Playing Autumn (Breathe Rockstar Romance Book 1) (10 page)

When she first started volunteering at Breathe Music, the Lake Star Hotel looked like a lodge, an imposing log cabin with the occasional stuffed deer head peering at her. Inside the library, looking out into the garden, was nicer. Since then they had renovated and now the
entire hotel
looked like a library, but she still chose the same spot for her three-hour session with Mia Anders, sixteen-year-old singer/songwriter.

Mia had a wonderful rasp to her voice, Haley noticed immediately. The kind that filled songs with depth, and when done right lent an impression of
experience
despite being so young. The students were scheduled to perform several times during the weekend’s activities, and technically the least a mentor should do was help the student with each song. That was all.

“Are you two together?” Mia asked, in what Haley was learning was her direct way, after Oliver made his scene and then left their room.

“We’re not,” Haley said, still a bit shaken.

“Does he know that you’re Hot Piano Girl?”

“I don’t…I’m not…” Haley stammered through this, not sure how to defend herself. “How do
you
even know?”

Mia shrugged. “The list of mentors was up on the site. I looked you all up. You’re a fan of his, aren’t you? You did covers of his songs. You have like two million hits on them.”

“What? No…what? It can’t be that much by now.”

“Oh, it is. Like, last week. You don’t look at your channel?”

Haley shook her head.

“Because the comment threads started up again once I posted that you were going to be mentoring this weekend.”

A familiar tension collected in Haley’s neck. Those videos, they seemed to her to have been made another lifetime ago. She would have deleted them, but it was easier to go off the grid and stop looking. Another reason why she wanted out of this festival. Maybe the main one. Criticism she could take; encouragement led to hoping, and expecting.

“Did you know each other before he became famous? He’s from here, isn’t he?” Mia consulted her phone and started to go online. “No, but he would have left when he was in his early teens…and you’d have been really young…”

“Mia, can we not go on the Internet while we’re in session?”

Haley earned herself a glare from the teenager, who slipped the phone back into her pocket. “Well,
you
got to make out with someone during our session.”

“And you totally saw that it was accidental and I had nothing to do with it. Let’s talk about you now, okay?”

Mia did try to talk about herself, but the next hour was also spent talking about other people. It was a tic she seemed to have. She said things such as: “...like Taylor Swift, but more awesome,” when describing the song she wrote that got her into the festival. “...like Lea Michele, but less melodrama,” about her short stint in high school theater. “...like Carly Simon, but modern,” about the song she wanted to perform at the public concert on Sunday.

How many years had Haley been part of this festival? Eight, counting the year she joined as a student. A volunteer since she was fifteen, and then a mentor since she was twenty. In all that time, she'd met countless people who no doubt had talent but lacked any savvy in promoting themselves. Even Trey, back in his time as a student, he didn't even know which shirt he should be wearing onstage. (The tighter one, someone would eventually tell him.)

Hearing Mia talk like this also gave Haley the impression that the girl had it all figured out. That she didn't need to be here, and that being here meant she needed validation, not actual help. Could someone be
too
self-aware?

“I don't know who that is,” Haley admitted now, after Mia said her song for the evening was like “Alicia Keys and (someone else).”

Mia shrugged, dismissively, the way Haley used to when she came across someone who couldn't care less who Oliver Cabrera was, and she realized that she should cut the girl some slack. And so she asked her to sing. Mia made herself more comfortable on the bay window, propping her guitar against her thigh. And she started to sing.

Instantly, Haley felt something tug at her ear, heart, and gut, spots that wonderful voices always got to reach in her. Now this was more like it. Mia had the look down pat too, with her curly hair held in place with a clamp, bangles clinking together whenever she moved her wrist so. She didn't have to talk too much about the other people she was better than.

Listening to Mia let her drift her attention out the window, and she thought of Oliver. What was he thinking, coming into the room and kissing her? Nowhere had she read reports of erratic behavior like that, in any of the fan groups and forums. He never socialized with fans, was the thing. Oliver was polite and signed and took photos, but he didn’t have the back-and-forth with the groups that other singers did.

Haley shook her head and tried to get thoughts of him out of it. She had been thinking about him eighty percent of the day already, from when she woke up and remembered what it was like to kiss him, to when she helped Victoria unpack snacks and prepare breakfast, and now, again, as she looked out at nothing in particular.

She still couldn't believe he was there. Like, right there. Close enough for her to know that she had to look up a little bit to look him in the eye. And in fact to remember what he smelled like, how his mouth moved when he kissed. That he sang when he was alone in his room, because she heard it through the wall that they shared.

So they both agreed not to play mentor to each other, but how could she not feel sad about what was happening to him? He was hiding out here in Houston. Lucky her that he was hiding out in exactly the same place she happened to be in, but…

“What do you think of that last line?” Mia asked, ending her song abruptly, hugging the guitar to her chest.

“What? Um, can you switch it with the one right before? Makes more sense that way,” Haley said.

“But I wanted to end it on that word.”

“Maybe you should go with a different song on your first performance.”

That was a dangerous thing to say to an
artist
, and Haley’s brain was in so many places that she wasn’t able to deliver that right. Mia’s eyes widened, her hand stiffened. There was a tiny bit of confidence behind them, and Haley had snuffed it out.

“
Fine,”
Mia conceded, her voice cracking. “What should I sing?”

Frankly, Haley had heard so much commentary from Mia that she wasn’t even sure
what
the girl liked anymore. But Haley did know a thing about being new here and the nerves that could overcome you on that first performance. She wanted so badly to make a good impression. She didn’t have any professional training and knew that in the same small group there was an opera singer, an award-winning young composer, a singing tap dancer.

“Sing your audition song,” she said. “It’s the one that got you here.”

“But…”

“What did you sing?”

“
Time After Time.
”

“That should work.”

“It’s
old
. Everyone’s done that.”

Haley shrugged. “You asked me what I thought.”

There was a notebook beside Mia, and she scribbled something. Haley guessed that this was the right time to pick up her phone again and noticed that it had a message from Anastacia Lee:
Hope you're enjoying your weekend. Don't forget, we'll talk when you get back.

Haley paused to think, and then she started a new message.

Mrs. Lee, until when would you like for me to stay on as tutor?

Short, simple. Not so scary-looking.

The reply came in seconds later.

I was thinking that let's start wrapping up now, so when you go for Thanksgiving weekend that can be your trip home.

One month, give or take a few days. She just got her notice. What had changed? Did she totally misread Mrs. Lee’s job offer? Was it supposed to be a summer thing?

“I can't believe
Trey Lewis
is here,” Mia was saying, almost breathlessly. “I kind of want to tell him how big of a sellout he is, though. You think he'll be okay with that?”

“We try not to pass that kind of judgment here,” Haley said, measuring her tone. “Sure, you can tell him that whenever you want, but we kind of want to encourage everyone to find success however they define it.”

“So. Overproduced, overrated,
temporary
music that makes bubblegum pop sound like genius. You're okay with that?”

Every now and then there would be this kind of student, too. The kind who wasn’t merely talented, but also overly critical of everyone else. They were great artists, sure, but were a bitch to mentor. Haley took a deep breath and went with her standard line. “Mia, you should work on
you
right now.”

Mia shrugged and scribbled into her notebook again. “I work on me
all
the time,” she muttered. “I thought I’d be getting solid industry advice here. I mean, what else is the point, right?”

Ugh, and a smartmouth, too. Haley knew what that meant:
Why do others get record execs and pop stars and I get the has-been Internet girl?

And she would be right, this smartmouth Mia, because Haley couldn’t even keep a job teaching a high school girl to play the piano. What could she teach
anyone
about being an artist?

But this feeling—this suspicion that she was totally irrelevant to the person she was mentoring—this wasn’t new. Victoria kept telling her to push it away because she was a teacher first, and that was more helpful at this stage than wisdom from a chart-topping artist. Usually Haley could take it, but maybe not today, at the same time she had essentially gotten fired.

“What’s the point indeed,” Haley said, not disagreeing.

Chapter 14

One hour of watching Kari and John practice a Katy Perry song, the way Trey told them to do it. Oliver hung back and instead nodded, checked instruments, and listened.

Kari and John were going to attempt a duet on this, and when he got back after his quick trip to find Haley, they were already arguing over verses. It reminded him of that one week on
Tomorrow’s Talent
when they had to do duets with fellow contestants. He had been “randomly” partnered up with the eight-year-old girl who sang country. Audiences and critics considered that to be one of his best performances, surprisingly touching and a stretch of both contestants’ ranges, but rehearsal for that had been hellish.

“Do you know this song?” Kari looked up at him, eyes scrunched up in near-pain.

“Everyone knows that song,” Oliver said. “You really want to perform it?”

“Trey knows what he’s doing,” John said.

Trey and Ash were on the other side of the room; he would have heard it, and John probably meant for that vote of confidence to be heard.

Though he owed much to
Tomorrow’s Talent
and they knew it, they did something that he could never get over until today. They put contestants in shared rehearsal spaces, meaning to psych each other out. He’d only ever taken private music lessons until then, and at recitals he was able to tune out everyone else onstage. Going into a competition and being thrown together with fellow musicians, with parents hanging around pretending to “collaborate” and “help”—as soon as he got out of there, Oliver closed ranks on his “creative process” again. No one got to come in.

“John, you take this part and start memorizing. Kari, walk around with me?” he said.

John did not like this plan. “You’ll be back when?”

“You’ll get your alone time with me soon enough. Kari?”

***

Like riding a bike, some skills were coming back to him. Divide and conquer, for one. Standing Soft Taco Time was another.

He chose Kari for Standing Soft Taco time because she seemed like she wasn’t going to be a smartass about it.

“I didn’t want to say this in front of Trey,” Oliver explained as the waiter at the hotel café served their food, “but I’ve been around for a while. Longer than him. And he has his way of doing things, but I also have mine.”

“Soft tacos?”

“When I was on the show, we weren’t allowed to go out and have long lunches. There was catering, but sitting down to eat there seemed like forever when you had lines to memorize and on-set schoolwork to do. But meals were also the time when nobody was expected to hassle you about the competition, so I took food I could eat with one hand and walked off to think.”