Betty's Rock and Roll Reality (On Hiatus)

I stand in front of the armoire in the middle of the night as naked as the day I was born.

Except for my headphones. Although my dad insists that I was probably born wearing those, too. The sound of “The Next Big Thing” by FUNK-E, one of my all-time-favorite 80’s new wave bands, pumps into my ears.

My armoire has been picked clean except for a few clothes I wear every day. I pull out a black t-shirt and a pair of blue plaid shorts. I take the round pink bottle off my dresser and spritz Fantasy by Britney Spears on my wrists and neck until I smell like a walking cupcake. My sister Andrea surprised me with this fragrance last year on my birthday; she knew I’d been eyeing it since it came out the month before.

When I’m a star at the end of this summer, I’ll release my own perfume.

Carefully, I pack the pink bottle into my suitcase, wrapping it in some of my socks.

I pick up my brush next and work the tangles out of my long, black hair. The brush pulls on my scalp in a way that prickles like thousands of little needles.

Mom keeps asking me why I don’t just cut my hair already. I think it’s because as much as taking care of it sucks, it feels like a security blanket. I’ve had the same hairstyle since I was ten years old.

Eventually I give up, wrapping my hair and securing it with an alligator clip before disappearing into the bathroom to put in my contacts.

When I’m dressed, I heave my suitcases up the basement stairs and set them in the living room. The cases carrying my guitar and my oboe are still downstairs. Quiet internal panic ripples through me when the realization hits that I didn’t pack enough oboe reeds to get me through the summer.

I need to make multiple trips to get all my stuff up the stairs. Normally I despise making multiple trips to do anything, but today it’s not even an inconvenience.

In my rush, I accidentally bang my knee on the banister at the top of the stairs, but I barely feel it. My legs are covered in so many strange bruises from the times I’ve forgotten where my body is in proximity to the furniture.

At the top of the stairs, I smell the pot of coffee my mom put on. Coffee at this time of night smells like unmistakable optimism and possibility.

On my trip back down to the basement for the rest of my suitcases, my alarm clock radio switches on to the sounds of the local alternative rock station, but I barely notice it through the next track on my iPod Nano. It’s two AM and I’ve barely slept the night before.

I don’t miss it, though.

I breeze past my stuffed animals scattered on the floor. Carefully, I pick them back up and arrange them in neat rows on my bed. Except for my white rabbit. I take him and unzip my black roller suitcase gently placing him inside. Yesterday, my mom asked me how it is that I, at twenty-one years old, still sleep with dozens of stuffed animals on my bed.

The idea of only having one to keep me company at night for an indefinite amount of time makes me a little nervous, and even then, I almost debated whether I should take one at all.

“Call me when you land in Los Angeles! Don’t forget, Betty!” Mom reminds me for the millionth time since yesterday afternoon. It’s a little annoying hearing her repeat requests, along with her nagging to smile, make eye contact, and say thank-you, even if I am eliminated and don’t make it to the top sixteen.

“You know this will probably be the last time you’ll hear from me for a while,” I point out. “Once I get to the Doubletree, we’re all going to be sequestered.”

“I know! That’s why I want you to call. I’m so excited for you! Hey, are you even listening to me?! Don’t tune me out! You’re gonna go deaf if you don’t turn down the volume!”

Mom complains that I’m “tuning her out” any time I’m wearing my headphones. Never mind the fact that I’ve told her countless times that listening to music helps calm me down.

“I just have my headphones on!” I protest. “My iPod is on pause!”

Mom still wears her oversized navy bathrobe. Her long, grey hair is in loose waves instead of its usual single braid. She insisted she wasn’t going to wake up at two AM to see me off, but I knew she wouldn’t be able to resist saying goodbye to me before this.

I suppose I should really thank her, because she’s kind of the reason I’m taking this adventure.

Back in March, while in the throes of depression after dropping out of college, my mom convinced me to go down to Denver to wait around all day at the Bug Theater. She got this crazy idea that I try out after she saw a news story about nationwide auditions for a new musical reality TV competition.

That cold afternoon at the Bug, I sang for a panel of producers for a show that would be filming in Los Angeles this summer called International Rock-A-Thon, a competition where a rock band would select a new lead singer through a three-month audition process.

I almost said no to going to the audition until my mom told me that the band that I’d be auditioning for was one of my favorite 80s new wave bands.

FUNK-E got me through some rough shit in middle and high school, even if I was wearing diapers when they were first popular and most of their discography consisted of really elaborate, poetic metaphors for sex.

The summer I discovered FUNK-E, Matthew Hoffman, the band’s eccentric lead singer, hanged himself in his hotel room. The band hadn’t played a show since then.

And now here was FUNK-E, coming out of retirement to find a new lead singer to join them on their first world tour in a little over a decade.

The fact that there’s a very real chance their new lead singer could be me makes me squeal with absolute glee like a child tugging on her mother’s apron strings.

I’ve auditioned for reality shows before. I’ve tried out for American Idol three times. Twice I made it to the Hollywood round. And each time I got cut.

But something about this feels different. This is it.

This is the beginning of my heroine’s journey to fame, fortune, and glory beyond measure.

And after the year I’ve had, I deserve a lucky break.

This morning I’m flying out to Los Angeles for casting week. Everyone who made it past the first audition is being flown out to California on the show’s dime for a week of more auditions, interviews with the show’s production staff, and lots of other little formalities to decide on the sixteen finalists who will appear on the show.

“You got everything?” Andrea asks. She grabs the keys out of the bowl on the kitchen counter.

Andrea is just shy of two years older than me and is the spitting image of my mother when she was a young woman; her strawberry blonde hair reaches her waist. Her midnight blue eyes hover over a galaxy of freckles that dance like stars across her pale face. At five foot eight, she easily towers over me, and her strong, shapely figure suggests she could easily kick my ass if not for the fact that Andrea wouldn’t hurt a mosquito.

Meanwhile, I’ve always been my father’s female clone. I inherited his pitch-black hair and eyes that aren’t quite brown but not quite green. Instead, their color reminds me of those little caramel apple suckers you get at Halloween. Where Andrea burns after so much as fifteen minutes outdoors on a summer morning, I eagerly await getting my tan back after the last six months in Colorado have rendered me a ghost. The only thing I didn’t inherit is my father’s towering height. At barely five foot four on tiptoes, I’m easily the smallest person in my family.

“That’s everything.” All my suitcases and instruments are in the living room. My black leather purse, which is shaped like a cat’s head, has my wallet, my plane ticket, a tiny notebook, and my iPod Nano inside.

I’m not allowed to bring my cell phone with me since none of the contestants are allowed any outside contact with the world. Having forgotten to check my phone, I run downstairs to steal a final hopeful glance at the tiny screen on my flip phone.

Dad and I have only spoken a handful of times since Christmas when I failed my math class and dropped out of college. I emptied my savings account and flew back to Colorado in the middle of the night because I was too ashamed to tell my dad what happened.

It seemed a lot easier to live with someone whose disappointment I’m used to than someone whose disappointment terrifies me.

Back in the spring when I found out I was coming to Los Angeles for International Rock-A-Thon, Dad offered to fly me out a few days before I was supposed to be at the Doubletree so I could spend some time in Redlands with him and his wife Ellen. That idea just reeked of awkwardness.

Once I win, maybe things will get better. Maybe we’ll get along and be able to talk to each other without any weirdness.

And maybe he’ll finally say he’s proud of me.

Sebastian, my nine-month-old tuxedo cat, climbs onto my nightstand. He was a Christmas present from my mother after I moved back in with her and Andrea, and I named him after Sebastian Bach. Not the classical composer, but the lead singer of Skid Row. Mom insisted I needed a pet to cheer me up. She wasn’t entirely wrong.

I give Sebastian a good scritch behind his fluffy, black ears. It’ll be the last time I’ll do so for a very long time.

When I’m famous, I will spoil him more than Paris Hilton spoils her little chihuahua.

“Betty! We gotta go!” Andrea urges. I didn’t realize she’d been standing in my doorway.

“I’m just saying goodbye to Sebastian,” I tell her. “Do you think he’ll remember me when I get back? He hasn’t known me for very long.”

“I’m sure he’ll remember your smell.”

Andrea helps me load my things into the back of her clunky silver Jeep Grand Cherokee. I keep promising Andrea that I’ll buy her a brand-new car when I’m famous, but she won’t hear of it. She’s managed to keep the Jeep in one piece since Dad bought it for her when she was a junior in high school. We drive out of the forest, blanketed by the darkness of night where I hope this is the last I will ever see of the nowhere town of Cedar Creek, Colorado.

A weird sadness that I can’t quite name also takes me over.

These dirt roads were the same ones Andrea used to speed on when we would sneak out and go for drives in the middle of the night while Mom was asleep. Andrea would drive faster and faster, and I would stand on the passenger’s seat and poke my head through the run roof and feel the satisfying slap of the wind in my face.

Last year I came home for the weekend near my birthday, and Andrea drove me out to Kenosha Pass to see the beautiful fall colors. On a whim, we kept going until we ended up in Breckenridge, and we discovered a great little Indian restaurant and a good spot to get coffee afterwards. Hell, Andrea knew how to make mundane things like errands to the grocery store fun. We would roll down the windows and scream along to the 90’s grunge and modern alt rock stations on the radio.

I still remember homecoming my junior year when I didn’t have a date and just went alone. That night, I saw Caleb McPheters, a boy I had a crush on for years and years, dancing with a girl from another school who bullied me mercilessly as soon as she and Caleb started dating. Andrea picked me up after the dance and surprised me with a whole flask of root beer vodka that she got from one of her new college friends. She insisted I looked like I needed it more than she did.

Having lived in California with Dad and Ellen for three years and only coming back to Colorado for summer and holidays and occasionally my birthday, I knew when I left home a week after graduating high school that Andrea and I wouldn’t be able to go on our little adventures as often as we used to.

A smile rises to my lips.

I’m being silly. Once I’m rich and famous after winning this show, there will be plenty of chances for Andrea and me to get into shenanigans like we used to.

Except we’ll be doing it in a limousine instead of a beat-up Jeep. There are already plenty of places I’ve been meaning to take her in Los Angeles, and when I’m a star, hopefully that list will be even longer and swankier.

An hour later, the familiar white tents over Denver International Airport appear on the horizon.

Andrea stops at the curb and helps me with my luggage.

“Come back a winner, okay?” Andrea says with a laugh in her voice.

“Believe me, I don’t have a choice. What else am I supposed to do with my life if this doesn’t work out?”

I realize I sound a little melodramatic. But my track record for holding down jobs isn’t the greatest.

Mom is hoping once my Colorado residency is effective again and I’m not paying out the ass in out-of-state tuition, I’ll consider transferring all my credits to Metropolitan State University of Denver and giving the whole college thing…well…the good ol’ college try. I can live at home while I go to school to save money like Andrea has been doing with her art history degree.

In the meantime, Mom’s been nagging me to get a job, and it’s very hard to get a job as a musician in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere.

Instead, I bagged groceries at Slaveway and served coffee at a locally-owned coffee house called The Roasty Pine for about two weeks each in the spring before I was fired each time for snapping at patrons who got snippy with me for taking too long. The customers would yell at me until my hands shook.

The November before last, when I still lived with Dad and Ellen, my evil stepsister Katie (who ironically works as a professional princess) got me a holiday job at a very popular amusement park where one of their mascots is a white duck in a sailor uniform. That lasted for maybe a month. Let’s just say it’s highly frowned upon for said duck and one of his chipmunk friends to explore that…ahem…friendship in a break room. It’s also highly frowned upon to tell a coworker to go fuck himself...

“Oh, you’ll find something,” Amber assures me. “Even if you don’t win, I mean, if you get on the show it’s probably gonna be great exposure!”

I have no idea if she’s serious or if she’s just saying that to make me feel better.