he’s the type.”
    “Apparently,” I said.
    “Jimmy’s gonna get sick of him fast,” she said.
    “Jimmy?” I asked.
    “The host. That’s Janice over there.” She pointed to a portly, frosted-haired woman stuffed into a coral-pink halter dress, who was standing behind the sound equipment and fiddling with the knobs. “His wife. They’ve been doing this for years. They don’t appreciate showboaters.”
    Jeff punctuated this with a high-pitched yowl and took a bow before surrendering the mic back to a scowling Jimmy.
    I didn’t budge from my stool at the bar. Taffany kept the beer coming, chatting me up distractedly. The terrible singing kept coming too, but it wasn’t that hard to ignore—not counting the point in the evening when Janice herself abandoned her post at the sound board to perform a bizarre rendition of a song I somehow knew to be from the Broadway musical Les Misérables .
    Taffany paid no attention; she was obviously used to it all. As Janice and the rest of them sang, she gave me tips for successful karaoke: no songs over four and a half minutes; no Meatloaf; nothing too obscure, they won’t get it. I couldn’t tell if she liked me or if she would pretty