Sable Monroe

I Thought I Sounded Like Mariah Carey Until the Boombox Told the Truth

There are humiliations that stop hurting with age and become fucking hilarious.

At thirteen or fourteen, though?

They can feel like the end of your life.

One of mine involved puberty, a cassette tape, a boombox, Mariah Carey, and a very cute boy I had absolutely no business humiliating myself in front of.

Nobody Told Me Girls’ Voices Change Too

When you are a little kid, nobody really talks to girls about their voices changing.

Everybody knows boys’ voices crack and drop.

That’s part of the standard puberty package.

But girls?

Nobody said shit to me.

As a little girl, I could sing decently enough. Not Mariah Carey. Not Whitney Houston. Not about to get discovered in a mall.

But I could carry a tune.

At least I thought I could.

Then adolescence came along and apparently decided to rearrange some things without sending me a memo.

My voice changed.

Not dramatically enough for me to notice while I was talking.

But singing?

That was another story.

I just didn’t know it yet.

Then Mariah Carey Happened

Mariah Carey became popular when I was around middle-school age, and like everybody else, I was fascinated by that voice.

She was doing shit with her vocals that sounded almost supernatural.

High notes.

Runs.

Whistles.

Everything.

And naturally, because I was an adolescent girl with confidence unsupported by evidence, I would sing along.

One of the songs I remember singing was “Love Takes Time.”

And in my head?

I sounded good.

Not just acceptable.

Good.

I had apparently appointed myself Mariah Carey’s understudy without consulting anybody.

The acoustics inside my own skull were very generous.

Then I Borrowed His Cassette

There was a boy I had a massive crush on.

And of course he couldn’t just be regular cute.

No.

He was Jamaican, mixed Black, Indian, and Chinese, and somehow he ended up looking almost Hispanic.

He had these nice little curls.

To me, he looked like somebody had blended El DeBarge and Prince together and then dropped the result into my school.

Cute as shit.

So naturally, when I borrowed his Mariah Carey cassette, this became a high-stakes object.

This was not just a tape.

This was his tape.

His property.

His cassette had entered my home and therefore, in my adolescent mind, had acquired romantic significance.

I should have treated that cassette with the care normally reserved for museum artifacts.

Instead, I accidentally recorded myself singing on it.

The Boombox Betrayed Me

I had one of those little boomboxes where you could play cassettes and record onto them.

At some point, while singing along, I must have hit record.

I didn’t realize what I had done.

Not right away.

Then I played it back.

And that is when I met myself.

Not the version of myself I heard while singing.

Not the internal version.

Not the fantasy.

The external version.

The version everybody else had been hearing.

And holy shit.

I did not sound good.

I remember cringing.

What the fuck happened to my voice?

This could not possibly be the same person I had been hearing in my own head.

Surely the boombox was defective.

Surely the tape was warped.

Surely there had been some technological failure.

Unfortunately, the technology was fine.

The problem was me.

And Then I Remembered Whose Cassette It Was

The horror of hearing yourself sing badly is one thing.

The horror of realizing you have accidentally recorded that singing onto your crush’s cassette is something else entirely.

Because now I had a decision to make.

I still had to give the tape back.

There was no cloud.

No Spotify.

No digital file I could quietly delete.

I had physically recorded my voice onto this boy’s cassette tape.

My humiliation was analog.

It existed on plastic.

And eventually, I had to hand it back to him.

I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I returned it, but probably some version of:

Maybe he won’t notice.

Which is the kind of stupid hope adolescence is built on.

Of course he noticed.

He Had Jokes

He heard it.

My cute little Prince-meets-El-DeBarge crush heard me attempting Mariah Carey.

And he had jokes.

Of course he did.

I don’t even remember every joke he made.

I remember the feeling.

Mortification.

Pure adolescent mortification.

Because at that age, having your crush discover that you can’t sing doesn’t feel like one small embarrassing fact.

It feels like your entire attractiveness has been revoked.

I’m sure I thought:

Well, that’s it.

I am no longer cute.

The singing has canceled the face.

There will be no romance.

There will be no future.

My reputation is ruined.

Everyone will know.

Meanwhile, this boy probably laughed about it for five minutes and went on with his day.

That’s adolescence.

Your humiliation is historic.

Everybody else has math next period.

The Worst Part Was Finding Out I Wasn’t Who I Thought I Was

Looking back, the funniest part isn’t even that he heard me.

It’s that I heard me.

That was the real betrayal.

Until that cassette played back, I had been enjoying myself.

I thought I could sing.

Not professionally.

But enough.

Then technology gave me evidence.

There is something uniquely violent about hearing your recorded voice for the first time when it does not match the version living in your head.

Especially when the version in your head thinks she’s singing Mariah Carey.

Puberty had apparently changed my instrument and forgotten to notify the musician.

I was operating with outdated information.

Adolescence Is Full of These Little Betrayals

Your body changes before your brain fully catches up.

Your face changes.

Your skin changes.

Your hair changes.

Your voice changes.

Your proportions change.

Suddenly something you could do as a child doesn’t work the same way anymore.

And nobody necessarily explains it.

You just discover it through some humiliating little accident.

In my case, the lesson arrived through a borrowed cassette.

And because the universe enjoys comedy, the owner of that cassette happened to be one of the cutest boys I knew.

Perfect.

The Boombox Told the Truth

I can laugh now.

Actually, I laugh hard as hell thinking about it.

The girl who confidently sang along with Mariah Carey.

The accidental recording.

The playback.

The horror.

The realization that the tape did not belong to me.

The return.

The jokes.

All of it.

Back then, though?

I wanted to disappear.

That’s one of the nicer things about getting older.

Some memories eventually stop being evidence against you.

They become stories.

And somewhere in my adolescence was a very cute boy with curls, holding a cassette that contained undeniable proof that I was not Mariah Carey.

I thought I sounded good.

The boombox knew better.

Unfortunately, so did my crush.