Renaming Dragontail Peak

The stage is set.

The meager applause dies in the air, its praise fading faster than it had come. All the middle school students sit in rows on the retractable bleachers in the gym which, on days like today, doubles as an amphitheater. The teachers have constructed a makeshift stage underneath the basketball hoops, a simple raised platform with a decorative garland stapled all around its edges, little paper stars hanging from the shiny purple plastic fringe. The cheap decor doesn’t do much to make the gym look any less like a gym, with its giant scoreboards all over the bland cinder block walls. P.E. is Sascha’s least favorite class, and as such, the gym is her least favorite part of the school. Today, in particular, has done nothing to change that.

A tiny eleven-year-old girl, short even for her young age, Sascha sits in the lowest row of bleachers, a spot she’d chosen specifically because it was close to the door. A preventative measure, just in case she needs to puke, or just storm off in anger. Her skinny legs bounce as she taps her foot nervously, her little fingers pulling relentlessly on a strand of her own straight black hair. Her father is there too, but he sits with the other parents, in a portable set of bleachers at the other end of the room. They are calling the students by name alphabetically; she knows which name comes next.

Sascha takes a second to glance over the classmates seated beside and behind her. Some of them make awkward eye contact as her eyes graze over them, and she swears she can feel them resisting the urge to say something snotty. They all have such blank faces, she doesn’t know if they are uninterested in the day’s events or just unimpressed with the talent thus far. She isn’t sure which would be worse. The students here seem less friendly than the Seattle school district she’d grown up in; Wenatchee kids were harder, meaner. That, or she’s just an outsider. Sascha supposes she’s still a new kid, but she’d been going to this school for almost two months now, and she still hadn’t made any friends. She doesn’t know what about Wenatchee was so different, but kids look at her strangely here.

Take last week, for instance. She’d been wandering around the schoolyard at recess, just walking to pass the time until classes started again. She’d already reached a point where she no longer tried to approach other kids, having resigned to the fact that they weren’t interested in playing with her.

Then, out of nowhere, a kid named Dennis had come up to her, asking why she was so quiet. Sascha thought that was a pretty stupid question, and she simply sidestepped the kid and kept walking. She wasn’t so desperate for friends that she’d stick around through such a boring excuse for conversation.

Dennis didn’t seem to like her much after that. He still tended to stare at her when he passed her in the halls, which she found annoying. Maybe his height and stocky frame should have been intimidating, but Sascha wasn’t scared. Sometimes she stared right back, even if it was just to inspect his Foo Fighters T-shirts. He wore his reddish brown hair longer than most boys dared, tucked behind his ears, the wavy ends of it resting on his chest. It made her want to laugh; he really thought he was Dave Grohl.

Taking another quick glance over her shoulder, Sascha spots Dennis seated a few rows behind her in the bleachers, just waiting for the next name to be called like everybody else. He is sitting still and quiet, but he clearly isn’t paying attention. His eyes are blank, staring thoughtlessly into space.

Sascha turns back toward the front, heaving an anxious sigh and wiping her sweaty palms over her jeans. A girl next to her gives her a weird look, and her side eye just makes Sascha feel worse. The teacher hosting the talent show is Mrs. Johnson, the same bubbly blonde woman that taught Sascha’s music appreciation class. She was on the stage now, walking toward the microphone to announce the next performer. Her snug denim pencil skirt didn’t look like it allowed much freedom of movement; she took small steps across the stage, each one feeling longer than the last. She reaches out a slender hand that closes around the mic firmly, like she was shifting gears in a car.

A sudden screech of feedback squeals from the speakers as Mrs. Johnson lifts the mic to her mouth, making a few of the students flinch. Sascha nearly falls out of her seat.

The music teacher smiles apologetically. “Sorry about that, folks - it hurt my ears, too. But our next performer will take your mind off of it! Give it up for Damien Hughes!”

She gestures emphatically to the other end of the bleachers, and Sascha watches her brother stand from his seat as the polite applause fills the room again. Damien hadn’t put as much thought into the seat he chose. He clambers down rows of bleachers, having to stand and wait as kids scooch out of his way so he can pass. Even from the other end of the gym, she can clearly see the tense angles of his arms, the nervous fists of his hands. Despite everything, Sascha finds herself cringing in secondhand embarrassment and fear, even though she’s sure he’s going to do fine. After all, she’d watched him practice.

The very moment that you first walked into the Hughes household, the first thing you saw was the wall of guitars; Sascha’s father, Adrian, had made sure of that. There wasn’t a single plain white wall in the entire house, not even in the bathrooms. In every available space, there were instruments or band posters or both. Though Sascha’s parents had divorced when she was too young to remember, she and her brother had visited plenty of times after their father let go of his rock star dreams to move away from Seattle, returning to his comparatively small hometown of Wenatchee, Washington. This house was the one he’d grown up in, and it still had that childhood familiarity to Sascha, but no more than that. She didn’t think it felt like hers yet.

When Adrian Hughes was a younger man, he had been active in Seattle’s punk and grunge scenes in the 90s, and his love for music had dominated not only his home, but his parenting style. Adrian stressed to his children the importance of creativity; not only promoting it, but using it as an emotional outlet. This had become more intense than ever when his children had come to live with their father a few weeks ago. Sascha could see through it; the pep talks, the lectures, the enthusiasm. It had completely boiled over when he heard that Damien had started showing interest in learning the guitar. Sascha had never seen him that excited, before or since. Adrian had practically begged Damien to let him teach him, and since they’d moved, the two had been practicing together almost constantly. The only hard limit their father set was his refusal to teach Damien any Nirvana songs; this came as no surprise to either kid, as they’d grown up listening to their father rant and rave about how Kurt Cobain had supposedly stolen a chord progression from him for their biggest song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Sascha vividly remembered the only time she’d ever seen anyone challenge him on this. One of her aunts on her mother’s side had pointed out that the song had a rather simple chord progression, one that two different people could have easily come up with independently. Sascha never saw that aunt and her father in the same room again.

She and her brother had first arrived in Wenatchee shortly after Damien started playing guitar; her dad had greeted them both with housewarming gifts, neatly wrapped and waiting in their new bedrooms. Her brother got a brand new, bright green Fender Telecaster, with dials and tuning pegs so shiny, you could see your reflection in them. Sascha got an easel and a paint set.

“You always used to bring sketchbooks over on your visits,” Adrian had explained to her. He tried to sell her on it, but she could see an apologetic curl to his lips; her father never was good at hiding his emotions. She thought that maybe it was a product of getting used to laying them bare on stage, spending so many years of his life mining his personal experiences for content to write songs about, or ripping free the painful feelings he injected into music. He lived with the rawness of the human experience barely contained; love and anger, joy and despair, everything always bubbling just below the surface. It was the trait that made him such a good father to Damien, but it also laid bare the uncomfortable truth to Sascha; her father didn’t know how to be a parent to her, didn’t know how to relate to her.

She’d tried telling him about how she was learning to play the drums - the first day she and her brother arrived in Wenatchee, she’d sat on this secret until dinnertime, excited to see his reaction, telling herself that he would dote on her the same way he doted on Damien once he knew that she could be musical, too. The three of them had sat at the cluttered dining room table, where her father had hastily pushed aside books, bills, and folders upon folders of loose sheet music so they could all sit down and eat pizza. She’d picked at her slice of pepperoni, waiting for a quiet moment; several came and passed before she built up the nerve to speak.

“Hey Dad,” she said.

Adrian looked up from his pizza.

Sascha fidgeted with the hem of her shirt as she continued. “I’ve been learning to play the drums.”

Her dad nodded, returning to his pizza. “Yeah, your mother told me. That’s good.”

Sascha waited, but he said nothing else. Her heart sank, and she returned to her pizza, not knowing what else could be said.

Growing up, Sascha had seen all the home movies, all the music videos, all the bootlegged concerts from before she and her brother were born. The quality of the videos themselves varied wildly; sometimes they were so pixelated that she couldn’t make out her father’s features, and other times they were just fuzzy, dreamy in the way that so much film from the 90s was. Sascha used to watch their videos over and over again on her mother’s computer, fascinated not only by the music, but also the way the older cameras captured it. The videos were almost always shot by her mother, and she was a terrible videographer; she was always cheering loudly into the microphone or brushing it against things, and sometimes other people blocked her view of the band. The bassist had long, messy hair of such a light blonde that the rest of the shot became too dark to see if the camera focused on it. Despite what her father seemed determined to believe, Sascha did like his old music. She actually felt the most familial affection for him when she was watching him play on screen, his chaotic hair sticking out in all directions, the same harsh black color as hers. The content of the music itself varied a lot. Sometimes, the band sang about genuinely important things - spoke truth to power, as her father would describe it - but other times, their lyrics were absolute nonsense. She actually liked the latter songs better; she’d been a quiet kid all her life, but she was endlessly fascinated with the idea of making noise for the sake of noise. Making music with the simple intention of being loud, rather than trying to impart wisdom. There was no message. Just to be loud was the message.

The Hughes household was one that should promote gratuitous noisemaking, but whenever Sascha walked through its halls, she couldn’t help but feel silenced. When she sat in her room, the new easel stood much taller than her, staring down on her like it was only there to remind her who she was to her father. When she stood in the living room, old pictures sat on shelves that were hung so high, she couldn’t see what was in the frames. One day as she listened to her father and Damien practicing guitar in the other room, she climbed up onto the back of the sofa just to inspect the contents of the shelves. She recognized the pictures; she and Damien posed with their father at Colchuck Lake, an alpine lake surrounded by huge, craggy mountains of granite tall enough to scratch their way through the clouds. He’d taken them there on a hike on one of their visits, and she had hated the walk - it had been absolutely brutal, almost all uphill. When they finally reached the lake, Sascha had practically collapsed to sit on a rock, pouting about being forced to exercise. Her father sat next to her, with Damien wandering toward the lake. He ignored her resentfully crossed arms and the grumpy set of her eyebrows to point towards one of the mountains, standing tall in front of them, just on the other side of the lake.

“See that big mountain right in front of us?” he said. “That’s Dragontail Peak. You know why it’s called that?”

Sascha remained silent.

Adrian looked out towards the peak. “Many years ago, three men were climbing another mountain nearby, and one of them remarked that this one looked like a dragon’s tail, with its two spikes coming out of the top.”

Sascha was pretty sure she didn’t speak to her father at all the entire walk back to the car. When they finally got back, her father tried bribing her to lift her mood, offering to let her sit in the front seat, even though she wasn’t old enough or tall enough. When her seatbelt was buckled, he asked her to pick the music.

“Can I play Nirvana?” she asked, cheeky.

Adrian sneered. “A bad mood is no excuse to be cruel.”

Eventually, Sascha came to see the trip to the mountains as a more positive memory. Still, you could see her discomfort in the photos, her tiny shoulders tense, her mouth in a stiff line that only vaguely resembled a smile.

Damien has taken his place on the stage, after picking up his guitar from a stand on the edge of the platform and hoisting the strap over his shoulder with shaky hands. The room is quiet for a long moment of silence, almost as quiet as it had been on those mountains. Sascha thinks that if someone on the other side of the room shifts in their seat, she’ll be able to hear it. The moment is a tipping point, after announcement but before execution, the moment when Damien’s performance has been acknowledged as fact, and the obligation to perform settles over his stage fright like a knife in his back. He looks clumsy, with his odd outfit in clashing colors, his hair that is reddish, brownish, shortish, longish. Then Mrs. Johnson presses a button on the big stereo, with its giant speakers on either side of the stage. The backing drum track over the speakers finally counts in, the time signature 4/4, the first measure nothing but a digital hi-hat. And Damien begins to play.

It’s pretty loud. Plucky double stops, then shrill power chords shout over the speakers. With her feet on the floor, she can feel the vibrations of the amplifier, sending shockwaves through the entire room. Sascha is seething, but she doesn’t even know why she’s angry. She remembers Dragontail Peak, where a man once made one small comment that changed his surroundings forever, where he named a mountain with one sentence. How must it feel to be heard like that? To casually say anything, and have the entire world take notice?

Suddenly, the noise in the gym dies down. Sascha snaps back to attention to realize that her brother has missed a note, pressed down the wrong string on the wrong fret, and it’s thrown off his entire performance. She feels sick watching him. His muscle memory was not prepared for a mistake, and now he’s caught by it, his eyes wide, fingers waving helplessly over the fingerboard. He’s lost his place, and he can’t find where to begin again. The backing drums over the stereo had seemed so loud when he started, but now they just sounded empty, the snare and the hi-hat spitting out of the speakers on a loop, with no personality, no embellishments. She sees her brother’s panic, and her father’s panic in the parents’ section behind him. After a while, Damien’s fingers stop waving over the neck of the guitar.. He is no longer trying.

Her brother looks over at Mrs. Johnson where she kneels next to the stereo controls, tears already spilling down his cheeks. The teacher hurries to turn off the drum track, the sound of the digital snare cutting off abruptly, and the gym is cloaked in that pure, alpine silence once again. Her brother stands, motionless, eyes squeezed shut, his fingers holding down the strings to keep them quiet. Sascha sees her father excusing himself to the other parents as he makes his way off the bleachers. He rushes to the stage, turning off the amplifier and helping Damien pull the guitar off of his shoulders. Mrs. Johnson rushes to the microphone.

“Give it up for Damien Hughes, everyone!” she squeals into the mic, and meager applause rises from the bleachers, mixed with mean-spirited laughter from a few kids.

Even if she knew there was a chance of Damien messing up, Sascha wasn’t expecting him to cry. The tears are oddly surprising to her as her father helps her brother off the stage, trying to comfort him by rubbing a hand over his shoulder. Sascha almost followed them out, almost got up and left the gym. But then she felt herself getting angry again.

The night before the talent show, Sascha had begged - as she had done many times before - to play the drums for Damien’s performance, so they wouldn’t have to use the bland backing track. After several minutes of begging, Adrian had lost his temper, banishing Sascha from their practice room, telling her to go do her homework. Sascha quietly cried in her bedroom, face buried in her pillows and stuffed toys; when the three of them sat down for dinner, she didn’t talk much, just did the bare minimum until she could leave the table, retreating back to her bedroom, feeling unwanted.

For a few minutes she sat on her bed, staring blankly at the homework she had no intention of finishing. Damien appeared in her doorway, looking in on her sheepishly.

“Hey,” he said.

Sascha sighed. “Hi,” she said back.

Her brother took a few steps into the room. “You know, if it was up to me, I’d let you play the drums.”

She gave a little smile. “Thanks.”

He nodded, turning to leave. But he lingered in the doorway, deliberating, before making up his mind and turning back around. “This whole talent show thing… y’know, it’s more for Dad than it is for me. He’s just excited that I’m playing the guitar. Like he did.”

Sascha looked up at her brother, his hazel eyes, his freckled skin. She nodded. “Yeah. I know it’s for him. I just… don’t get why he won’t let me play.”

Damien’s eyes wandered around the room as he thought about it. “I didn’t think you liked that music anyway. It’s really not for girls.”

Sascha frowned. “It’s not?”

Her brother shrugged. “You never see girls in the videos.”

She watched his back as he turned and walked out of the room. He was only thirteen, but already so much taller than her.

Now she’s watching him walk out of the gym, their father leading him out with so much delicacy, like he’s a kicked puppy. She had come so close to feeling sorry for him, but now, she’s livid.

Her eyes move to Mrs. Johnson on the stage. The teacher adjusts her skirt, nudges her blonde hair out of her face. Once again, she’s lifting the microphone to her mouth. Sascha feels something like a bass drum in her chest - Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

“Now, everybody, give a warm welcome to our next performer - Sascha Hughes!”

“Who?” she hears a kid ask from somewhere behind her. The polite, scattered applause starts up once again, and she feels outside herself as she stands from her seat, walking stiffly away from the bleachers and up, towards the stage. She doesn’t look back at the crowd, or at the doors. Her skinny limbs clamber up onto the stage, and she makes a beeline for the drumset and takes her seat. She closes her eyes, feeling herself breathe in and out, forcing herself to slow down. She hears Mrs. Johnson somewhere to her left, fiddling with the stereo to put in the CD Sascha had given her at the tryouts two weeks earlier. Sascha opens her eyes to pick up the drumsticks; even to her, her hands look small holding them. She finally looks up, and sees at least two hundred kids her age staring back at her. From the corner of her eye, she can see that her father and brother haven’t left, their bodies standing still by the door, but she doesn’t dare look directly at them. Her eyes scan the crowd, and they land on Dennis. He’d been drifting into space before, but he paid rapt attention now, his eyes staring straight into hers.

Mrs. Johnson gives Sascha a thumbs up from where she kneels next to the stereo, and Sascha nods at her. The teacher gives her an encouraging smile as she clicks ‘play.’

Adrian takes a few steps closer to the stage, and Sascha finally looks up, making eye contact with her father just as the song begins to play - and she watches his eyebrows furrow together the moment he recognizes the opening chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” She gives him a subtle smile as she waits for her cue - and then she descends upon the kit like a lioness taking down a gazelle. The anger makes her that much more determined, makes her sticks hit the drums that much harder. She fills the gym to the brim with noise, the drums harsh and loud, and she notices Mrs. Johnson turning up the stereo so the drums wouldn’t drown it out completely.

At the start of the second verse, Sascha has a few of the students straightened in their seats or tapping their feet. She lifts her eyes from the kit to make eye contact again with Dennis, the punch of the snare ringing in her head as she watches him grin from ear to ear. At the start of the second bridge, she improvises, adding a roll where the song didn’t have one before. In her peripheral vision she sees Dennis open his mouth, hears a cheer that gets lost in the music as soon as it comes out. Then comes the second chorus, and the crowd’s engagement emboldens her, creepy grins and claps egging her on further. She slams into the drums, with little thought given to anyone else in the room.

As the second chorus comes to a close, Sascha risks a glance up to her father. He stands motionless in the same place she saw him last, his eyes wide in an expression that could mean anything. He looks shocked, to be sure, but she has no way of knowing whether he’s angry.

In the third and final chorus of the song, Sascha forces herself to let go of her inhibitions. Her hair goes flying, blocking her eyesight and sticking to her lips. When she hits the snare, her entire arm rises and falls with the movement. When she hits the cymbal, it sways dangerously at impact, the stand nearly tipping over and falling. And as she beats at the drums through the final notes of the song, the tip of a drumstick snaps clean off, the sliver of wood flying off somewhere behind her. She finishes the song with one hand, her performance ending with hit after hit of the crash cymbal.

She gets no silence; the crowd doesn’t wait for the teacher to acknowledge that the performance is over before the children burst into raucous applause. Dennis is the first one to stand, clapping and hollering. Many others follow suit, including some of the parents, their hands and their voices forming a wall of sound that hits her all at once, like a sonic boom. She looks toward the door and sees her father among them, clapping and shaking his fists, and laughing.

It’s the loudest thing she’s ever heard.