The Rise Of A Star

Four Notes and a Deadline

By Thursday, the four notes had turned into eight, and Andrew still didn't have a single word to put over them.

He sat cross-legged on his bedroom floor at eleven at night, guitar in his lap, notebook open to a page that was mostly crossed-out lines and one phrase he kept circling still here without knowing yet what came before it or after it.

Downstairs, he could hear the low murmur of his parents' TV, the specific laugh his dad did at anything remotely funny, too loud, too full, like laughing was a full-body sport for Marcus Cole. Andrew smiled without meaning to. Some sounds you didn't even notice you loved until you tried to write music around them.

Still here. He hummed it against the melody. It almost fit. Almost.

His phone buzzed on the carpet beside him. Jayden.

jayden: you alive

jayden: bro

jayden: ANDREW

jayden: ok you're either dead or writing the world's most tortured song again

Andrew huffed a laugh and typed back: writing. leave me alone.

jayden: tell the song i said hi

jayden: also mia asked about you today

He stopped humming.

andrew: mia who

jayden: mia who he says. mia THOMPSON. the one who sat next to you in Alvarez's class and complimented your "whole vibe" and you just NODDED like a malfunctioning robot

andrew: i said thank you

jayden: you said "cool" and then stared at your guitar case for eleven straight seconds i counted

Andrew set the phone face-down on the carpet, which did nothing to stop the heat crawling up his neck, and went back to the notebook like it might save him. It didn't, particularly.

Mia Thompson had, in fact, said something about his "whole vibe" in third period, and he had, in fact, responded with the verbal equivalent of a shrug, because there was something about being looked at really looked at, not just heard, that still made him want to fold in on himself a little.

Singing in front of people was different. Up there, with a guitar between him and the room, he wasn't quite himself. He was some louder, surer version of himself that knew what to do with his hands. Down here, in the hallway, with no guitar and no stage and just a girl looking at him like she meant it he had no idea what to do with his hands at all.

He picked the guitar back up. Easier problem.

Whitfield Auditorium loomed over everything now not literally, it was just a beige brick building attached to the community college twenty minutes from school, but in his head it had taken on the size of something enormous, something with teeth.

Nineteen days. Mr. Alvarez had started a countdown on the whiteboard in the music room like it was a hostage situation, and every day Andrew walked in, the number was smaller, and every day the song was still not finished.

"You're overthinking the bridge," Alvarez said Friday afternoon, arms crossed, leaning against the piano while Andrew played the same four bars for the fifth time. "You keep resolving it too early. Let it sit in the discomfort a beat longer before you bring it home."

"It doesn't feel finished if it's not resolved."

"That's exactly why it should sit there." Alvarez tapped his own chest, once.

"Discomfort's not a mistake, Cole. Sometimes it's the whole point. People don't remember songs that wrap up neat. They remember the ones that make them feel something they didn't ask to feel."

Andrew tried it held the chord an extra measure, let the tension hang instead of resolving into the easy, expected note and something about it did land harder. Truer.

He didn't have words yet, but the shape of the song was becoming a shape he recognized, even if he couldn't explain what it was shaped like.

"Better," Alvarez said. "See? You already know how to do this. You just don't trust yourself yet."

"What if it's bad? At Whitfield, I mean. What if I get up there and it's mid "

"It won't be bad." Alvarez said it so plainly, so certain, it startled Andrew a little. "I've taught a lot of kids who wanted this, Cole. Most of them wanted the idea of it the attention, the applause. You're the first one in a long time who actually needs it. There's a difference. Trust me, it shows."

Andrew didn't know what to do with that either, so he just nodded and went back to playing.

Monday, Jayden ambushed him at his locker with the subtlety of a marching band.

"Mia's right there," Jayden hissed, not quietly at all, jerking his head down the hallway to where Mia Thompson stood at her own locker, laughing at something on her phone, hair falling forward as she tucked it back with one hand. "Go say something."

"Say what?"

"I don't know, man, anything. 'Hi' is a whole sentence. You know how to do 'hi.'"

"I have geometry in four minutes."

"Geometry will still be there in four minutes and thirty seconds. Go."

Andrew didn't go, not exactly what happened was closer to drifting, some traitorous current pulling him three lockers down the hall until he was standing near enough that Mia looked up and smiled like she'd been expecting him, which somehow made it worse.

"Hey," she said. "Andrew, right?"

"Yeah. Hi. Hey." Two greetings. He'd used two greetings. Jayden, watching from a safe distance with the expression of a man watching a car crash in slow motion, put his face in his hands.

"You're doing the Whitfield thing," Mia said. Not a question. "Alvarez won't shut up about it. He says you've got something."

"He says that about everyone."

"He does not." She said it plainly, like a fact she was correcting him on. "He told my brother his trumpet playing sounded like 'a goose being interviewed for the news.' He does not say that about everyone."

Andrew laughed actually laughed, easier than he expected and something in his chest loosened a half-turn. "Okay. Fair."

"I'm coming, by the way. To Whitfield." She said it easily, already turning back toward her locker, like she hadn't just rearranged something in his entire nervous system.

"Just so you know. In case you need someone in the crowd not clapping out of obligation."

"That's cool. Thanks."

Cool. He'd said cool again. He caught Jayden's eye down the hall, who was silently, gleefully losing his mind, and Andrew had to physically resist the urge to throw his own textbook at him.

The bell rang. Mia lifted two fingers in a small wave and disappeared into the crowd, and Andrew stood there a second longer than he needed to, replaying a thirty-second conversation like it was the most interesting thing that had happened to him all year. Which, he realized as he finally turned toward geometry, it might have been.

Saturday, he told his parents about the deadline over dinner, nineteen days had become sixteen by then, time doing the thing where it moved slow until it suddenly wasn't slow at all and his dad set down his fork with the specific gravity of a man about to say something he considered very important.

"You know what we should do," Marcus said.

"Family rehearsal night. Right here. Your mother and I will be the world's toughest audience."

"You cried during my third-grade recorder concert."

"That's different. That was art."

"Marcus," his mom said, laughing into her water glass, "you cried because Ms. Delgado's daughter played 'Hot Cross Buns' out of tune and you said it 'moved something in you.'"

"It did! I contain multitudes!"

Andrew laughed, really laughed, the kind that came up from somewhere low in his chest and for a second he forgot to be nervous about Whitfield at all.

This was the thing about his house that he didn't know yet how rare it was, how most kids didn't get dinners like this, parents who showed up fully and loudly and without condition for every version of him, the third-grade recorder version and the maybe-actually-good-at-this version both.

"Fine," he said. "Family rehearsal. But if you cry, you have to leave the room."

"Absolutely not," his dad said. "Crying is how I show support."

"That's not how anyone shows support."

"It's how I show support. Ask your mother."

"He's not wrong," his mom admitted. "He cried at our wedding before I even walked in. The organist started playing and he just went."

"The organist was very talented!"

Andrew shook his head, grinning, and reached for the guitar leaning against the wall by the table, a house rule so old he couldn't remember it being made, that the guitar lived within arm's reach of wherever he was, like a fourth family member with strong opinions about tuning. He played the eight notes. Still no words. But his parents listened anyway, the way they always did, like the notes alone were already worth something.

"Still here," he sang, quiet, testing the phrase out loud for the first time. It didn't fit yet. But it felt close. Closer than it had all week.

His mom's face did the thing again that stillness, that quiet and for a second nobody said anything at all.

"That's the one," she said finally. "Whatever that turns into. That's the one, baby."

He didn't know, not yet, how right she was. Not just about the song.

About all of it.

Sixteen days left. He didn't waste any of them. Every free period found him in the back of Alvarez's room, guitar in his lap, chasing the shape of a song that was slowly, stubbornly becoming something real.

Every night, the notebook filled a little more crossed-out lines giving way to fewer crossed-out lines, then to actual sentences, then to something that almost resembled a bridge that resolved exactly one beat later than felt comfortable, exactly the way Alvarez had told him to let it.

Some nights his mom would linger in the doorway before bed, not saying anything, just listening to whatever fragment he was working on, arms crossed, a small smile on her face like she already knew the ending of something he hadn't finished writing.

Some nights his dad would knock twice on the ceiling from downstairs not the annoyed broom-banging kind, but a rhythm, an actual rhythm, tapping along to whatever chord progression drifted down through the floor, his own strange way of saying keep going.

Andrew didn't know yet how much he'd give, later, to have a single one of those ordinary nights back. He didn't know that the sound of his dad's fist against the ceiling, badly keeping time, would become one of the things he missed most in the world.

He just knew, somehow, underneath everything, that the song was going to matter. That some part of him was writing it for a reason he couldn't name.

He had no idea how right he'd turn out to be.