I’m trying to focus, Lucy thought grumpily. I am. But the tangle of beat-marks that danced across the page just refused to make sense today. They were taunting her, picking at her brain like tiny little fingers. With claws.
Christ, she wasn’t even hungover. What was wrong with her?
Secrets, Lucy thought. It’s all the secrets destroying my brain. She didn’t want to know any of the things she’d learned that Saturday at Skye’s. But you couldn’t un-know something, no matter how hard you tried.
All Lucy wanted to do was call her mum. Not that she thought she’d really tell Mum all of the crazy things she suspected her bandmates were up to. Mum would go completely mental if she knew.
Mum and Dad would chat to her about the flower beds and how Emily was learning to do double pirouettes and was destroying the kitchen in the process. And somehow, if they stayed on the line long enough, Mum would guess that something was wrong. They’d harass her about it for a while, and then they’d reel off every cliché piece of advice ever known to man and Lucy would be thoroughly annoyed by the time she got off the phone.
And she’d feel better.
“Lucille!” Alexander’s voice barked over the intercom from the booth. “Where are you today, and when do you plan to join the rest of us here on planet Earth?”
“Um, sorry, Alexander,” she said, suddenly terrified that she was about to start bawling. She scrubbed at her eyes to clear them. “I just … I can’t seem to get this beat.”
“You had it yesterday,” he pointed out.
Robyn caught Lucy’s eye from where she stood between three low-slung mics set to catch her guitar solo and mouthed, You okay?
Lucy nodded — unconvincingly, apparently, because Robyn mouthed back, What’s wrong?
Lucy shook her head vigorously and looked straight ahead. Robyn’s sympathy would do her in if she let it.
“Let’s try it again,” Alexander boomed. “With a little less day-tripping, shall we?”
Lucy nodded, still avoiding Robyn’s concerned gaze. She just wanted to get through this song. That was all. Then they’d be done for the day.
“One, two, three, four,” she counted off.
They made it thirty seconds into “Sucker Punch” before Alexander cut them. Lucy knew it was her fault. The others had been dead on, Toni’s deeper bass guitar flowing smoothly under Robyn’s picked-out melody as Iza pounded out a percussive piano line to punctuate the first few verses of the song. Lucy had blown the beat. Again.
“You girls can go,” Alexander said, stepping out of the booth. “Lucille can stay.”
Lucy sagged. Now she was in for it.
She didn’t look up as the others gathered their things and cleared off.
Someone squeezed her shoulder as they passed. Robyn, she thought, catching a glint of the yellow nail polish Robyn had discovered last week on Melrose and fallen head over heels in love with. Trust Robyn to be the one who saw she was sad. She always did.
Robyn’s sensitivity to every little thing could be quite annoying. You constantly had to reassure her that you weren’t upset or she hadn’t offended the waiter or that a passerby didn’t think she was odd. But Robyn always knew when someone was sad or upset or had PMS and needed an extra coffee and muffin. Lucy tried to smile up at her as she left, but she knew she was doing a lousy job at it.
Just like she was at everything else.
“Okay, Lucille,” Alexander said, settling on a stool beside the drum kit once the others had fled. “What’s going on?”
She wanted to blurt it all out, right then. Harper and Rafe. Robyn lying about having food poisoning. Toni and Jason. But what would Alexander do? What could he do? A lot of things that might bloody well ruin all their chances, that’s what he could do.
“Don’t hold out on me, miss,” Alexander snapped. “I am neither blind nor deaf. You could hit that beat backward and forward and upside down in a hurricane, but you can’t get it to come out of your sticks to save your own life today. Something’s eating you and it’s getting in the way of my record, so it’s time to spill.”
She had to tell him something. She should tell him everything. Or maybe she shouldn’t. What if she was wrong. What if—
“It’s my family,” she blurted. She was a bit surprised, actually, when the words popped free of her mouth. She’d honestly thought she was covering for her real concerns, but once she’d said it out loud, she realized it was her family that was bothering her, as much as it was anything else.
She’d been fine, at first, being at odds with them, but now as the days went by and LA and Crush and all the rest became more demanding and the girls all had their own concerns … She was just lonely, Lucy realized abruptly. So bloody lonely.
She didn’t know she was crying until Alexander reached out to pat her shoulder, his expression much the same as if he’d stumbled across a stick of dynamite primed to explode. Lucy tried to stop crying, but now that the tears were flowing, they didn’t want to stop.
Alexander fumbled for a box of tissues stashed on one of the side tables beside the sofa at the back of the room, then stamped back to her and thrust a wad of them into her hand.
“What’s wrong with your family?” he asked. Then he awkwardly added, “Dear?”
She almost smiled, despite herself. Poor Alexander. Comforting crying teenage girls was not in his skill set. She blew her nose on the tissues rather violently.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to fall apart,” Lucy said, trying to gather herself. “I’m fine, really.”
“Young lady,” Alexander said. “You will learn, someday, that most problems are bigger inside your head than they are when you take them out and look at them in the light of day. I think it’s time this one saw daylight, don’t you?”
She gulped back more tears and nodded.
“So …” he prodded.
“They don’t approve, you see,” she blurted. “My parents, I mean. I didn’t tell them about Project Next when we tried out because they wanted me to focus on my studies and were never going to let me join a new band, much less try out for the show. I meant to tell them eventually. I did. But before I knew it we were about to fly to Los Angeles and they’d seen me on TV and they didn’t know I was on the show and it was just a disaster. Now they’re not speaking to me, and John — that’s my brother — says they’re still livid and I think they’ll never forgive me and I just want to talk to them. I just want them to irritate me with too many questions and tell me all about rebuilding the gutters and the like until I die of boredom, you know? I’ve no idea why but … I want that. And I’ll never have it again.”
Alexander sat quietly for a long time.
“I know the feeling well, unfortunately,” he said finally.
“They just don’t understand,” Lucy said. “They don’t understand why it matters. Why music is so important. They never have.”
“Have you explained it to them?” Alexander asked.
“I tried,” Lucy said. “Well, I meant to. But I’m not sure it’s ever been as much a case of explaining as making a lot of stuttering sounds and waving my hands, then running off to LA and sulking for days.”
Without a word, Alexander stood and crossed to the booth. When he came back, he was carrying a notepad and a pen.
“You can’t expect them to understand if you don’t at least try to explain it to them. They might never get it. And if you tell them and they still don’t feel you, that’s their problem, not yours. But you do have to try.”
“How do I do that?” Lucy asked. “They won’t call me back or return my texts.”
“Then write it down, Lucille,” Alexander said, handing her the pad and pen. “Write them a letter and make it as long or short as it needs to be to tell them how you really feel about your music. Then tell them that they will have two seats at the Las Vegas finale, if they want them. All they have to do is call me.”
“But Jason said family wouldn’t be invited,” Lucy said.
“They will be if I say they are,” Alexander said. “Now write, Lucille. We’ve got beats to run through and I want this out of your system!”
Then he strode away, as though he didn’t want anyone to catch him taking care of a teenage girl instead of glowering at a band from his booth.
When he was gone, Lucy stared down at the pad.
How was she meant to explain why she loved music? There was no explaining it. The feeling that the heartbeat of the universe was pulsing in her fingers, just waiting to drive outward, into the air, through her drums. The throbbing snap that you could feel all the way up your arms while you played. And the feeling you got, if you were really doing it properly, that it wasn’t you playing at all, that you could look down on yourself and see this awesome, impossible dance of sticks and arms and cymbals and think, Christ, nobody can do that, and then realize that you, in fact, were actually doing that.
But how was she meant to describe it to her parents?
Alexander’s voice rang in her ears once more.
Write it down, Lucille. Write it down.
Lucy picked up the pen and started to write.