Teenage Icon (UNDER REVISION AND REWRITING)

♫ Three Days to Go

The Escalade village in the south of Phoenix, Arizona is a beautiful place, it should be though, with the amount of money people pay to live here.  Only, I have a few issues with it. Due to it being so expensive it is a small very close community, so small in fact that pretty much everyone knows everyone. Due to that fact it has always been common knowledge that Finn, Jamie and I are adopted and whilst most people act okay with it, I know that most people around here aren't as accepting as they appear. They find it unusual that after Sarah and Steve had their family they decided to adopt 2 young kids within the same year and another just six years later. In truth it took a while for anyone to accept me when I started school around here, it helped that Finn had gone through the same thing just the year before and the small group of friends he'd gathered immediately accepted me too, despite their parents requests that they do otherwise. 

My point being everyone knowing everyone also means everyone knows everyone else's business, whether you like it or not, say something out loud and it's likely your whole street will know in approximately thirty seconds and then the whole village and high school within five minutes, give or take a couple of seconds. A prime example of this being in the eighth grade when Finn finally built up the courage to ask out Stephanie Daley, a girl he'd had a crush on since the fifth grade, and not ten minutes after he'd announced this to his group of friends at the time, her older brother was on our doorstep threatening to hurt Finn if he, being the 'freaky adopted kid' that he supposedly was, even dared to look at Stephanie again, that's how fast things travel here. 

That being true, you can imagine how long it took for the news to travel that Finn, and his band at the time, Taken Revenge, had been out to California and got rejected from the EVI records contest two years ago. Not long at all, though, none of them knew the real reason, only the members of Taken Revenge and I would ever know that little detail.

That's when Electric Apathy had formed, the rumour mill had managed the cause the break up of Taken Revenge when, people started to say they weren't as good as everyone had been lead to believe, which was completely untrue, but it left the boys arguing between themselves, shifting the blame until the constant arguments caused irreparable damage to their friendships and the only thing left to do was split up. 

Kie and Jase had always been on the outside of mine and Finn's social circle, with the Taken Revenge band members and I in the centre of our social group, so when everyone chose sides after the split everything fell into place with Electric Apathy. 

 I became manager of the new band, sticking with the name Taken Revenge still, which all the ex members had agreed to allow Finn to use, whilst they searched for a singer and second guitarist. Finn had suggested many times that I audition, but after that summer out in California I was still a little lost, I'd had my heart broken, Finn had no clue, I never told him, but it had taken me a while to get my confidence back.

So with low confidence and me refusing to audition you're probably wondering how I ended up being the lead singer of the band. Finn had convinced the boys to listen outside the door whilst I was singing in the shower, and that was it, I was in. When that year's EVI contest had finally finished and the winner was announced I became determined to help my brother win back the chance he'd unfairly lost out on, and maybe even fulfil my dreams too. We began practicing in our garage, much to our neighbours dismay about the band noise returning after the separation of Taken Revenge's first lineup. Then we started to play gigs, taking part in talent competitions, and after that it just blew up from there, people all over Phoenix were asking us to play gigs, paying us for them even, and eventually, two years later, we had enough money to book a crappy recording studio for the day, to record demo's for an album we'd been working on. The quality wasn't the best, and we could've improved with time, but it was ours, proof that what we'd been working for hadn't been a waste of our time. So we sent it off to EVI, alongside the new name of Electric Apathy, because Taken Revenge had been permanently banned from the contest. They contacted us a month later and like that we were back in California again, staying at Mitchell and Nicola's place, like we had done those two summer's before, but it was different this time. Back then we'd all been naive and trusting, especially me, and now, not so much, getting my heart broken at fourteen had made me stronger, it was the same for Finn after he'd had his dream unfairly crushed, we were much stronger now and we weren't giving up this time without a fight. I'd changed after that summer, I became more confident when Finn and the guys finally got through to me. I became me, the way I was meant to be.