December 24th [COMPLETED]

Chapter 2: Twenty-One

George spent the morning of her twenty-first birthday in the back of a taxi riding from her rented studio apartment in Kensington all the way out to the suburbs of South London, there to spend the morning at Willow Studios where it was tucked into the heart of a quiet little neighborhood.

George took this route almost every night, but going in the opposite direction. The studio where George had been interning for the last four months was an hour's commute via public transportation (the Tube only took her so far and there were two bus transfers to get to the stop nearest the studio). It was only a half-hour ride back by cab at three in the morning. George had never taken this route to the studio in broad daylight and so enjoyed looking out the window as the cab sped through the main thoroughfares and then into the quieter neighborhoods, watching the neat rows of houses decorated for the holiday season pass by.

While she watched as the skyscrapers turned into houses, George was struck by where exactly she was and how she had gotten there. It had been a long year of hard work, grit, and determination and somehow George had ended up exactly where she wanted to be.

George spent the first eight months of the year with a fire burning beneath her, propelling her forward. The fire sometimes took her gently by the hand and led her along but most of the time it pulled her headfirst against her will into the depths of what was quickly becoming her career.

Two things had stoked the flame underneath George. The first was Jayden's words at her mother's Christmas party coupled with the thought that there was no one like her in the music industry, no young female producer. That didn't sit right with George and everything in her wanted to be the first, wanted to make a space for herself at the table where there wasn't any.

The second thing? Vivian's insistence that it was George's turn to figure out her future, that college was George's next right step. Every path, every option her mother suggested to George only compelled George to dig her heels in deeper and plant her feet firmly on her dream of becoming a music producer.

George hadn't even been aware that this was her dream until she said it out loud to a complete stranger at her mother's Christmas party. But alas, once awake, her dream had yet to dim and the best George could do was hold on as the grit and determination she had inherited from her mother kicked in and kick-started George's next chapter in life.

George spent the first eight months of the year getting to know every single artist, manager, assistant, music producer, and sound engineer on tour, every single person on the talent side of things for every tour she worked with her dad. George convinced Julien to let her leave the sound booth at the start of the new year and let her become the runner for the talent, there to do anything and everything. Anything as long as it got her in the right rooms.

It worked. George was in the right rooms with the right people, meeting everyone, memorizing their names, doing her best to network and make herself known. It was simply a matter of genuinely getting to know everyone she interacted with. Just like she had when she worked sound, when she had worked lighting, instruments, and every other part of the tour, with every subset of the crew. George even got to know the talent's siblings, their parents, best friends, and significant others.

It came naturally to her, and she easily became part of their entourage, part of their team for the tour, someone they felt they could rely on, trust. All that just so that, when the moment came, when there was a rhyme they couldn't find during a late-night writing session in a hotel somewhere in Canada, George was there with a solution. When there was a melody for a bridge that didn't quite work, George was right there, offering up ideas. Most of the acts took her suggestions, surprisingly. About only half of those actually credited her for it. George did not care either way. She was doing the work.