Scott Westerfeld - The Last Days

“But… not really,” Pearl said. “Really?”

“Really. You have an hour.” Astor Michaels looked at his watch. “How’s that for motivation?”

We sat there in silence for a moment, the blown-up photos of rats staring down at us. The room was full of guilt, like we’d all committed some terrible crime together.

“Was that meant ironically?” Alana Ray asked.

“Um… I don’t think so,” Pearl said.

“Crap,” Moz said. “What are we going to do?”

Pearl turned to me and Moz, suddenly angry. “I knew we should have figured this out when it was just us three, in that first rehearsal. Now it’s all complicated !”

“Hey, man,” I said, holding up my hands. “That’s the day I said we should call ourselves the B-Sections. Why don’t we go with that?”

Moz and Pearl just stared at me.

“What?” I said. “Don’t you remember? B-Sections?”

Pearl glanced at Moz, then turned to me. “Yeah, I remember. But I didn’t want to be the one to explain that band names based on musical terms—the F-Sharps, the Overtones, the Tapeloops—are in fact the lamest. Thing. Ever.”

Moz shrugged. “I just thought you were kidding, Zahler. I mean, for one thing, being plural is stupid.”

I frowned. “Being what?”

“ Plural. With an s at the end. Makes us sound like some fifties band, like the Rockettes or something.”

Minerva let out a giggle. “The Rockettes are dancers, Moz. They have long, tasty legs.”

Okay, maybe she wasn’t totally normal yet.

“Whatever,” Moz said. “I don’t want to be a plural band. Because if we’re the B-Sections, then what’s one of us? A B-Section? ‘Hello, I am a B-Section. Together, me and my friends are many B-Sections.’”

Minerva giggled again, and I said, “You know, Moz, anything sounds retarded if you say it a bunch of times in a row. So what’s your great idea?”

“I don’t know. A ‘The’ in front is cool, as long as the next word isn’t plural.” He kicked Astor Michaels’s desk in front of him. “Like, the Desk.”

“ The Desk ?” I groaned. “Now that’s just a genius band name, Moz. That’s much better than the B-Sections. Let’s go upstairs and tell them we want to be the Desk.”

Moz rolled his eyes. “It was just an example, Zahler.”

I sank back into the big leather couch. I could see how this was going to go. It was that old classic, the Moz Veto. Like whenever we’re trying to figure out what movie to see, Moz never suggests anything, so I have to keep coming up with suggestions while he goes, “No,” “Not interested,” “That sucks,” “Seen it,” “Subtitles are lame…”

Pearl leaned forward. “Okay, guys, we don’t have to panic about this.”

“Panic!” I said. “We could be the Panic!”

“I’d rather be the Desk,” Moz said quietly.

“Hang on !” Pearl said. “One idea at a time. A couple of weeks ago, I thought of something.”

Moz swung his veto gaze toward her. “What?”

“How about Crazy Versus Sane?”

“Pearl, darling,” Minerva said. “Don’t you think that’s kind of… pointed?” She looked at Alana Ray, not noticing that everyone else was looking at her.

“It’s not about us ,” Pearl said. “It’s about all the weird stuff going on. Like the black water, the sanitation crisis, the crime wave. Like that crazy woman who dropped the Stratocaster on me and Moz… That’s how this band got started.”

“I don’t know,” Moz said. “Crazy Versus Sane. Sounds kind of artsy-fartsy to me.”

Score another one for the Moz Veto.

I tried to think, random words and phrases spilling through my head, but Pearl had been right. Band names only got harder the longer you waited to pick one. The deeper the music got into your brain, the more impossible it became to describe it in two or three words.

The silence was broken by the shriek of some metal band’s demo tape echoing out of another scout’s office. The steel walls of the safe seemed to be closing in, the air growing stale. I imagined Astor Michaels shutting the door, giving us until we ran out of oxygen to come up with a name.

I thought of the growling, thumping rehearsal building on Sixteenth Street and wondered if all the bands in there had names. How many bands were there in the whole world? Thousands? Millions?

Looking up at the ranks of safe-deposit boxes surrounding us, I wondered if we should all just get numbers.

“Why don’t we just pick something simple?” I said. “Like… Eleven?”

“Eleven?” Moz said. “That’s great, Zahler. But it’s no ‘the Desk.’”

Minerva sighed. “That’s the problem with Crazy Versus Sane: it’s false advertising, seeing as how we’re kind of short on sane.”

“What’s not sane is making us choose a name this way,” Pearl said, glaring up at the rat photos.

“Is this sort of ultimatum normal for record companies?” Alana Ray asked.

“No. It’s totally para normal,” I said.

Pearl’s eyes lit up. “Hey, Zahler, maybe that’s it. We should call ourselves the Paranormals!”

“Plural,” Moz said. “Do you guys not get the plural thing?”

“Whatever,” Pearl said. “Paranormal? The Paranormal, if you want to be all the about everything.”

“ Paranormal can mean two things,” Alana Ray said.

We all looked at her. Those rare times Alana Ray actually said something, everybody else listened.

“ Para can mean beside ,” she continued. “Like paralegals and paramedics, who work beside lawyers and doctors. But it can also mean against . Like a parasol is against the sun and a paradox against the normal way of thinking.”

I blinked. That was just about the most words Alana Ray had said in a row since that first rehearsal. And like everything she said, it was very weird and kind of smart.

Maybe Paranormal was the right name for us.

Pearl frowned. “So what’s a parachute against?”

Alana Ray’s eyebrows twitched. “The chute of gravity.”

“Gravity sucks,” I said softly.

“So if we go with Paranormal,” Alana Ray said, “we should figure out whether we are beside normal or against it. Names are important. That’s why I ask you all to call me by my whole first name.”

“Hey, I just thought Ray was your last name,” Moz said, then frowned. “What is your last name anyway?”

I held my breath. With Alana Ray, asking her last name was practically a personal question. But after a few seconds, she said, “I don’t have a real last name.” She didn’t continue right away, her hands flickering nervously.

“How do you mean?” Pearl asked.

“At my school, they gave us new last names, ones that anyone could spell. That way, when we told our names to people, no one would ever ask us to spell them. It was to save us from embarrassment.”

“You have trouble spelling?” Pearl asked. “Like, dyslexia?”

“Dyslexia,” Alana Ray answered. “D-y-s-l-e-x-i-a. Dyslexia.”

“Dude,” I said. “I couldn’t spell that.”

She smiled at me. “Only some of us had trouble spelling. But they renamed us all.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Minerva said softly, and everyone turned toward her. “As long as the music’s good, people will think the name’s brilliant too. Even if it’s just some random word.”

Moz nodded. “Yeah, the Beatles had a pretty stupid name, if you think about it. Didn’t hurt them much.”

“Dude!” My jaw dropped open. “They did not have a stupid name! It’s a classic!”