Out of Tune: The Original 2015 Draft

chapter 19

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune—Thomas Fuller

Things between Spencer and I became...different after he took me to visit his old house. Our entire friendship seemed to be teetering on a precarious edge, though I wasn't entirely what lied on the bottom of the cavern. I was worried what would happen when it fell and tried as hard as I could to keep our relationship exactly the way it was.

It was hard to tell exactly what was changing between us. If anything, it seemed as if we were becoming increasingly more comfortable with each other, which was astonishing considering how comfortable we already were with each other. There seemed to be a lot more subtle touches, like me leaning on his shoulder or him brushing his hand against mine.

Taylor kept telling me that he was sending me signals, saying that he was interested in me but I kept brushing her off. If it was true, Spencer would have said anything. He was terrible at keeping secrets like that. If he really liked me, I would know.

When I went back to school, a week after returning from New York, I noticed immediately the change in the air between us and the rest of the student body. People who I had never spoken to were coming up to me and starting conversations. Girls were asking the guys out on dates, except for Miles whose announcement about being taken on live television made the girls only slightly more hesitant to approach him. Add onto that the fact that Taylor was always by his side, most girls chose not to corner him and ask for a date.

Spencer though, I noticed, was quite a hit with the ladies. After he'd cut his hair and gotten contacts months before, the female population of the school started taking a slight bit more interest in him, but now with his potential music-star personality, girls were flocking to him like cookies to milk.

I took the attention worse than the others. Not only was I the only girl in the band, meaning that there were not four of me to distribute the attention like the boys had, I also came back to school with a shadow of a bruise on my cheek. It was mostly gone, only a slight discolouration, but the moment it was spotted the rumors began. Suddenly, people were asking me if I was being abused at home or if one of the guys in the band had hit me.

That shocked me more than anything. The fact that the believed Spencer, Miles, Zeke or Charlie could, or would, hit me astounded me. I'd been stunned into silence the first time I'd been asked which had only furthered the rumors as Spencer had stepped in saying that it was nobody's business. The rumors had begun spreading so far that he was even receiving angry comments on some of our video blogs on YouTube. As everyone believed he had hit me, I'd been forced to make an announcement on one video blog stating that the guys were in no abusive to me. I did my best to quiet down the rumors but some still circulated, though most were consoled by my announcement. I told everyone that I was clumsy and had tripped during rehearsal to land on the corner of an amp. I didn't think that it was that plausible of a story, but it was the best we could come up with under short time and seemed to do the trick.

A few days after we got back from New York, Taylor got a call. She was acting as our official manager, booking gigs and taking calls and the one that she took pushed us another step closer to making it in the big leagues. Face the Tides, a world-wide volunteer organization directed towards helping the victims of major tsunamis and floods, had heard our song on the Mindy Manson show and wanted it to become the official song for their campaign. We were scheduled to record it in a few weeks' time for them and then it was going to be set to every commercial, both on television and on the radio, and heard around the globe. It would be our first recorded song and the first to garner major attention.

Taylor was certain that this opportunity was going to start bringing scouts to our shows. She said it was only going to be a matter of time until they started appearing and, like usual, she was right. Three days ago, she received an email from a major record company, Starr Records, saying that they were going to send a representative down to see us perform live at the Boathouse, a popular little bar we'd been asked to perform in. They wanted us to have a few covers, as well as several original songs for them to hear.