Fanfare (Country Roads #2) - Chapter 7

I’d decided not to say anything to Mom about Chef helping until I knew something concrete. She’d be pissed when she found out I’d disobeyed her specific instructions, so I needed to have a real solution ready to show her it wasn’t just about disobeying her. Staying quiet wasn’t easy as I watched her get her stuff together to go to work, clearly still upset about everything.

Normally after she left I practiced my guitar or worked on writing songs, but I found I couldn’t do either. I still had hours until I needed to be at Hanna’s to get a ride to the Blue Ridge, and all I wanted to do was crawl in bed and hide from the world. Less than a week ago the whole year ahead of me looked hopeful, and now I had to deal with shit I honestly wasn’t old enough to deal with. Even with Chef offering to help, it wasn’t a sure thing we’d win.

Aaron’s father might be the kind of person to ignore who his son was and take it out on others, but he’d also managed to get elected county prosecutor five times running. People apparently thought he was doing a good job, which meant he was at least somewhat competent. It sucked that we’d just started to pull ourselves up to the point where we didn’t have to choose between paying the full rent or skipping meals, and now we were in danger of sliding back into struggling to keep from becoming homeless. The one thing I knew for sure was this was too much for a kid.

I was pulled out of my spiral by a knock on the door. The last time someone showed up unannounced was after Rhonda publicly dumped me and I tried to hide from the world. I might be feeling down with the lawsuit thing, but I wasn’t at that level and I hadn’t missed anything yet, so it probably wasn’t Hanna or anyone else coming to pull my head out of my ass.

I peeked through the window and saw Kat’s car sitting out front. My first thought was something had gone wrong. She spent a lot of time hanging out with Hanna and me, but she didn’t usually show up unannounced, which meant something was wrong.

“Is everything okay?” I asked as soon as I opened the door.

“Yeah, I’m here for your tutoring session.”

“What?”

“I put too much work into you to let you start failing now. The school might be able to tell me I can’t tutor you during school hours, but they can’t tell me to not come and do it on my free time.”

“Don’t you have swim practice on Saturday mornings? You need to take care of the things you need to do first. You don’t need to worry about me. I’m pretty close to getting caught up.”

“I asked my coach to move me to the afternoon. You’re busy at the Blue Ridge on Saturdays and we practice indoors anyways. Plus, this way we get to hang out more and I get to sleep in. I made sure I was taking care of everything I needed to. You might be in charge of everything else, but when it comes to your schoolwork, I’m the boss. Being pretty close and being caught up isn’t the same thing, and you have other subjects you could be doing better in. You said the only way your mom would let you keep doing music was to keep your grades up and get into college. I’m not going to let you miss out on your dream because of something I can help with. Now, we don’t have a ton of time, so let’s get to work.”

I was impressed. This was the most assertive I’d ever seen her. Of course, I knew Kat well enough now that I could see the telltale signs of how nervous she was. Her shoulders were tense and she was continuously rubbing her hands together as she spoke. She’d kept it out of her voice, but she was really pushing herself to confront me about this. She’d probably been practicing her speech the whole way here.

“You’re the boss. We’re doing just math today?”

I had to hide my smile as she visibly relaxed. Confrontations made her incredibly anxious, to the point of fairly extreme panic attacks. Even with how comfortable she was with me and our existing power dynamic, I was honestly surprised she’d managed to do that so well.

“No. You’re going to have a biology quiz in a few weeks and you’ve started a section on The Great Gatsby that I want us to work on. You’re a good reader, but that isn’t the same as being able to analyze text the way teachers want you to.”

“How do you know what I have coming up?”

“Part of the tutoring program means talking to the student’s teachers and knowing what they need to be prepared for. I worked with them all last year once you were assigned to me, and even though you’re not in the program now they were all willing to show me what you needed to be prepared for these next six weeks. Well, except your history teacher. He refused to work with me while you were in the program so I didn’t even bother talking to him this time.”

“Good call. He hates me.”

“I noticed. Now, we have a lot to cover, so no more stalling.”

“Yes, ma’am. Good job.”

“What?”

“With everything since I opened the door. You’re doing great and I know how hard that all was. I’m really proud of you.”

“I said no more stalling,” she said, trying to maintain the strict teacher thing, although she didn’t pull it off one-hundred percent.

She practically shuddered and let out the breath she’d been holding in. I wasn’t a psychologist and didn’t know if we were just digging us into some kind of dependence that would be a problem when she eventually got the counseling she needed, but it felt like we were making progress.

“Sorry, you’re the boss. Okay, where do we start?”

“Let’s start with the book you got assigned in English,” she said, unable to hide her smile.

***

Monday, I was eating my sandwich in Mr. French’s office, talking about music. It’d only been a few days, but we’d fallen into a routine of sorts. We’d both eat lunch in his office for a bit, since he didn’t want anyone to have food next to the piano, which made sense. Sometimes we just chatted and sometimes he gave me notes on whatever change I’d made to a song, after which we’d moved to the piano and work there.

I’d felt awkward the first few days, worried that he was giving up his lunch break to work with me, but after the third time he told me not to worry about it, I decided to just give in and accept the situation. I was thankful I had someone of his experience to work with me. It was something most new musicians didn’t get. I might not ever make it in music, but I knew I was getting a ton of opportunities that others my age would never get. I’d be an idiot not to take him up on his help.

Besides, I did get why he was doing it. I loved talking music, whether it was with Mr. French, Willie, or any of the guys in the band. It was like we all spoke this language that regular people didn’t know, and I only got to do it when I was with them. I could imagine it was the same for him, maybe more so. He might work as a choir teacher, but he’d started off playing on stage himself. If I eventually ended up teaching, which I would honestly be fine with if that’s where life led, I knew I’d still want to have some hand in performing, even if it was once removed like this.

“That’s a hard question to answer,” he said, wiping his mouth with one of the cafeteria’s flimsy napkins.

I’d asked how he knew when he’d finished a song, since it seemed like every time I looked at them, I found something else I wanted to change.

“There is a temptation to just keep tinkering with them forever, but that’s a trap. You might find things that are technically better but you’ll end up losing the soul of it. When you first start off, you’re just putting your feelings down. It’s the truest representation of what you want to tell the audience. Then you start the work of making it something that others will enjoy listening to. Making the music catchy, fixing the words so they flow well, things like that. The thing is, the more you do that, the further you get from the thing you started with. The trick is to find that balance point, where it’s both the message you want to send and something that others will want to listen to. A lot of new musicians make the mistake of wanting it to be ‘perfect,’ but the more they work on it, the further they get from perfection.”

“Are there times when there’s a flaw in the music that still works?”

“Sure, lots. I’m not sure if you know it but there was this song back in the seventies called Ain’t Sunny No More by Billy Walters where he says ‘I know’ twenty-six times. Now, if you get into music theory classes, they’re going to talk about traps in songs and will specifically tell you to avoid repeating yourself as much as possible. It’s fine to have a little, especially if you then subvert that reputation later, but a whole verse of just ‘I knows’ would be a huge red flag. Thing is, Walters had them in as a placeholder until he worked out the words, since he wasn’t happy with the verse he originally wrote. He played it for a bunch of friends of his, who were all big names at the time, and they all agreed they loved the way it sounded. He just shrugged and recorded it as is. On paper, it’s weird but if you listen to him perform it, his ‘I knows’ become sadder and sadder, almost pleading in the end. You can feel the song’s protagonist falling apart as he begs for things to get better, for the sun to come out again. It’s kind of haunting, which is probably why it ended up hitting number one on the charts when it was released.”

“So it’s okay to break the rules if it works?”

“Sure, but you have to really know what you’re doing. I hear a lot of amateurs talk about breaking the rules, and they always have a reason why they think their thing is different, but it seldom is. The rules are the rules for a reason, they usually work. Now, no rule is perfect and there are times to break them, but you have to understand the rules and why they’re in place before you’ll know how to break them in a way that doesn’t do exactly what the rules are there to stop. Walters already had a bunch of smash hits and was recognized pretty universally as a gifted songwriter, and he had to have five guys just as good as he was, all with decades of experience, to convince him to leave the track as it was.”

“Okay, so follow the rules until I know enough.”

“More like follow them until you’re worried enough about breaking them that you do it grudgingly. If you go in wanting to do things differently for the sake of being different or because you can’t make anything else work, you’re doing it wrong. I think I got off on a tangent,” he said, taking another bite of the rather disgusting pizza he’d gotten from the cafeteria and grimacing.

“A bit. How do I find that balance point between what I want a song to say and it being technically proficient?”

“There’s no real easy answer for that. First, record yourself, nothing fancy, just on your phone, and listen to it back. Ignore those little errors that always stand out and try to listen objectively. See if it feels right, or if you’ve moved too far from the point. Of course, after working on a song for a while, it’s hard to hear it with an objective ear so sometimes it helps to play it for other people. Try not to use friends, unless they can remain objective and will tell you when something isn’t working. Play it and then ask them about it. Ask how it made them feel, was there any part that didn’t feel that way, what message they got from it, that kind of thing. Don’t listen to just one, listen to a bunch of people telling you what they thought, then go back and look at what you originally wanted to do with it. If the feedback is off from that original intention, then you’ve gone too far in one direction; but if the feedback is all about technical problems, you haven’t gone far enough. Eventually, though, you just gotta put it down and say it’s done. I’ll tell you now, you’ll never be one-hundred percent happy with anything you ever make. It’s the curse of all creative types.”

“How do you find people to listen to your songs?”

“Well, some are just people you meet that have an ear for music. It’s good to get non-professional opinions, since they’ll give you a better insight into whether you got the catchy part of the equation right. The rest will be people you end up working with, other musicians, venue owners, producers, and so forth. Once you really start working in the business, you’ll find people asking you to listen to their stuff too. That’s the way it works sometimes.”

“So it’s all informal?”

“No. That’s all helpful, but this is where you need to end up working with a good producer. The good ones know when something is done and when things still need tweaking. Now, don’t let them try to ride over you. It’s still your baby and your story to tell. The real greats end up in partnerships with a producer who gets them and sees the same vision they do. If you find that, you’ve got it made.”

“Dad never had that,” I said, thinking back to Dad when he made his own music, although he never really played for anyone. “At least not as far as I can remember. I know he played in bands when I was real little, but I just remember him writing songs in the RV and then playing them on stage. I never heard him talk to anyone about his music.”

“Some people can do that, but it’s tough. Real pros have people they can bounce their stuff off of and some kind of technical collaborator. I can only think of one or two artists who did everything themselves, and one burned out pretty damn fast. Ended up walking away from the industry entirely.”

“Well, I think I need people. Especially now. I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Impostor syndrome. That’ll never go away.”

“Impostor syndrome?”

“Most people have it, especially in an area where they don’t have a ton of experience. It’s that doubting sensation you have that people will find out you don’t have the ability or knowledge to do what you’re doing, and realizing you shouldn’t be there. I once heard an interview with this guy who won the Nobel Prize for math talking about feeling it while he was accepting his award. The guy was a legit genius that everyone recognized as the head of his field, and here he is saying he’s afraid people are going to find out he’s a fraud. I think it’s a good thing. It’s the people who think they’ve always deserved what they get that end up being the worst people to work with. A little humility goes a long way, especially in the music industry. If you understand you don’t know everything and that you can always learn something new, you’ll find it easier to get people to work with you.”

“I don’t think there’s much danger that I’ll stop thinking there’s stuff I don’t know. I still feel kind of overwhelmed.”

“Well, that’ll go away some. Remember you don’t have to do all of this now. You’re young. Yeah, you’re getting good opportunities and trying to make the most of them, but you don’t have to get your big break right now. Sometimes it’s good to remember you’re still a kid.”

“That’s what Mom says.”

“Well, she sounds like a smart woman. Now, clean up your trash, and let’s move over to the piano. I had some thoughts on that second riff you were having trouble with.”

***

By Wednesday, I’d gotten into a pattern with the new schedule. While I missed having lunch with everyone, and felt a little bad about monopolizing so much of Mr. French’s lunch break, I’d made huge progress on my music in just over a week. The two songs I’d started at Christmas were both coming along well, and some of the places where I felt like it was missing something, had started getting fleshed out. I’d even started working on two more.

Mr. French cautioned me on trying to work on too much at any one time, pointing out I wouldn’t want to play all of these for audiences at one time to get ‘audience feedback’ on them. They’d have to be spread out. While having something of a backlog was good (since I’d always be able to work in a song to test out when I played), I didn’t want to have so many that they became jumbled together. I decided that this was as many as I was going to work on at one time. These four, with Country Road, would be all I’d work on for now until I felt that most of them were in a good place to consider them more or less down. He’d pointed out that when I got to the point where I could actually record them into an album I might be making changes to them, but until then it was okay to lock them down once I felt they were far enough along.

I was coming out of the music room, not really paying attention and thinking about music, when something pulled me out of my head. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was, since I hadn’t really noticed it consciously. I was halfway across the cafeteria, which was between the small wing that held the music and art rooms and the rest of the school. I didn’t see Aaron or anyone else that could be a threat and was starting to think it was nothing when I heard Rhonda.

“Can you believe her? Like anyone with an ass that size would be able to squeeze into the uniform.”

I hadn’t noticed her at first because Rhonda was surrounded by a cluster of her old friends. Rhonda was standing in front of a heavy-set girl who was looking down at her shoes. I was honestly surprised. Rhonda had always been a social climber, but she hadn’t been vicious about it, unlike Camille or the rest of her pack. I noticed that Camille and several of her old crew were missing, but apparently, Rhonda had decided to take up Camille’s mean streak now that she was missing.

“Can you even do any kind of tumbling? I mean without looking like you’re a whale floundering on a beach.”

They all laughed, some openly and some covering their mouths, like they were trying to be coy about it. The other girl just stood there, staring at her feet.

“I’m sorry Cindy, I was just giving you a hard time,” Rhonda said, stepping forward and putting her arm around the girl, who looked up almost hopefully. “We could use you on the team. You could be the entire bottom of the pyramid.”

Rhonda stepped back and started laughing hysterically at her own joke. She was just starting to say something else when she saw me, and clamped her mouth closed. She looked sideways at the girl, who was visibly shaking now, and then back at me before saying something I couldn’t hear to her friends. As a group, they all walked off, Rhonda casting one last look my way before turning and disappearing down the hall.

The girl they’d been mocking just stood there, her shoulders shaking, clearly crying.

“Hey,” I said, coming up and stopping in front of her. “Are you okay?”

“What?” she said, looking up and wiping her eyes.

“I heard what they said and I wanted to see if you were okay. Did you want me to walk with you to class?”

“I’m fine,” she said, almost angrily. “Leave me alone.”

She turned and stomped off, leaving me surprised. That wasn’t the reaction I’d been expecting, but I kind of got it. There was something about being made to feel weak by those with more power than you and the idea that someone offering you help back up was just making you look weaker. Of course, maybe she knew I used to date Rhonda and thought I’d just make it worse.

My real surprise, though, was at Rhonda. After everything that happened last semester with her and Aaron, I’d think she, of all people, would know how it felt to be treated like that. I guess she wasn’t kidding about wanting to get back on top and apparently the only way she could see of doing that was by knocking other people down.

This wasn’t who she was when we dated, but apparently, it’s who she thought she had to be to get ahead. It made me sad to think that any hope of Rhonda finding her way back to being the good person I’d seen glimpses of, was gone.