Changing the Stars (On Hiatus)

Chapter Six: Sam

Samantha was nervous. She had trusted that Vanessa would take good care of her guitar, but what if V had broken it? What if it had been stolen? 

Gah! Sam was an idiot! Why would she let her guitar go to a different school to stay, rather than sit safely in her car? Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

Sam's grip on her car's wheel was tight. Her knuckles were white, her fingers ached and the music was way too loud, causing her head to pound. Sam felt dizzy. God, with her luck, the guitar was gone and had been sold in Puerto Rico to twenty year old sex offender who needed the guitar to start a band to coax children into his trap. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

With one last turn, Sam approached Vanessa's school and parked on the street. She shook as she got out of the car and started walking. She'd been to the school a hundred times and it seemed nice enough. She didn't think anyone stole people's things. But what if they stole her baby? She couldn't survive. That guitar was her life.

"Fuck it," she muttered and began to run to the building. Through the doors she flew, up the multiple flights of stairs until she was out of breath and walking slowly to the music room. People stared at her with amused looks, sometimes they were a bit freaked out. She was panting too heavily for only running a short distance. 

She finally reached the room and braced herself for what would come. She breathed. In. Out. Then she opened the door. 

A relieved sigh left her as she saw her baby without a scratch on a stand in the corner of the room. She walked to it as fast as she could and patted it lovingly, "I missed this thing!" she cried and Vanessa, whom had just walked in, started to laugh at her friend.

"You're insane," she laughed, walking to a folded keyboard stand and dragging it out to the center of the room. The chairs had kindly been folded and put to the side of the room so the girls could set up.

Sam laughed, warming a bit from being caught talking to herself. She started to walk around looking for an amp to plug her guitar in and after that had been retrieved, the girls spent another twenty minutes looking for the cable to connect it to the guitar. 

It must've been a good forty-five minutes that the girls had spent setting up before they were ready to start playing.

And they played with their soul. The music flowed out of them and made the room vibrate and shake with imaginary applause. Sam's guitar riff was obviously practiced, her voice raw and sweet and perfectly in tune with the melody that Vanessa's keyboard played. The plastic keys hit against their socket with hard thumps that were drowned out by the amplifiers and vocals and tapping of feet.

The song ended on slightly off beat notes that made Sam cringe. The ending was always the hardest part. 

So they started up again on the last chorus and the magic returned. They tweaked and strummed and wrote and fixed every note. They played the intro at least a dozen times and rewrote various lyrics in the chorus. They added a key change in the bridge and the pre-chorus riding to the end verse. They watched YouTube videos that showed them techniques that neither of them would have thought of. 

They spent hours in the small music room. They were sweaty and they were bored and the magic seemed to have faded half way through the session, but they still went on. Five o'clock passed and then six o'clock. They tested different keyboard settings, they calculated how much they would need for a new amp, they tested some new melodies and played around with rewritten lyrics. They practiced a few covers for fun.

It was eight when they called it a day. Four hours of music had made them numb and tired and sweaty. Sam took her glasses off and wiped at her eyes. She took the hair tie that was on her wrist and put her hair in a bun. Multiple strands of hair and light curls popped out, but she was too tired to perfect it.