by Kristi Ayers
Strings of the Muse
Kristi Ayers
Strings of the Muse
Copyright © 2019 by Kristi Ayers
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Editing and formatting by BZHercules.com
Cover Art by Coverinked—www.coverinked.com
Acknowledgements
This book has been a constant in my life when times were rough. I lost my brother, my father-in-law, and various other extended family members over the time it took to write it. They will always be in my heart.
I need to say a special thanks to everyone who has supported me during my writing journey. I started seriously writing in 2008 and have never tired of it. Transforming the pictures and dialogue in my head into a full-length novel is my favorite way to spend the day. They say to do something with your life that leaves a positive mark, something material, or intellectual, and stories are what I choose to give to the lovers of fiction.
If you enjoyed this novel, please consider writing a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Reviews help other readers find books they desire to read. I’d also love to hear from you. You can email me at [email protected].
Dedication
For my readers
Without you, I couldn’t live my dream.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 1
Max
A gusty mid-October wind blew across the university campus as I made my way along the aging, cracked sidewalk from one class to the next, internal musings more on band practice and less on my assignments. My shoes crushed down on red maple leaves at a steady pace as I ran through a song in my head, my lips silently mouthing the words. My biggest fear was forgetting the lyrics, and right up next to that, my voice cracking on a high note. Repetition was the only thing that helped, but even it would occasionally fail if my voice box became strained.
Satisfied enough with my ability to mouth the song after a preliminary run-through, I took a moment to look around me. I loved the fall. The weather could hand you a multitude of performances, from a fine mist drifting down from hazy grey clouds, to a torrential rogue rainstorm, to a heatwave causing everyone to break out the shorts again. Mother Nature was capricious in the fall, but it was the changing of the leaves I most welcomed. I momentarily ignored the breeze to admire nature’s last burst of color before the winter eased its way into the Northeast. It would be another two months before stark white snow blanketed the campus grounds and ice clung to the stone buildings, and I planned to enjoy every moment before that happened, especially at the skate park, my refuge.
As my eyes slid from tip to trunk of a large maple, I squinted at what was under the canopy of branches. A girl. And she looked frightened.
She clutched her forest green messenger bag close as she glanced around the campus grounds every few seconds. Her thick, long brown hair whipped and tangled with each gust of wind, twirling in front of her face and making her fingers rake to tame it back. Then she froze, looking down at the ground with a pained expression on her face.
I quizzically scanned the grounds in attempt to find what was making her so apprehensive. No people appeared to be paying any attention to her. Above us were dark, leaden grey clouds billowing in from the west. A thunderstorm was fomenting, and it looked angry. A few drops came down, surely to turn into a shower in no time. Why didn’t this girl get into a building? She had enough time to get to the girls’ dorm if she lived there.
Although, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she walked from the apartments a few blocks down the street, in which case it would be tricky to get all the way there without getting soaked. But taking refuge under a tree? That was the worst possible place to stand.
I needed to do something before the lightning started, which by the look of it, could have been any moment. I stepped off the sidewalk and onto the low trimmed grass. The closer I got, the more I noticed her stunningly beautiful features. Her full lips tugged downward in a worried frown, but it was her big hazel eyes that captured my full attention when she darted a glance at me, startled.
“Hi, I’m Max. Can I maybe help you get to shelter before the rain starts?” She looked like a timid fawn, lost and frozen into place. Her eyes took me in from head to toe, deciding if I looked trustworthy. I realized my longish hair put me in the iffy category. “It’s not safe for you to be out here when a storm is coming… Especially under a tree… Lightning can strike.” I couldn’t believe I had to explain it out, but maybe she was from somewhere that didn’t have storms often. “Trees are like magnets to lightning, and the jolt can travel to whatever or whomever is near it. Like you. And now me.”
Her eyes left me for a moment to scan the darkening sky. Did she not believe me?
“Look, I’ll walk you to your dorm or apartment. If we leave now, we can hopefully avoid the rain. You can use my newspaper as an umbrella if need be.” I slipped it out of my backpack to show her.
Her face slightly animated, finally acknowledging me. It was like a light flickered on and she came out of the harrowing place that was holding her. “Okay, let’s go. Hurry.”
I didn’t ask her if she was okay; I simply led her to the sidewalk and toward the girls’ dorms, assuming that was where she lived. My mind analyzed what could have possibly put that amount of fear in those striking eyes. No sketchy people seemed to be stalking her as I swept my attention between buildings and trees. We continued in silence, and she set the brisk pace. I’d covertly glance at her profile every ten steps or so. Her straightforward stare was rather unnerving, and it almost appeared she was holding her breath. Her lips were set in a determined line, a line that had zero faith in curving upward.
When we were at the stone steps of the girls’ dorms, the clap of her brown boots against the concrete didn’t cease; they didn’t even slow. She kept her steadfast pace, and I kept up right along with her.
She must have lived in the apartments. That meant she wasn’t a freshman. The freshmen had to live in the dorms for at least one year, unless they had family nearby. After that, it was a matter of choice. I liked the dorms well enough, especially since I was rooming with one of my best friends from high school.
But I was wrong again, because the next building, the co-ed dorms, she planted her boot on the first step, and then looked back at me. “Um,” her face flitted between gratitude and the blueprints of an old memory, “thank you for walking with me.” She couldn’t look at me more than a couple seconds, her eyes shifting nervously away.
At that moment, I felt the intrinsic need to know her. Not just her name, but the reason why she looked so haunted. Beautifully haunted. Her hazel eyes held stories carefully guarded. But all I managed to say was one sentence, because she was turning to go, and I was fumbling with the invisible string that hung between us.
“I live here too.”
Smooth, Max… Damn.
She looked back at me with a sweet smile, one you offer a stranger that holds a door open or gives the cashier the few extra cents you didn’t carry in your pocket that day. And then she went through the thick wooden door to Montgomery Hall and I was left staring at the ghost of her as fat raindrops began to steadily fall.
“Max.”
“Max.”
“Max!”
I blinked away the thoughts my mind kept circling. “What?” Instead of leaving completely, they hazily perched on the periphery of my consciousness, like a lone owl on a low tree branch. Present, mystical, untouchable.
“Are we practicing tonight?” Adam, ever the planner, looked over at me, his arms casually crossed. If we weren’t going to have band practice, then he wanted his free time to be free, often choosing to hook up with his girlfriend. If she wasn’t available, then his next choice was getting drunk. Or, two for one, getting drunk and hooking up. Boobs and booze were his daily prescription.
“I’m cool with that.” Hell yeah, I was always up for practicing. It was my solace when life felt heavy, school demanding, worries of back home consuming—I could check out for a few hours and come out feeling like I at least accomplished something good.
Adam stood in my dorm room’s perpetually open doorway, half his attention on passing girls and the other half now on Douglas. “D, can we expect you to grace us with your presence?”
I glanced over at my roommate, who, upon all waking hours not in class, was glued to a video game. They were his escape, his addiction. With his uncanny ability to strike down ten military personnel and speak in a bored tone, he said, “I’ll be anywhere you need me. Mars—I’m there. Pirate ship—I’m sailing it. Asylum—I was already there three days ago.”
Adam shook his head. “Fu—A simple yes or no would have sufficed.” He turned to go, pausing only to say, “My place, six o’clock. We need to get a few songs squared away before we hit up the clubs for spots. Don’t need to look like a bunch of douches.” And then he left us to our typical Friday afternoon with me strumming my acoustic and Douglas sandwiched on the threadbare recliner between a bag of chips and a jug of sweet tea, the game controller in his hands like a lifeline to Utopia. I let my thoughts wander back to my apprehensive owl, wondering exactly where her room was located and if she happened to be in it at this very moment. I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. Most likely, she hadn’t thought of me once since she stepped into the mouth of Montgomery Hall that stormy afternoon three days ago.
I regarded Douglas for a moment, and our history. We grew up together, neighbors since grade school. He was the brother I never dreamed of having. That was because a house full of sisters made me wish I’d been an only child. But Douglas really was like a brother, and we found solace in avoidance and escape: I from my sisters and him from the screeching of his relentlessly feuding parents. They fought, sometimes physically, at any hour, and more times than not, I found Douglas in my old tree house with a blanket wrapped around him and a hand-held game clutched in one fist. We centered our days around dodging parental conflict and fragile pubescent female hormones of sisters, often spending most of our time on the boardwalk hanging out or skateboarding at the park.
It was in our junior year that we met and accepted the pudgy, subdued new kid. A guy that in a matter of six months would be half the person he started out to be. Literally. Adam Porter gave new meaning to the word transformation. Glasses were traded for contacts. Exercise morphed him into someone who learned how to skateboard with ease, thus giving us a common interest. With the decrease in weight, black hair grown out slightly longer, brown eyes dark as night and no longer obscured by glasses, his personality soared, as did his status with the school’s female population. He dove into the dating scene with two feet, and only briefly confiding in me that his love life at his previous school was nonexistent. The blatant invisibility he endured there did a number on his psyche, which inevitably led to the excessive indulgence in drunken pleasures. Rarely did anyone at his old school take pause to get to know him, aside from a few like-minded intellectual guys that apparently found a common bond over science fiction movies and competitive test scores.
The determination to be seen and admired by his peers sealed his decision to form a band. He admitted playing percussion in Orchestra at his previous school, along with a warning of bodily harm if I ever divulged that fact. Douglas assumed Adam was just born gifted to play the drums. That inspiration gave Douglas the push to buy a bass guitar, leading me to get further acquainted with the electric guitar I got on my fourteenth birthday. Months of learning chords and riffs paid off because we were playing covers at house parties the second half of our senior year.
Well, the guitar wasn’t the only thing I had to learn. By some odd and unfortunate default, I became the singer. Even though I declared stage fright until I was blue in the face, my honest claim fell on deaf ears because we had no one else as a prospect. Both Adam and Douglas couldn’t sing. At all. We tried, and it was ugly. So I manned up and took lead for Proof of Stars, which symbolically meant “The cosmic proof of someone worth your time.” It fit for all of us, because more often than not, we experienced the proverbial cloud cover and invisibility at one time or another in our high school years. Although I was sure some people took the name to mean we were narcissistic, that couldn’t be further from the truth. We were like the literal stars in space, only shining brightly after forming from basically nothing.
When we started college, Adam bought a small house just down the street from the campus. Yes, bought. He came into money when he turned eighteen. Paint-chipped wood and weather-worn bay windows only added to the historic Victorian charisma the entire neighborhood wore. Towering autumn-colored trees lined the street and gave a fair amount of reprieve from the sun. Tailgating parties took place in every front yard, whether the residents were students or middle-aged men who could never quite say goodbye to the campus party atmosphere.
Rumor had it that an old algebra professor lived and died in Adam’s house, which lent credence to the fact that it was indeed haunted. But Adam would always discount the claims, offering his usual rebuttal: “No, you’re wrong, and this is why you’re an idiot.”
The décor in the bachelor pad was just that, exactly what a bachelor would choose. Extraordinarily large flat screen TV, leather couches that visibly worshipped said TV, and a bar area in the kitchen chock full of every type of drink one could want. The muted lighting was on purpose. Classroom fluorescents were enough to drive anyone into a bat cave. And that was how Adam liked it—dim and relaxed. Now that it was getting cooler, the fireplace would become an evening staple, just part of the background, yet serving the dual purpose of warmth and romantic ambiance for his girlfriend, Bex.
Out of the view of party drunks was his drum set, tucked safely behind the locked door of one of the spare bedrooms. He shelled out a pretty penny to transform that room into a makeshift studio for us. Never mind that the house needed a new paint job and weather stripping. He even knocked out a wall to make the room bigger. We were able to add a couple of couches against the wall for guests to watch. Occasionally, Bex and her friends would come, but when she came alone, it inevitably turned into foreplay for her and Adam. Apparently, nothing was sexier than your man beating drums and dripping sweat. Douglas and I would take our leave when that happened, claiming the need to study for tests.
Thankfully, we were audience-free now. An audience of any kind still made me nervous. I never knew if my voice was going to betray me and hit the wrong note or crack. There was a multitude of problems singers could have that I never knew about. It compelled me to give them more credit for what they do day in and day out. A guitarist might hit the wrong chord, which often went unnoticed, and a drummer could screw up the beat, but it was nothing compared to sounding like a frog or forgetting the lyrics.
“Frog man, let’s get this show started.”
I
sighed and glared at Adam. He could be such an ass. I shook it off, silently thanking the powers that be we had no guests this time, and picked up my guitar. My electric stayed here while my acoustic shuffled from dorm to house. I strummed out a few chords, checking the tuning, and then launched into one of our typical warm-up songs. I liked how a few drumbeats or chords were our unspoken language. We were so in tune to each other, we barely had to speak. But what gave me the most satisfaction at that moment was the fact that my voice was cooperating. Adam could kiss my ass. Frog Man would lie dormant tonight.
Between songs, Douglas’s fingers, much like in the dorm, had to be incessantly moving, so he absently thumbed his bass. Adam would gripe that he couldn’t think with all the “extra noise,” and then the sequence of song, “extra noise,” and griping would repeat. That was until Bex showed up, tipsy and bored.
Our practice session was cut short, but I think neither Douglas nor Adam cared. Douglas could go back to playing his games. That left me with the only thing remaining.
Time to hit the skatepark.
Chapter 2
Holland
Moving from a small, rural town to a prestigious university near the Atlantic Ocean was ten shades of daunting. Miles away from my parents. Miles away from my friends. All because my life’s passion was in music and my goals included a certain violin that never left my side. But since my life toggled between the fallacy of appearing well off and the reality that my family was just shy of middle class, I had to struggle to afford my education. The scholarships I did receive were only enough to buy books, unfortunately. My GPA in high school just wasn’t where it needed to be, which was entirely my fault. I faltered for a year due to unforeseen circumstances.
Juilliard wasn’t in the cards, so I directed my efforts into cutting costs at any corner I could. One being my attendance at the local community college for a year, rather than jumping right into the financial slap of a university. I was able to work evenings at an upscale restaurant and made a fair amount in tips, but even with what I saved up, I knew I’d still be paying off student loans for the rest of my life. My future centered around getting a career in music, and even I knew it was a path that could give me nothing more than a life of eking by, each bill a struggle to pay. If I were one of the lucky few, I’d land a spot in a professional orchestra. High hopes weren’t going to get me there, and quite possibly an education wouldn’t either, but at least I could teach if nothing else. Shaping young minds and musical hearts wasn’t out of the question.