It had been a year since we’d seen our old friends, and they’d started to grow up faster than we had.Įarlier that day, I’d been shopping at the Value Village up the street and bought a real leather motorcycle jacket. My sister and I were visiting our father and our hometown, after our parents had divorced and we’d moved with our mother. Instead, they jumped onto the twin beds and practiced their stage personas for dream punk bands, screaming into the microphones. We were naive to think that any of them would want to sing along to recorded songs all night. It was that-not the makeshift cocktail bar my teen friends manned-that got us kicked out. FOR OUR 15TH or 16th or 17th birthday in one of those first few years of the 2000s, my father got my twin sister and me a room at the Hotel Congress in Tucson, Ariz., and rented a karaoke machine.
