Out of Tune

Chapter Two

Music is just something that helps me escape and be totally free from everything – David Schmitt

She woke up to the sun streaming through the window, bathing her in a warm light. Lennon opened her eyes, still half-asleep, and felt immediately disoriented. She didn't recognize her surroundings. The bed she was resting on was much too soft. It felt nothing like the daybed she was used to sleeping on. And it was bright. Too bright. Lennon didn't understand where the light was coming from. Her bedroom faced a red-bricked building that completely obscured the sunrise.

It took her a long minute to remember that she was no longer in Brooklyn but was instead in sunny East Long Beach. The change in place was disorienting, much more so than Lennon had anticipated. Even though she'd known the relocation was coming, she'd been preparing for it since her father had died, it was still a major shock to her system. It was the last place on Earth she wanted to be.

She was in a room that wasn't hers but now was, in a house she didn't belong in but was living in anyways. She was living with a family she didn't really want and one who didn't really want her either. It was a strange adjustment. She felt like a stranger who'd snuck in during the quietest hours of the night to steal somebody else's life.

It wasn't surprising as she'd never been close with her mother. The distance between them had started long before her parents' divorce but had gotten steadily worse after it. They'd never gotten along even when they were married and Lennon had been woken up many times by the two of them yelling at each other. Or, Lennon surmised, her mother had yelled at her father. Her dad had always tried to talk things out, had always done his best to make her mother happy but nothing had worked until they'd finalized the divorce and she'd moved on with Brad.

Lennon had lived with her mother and Brad for seven months following the divorce. She'd thought that the fighting in the house would stop with her parents separated and living in separate states but that couldn't have been farther from the truth. Instead of fighting with her ex-husband, though, Lennon's mother began fighting with her daughter.

As a thirteen-year-old spitfire, Lennon didn't take the fighting well. Sometimes, she and her mother would go days without speaking. There had been an entire week where they hadn't seen each other once as they'd each been preoccupied with avoiding each other. Then, the explosion had come and changed everything.

That was what Lennon called it at least. It was the fight to top all of the other fights. It had been a culmination of issues that kept building up until they could no longer be ignored. And then, during the fight in the heat of passion, her mother said the one thing that Lennon had never quite forgiven her for. That she hated Lennon's father and everything about him and wished that she had never met him.

The tension between Lennon and her mother had been so tight that even at thirteen years old, Lennon had come to realize that there was no possible way for her and her mother to love each other while living together. There was no scenario she could fathom which would allow that to happen.

So, in the dead of night as her mother and Brad had slept in the room down the hall, Lennon had packed a bag, bought an airline ticket online using her mother's credit card, and called a taxi. Before her mother had remarried Brad and moved into his home, Lennon and her mother lived in a small house in suburban Sacramento and it was from there that she'd gotten into a cab and made the trek to the Sacramento International Airport.

It had taken nine-hours and some lying to airport security about why she was travelling on her own before she made it to her father's door in Brooklyn, New York. He'd been surprised to see his daughter but happy. The joy she'd seen in his face was more than she'd seen in her mother in months.