Rising Star: Book 3 of The Orion Series

Slaying It

I burn an effigy in your name

But you were lost awhile ago

There's so much I want to grasp

But my hands won't reach high enough

I want to climb to the tree tops

But the stars twinkle too brightly

My heart weeps for you

But who will weep for my heart?

Oh, I wonder what they mean?

If anything at all

Catch me as I fall

Never your voice will stroke my ear

The birds of our destinies may crumble and fail

But get up and get dressed

There's so much to do

But the roses smell foul

The days will lose meaning

But I'm not your pity pawn

Your words bleed contempt

But get up and do the thing, anyway

--The song Do The Thing, lyrics by Orion Bauwens

Senior Year

"Ready?"

Orion grins at me. It's the last Battle of the Bands we'll be partaking in. It's definitely a bittersweet moment. Even so, I grin at him and nod. We start.

There are two surprising things about this performance. The first is the fact we've convinced Orion to play one of his songs. It's called Do The Thing, and it would end up becoming one of our first hits. Obviously at the time though no one knows it.

It's a strange little ditty that starts out as a ragtime song. Orion had one of the school pianos brought in, keeping the beat of the song with it. I didn't know until he introduced us to the song that he knew how to play piano, too. 

I'm singing at first (in later iterations, Orion does all the singing). Abruptly it changes into rockabilly--Orion hurries over to his electric guitar, playing, and taking over singing. From there it goes into pure rock. It ends with us slipping back into ragtime, slower and slower, until at the end of the song we finally stop.

It showcases Orion's insane voice. It's why Ben and I pressed him to sing this specific song. For most of it he's singing in his upper range. At one point he plunges to his lowest, a deep, guttural near-growl. From there he flings it into his high falsetto. I don't know how he does it. It's fucking impressive every single time.

Everyone in the lunchroom loses their mind when we're done. You're supposed to cheer at the end of both songs, but the student body couldn't wait for that. Orion turns beet red and grins. In fact, we're all grinning. We nailed it--every tempo change, every time change. We've literally never played it that well.

The next song we play is a cover of a song. It's called Chicken on the Ground. It's a very silly country song. While we had to convince Orion to let us perform one of his songs, he had to convince Ben and I to do this cover. He wanted to put on display our ability to play a wide variety of music.

We play this one perfectly, too. But after how well Do The Thing went, we're having fun with it. Orion is kinda dancing. I keep on breaking into the lyrics, singing with him at the one microphone we have. Every time I do, Orion and I break into huge grins, our faces nearly touching, looking at one another with our eyes.