There are certain places in high school where humiliation tends to happen with clockwork precision: the cafeteria, the gym locker room, and—if you’re especially unlucky—the main hallway between second and third period. For me, that place was the hallway, the one that smelled faintly like bleach and chicken nuggets, with the flickering fluorescent light that buzzed like it was judging you.

That’s where it happened. That’s where Roger Dalton, self-proclaimed king of Ridgeway High and frontman of a band actually called Leather Voltage, decided to publicly obliterate my dignity.

I was standing by the trophy case with my best friend and partner in musical delusion, Ryan. I’m tall—awkwardly tall, the kind of tall that makes teachers ask if you play basketball when you clearly do not. My hair, a chaotic tuft of brown that could double as a nesting site for small birds, had a habit of sticking up even more when I was nervous. Ryan was shorter, with spiky blond hair that looked permanently shellacked into a position that said don’t notice me but also please notice me. He had this habit of whispering things into my ear at the exact moment I least wanted to hear them, which was often.

That day, he leaned in as I tried to tape a hand-drawn flyer for our band, The Static Moon, onto the wall.

“Maybe don’t put that one up,” he whispered. “The ‘O’ in ‘Moon’ looks like a butt.”

“It’s supposed to be a crater,” I said. “You know, like the surface of the moon.”

He squinted. “Pretty sure craters don’t have… cheeks.”

Before I could defend my artistic vision, a voice behind us cut through the hallway chatter like a guitar feedback loop.

“Well, well, if it isn’t The Static Moan.”

I didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. Roger Dalton. Senior. Heartthrob. Leather jacket wearer in all seasons, including August. The kind of guy who could walk into a room and instantly make you feel like you’d been doing high school wrong this whole time.

He was surrounded by his bandmates—Leather Voltage in the flesh. Their drummer, Jeff, carried drumsticks everywhere like a security blanket. Their bassist, Nate, had the charisma of a houseplant but made up for it by standing next to Roger.

Roger pointed at our flyer. “You two actually think people are gonna come see your band? Dude, I heard you play at that open mic last month. You made ‘Smoke on the Water’ sound like it was drowning.”

A few kids nearby laughed, that cruel, high-school kind of laugh where everyone’s trying to prove they’re not the one being laughed at.

Ryan tugged on my sleeve. “Just ignore him,” he whispered. “He’ll get bored.”

But Roger wasn’t the kind of guy who got bored of himself. He stepped closer, smirking. “Tell me, Matt, what’s it like knowing your band’s gonna die faster than a TikTok trend?”

I felt something snap inside me. Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was the memory of our disastrous open mic set when Ryan’s amp caught fire. Either way, I decided I’d had enough.

“You think your band’s so great, Roger?” I said, louder than I meant to. Heads turned. Locker doors paused mid-slam. “Why don’t we find out? Battle of the Bands. You. Us. School dance.”

The hallway went silent, the kind of silence that only happens before someone’s about to make a bad decision.

Roger’s eyebrows arched. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope,” I said. “Unless you’re scared.”

That’s when I realized I’d said it out loud. The word scared was like blood in shark water.

Roger grinned, all teeth. “You’re on. Friday night. Loser admits they suck. In front of everyone.”

He turned and strutted off, his leather jacket glinting under the fluorescent lights like some sort of shiny, evil prophecy.

Ryan was pale. “Matt,” he whispered. “We don’t even have a full setlist.”

“We’ve got four songs,” I said.

“Three,” he corrected. “The fourth is just you yelling because your mic broke.”

“Then we’ll write more.”

He blinked at me. “By Friday?”

I shrugged, trying to look confident. “Great bands rise under pressure.”

“Name one.”

“Queen.”

“They practiced for years.”

“Well,” I said, “we’ve practiced for months. That’s almost the same thing, proportionally.”

The rest of the week was a blur of bad decisions disguised as rehearsal. We set up in my garage, surrounded by the ghosts of failed hobbies: an old treadmill, a box of broken skateboards, and a deflated basketball that I swore used to be regulation size.

Our drummer, Eric, was perpetually late because he shared a car with his mom, who apparently needed it for “real things.” Our bassist, Drew, was new—he’d joined because he thought we were a cover band for The Moonlight Wizards, which we were not.

“Okay,” I said on Wednesday night, strumming my guitar. “We just need something original, something that’ll blow people away.”

Ryan, tuning his keyboard, sighed. “Maybe we could just blow the power breaker instead. Less humiliating.”

I ignored him and launched into a riff that was basically Smoke on the Water backward.

“Sounds familiar,” Ryan said.

“It’s inspired,” I said. “All great music is inspired.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Usually by talent.”

Still, we kept at it. Every night after homework, after microwaved dinners, after my mom shouted down the stairs that it was “quiet hour,” we practiced. The neighbors complained. The cat vomited. Eric broke a drumstick and tried to fix it with duct tape.

By Friday morning, we had exactly three songs, all of which sounded vaguely like different stages of a panic attack. But I was feeling weirdly confident. Maybe it was delusion. Maybe it was sleep deprivation. Either way, I walked into school ready for war.

The hallway was buzzing—literally and figuratively. The buzz came from the fluorescent light (still judging me), and from the student body, now fully invested in the impending musical bloodbath. Roger and Leather Voltage were legends. They’d played the local skate park, had actual merch, and their drummer had once been interviewed on a podcast no one had heard of.

Ryan, as usual, whispered from behind me. “Maybe we can fake food poisoning. Or real food poisoning. I’ll eat cafeteria sushi right now if it gets us out of this.”

“Relax,” I said. “This is our moment.”

“Moments,” he whispered, “can be bad.”

We passed Roger, leaning against a locker like he’d been born there, surrounded by admirers. He winked at me. “Hope you brought earplugs for when I melt your faces off.”

I grinned. “Hope you brought tissues for when you cry after we win.”

The hallway erupted in “ooooohs,” that primal teenage chorus of encouragement and doom. I felt like a gladiator entering the arena, except instead of a sword, I had a guitar that buzzed whenever I touched the high E string.

That night, the gym was transformed into something almost magical—if you squinted and ignored the smell of sweat. The disco ball spun, the lights flickered, and the banner that read “RIDGEWAY SPRING DANCE” was hanging slightly crooked, courtesy of someone’s poor ladder skills.

Leather Voltage went first. Of course they did. They played flawlessly, all synchronized head-bobs and rehearsed swagger. Roger did that rock-star thing where he pointed at random people in the crowd like they were the reason for his success.

Then it was our turn.

We shuffled on stage, and I swear I could hear Ryan’s breathing over the chatter. I adjusted the mic, which squealed in protest.

“Hey, Ridgeway,” I said, trying to sound cool. “We’re The Static Moon, and we’re here to—uh—rock your gravitational pull.”

Someone in the crowd laughed. I decided to take it as encouragement.

We started with our strongest song, Falling Satellite. It began well—Ryan’s synth shimmering like something out of a dream—but about thirty seconds in, Eric dropped a drumstick, Drew hit a note that sounded like a dying foghorn, and my amp made a noise that could only be described as “angry robot.”

But then something strange happened. People started clapping. Not ironically—well, maybe a little ironically—but still clapping. A few even cheered. We finished the song, sweaty and shaking, but alive.

“See?” I whispered to Ryan. “We’re doing it.”

He didn’t respond. He just stared at the crowd like he was watching a car crash in slow motion.

We launched into our next song, Gravity’s Overrated. Midway through, the lights flickered, the power briefly died, and Ryan’s keyboard restarted in demo mode, playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in cheerful MIDI tones.

The crowd roared with laughter. I leaned into the mic. “Remix!” I yelled. And somehow, it worked. People were dancing—ironically, sure—but dancing.

When we finished, the applause was louder than I expected. Maybe pity applause, maybe not. Roger went up next and closed the night with another technically perfect performance, but I noticed something: no one was laughing, no one was dancing, just watching.

Afterward, Roger cornered me by the gym doors. “Not bad, kid,” he said, smirking. “You’re still terrible, but not boring terrible. That’s something.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You too.”

He frowned. “You mean…?”

“Boring,” I said, smiling. “You’re boring.”

He stared at me for a second, then laughed. “You’ve got guts, man. Maybe too many.” He walked off, his leather jacket shining under the exit sign like a farewell salute.

Ryan appeared beside me, still pale. “You know,” he whispered, “we really are a terrible band.”

I nodded. “Yeah. But we’re our terrible band.”

He sighed. “You think we’ll ever be as good as them?”

“Better,” I said, watching the last of the crowd filter out. “Because we’ve got something they don’t.”

“What’s that?”

“Nowhere to go but up.”

Ryan snorted. “That’s… inspiring, in a depressing kind of way.”

“Perfect,” I said. “That’s our next song title.”

And right there, under the flickering gym lights and the faint echo of our catastrophic performance, I realized something: sometimes being terrible is just the first step to being great. And if nothing else, at least we were the kind of terrible people remembered.

Besides, craters do kind of look like butts.

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