Winona Bluebird. Modelling for Benjamin Renzetti. Naked.

  I tried to shake the image out of my mind. I didn’t like it. Not at all. Winona, however, felt I’d helped her take a step closer to Benjamin’s heart — compared to my own snivelling serf behaviour around Felicity.

  “I can’t help it,” I said quickly. “Something about her sharp lashes makes me want to fall to my knees and worship.”

  Some of the students we passed in the hallway heard the comment and gave me the side-eye. I didn’t really care. Neither did Winona, who still hadn’t put her black vest back on. The weather had grown more humid, and she felt it was time to undo a fourth button near the middle of her linen shirt. The eagle-eyed among us could make out the faint outline of a pink, frilly bra.

  I always loved that pink frilly bra. Now Benjamin Renzetti would see it — and her pink frilly panties would come undone right in front of him too. I grew furious.

  “I think you’ll have to prepare for a career in harem politics soon,” I said.

  “Shut up!”

  “Hey! Don’t blame me if you wind up with a knife in your back.”

  We passed more of the art-hoe posse as we made our way down to the music hall. Even I recoiled from the stares. Women could be such cruel creatures to one another when the heart and passion of a man were on the line.

  “I did try to warn you.”

  The inferno still wasn’t getting through to Winona, however. “Come on. I’ve had enough Frida Kahlo wannabes stuffing their noses into my chest.”

  “Quite the taboo image,” I slyly whispered.

  She shook her head, smiling. “Let’s just go and jam out together.”

  Friday afternoons meant the music hall was bereft of the usual suspects who lived and breathed here. Campus bands were usually booked to perform here or elsewhere, and it was too much hassle for a rock band to have one last practice performance before getting on stage in front of a crowd of twenty or so people.

  Irish Navajo had made that mistake a few times, especially in our first few years as a band. I would (and still do) always suffer from a crippling case of stage fright, so I talked Winona into having us practise one last time before getting on stage.

  It worked — for a time. My nerves would settle, but we’d both leave the music hall sweaty and worn out from all that practice as Winona belted out the lyrics to The All-American Rejects’ Gives You Hell, while I stayed on the sidelines, strumming my bass guitar, hoping I could catch up with her.

  Tired. Sweaty. Exhausted. Not at all helped by all the gear we had to lug and carry around with us as we went on our way from our mouldy apartment to whatever distant comic book shop or café would take us — we always ended up getting eviscerated by critics who’d never held a guitar pick in their entire lives.

  It strengthened my stage fright. Then it strengthened my desire for us to practise hours beforehand. Then we wound up getting booed again by the crowds, and it was back to square one. Winona, despite my simpering behaviour, always took it on the chin for us.

  She was determined to succeed as a rock star. But she wasn’t going to let me fall behind or throw me underneath the wreckage of musical careers to do so. Eventually, after much soft coaxing and holding me deeply in her arms as I wiped away tears in our apartment bath, she said we should let go of the whole practising-before-a-concert thing.

  And then we did. And then I felt a change in how Irish Navajo was perceived among Boston’s underground music scene. No longer regarded as the perennial joke who sang Sum 41 and other pop-punk crooners when audiences started walking out — no, we were now regarded as a solid opening act to book for a piss break.

  Not what we hoped for, but it was still an improvement. A measly one, but one that moved us in the right direction. Soon enough, we might be an opening act that people paid money to see alongside the growing Bostonian rock behemoths that would one day sell out Fenway Park, Gillette Stadium, and TD Garden.

  …And when that happened, hopefully we’d scrounged up enough money to pay someone to go and grab our musical gear instead of scrunching down on our legs like we were doing now. This was tough work, treading through musical closets that people hadn’t bothered to put all their instruments back into properly. I felt like I was working one of those mine shafts that had been my great-great-grandfather’s workplace.

  It was a time under the Penal Laws, where those British bastards had every Irishman working hard labour to keep him and his mind preoccupied and not get uppity about having a country they themselves could rule. It had happened to Winona’s people at the same time too — the white man didn’t want any Natives getting too uppity and learning that the land they toiled for their masters belonged to themselves.

  “Found it!” Winona exclaimed, holding out a Fender blue electric guitar. It was the same one she had back in our apartment, but without the American Indian Movement stickers and Navajo tribe symbols on the pickguard. I whistled.

  “Blue looks good on you.”

  “Thank you,” she replied, blushing a bit. “I do try and be a fashionista when I can.”

  “Better than my wardrobe of blacks and very, very dark blues.” I still couldn’t find my own black guitar doppelg?nger in this place. Maybe that was just my punishment for not going for a green one when Winona and I were putting the band together. If we were going to be called Irish Navajo, she explained, one of us should have a blue guitar to represent America, and the other a green guitar to represent the land of Guinness and shamrocks.

  I didn’t want that. It would’ve been far too kitschy, and I hadn’t become the overtly sentimental kitsch master that I am now when it came to protecting Irish Navajo’s image. So now I was suffering for not heeding Winona’s visionary band ideals, and for not having a torch on hand because the pair of us had ditched our smartphones.

  Then I saw it. Standing in one of the taller cupboards with the other hand drums. Blemished with dirt and yet clearly untouched, since there were no signs of its goatskin being worn out.

  “Would you look at that,” I pointed out. “It’s a bodhrán.” I reached in and took it out, careful not to strike the bongo drums on my way, lest an absolutely earth-shaking noise came to assault our ears.

  “It looks like a pint of Guinness,” Winona said. She was more into that stuff than I was.

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  “That’s the point,” I answered, trailing my hands around the dark wooden curvature, then over the creamy goatskin. “They play them in pubs back home.”

  “…You’re American, Nathan,” she said. “This is your home.”

  I ignored her. “It’s very popular over there. I learnt to bash out a tune or two so I could be the centre of attention when I went back home on holidays.”

  That was only partly true. My mother had found me playing the blasted thing when we stumbled into a music shop in Dublin city centre together, and thought I would become the Mozart of bodhráns. It hadn’t turned out that way, but she insisted that I do bodhrán lessons anyhow once we came back to America.

  I was passionate at first, but then it gradually dissipated once my fingertips grew a little too red from playing it for one hour too often. The ringing in my ears after a heavy session didn’t help either. I wanted to avoid getting tinnitus if I could, so I let it go, and I hadn’t gazed upon a bodhrán in over a decade at this point.

  But now I was itching to play it once more.

  “Let’s try it out,” I said. “I can’t find my favourite bass guitar, so we’ll make do with the bodhrán instead.”

  “Nathan,” Winona put her hands on her hips, “I know you said we needed a drummer. But this is not the way.”

  “This is a one-off thing. Next time I’ll just bring my guitar from the apartment with me.”

  I tucked the bodhrán under my left arm and held out my right hand.

  “Come on. We’ve only a few hours left to play before we get home. You still want to head to Minerva’s tonight, right?”

  She paused. Then she took it. She knew better than to argue with me in the dark with all these instruments around us.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Any time now, Winona.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled in frustration. “I’m still looking.”

  “You said that five minutes ago,” I said, whipping the bodhrán beater against my knee. “And I’m still here. Waiting.”

  She could be quite pernicious when it came to deciding what music to play. Winona was lying on the ground, threading her hands through the pages of the songwriter’s notebook she always kept with her.

  Like her lingerie, it was pink and frilly. She claimed it was to throw people off the scent — to stop them making the connection that it belonged to her, the Native girl who dressed in dark, earthy colours and went on long, arduous rants about political instability in far-off countries most Americans couldn’t point out on a map.

  I told her it didn’t make any sense. She’d let me flick through a few pages once, and it had all the hallmarks of Winona Bluebird, name omitted. Passionate lyrics that decried the perennial injustices ravaging the world, using Indigenous examples from American history to draw — often well-researched — comparisons between the plight of her people and that of others today.

  If it caused her such a headache, she could’ve used a computer to record her thoughts instead, but she and IT didn’t mix in the slightest. I had my own diary, but without a smartphone on hand I had to settle for writing things down here rather than elsewhere.

  She kept reading, so I rattled the bodhrán beater against my knee again. And again. After the fourth strike, Winona finally broke out of her self-induced spell.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “It’s tradition,” I said. “My bodhrán teacher made me do it before we practised. Said you had to make sure the thing worked beforehand.”

  “So it’s like a drumstick?” she asked.

  “Yes, but I don’t think of it as a drumstick,” I said. “More like a large club. Something an Irish warrior would bang before fighting Vikings.”

  “I can certainly see the appeal of that,” Winona smiled. “Men do like to bang things to make themselves feel important, after all.”

  The innuendo wasn’t lost on me, so I smiled back. In truth, the bodhrán’s origins were far more modern — evolving sometime in the nineteenth century from the tambourine — but it was the story I preferred whenever I had to introduce it to someone new.

  Even now, I still thought of myself as a Celtic warrior when I played. Just a curious, angry boy who couldn’t get enough of banging things together.

  “Found anything to work with yet?” I asked. This was taking a long time. “Anything at all?”

  She continued moving steadily through the pages, assembling one song lyric after another. That was Winona’s way — scattered to me, but complete and whole to her. I was about to grumble myself when her hands suddenly moved faster, more urgently, and she found her lead.

  “Ooh! Ooh! I know what we should play!”

  “What?”

  “You remember The Ballad of Mary Crow Dog?”

  “Vaguely,” I lied. I knew it by heart. Winona had forced me to memorise it before we performed it on behalf of Palestinian children at our last concert. The one in the coffee shop. The one where everything went up in flames and we were almost lynched by the audience for how badly we played, before the owners threw us out.

  “Is there anything else we could try?”

  “Anything else?” Winona raised an eyebrow. “Nathan, the last time we performed, the roof nearly came off the place!”

  “Yes, but not in a good way.”

  She ignored my pleading. “The composition just needed a drummer rather than a bass. I told you that at the time, but you wanted to play it anyway.”

  “Yes, because you wanted to belt out Dirty Little Secret by The All-American Rejects if we needed to stretch for time.” I liked The All-American Rejects, but even I knew that wouldn’t go down well in an artsy-fartsy coffee shop.

  But she didn’t take any notice. She was already on her knees with a large marker, hammering out universal beats I could’ve deduced with any instrument I’d ever drummed together, leaving me alone with my thoughts and ruminations. I decided to think back on the story behind the ballad.

  Mary Crow Dog, as far as I remembered, was a Native American woman who became involved with the American Indian Movement in the 1970s. She’d been radicalised from a young age after years of poverty, turmoil, and fanatical racism on the South Dakota reservations, and had taken part in the siege of Wounded Knee — a standoff between the US government and AIM.

  She wrote about the blight of the American government’s colonial ambitions, and about the blight of sexism within her own movement. That made her fertile ground to become one of Winona’s role models, and the next inspiration for her to write a ballad about.

  Winona tore a strip of paper from her notebook and handed it to me.

  “There. Simple stuff. I’m sure you could play it with that drumstick of yours.”

  “I would think so…” I mumbled.

  There wasn’t much in the way of instruction. One beat, then two, then a few seconds of silence, then one beat followed by a heavier double strike.

  There was no indication of whether I should strike upwards or downwards. Winona probably assumed I’d just whack the thing like it was a massive taiko drum, while she soaked up and hogged all the spotlight.

  Not that I minded. She was a front woman by nature, while I was content to stay out of the glare. Things would only get worse if we both tried to play the opposite roles.

  “Ready?”

  “No, I’m not ready yet, Win—”

  My simpering pleas didn’t matter. Winona was already off on her own accord, rattling her fingertips across the strings while I sat in a chair, trying to keep up.

  “She kept her head bowed low,” Winona boomed into an imaginary microphone, “but the land whispered what it knew — that the earth she toiled on belonged to me and you.”

  I started rattling the bodhrán, letting Winona’s dreadful instructions fall away. It wasn’t so hard once I moved to the beat on my own terms, watching her figure sway from behind in front of an invisible crowd.

  “So sing, Mary Crow Dog, sing it loud,” Winona droned on, “for the mothers, for the stolen, for the unavenged ground!”

  It truly was an eventful song, much like Mary’s life — which Winona had tried to explain was similar to many of the historical Irish figures I babbled about when it was my turn to lecture her on Irish civil rights.

  I kept working through the words, trying to remember what came next. Remember what Winona was on about as the song progressed. When did the god-awful took an arrow to the knee meme reference come in again?

  “They’ll joke they had dreams till an arrow hit the knee, Laugh it off easy, call that history.”

  Oh. There it was. Near the end of the song — yes, now I remembered. That was what had gotten us barred from the coffee shop in the first place. A horribly dated Skyrim reference sandwiched into a song about the life and times of an indigenous rights leader.

  I banged on the drum a bit harder, then leaned around Winona’s shoulder — beating her to the punch — and whispered the final lines of her ballad.

  “Then she said, I’m not your symbol, I’m not your past. I’m what survives when the smoke won’t last.”

  “So you did remember!”

  “Obviously. Who doesn’t know the legend of Mary Crow Do—”

  I paused.

  “What is it?”

  “I thought I saw someone moving past the windows.”

  “Which ones?”

  “The ones out in the hallway — look.”

  There was a figure moving. Someone who’d been watching us the entire time, not saying a word while the pair of us argued over the silliest of things.

  It was a feminine form, long auburn hair falling beneath a face dotted with deep freckles, wearing a shirt that read TEAM USA FENCING in an assortment of red, white, and blue.

  It was Felicity.