Vintage--Jason Reeves Fanfiction

Chapter 1

My phone was ringing, a soothing song coming from its speaker. When I picked it up and said, "Hello?" Nelly answered.
"Jason? Is that you?" she called. Her voice sounded frantic. I started panicking, as I answered without hesitation,
"Yes, this is me. What do you need, Nelly?"
"They're saying that we can't tour for them, since we don't make enough money to support their company."
She sounded way more panicked than the situation deserved.
"So what?" I asked, "We can tour with some other artist...or company...supporting us!"
"That's just it," Nelly said, "No one wants us, even as the opening band. We're not needed, and since we have to pay the company 75 percent of the money we earn anyway, we basically can't afford to go on tour."
"So we have a road trip and play on the streets. I don't care, Nelly, High Dive Heart is going to happen whatever anyone else does. Colbie won't let us open for her?"
"No, someone else already chose to open for her. She hasn't been speaking to us lately. I don't know what her problem is."
"I don't know either." I sighed, "But she does sometimes do her own thing."
"True," Nelly said,"I don't understand why she didn't take us into fame with her."
"Oh, we don't want fame, Nelly, you know that."
Nelly just sighed, and hung up.

I looked out the window and the flowers blew invitingly in the breeze. I went outside with my camera, ready to take some pictures. I aimed my Canon at the perfectly positioned pink roses and pushed down on the button to make the shutter click. Then, I scrambled down onto the grass, lying under where the flowers grew, and aimed the Canon again, only this time up at the sky, shooting with renewed excitement, capturing birds and clouds and the pale pink, smooth undersides and coarse green leaves of the flowers.

    "What are you doing?"

I gasped in complete surprise, then hurriedly jumped to my feet. The voice had taken me by complete surprise. Whirling around, I saw an all too familiar figure perched on the low wall with flowers growing out of its cracks. Though still somewhat affected by the surprise, I managed a quiet smile. I walked up to the young girl and said, "Hey!"
    The girl was trying to hold back a smile, but evidently this wasn't quite working. She turned her face away from me as she said, her voice trembling, "Hey, Jason. I'm sorry...I startled you. I just wanted to come see you, and I didn't know what you were doing, so I asked you, and then...you sort of...got nervous. So, I'm sorry."
    "That's OK. Wanna come in and rock out?"
Her smile was allowed now, she decided, to break across her cheeks, and the result was nothing short of how extraordinary the sun looks after it breaks through the clouds. I knew this girl was shy, but I wanted to tell her sometime that she could always smile when she was around me, even if it embarrassed her to do so at that particular moment, because I liked it. It looked like such a sweet, innocent smile. Such a rare, happy treasure on the face of this girl who had suffered several varying degrees of anxiety and depression. She replied to my question.
"Yes, Jason, I'd love to rock out with you!!"

Yes, this girl was shy out in the morning sunlight with someone she was still getting to know, but when she 'rocked out' with me, it was quite different. She would be belting her heart out, and dancing wildly as if a spotlight glowed down from the dingy, dusty celling or walls of my basement, which served as a music creation studio.