Chapter 2 #2
My laptop is buried under study planners and old setlists, but I manage to excavate it like I’m digging for treasure in a landfill. As my hand wraps around the laptop, a crumpled setlist from last week’s show catches my eye. I smooth it out, reliving the thirty minutes of music.
The only thirty minutes of my week when I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
But what if Joel’s right? What if the hum does make us sound like amateurs, and we finally get a real break—a showcase, a label scout—and the only thing they remember is that my amp sounded like a dying refrigerator?
What if I’m the reason we never make it out of dive bars?
With a sigh, I open my laptop and navigate to the university portal. Suddenly, this feels like the scene in every horror movie where the audience screams, “Don’t go in there!” and the character goes in anyway because the plot demands it. I’m that character. There it is, my grade.
Midterm Exam: 58/100
Not quite failing, but close enough that it feels like the difference between drowning in six feet of water versus seven. It stings, because I’ve never gotten a grade this low in my life. Even in high school, when I was coasting on raw talent, I pulled Bs.
This is different.
This is proof.
My stomach drops, a sick, hollow feeling spreading outward until my whole body feels cold. I want to close the laptop, unsee it, but my hand scrolls down on its own, because apparently if I’m going to sink all the way under, I need the weight of my professor’s comments to help me.
The PDF loads, and Dr. Atwood’s red ink covers nearly every page. I already feel raw after the argument with Joel, but Atwood’s handwriting is surgically precise, like he’s performing an autopsy on my ignorance with a calligrapher’s scalpel.
Incorrect application of harmonic theory.
Misidentification of the secondary dominant.
This analysis lacks rigor.
Each comment is a small, precise cut.
Then I see the last note—the one at the bottom of my final essay.
“Your analysis demonstrates a certain instinctive understanding of the material, but remains technically unsophisticated. You play by ear, and that is evident. In an academic context, this approach is insufficient, so I strongly suggest you attend tutoring sessions to address these foundational gaps.”
Translation: You’re faking it, and I can tell.
I can picture him saying the words, and his exact tone. He’s kind on the surface, but with a dose of polite dismissal, the clinical assessment that you’re not quite good enough, and that you don’t quite belong, no matter how hard you try.
Suddenly, I’m back in that coffee shop last spring, gray light filtering through dirty windows, sitting across from Eric (who I’ve dubbed The Critic). A grad student and music blogger, he’d seemed different from the band guys I usually date.
He’d come to a show, approached me after, and told me he wanted to interview me about my “songwriting process.” I’d felt seen for the first time in years. We did the interview and then slept together right on his couch, the chemistry between us instant.
For a month, it was good. He talked about music with a vocabulary I didn’t have—modal interchange, borrowed chords, Phrygian cadences—but he didn’t make me feel stupid for not knowing the terms. He called my playing “raw” and “authentic,” and I let myself believe it was a compliment.
I should have known better.
I close my eyes, but the memory plays anyway.
One night, after sex in his cramped apartment above a Chinese restaurant, he asked about my process. Not in interview mode, but in that soft, post-sex voice that makes you think vulnerability is safe, and that intimacy is rewarded instead of punished.
So I told him the truth.
I told him I didn’t really understand harmonic minor scales, that I played by ear and feel and instinct, and that I was terrified the music program would realize I didn’t belong and revoke my scholarship. I couldn’t see his face in the dark, so I’d continued, thinking his silence was acceptance.
“I feel like a fraud, sometimes,” I’d said. “Faking my way through theory classes and hoping nobody notices…”
I thought that’s what intimacy was—showing someone the messy parts and having them not run—but he’d stayed quiet. Not comfortable quiet, but the bad kind, where you feel the temperature drop ten degrees and the person you’re snuggling into suddenly feels as stiff as a corpse.
Then he said it: “You know, I thought you were real, but raw. I was wrong. You’re just a three-chord hack with a pretty face.”
It came out casual, like he was commenting on the weather instead of detonating a bomb in my chest, and before I had a chance to recover, he’d gotten up to shower. I dressed and fled his apartment while he was in the bathroom, the taste of him still in my mouth.
My breath catches at the thought, and at the shock of the grade, and the hot prickling behind my eyes is a warning I’ve learned to ignore. But I don’t cry, because crying means surrender, and giving all the assholes who’ve doubted me the satisfaction of being right.
Because this is the pattern, with every single guy I’ve ever let into my life, romantic or otherwise. It’s a revolving door I keep walking through, learning the same lesson over and over like I’m in some fucked-up Greek myth where I’m doomed to repeat my mistakes forever.
Guys are drawn to the persona. The girl on stage who snarls into the mic, plays guitar like a weapon, and looks like she could burn the world down. They love the raw energy, the spectacle, and the fantasy of the punk rock girl who doesn’t give a fuck and would be great to fuck.
But when the lights go down and the volume goes down, they get close enough to see the reality—the messy, self-taught girl who grew up poor, doesn’t understand real music, and lies awake terrified she’s a fraud—and they recoil.
There was Blake (“The Fanboy”), who loved watching me perform, cheering louder than anyone. But when I tried to share my pre-show anxiety, he looked confused, like I was breaking character, like the real me was an unwelcome intrusion on his fantasy.
He ghosted me two weeks later.
Or James (“The Adrenaline Junkie”), who loved the chaos and the danger I projected. He was always the first in the mosh pit, watching me with a big grin and love in his eyes as I dived off stage, without checking to see if anyone was ready to catch me.
He loved the idea that I was fearless, until the night a bar fight broke out at one of our gigs and I hid in the green room, trembling and crying. He found me there, saw the crack in my armor, and his attraction died like someone flipped a switch.
And now, in one night, Joel and Dr. Atwood have both rejected me, too.
The tears break free anyway, hot and furious. I swipe at them, angry at myself for the weakness. My throat tightens, my chest aches, and I want to scream or punch something or just disappear. Because this isn’t just about the grade or Joel being an asshole about the amp.
It’s about every guy who looks at me and sees a fantasy, not a person.
The persona is what they want, but the person?
She’s a fraud. A liability. A mess.
I bury my face in my hands, and the sobs come harder, ugly and choking. My shoulders shake, and I hate this weakness, the fact that I can’t just be the girl on stage all the time. Because that girl is invincible, all sharp edges and angry energy, flipping the bird at the whole damn world.
But this girl?
She’s real, messy, terrified, and drowning.
The red ink scrawled across the exam blurs in my mind, merging with Joel’s frustration, with the hum I can’t fix, and with the disappointed words of every guy who ever saw the real me underneath. And all of it braids together into one suffocating truth.
I don’t belong here.
I never did.
And eventually, everyone’s going to figure it out.