Part 5: OBM

Our Beautiful Misery, the story went - a story any respectable member of the Company (including Hannah Pratt and Victoria Brixton) knew by heart - had started in a bedroom. An unremarkable bedroom in an unremarkable suburb in an (Xander always smirked here) unremarkable country, where an adolescent Xander Cross had hidden away from the “plastic kids.” Where he turned the music up just loud enough to drown out the sound of his parents’ fighting. Where he found refuge in a notebook - full of drawings (heavy on the skulls and hearts), lines of poetry and song lyrics (the difference between the two was impossible to define, but Xander always knew which was which), and even the occasional Latin phrase. 

This notebook was famous now. Its pages had been scanned, one by one, and uploaded to the band’s website, to be pored over by all the fans who wanted a glimpse into the tortured past of the man they idolized. 

Tolstoy said each unhappy family was unhappy in its own way. 

Not so for teenagers. 

If Anna Karenina had been fifteen, the line might have gone like this: every teenager is convinced he or she is unhappy in his or her own way, but really they are all unhappy in the same way, but don’t ever try to tell them that. 

There are two great joys in being a teenager. The first is being utterly convinced, beyond the shadow of a doubt, with a level of certainty that shock even the most devoutly religious, that you are completely alone in what you are feeling. The other is finding the one person, or the group of people, that understands what you feel and feels the same way. 

Despite the apparent contradiction, these two joys often coexist. 

The second joy is the one that the fans found in the scans of Xander Cross’s notebook. The more diehard of them were even willing to wait patiently for the files to download to their family computers (thus giving their parents a very convenient scapegoat the next time anything went wrong with the computer, down to a sticky keyboard key) and print them out. Others made their own, very derivative notebooks. There was even a room on the official OBM forums to post scans of your own notebook, some of which were revered and others of which were panned, according to some formula that no one could quite determine. 

Victoria had once uploaded a scan of the first few pages of her own notebook, but took it down an hour later in a mild panic. 

What none of the fans knew was that the notebook that had been scanned and uploaded to the OBM website was actually the second notebook. Xander Cross had written the words and drawn the pictures, yes, but not in that dark bedroom while angst flooded through him. The second notebook had been created in a rather well-lit office room in Los Angeles, and the only emotion Xander Cross had felt while writing it was a kind of tedium. 

It was, in large respects, a copy of the first notebook, but with some portions removed. The notes from history class on the Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo, for instance, were omitted entirely, as were the games of Hangman. (The hangmen themselves were kept, but made more realistic.) The lines of poetry that were more, say, Jack Prelutsky than Jack Skellington were cut, and so were the most egregious rip-offs of copywritten material. There was a fine line between derivative and actionable under the law. 

It was kind of like the hatchet job that Anne Frank’s father did to her diary when he decided that nothing says published around the world in a hundred different languages for the edification of school children like "private diary keep out."

The record label had had him write out some notes on quadratic equations, though, for the sake of “authenticity.” Apparently algebra was more authentically high school than history. And in the margins, some musings about the fakeness of everyone around him, which Xander didn’t remember writing. 

He’d had some friends in algebra, actually. 

The other thing the fans didn’t know - couldn’t know - was that his parents’ fighting had been more along the lines of “I can’t believe you forgot to pick up the dry cleaning again” than “I hate you, you make me wish I was dead, you fucking bitch,” etc etc etc. He had drowned it out with loud music, but moderate-volume music would have done the trick as well. 

But one detail that was both written into the hearts of every OBM fan, and also happened to be true, was that the name of the band came from a line on the very last page of the notebook, the only words in a sea of Gothic symbols and shapes: forever will i remember you and our beautiful misery. 

This page had been turned into a very popular T-shirt - the very t-shirt that Victoria Brixton had been persuaded not to wear to the concert. 

It also became a line in the first song that Xander Cross wrote, entitled “World of Darkness.” He performed this at his high school’s annual open mic night his sophomore year, in a perpetually sweaty gymnasium at 6 PM, to an audience of about forty-five students (mostly band geeks), their parents, and the odd grandparent or aunt and uncle who had been somehow guilted into attending. The act before him was an alto-sax-and-trombone duet rendition of “My Heart Will Go On.”

It was 1997.

Young Xander (or, as he was known then, Alex - the decision to go by the second half of his name didn’t come until junior year and didn’t really catch on until senior year - something about the summer vacation allowed people to process the change, though there were a few holdouts, even to this day - people who usually waited for someone else to ask if they had known him in school, so they could make dismissive remarks about him, and usually were kept waiting) had been hoping his Muse, as he called her, would be in the audience. Her name was Stephanie Shill and she inspired the first few OBM songs in an indirect way, kind of like how a well-placed bar inspires an alcoholic to start drinking on a particular night. 

To prove this point, Stephanie was followed by a series of four or five other girls, who were all very different but inspired shockingly similar song lyrics. By the time the album was finished, Xander couldn’t tell you which songs had been written about which girl. Miraculously, they all always seemed to be about the girl he liked at the moment. 

In the notebook, Xander had been forced to alter "Steph is my muse," scrawled in the margin of some mythology notes, to "She is my muse."

On the night of the open-mic, though, Stephanie had been at some other school-sponsored event, so she did not get to hear “World of Darkness” in person. She did, however, get to hear the incessant, mocking renditions of it that spread through the school like a sickness in the weeks that followed. It was often unclear whether this was intended to mock Xander or Stephanie, and there were even cases where it was done to mock someone who had overdone the whole mocking thing. Everyone knows high school is ruthless, but many people forget how complex it is. 

OBM’s second song, like those of many musicians, was about the experience of becoming famous, and how terrible it was to achieve the very thing he had been (and indeed, still was) striving for. It was entitled “Behind These Eyes” and it offered the listeners a Rare Glimpse at what it was like to be someone who was more complex than he appeared on the outside. Armed with his two original songs and a slew of mediocre Nirvana and Green Day covers, Xander began playing the local house show circuit. 

And “Behind These Eyes” was mocked at school, as well. But Xander kept playing it anyway. And for his seventeenth birthday, his parents got him an afternoon at a recording studio (Xander played guitar and sang; some session musicians, burnt-out guys in their twenties whose other legacy was to introduce Xander to the notion of being “straight-edge” - a very handy way to form an identity based on not doing something, which was a lot easier than doing things - and all you had to do was write an X on your hands and you got to feel superior to everyone else) - and the first demo was born. Everyone got a copy for Christmas that year. 

There is a thought experiment about a heap which gradually turns into a not-heap, and no one can quite decide when it crosses the line. This is interesting to think about but has no practical value. 

There is another very common event where a not-baby gradually turns into a baby, and a lot of people are very certain and vehement about when it crosses that line. This is the exact same thing, but has a lot of practical significance, because they kill each other over it. 

Something like this happened with regard to Xander Cross and Our Beautiful Misery. At some point, the constant singing of his lyrics transformed from mockery into admiration, and even looking back Xander couldn’t pinpoint when this occurred. Perhaps it hadn’t happened at all. Maybe there was an undertone of mockery present in even the most devoted members of the Company. In Xander’s more paranoid moments, he wondered if he was the victim of a real long-game of a practical joke. 

Lately, he had started to suspect that this was wishful thinking. They should be making fun of him out there. Hell, they had better be. Because the alternative was that his trite, boring lyrics were actually resonating with all these teenagers. That not only were they all just as dumb as he had been, but even dumber, because they couldn’t even write the stupid lyrics themselves. They needed someone else to do it for them.

A world that had elected him as its spokesman was probably a world who it wasn’t worth speaking for. 

Bobby Melrose was right about one thing, though. Our Beautiful Misery was Xander Cross, and vice-versa. The other three members of the band - though they had their own boards on the forums, and their own loyal fangirls, usually contrarians who just didn’t want to like the one that everyone else liked - were more like hired help. Mercenaries. They played the parts they were given, both musically and personally. Their jobs were boring and repetitive, which is what jobs were supposed to be. Then they went home to their girlfriends or their drugs and didn’t think about death or despair or the color black for the rest of the night. 

Xander envied them.