We practiced like crazy in between. I convinced the guys to start meeting three times a week, and Patrick talked his parents into letting us take over half their garage.

And I practiced. I’d been working an hour or two each day. Now it was three. Sometimes more. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with cramps in my hands and realize that I’d been playing imaginary chords in my sleep. Music followed me everywhere. I could literally feel it thumping in my bloodstream. And that was all I wanted: to be part of it. To be a conduit for it. To be one tiny piece in whatever it was that made it real.

We played our three songs at the Crow’s Nest. We got the longest, loudest applause of the night. It was incredible.

Ike offered us a night of our own.

It was a Tuesday, when the Crow’s Nest would be half empty, almost dead by eight. But we took it. We felt like gods.

I went straight home from that local talent night and wrote three songs, all of them crap. Then I wrote one that was a little less bad. Then I wrote one called “Blood Money.” I could tell it was all right, because I went around humming it to myself for days, its rhythm stuck like a burr in my head. Patrick added some great lines.

We played it on Tuesday night.

People went nuts.

We did tighter and tighter covers. Patrick and I wrote more songs, sitting up late in his bedroom or mine, surrounded by empty Mountain Dew cans, scribbling and testing and trying again.

Ike gave us a Thursday night.

Somebody came from the local newspaper. They wrote about us: “Young Locals Take Aim at Heavy Metal Fame.” They wrote that Jezz’s name was Jess, and that Patrick had said he was inspired by Slipknot, when Patrick actually hates Slipknot and had just said that the drummer Joey Jordison was awesome. Jezz laughed about it. Patrick was pissed.

Then someone came from the Bemidji newspaper, which has about eight times the circulation of the Greenwood Gazette.

And then someone posted a clip of us playing on YouTube, and things started to spiral.

By the end of summer, a couple of metal bloggers had made the drive just to see us. Another came in early September. He wrote for an actual online magazine, one we’d even heard of. He looked only a little bit older than we were, with stringy dark brown hair and a round face and thick-framed glasses, and he had an ancient black leather jacket that he said had once belonged to Dimebag Darrell.

After our set he hung out, chatting, helping us move the drums, wind the cords. He was too excited about metal to even bother pretending to be cool, which made me like him a million times more.

When we had everything packed up in our cars, he still made no move to leave. Now he was talking about metal movies, documentaries, the best tour DVDs. Patrick finally had to leave, taking Jezz with him. The writer shook their hands. Then he pulled them both into big, back-pounding hugs.