“Panic!” I said. “We could be the Panic!”

“I’d rather be the Desk,” Moz said quietly.

“Hang on!” Pearl said. “One idea at a time. A couple of weeks ago, I thought of something.”

Moz swung his veto gaze toward her. “What?”

“How about Crazy Versus Sane?”

“Pearl, darling,” Minerva said. “Don’t you think that’s kind of… pointed?” She looked at Alana Ray, not noticing that everyone else was looking at her.

“It’s not about us,” Pearl said. “It’s about all the weird stuff going on. Like the black water, the sanitation crisis, the crime wave. Like that crazy woman who dropped the Stratocaster on me and Moz… That’s how this band got started.”

“I don’t know,” Moz said. “Crazy Versus Sane. Sounds kind of artsy-fartsy to me.”

Score another one for the Moz Veto.

I tried to think, random words and phrases spilling through my head, but Pearl had been right. Band names only got harder the longer you waited to pick one. The deeper the music got into your brain, the more impossible it became to describe it in two or three words.

The silence was broken by the shriek of some metal band’s demo tape echoing out of another scout’s office. The steel walls of the safe seemed to be closing in, the air growing stale. I imagined Astor Michaels shutting the door, giving us until we ran out of oxygen to come up with a name.

I thought of the growling, thumping rehearsal building on Sixteenth Street and wondered if all the bands in there had names. How many bands were there in the whole world? Thousands? Millions?

Looking up at the ranks of safe-deposit boxes surrounding us, I wondered if we should all just get numbers.

“Why don’t we just pick something simple?” I said. “Like… Eleven?”

“Eleven?” Moz said. “That’s great, Zahler. But it’s no ‘the Desk.’”

Minerva sighed. “That’s the problem with Crazy Versus Sane: it’s false advertising, seeing as how we’re kind of short on sane.”

“What’s not sane is making us choose a name this way,” Pearl said, glaring up at the rat photos.

“Is this sort of ultimatum normal for record companies?” Alana Ray asked.

“No. It’s totally paranormal,” I said.

Pearl’s eyes lit up. “Hey, Zahler, maybe that’s it. We should call ourselves the Paranormals!”

“Plural,” Moz said. “Do you guys not get the plural thing?”

“Whatever,” Pearl said. “Paranormal? The Paranormal, if you want to be all the about everything.”

“Paranormal can mean two things,” Alana Ray said.

We all looked at her. Those rare times Alana Ray actually said something, everybody else listened.

“Para can mean beside,” she continued. “Like paralegals and paramedics, who work beside lawyers and doctors. But it can also mean against. Like a parasol is against the sun and a paradox against the normal way of thinking.”

I blinked. That was just about the most words Alana Ray had said in a row since that first rehearsal. And like everything she said, it was very weird and kind of smart.

Maybe Paranormal was the right name for us.

Pearl frowned. “So what’s a parachute against?”

Alana Ray’s eyebrows twitched. “The chute of gravity.”

“Gravity sucks,” I said softly.

“So if we go with Paranormal,” Alana Ray said, “we should figure out whether we are beside normal or against it. Names are important. That’s why I ask you all to call me by my whole first name.”

“Hey, I just thought Ray was your last name,” Moz said, then frowned. “What is your last name anyway?”

I held my breath. With Alana Ray, asking her last name was practically a personal question. But after a few seconds, she said, “I don’t have a real last name.” She didn’t continue right away, her hands flickering nervously.

“How do you mean?” Pearl asked.

“At my school, they gave us new last names, ones that anyone could spell. That way, when we told our names to people, no one would ever ask us to spell them. It was to save us from embarrassment.”

“You have trouble spelling?” Pearl asked. “Like, dyslexia?”

“Dyslexia,” Alana Ray answered. “D-y-s-l-e-x-i-a. Dyslexia.”

“Dude,” I said. “I couldn’t spell that.”

She smiled at me. “Only some of us had trouble spelling. But they renamed us all.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Minerva said softly, and everyone turned toward her. “As long as the music’s good, people will think the name’s brilliant too. Even if it’s just some random word.”

Moz nodded. “Yeah, the Beatles had a pretty stupid name, if you think about it. Didn’t hurt them much.”

“Dude!” My jaw dropped open. “They did not have a stupid name! It’s a classic!”

“It’s lame,” Minerva said. “Beatles, like the insect, except spelled like beat, because it’s music?”

Pearl cleared her throat. “Had to do with Buddy Holly and the Crickets, actually.”

“Whatever,” Minerva said. “It’s a really pathetic pun. And it’s plural.” She smiled at Moz.

“Whoa… really?” I blinked. But they were right: beetle didn’t have an a in it. They’d spelled it wrong.

Moz and Minerva were laughing at me, and he said, “You never noticed that?”

I shrugged. “I just figured they spelled it that way in England. I mean, I read this English book once, and all kinds of stuff was spelled wrong.”

Now everyone was laughing at me, but I was thinking maybe Minerva was right. Maybe it didn’t matter what we called ourselves: the Paranormals, the F-Sharps, or even the Desk. Maybe the music would grow around the name, whatever it was.

But we kept arguing, of course.

When Astor Michaels came back expecting an answer, Pearl pulled out her phone. “It’s only been forty minutes! You said an hour.”

He snorted. “I’ve got work to do. So what do we call this band?”

We all froze. We’d come up with about ten thousand ideas, but nobody could agree on a single one. Suddenly I couldn’t remember any of them.

“Come on!” Astor Michaels snapped his fingers. “It’s do-or-die time. Are we in business or not?”

Naturally, everyone looked at Pearl.

“Um…” The silence stretched out. “The, uh, Panics?”

“The Panic,” Moz corrected. “Singular.”

Astor Michaels considered this for a moment, then burst out laughing. “You’d be amazed how many people come up with that.”

“With what?” Pearl said.

“Panic. Whenever I give bands the Name Ultimatum, they always wind up calling themselves something like the Panic, the Freakout, or even How the Hell Should We Know?” He laughed again, his teeth flashing in the semi-darkness.

“So… you don’t like it?” Pearl asked softly.

“It’s crap,” he chuckled. “Sound like a bunch of eighties wannabes.”

No one else was asking, so I did: “Does this mean we’re dumped?”

He snorted. “Don’t be silly. Just trying to motivate you and have a little fun. Lighten up, guys.”

Minerva was giggling, but the rest of us were ready to kill him.

Astor Michaels sat down behind his desk, his smile finally showing all his teeth, a row of white razors in the darkness. “Special Guests it is!”