Violet Sunshine

Chapter 17: We Declare War

I declared the emergency meeting over text to the ECHO group chat, rushing over to Will's after my shift at La Promenade. I'm more careless than usual, throwing my bike to the side of the garage before slipping under the garage door, Olivia, Ryder, and Danny already waiting for me. I grabbed one of the chairs off to the side, swinging it to the center and sitting in it back-to-front, leaning my arms against the back of the chair, trying to steady my nerves before I opened my mouth to speak.

"What happened?" Olivia's question is out of her mouth almost before I sat down. "Is it about the third round? The performance?"

An involuntary chill jolted down my spine, but I shoved away the creeping dread in the pit of my stomach, shaking my head. "It's one of the bands we're playing against," I told them, trying to keep the emotion out of my voice, but it just ended up sounding flat. "Midnight Thunder."

Olivia and Ryder blink blankly at me, but Danny's eyes widen in recognition.

"Ethan's band," he said, and I nodded, a headache beginning to form just behind my eyes, prickly and painful.

"Ethan? No way," Olivia glanced at Danny, then back to me. "How?"

I gave a halfhearted shrug. I wasn't willing to dive into a convoluted theory on how Ethan could have possibly finessed his way through the contest with his band. All I cared about was what currently lay ahead of us. "That's not our only problem," I confessed, already pulling up the audio clip from this morning on my phone, my limbs feeling like they weighed a million pounds. "Listen."

The audio clip started playing, and almost as soon as Olivia heard the guitar riffs, a look of outrage crossed her face, but she doesn't say anything, letting the audio clip continue playing and Ethan continue singing. Even Danny looked pissed, which was rather uncharacteristic of him, his curls flopping in his face as his ears turned pink, staring at my phone as if he wished he had laser vision so he could obliterate it on the spot. Ryder is frozen in place, his drumstick he was fiddling with hanging between his fingers in mid-air.

"That," I said, pausing the audio clip when I'd had enough, "is the song that Midnight Thunder is planning on playing for the third round."

"What?" Ryder leaped to his feet. "How? That's ECHO's song!"

"That's your song, Vi," Olivia corrected, her face also tight with a barely suppressed anger. "How could he have stolen it like that?"

Will was looking at us all quizzically. "Your song?" He said, his frown creasing his forehead. "Ethan stole your song?"

I took a deep breath. This is was I dreaded the most — telling them the truth. The truth of that hot summer day. Of scribbled notes on napkins and exchanged laughter. It all faded away and felt corrupt and tainted now. "I wrote On the Run before I formed ECHO. It was the first song I had ever truly attempted to write myself. It was also the only song that we worked on for a while, in our first few weeks and months of forming the band." I glanced at Olivia, Ryder, and Danny. They all knew this part; only Will was in the dark on our band's history. But there was a piece of history they were all missing out on, a piece I had locked away and buried deep; only I could never seem to get rid of the key.

"Ethan knows that song because he helped me with it," I said miserably. "I asked him to when we first started dating. And shortly after, I joined Midnight Thunder."

The room was so silent I could've heard a pin drop.

The weight of the information I just gave them felt like a cement block dropped upon all of our shoulders, and even Ryder began to slouch forward in shock. "You joined Midnight Thunder," he repeated, almost in a daze.

"Yeah. For the three months that we were dating. I left, obviously, once we broke up." I stared at the ground, not able to make eye contact with any of them, and certainly not with Will, who was looking my way, his gaze boring into me. They all definitely had some questions, and I was sure they were questions that I would not want to answer, for fear of having to look back at that memory, dusting it off again and again and again instead of erasing it entirely like I wished I could.

"You said he helped you with the song," Danny said slowly, being the first to return to his senses. "What does that mean, exactly?"

"It means he helped me with a couple of chord progressions and shifted a few lyrics here and there," I replied, shifting uncomfortably in my chair. "That's all."

"So you wrote all the lyrics, melody progression, and any harmonies?"

I nodded in confirmation. "He seemed to have changed a couple of lyrics in there, though."

Danny shook his head adamantly. "Then it's still downright stealing," he said. "Plagiarism. Copyright infringement. Whatever you want to call it, it's illegal."

"What do we do about it?" Will asked, crossing his arms and looking at Danny, an unfamiliar solemn expression on his face.

"We have to report Midnight Thunder for plagiarism to Berklee," Danny replied, swinging his chair around and opening up his laptop. "And we have to do it now, or it'll be too late."

"What if it is too late?" Olivia asked, her voice edging on desperation. "The live performance is only a few weeks away. We don't have time to create a brand-new song, practice it, and be able to perform it in that timeframe."

"On that, we don't have a choice," Danny said bitterly. "I'll handle the Berklee side of it and get into contact with the music department overseeing the contest. In the meantime, we need to come up with another song that we can perform in a matter of three weeks."

At this, my heart began to thud involuntarily. "And if Berklee doesn't strike him from the competition?"

Danny turned around in his chair, his gaze fixed on mine with a fiery, determined glint in his eyes. "Then we confront him face-to-face," he replied. "And we declare war."

whelp, danny boi means business, so you know it's about to go down...

what do you think of how things are heating up for ECHO thus far?