The Black Dog Apparition

Jennifer’s Point of View

I leapt off my four-wheeler and dashed into Laura’s basement.
It was a homey basement. And it was obvious a band resided in it. Speakers, amps, wires galore. There were posters of every metal and punk band, ranging from Metalica to My Chemical Romance and The Used, my personal favorites. In a corner in the back was an old run-down, but not yet dead, computer that we used to find lyrics, buy concert tickets, and just about anything else. Against a wall was a long, ancient couch that we had found on the side of the road. Hey, it was free, wasn’t it? Oh, and lots of rolling chairs. We loved those especially. And mainly all of those rolling chairs were half-mooned circled around a white marker board. All of us in the band liked to be technical and objective when it came to our music, so we always wrote things down on that board. If we were trying to come up with a new song, we would write down random ideas and bits of inspiration until we formed a decent song. Yes, we were geeks.

“Hey, guys!” I called while I trotted to my drum set. Laura’s mom had agreed that as long as the drum set only stayed in the basement, I could keep it here. I plopped into my seat and ran a hand through my short, spiked, natural red hair. Gabe had always liked my hair short in that strange punk-looking style and I had quickly warmed up to it.

“Hey, Jen,” Laura greeted.

Michael waved and I stuck my tongue out at him, “You got that guitar solo down?”

“There’s this one measure that’s kicking my ass… Bret will have to help me.”

“Yeah,” I said, “where is Bret, anyway? He’s normally, like, the first one here…”

“I dunno,” Laura put in quizzically. “He called me at twelve and he said he would be at pract- Oh.” Her face became sullen. “Jen, can I borrow Red and go get him? He might be the same as he was last week.”

Michael stood from his seated place on a stool and growled, “If his dad’s gotten drunk again…”

“Well, I mean, what can we do? It’s not like he could just start living with one of us! Our moms and your boyfriend and his family would freak out!” Laura cried.

I sat back, crossing my arms, rolling my eyes. Bret had been the subject of many of Michael’s and Laura’s conflicts. This was just verbal-boxing round 2,958. Nothing too big.
The singer and the guitarist bickered like siblings back and forth for about five minutes. Michael always argued about helping Bret, as we all wanted to do, but he proposed impossible ideas that ultimately wouldn’t be good for our bassist in the least. Laura was the clear thinker and continually tried to explain to Michael that… wait, I’m getting tired of narrating this fucking argument.

I stood from my seat, “SHUT UP!” I yelled above their tones. “Laura, take Red and go get Bret. Michael, go get the first aid kit and I’ll feed the dog.”

The two of them blinked at me. I shrugged my shoulders, “What? I’m just betting that you haven’t fed Hope yet!” Laura’s pet black Labrador, Hope, lifted her head from the dark green dog bed which had been thrown down into the basement for the sake of keeping the ground story clean of dog hair. Her food bowl was empty.

Well, the dog did need to eat.

Laura’s Point of View

I mounted Jennifer’s four-wheeler, which I affectionately called ‘Red’ for its red color, and began the drive to Bret’s house in the trailer park about five blocks down. I was glad cops rarely patrolled this part of the town, where my friends and I lived. I honestly didn’t want a record behind me like Jen for driving a four-wheeler on public streets. I actually had a plan for my life. And that plan didn’t include getting screwed by the juvenile court.

God I hoped Bret was okay. He never really spoke much about his home life, but we all saw his bruises and we knew his father was a drunk. The police were familiar with his house, but his father was a big man, and very persuasive. Bret had been taken into custody once before and questioned about child abuse, but he would never give into the lies about ‘If you tell us we can protect you’ or ‘We can make this all stop’. His father must have really had him scared.
I wanted to help him just as much as Jen and Michael did, but there was nothing we could do. We were just teenagers. A group of basement-band teenagers couldn’t fight against a full grown drunken man.

The gravel driveway to Bret’s trailer was empty, and I sighed. His father wasn’t home. I parked Red and went to the tattered screen door of the putrid green trailer and knocked. “Bret?” I called.

No answer.

“Bret!”

Still nothing.

I shook my head and let myself in. I knew the routine oh so well and I hated it.
I found our bassist just outside his room, on the floor, unconscious. His cheek was badly bruised; a fleshy dark brown bruise infected half his face. I squatted next to his form and shook his shoulder. “Bret, wake up.”
I don’t know why I was so gentle with him. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to hurt him like his father loved to do. Bret was a hard sleeper, anyway, and so that made him even harder for him to regain consciousness. I left him and went to the kitchen and filled a large mug with ice cold water. Classic wake-up call.

It worked.

Bret’s Point of View

“HOLY SHIT.” I exclaimed when I felt something ice cold hit my body. I flopped around like a fish out of water until I could feel oxygen come back into my lungs. Jesus, why did she have to do that?!

“Bret?”

“YES,” I said tensely from the carpeted floor, rubbing my head, “that is my name…”

Where was my dad? Was he gone? Good, maybe he’d die wherever he was… That fucker needed to die. I wouldn’t mind. Maybe he would come home from a car crash, and I could finish him off.

“C’mon, get up. You need to get out of here before your dad gets back. I brought Red.”

She helped me up and she had to guide me to the door, or else I would have walked in circles from dizziness. I mounted the four-wheeler as I had done so many times before in this exact routine. The lead singer had found my bass and strapped it to the back of Red, and when Laura mounted I clung to her shoulders, and we were off.

Christ I had such a fucking headache…
And the bumpiness of the road was not helping in any way.
I laid my head on Laura’s shoulder and the drive back to her house suddenly didn’t seem so long.

Michael’s Point of View

Soon enough we had Bret on the couch with a gigantic blue ice pack on his cheek and about four Tylenols in him. No one dared to ask him what happened, because everyone already knew. His bruise had gone from a dark fleshy color to black and blue. He argued that he was alright, but Bret was a good liar and that was something else we knew about.
Yeah, band practice wasn’t going to consist of music again today. Just planning and song-writing. Maybe actually getting the band a fucking name.

I looked over at the white marker board and read the labels again like I did every day.
Possible Band Names, Possible Song Titles, Publicity.
Under Band Names things like “Skeleton Crew”, “Look Pretty Dead”, and “M.I. Escapees” were written in all of our scratchy handwritings. Under Song Titles were written of either song titles we had already applied to a song we wrote, or titles that could inspire or name a new song. Publicity was the smallest column on the entire board. Under it was only one gig that we could grow known through. Our high school’s talent show at the start of the year. For the majority it was a bunch of kids with stage-fright and low self-esteem who did it only because their mothers told them to. Stupid tricks, lame jokes, and deer-in-the-headlights-look galore. But not us.

The band had formed because of the talent show, our freshman year.

Bret and I had entered as a two person show, he playing bass and I on guitar. We weren’t in it for the trophy-money; we just wanted to show off. It was the only day students could bring in their instruments and shove their talent in the audiences’ faces. The day we could become invincible on that stage. Our show got second place - outplayed, or rather, out sung by Laura and Jen.

Jen and Laura had entered as two separate acts, but they both sang. And holy mother of god could they. It was a first-place tie between the two, but Jennifer was gracious and gave the money to Laura. Of course, the very next year Jen blew Laura out of the water with a drum act, but a foreign-exchange student won first-place with some type of weird Middle-East dancing.

Throughout the year we had grown closer as friends and eventually learned that we lived relatively near each other in our run-down, dirt-road trailer park neighborhood.

The band was only a few months old.

I went to the white board and uncapped the black marker. I thought for a second, my tongue sticking out like it normally did whenever I was thinking.
I wrote hesitantly under Band Names. Would they think I was strange for thinking of such a name? We normally didn’t question where we got each other’s inspiration from - it was too awkward a thing to explain. But maybe I was being a little weird with this band name…

Hope, Laura’s pet dog, whined and I turned wondering if Bret had suddenly died or something of the like. She was looking up at me with her big brown wet eyes and her tail wagging nervously.

“What, girl?” I asked Hope.

The black mass of fur whined again and dipped her head, moving around jerkily, like she was guiltily of wetting the floor or tearing the trash bag to pieces and eating the garbage.

“Laura, I think there’s something wrong with Hope.”