Mayfly Melodies

Ten

Bailey

Country music is the people's music. It just speaks about real life and about truth and it tells things how they really are—Faith Hill

For the first time in a long time, Bailey had woken up feeling completely refreshed. Being tired was part of the job when it came to being a musician. She woke up early for rehearsals and fan meet-and-greets. And then there was the touring and travelling to different parts of the country, or even different parts of the world, which meant that she was in a constant state of readjustment.

Most of the time Bailey didn't mind being tired. But, there were days where she wanted to do nothing more than sink back into the soft mattress, pull the blankets up to her chin and sleep until she just couldn't anymore. Doing that, though, would have turned her into someone like Kyra, someone who wanted to do minimal work but reap all the benefits. There were some days where the three girls would be schedule for rehearsal and Bailey and Mae wouldn't see Kyra at all. She would sleep late and go shopping or get her nails done, leaving her bandmates to pick up the slack. Which they always did.

Maybe that was the problem. Perhaps if Bailey and Mae had stood their ground when it came to Kyra, forced her to join them at rehearsals and be more active in the band, then maybe she wouldn't have had time to screw Mae's boyfriend and the band wouldn't have unravelled.

Bailey thought of the band's dismemberment a lot. More than she should have. But the shock of being in a settled spot in life to a spot where everything was so uncertain was something that plagued Bailey. She also wasn't used to not seeing Kyra and Mae. They'd been near-constants in her life for the past four years. It was difficult to go from seeing them almost every day to cold turkey where she didn't see them at all.

When she woke that morning, the band weighed heavily on her mind. She'd dreamt of the other two girls during the night, a pleasant dream of their last performance together where the energy had been high and they'd been on top of the world. She'd dreamt of a crowd of adoring fans who screamed out her name and then she'd woken up, well-rested but with a heavy soul.

As she lied in her bed, listening to the sounds of birds singing just outside of her window and the hiss of the shower as someone—she presumed her father—went to get ready for the day, she found her thoughts drifting back to Mae and Kyra. Before she really registered what she was doing, Bailey reached for her laptop and dragged it up from the floor to her lap. Then, her fingers flying across the keyboard, Bailey searched her friends' names.

The first few hits were nothing—just several different news outlets reporting about the band's split—and then she found the others. There were pictures beginning to surface now, ones that showed Kyra with Cole, Mae's now ex-boyfriend, together. The reporters had made sure to find the absolute worst pictures of Mae where her eyes were puffy and red from crying and hair dishevelled and Bailey knew that those photos were not recent, but rather from when Mae's grandfather had died eight-and-a-half months ago.

Bailey clicked on the next article. It wasn't much better than its predecessor but it did provide the name of the studio with which Kyra was now affiliated. She'd signed with Millennium Records and Bailey knew that Kyra was exiting country music for good. Millennium wasn't really a country label. They tended to sign their artists who fit into the mold of mainstream pop. Of course, they had some artists who identified as "country" but everyone in the music community knew that these people were no such thing.

She scrolled through another few articles, in which people were commenting on where she'd disappeared to and why she hadn't yet announced a solo career. And then she learned that Mae had apparently backed out of the studio she'd just signed with as a solo artist and was now in talks with a few different labels but had yet to sign anywhere yet. Bailey wondered idly why Mae had backed out but didn't feel emotionally ready enough to call Mae and find out. After all, whatever her ex-bandmates decided to do now with their lives really wasn't any of her business.