My Butterfly

calm my excited breaths. It was as if there were some kind of weird adrenaline rushing through my veins all of a sudden; it was strange. But at the same time, I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t strange in a fun way because that would mean that she had been right all along.
    “Oh, but Will,” Chris said, interrupting my thoughts.
    I looked up at him.
    “You do know that it’s brown-eyed girl, not green-eyed girl, right?” he asked.
    I froze, as if I had been caught naked or something, then chuckled to myself.
    “Yeah, sorry,” I said, lowering my eyes again and shaking my head.
    “Okay,” Matt said. “It doesn’t matter what he sings. They’ll love it anyway. Let’s just keep it going.”
    When I looked back up, Chris was staring at me, and he had a mischievous look glued to his face. I furrowed my eyebrows at him, then brushed off his look and returned my attention to Matt, as he rattled off a list of songs.
    We played through the rest of the songs. They were mostly classics and country—oddly enough, the songs I used to sing to Julia—so I knew them well. Every so often, though, my heart would stab at my chest when a particular lyric sent me back to a summer afternoon with her in my arms. But then, not too long after, a slight smile would find my face when I realized that I couldn’t escape her no matter what I did. It was like her to always find a way to win. At least now, however, I would be a little distracted. Here, the music forced me on to the next moment without too much thought. And really, these guys weren’t bad.
    “So, what do we call ourselves?” Chris asked, when the music stopped for the last time.
    “I thought we had a name,” Daniel said.
    The men froze—Daniel where he sat and Chris and Matt where they stood. I watched each one’s face twist and turn into a puzzled mess.
    “What was it?” Matt asked, finally.
    A moment of silence passed again.
    “Whatever it was, it mustn’t have been that good,” Chris said. “Let’s come up with a new one. I feel like we’re a real band now.”
    “What about WDCM?” Daniel asked.
    “What?” Matt asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “It’s our initials all squished together,” Daniel explained.
    “Vetoed,” Chris yelled out. “What about Matt’s Garage?”
    “Matt’s Garage?” Daniel sarcastically asked and then snickered. “Yeah, I can see us famous someday, ‘Uh, hi, we’re Matt’s Living Room, uh, I mean, Matt’s Bathroom. No, I mean, Matt’s Garage. Can you guess where we started?’”
    I laughed and so did Matt.
    “This guy,” Chris said, pointing at Daniel, “has already got us famous now. Daniel, you’ll be lucky if Will remembers to introduce you tomorrow night.”
    Daniel hit the snare and then the cymbal and a ba-DUM ching echoed through the garage.
    All three of them laughed.
    “What about District 9?” I asked, shyly.
    Their eyes slowly moseyed toward my corner and then rested on me for a second.
    “You know, I like that,” Matt said first.
    “Yeah,” Chris said, nodding his head. “We’re firefighters first.”
    Daniel started a drumroll. It got louder as it continued until it finally stopped.
    “District 9 it is,” Daniel shouted.
    “Okay, we’ve got a name,” Chris said. “Shouldn’t we have at least one song that’s ours?”
    We all looked at each other.
    “We don’t necessarily have to,” Matt said. “Plus, are we really gonna learn a song in a night.”
    “Well, I think we could,” Daniel said. “But it doesn’t have to be for tomorrow. We can just have it ready for the next time.”
    “What next time?” Matt asked. “Do you know something I don’t know?”
    “Dude, we’re a real band now,” Daniel said. “We’ve got a singer.”
    He stopped, gestured toward me and smiled.
    “And we’ve got a kickass name, and you know all those club people who thought we were okay without a real singer,” Daniel continued.
    His eyes were planted on Matt.
    “Okay, okay,” Matt said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
    “Okay, so what about the song?” Chris chimed in.
    “You gonna write one for us, Chris?” Matt asked. “None of us could write a song to save our lives.”
    I watched as everyone’s eyes turned toward the floor. Then, after a moment, Chris’s head suddenly popped up.
    “None of us have ever written a song, right?” he asked the room, but he was only looking at me.
    And slowly, Daniel’s face and then Matt’s face turned up as well,