Out of Tune

Chapter Six

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl back to loneliness-Maya Angelou

Lennon had been to her fair share of high school parties but the kegger at the Adams' household was at a wholly different level than what she'd ever experienced before.

The main difference was the sheer size of the house. Three floors with a detached garage, a huge wrap-around porch, and massive backyard equipped with an outdoor kitchen, swimming pool, jacuzzi, and a fire pit.

She didn't even want to guess how many people had spread throughout the property. Most of the parties she'd been to had been fairly contained, friends and friends-of-friends. This seemed like a whole school affair.

Well, if by school one meant varsity and junior-varsity jocks and their friends.

Lennon had arrived to help Taylor set things up a little after six in the evening. It didn't take long to lay out plastic cups, bowls of chips, and the half-priced pizza from Quincy's Taylor had gotten. They removed anything valuable or breakable and locked it away in a storage closed for safe keeping. Taylor's parents had gone away for the weekend – off on some business trip to Chicago – so it was perfect timing for the end-of-football-season bash.

When it was all set up, they grabbed slices of pizza and sat down on the couch to wait for Kyle and Bryce to return with the beer keg they'd gotten Bryce's older brother to buy for them.

For a while they gossiped and chatted about trashy reality television. Lennon liked spending time with Taylor. She was down to earth, witty, and seemed to be just an all-around nice person. She was also wicked-smart, something it seemed she tried to hide at times, but Lennon soon learned that Taylor was on the honour roll and on-track to be valedictorian.

Unlike Lennon, she also seemed to have her entire life figured out.

"Business," Taylor told Lennon firmly. "I'm thinking University of Pennsylvania or U.C. Berkley. We'll see who accepts me. After that, I'll get my Master of Business Administration and be on-track to be CEO of my dad's tech company by the time I'm thirty."

"Impressive," Lennon said. She was slightly taken aback by Taylor's ferocity on the matter. It was like Taylor could see the future and knew exactly how her life was going to turn out.

Lennon couldn't think of anything that sounded worse to her than that. She liked the freedom of not knowing. Of having so much of the world to explore and going without a plan. Rigidity terrified her. It reminded her of her mother.

"What about you? Which colleges are you going to apply to?"

"That's the thing...I haven't really thought about it."

Taylor blinked at her. "Can't decide where you want to go?"

"Or what I want to do with my life." Lennon picked at a crumb that had landed on the edge of her plate. "When my dad got sick a lot of plans got derailed and thinking about college and life after high school was one of those things that got abandoned. I think I'll just take a year off. Re-evaluate my life. Move back to New York."

"Not planning on staying out here?"

Lennon offered her a one-armed shrug. "Probably not. There's nothing really tying me here, you know? My whole life was in New York. That's home to me."

"What about your mom?"

"We're not...close. She and my dad had a nasty divorce and I wanted to live with him not her so it made things ten times worse. We didn't really speak much unless I was on the mandated visitation trips to see her."