Chapter 14
fourteen
CASS
The music building’s seminar room feels like enemy territory.
As I slide into my usual seat—third row, left side, close enough to look engaged but far enough back to avoid direct fire—and try to arrange my face into something resembling confidence, my leather jacket creaks as I pull out my notebook.
It’s like an announcement: The punk weirdo is here!
Everyone else has already deployed their arsenal: laptops, highlighted printouts, and peer-reviewed journals in neat stacks. I have a battered spiral notebook covered in Sharpie doodles and a presentation I scribbled down in it.
Just get through this.
But before I can spiral about the presentation that I’m half a chance of bombing, I catch the excited voices of the two kids in the row ahead, leaning over a phone screen.
“Dude, did you see Kellerman’s hit in the third period?” The guy’s voice is electric with enthusiasm. “Absolutely flattened that guy from UMass.”
His friend nods. “My roommate sent me like five different angles. That dude’s a fucking beast.”
I sink lower in my seat, arranging my face into careful disinterest, avoiding the screen at all costs. Because if I watched it, I’d see him. And if I saw him, I’d remember the party. The kiss. The way he’d held me like I was something precious instead of something volatile.
For days, I’ve been shoving that memory down, because the second I let myself believe it was real, the second I let myself want it to be real, I risk him finding out the person underneath the performance is a fraud. Then he’ll leave, and we’ll both be hurt.
He doesn’t deserve that, and I can’t handle that.
So I’ve done my best to file all thoughts of “real” in the same mental drawer where I keep other things I can’t deal with: my bank balance, my mother’s voicemails, the certainty that I’m an outsider who snuck in the service entrance of this university and is seconds from being discovered.
As if on cue, Dr. Atwood—sixties, wire-rimmed glasses, elbow patches—strides to the front of the room. He sets down his leather briefcase with a soft thump and surveys us with the placid gaze of a scientist cataloging bacteria.
“Good afternoon,” he says, his voice carrying that smooth academic authority that says I’ve never doubted my right to this podium, and you shouldn’t either. “As you know, today we begin midterm presentations. These constitute thirty percent of your final grade.”
Gulp.
“These presentations are your opportunity to demonstrate not just understanding of music theory, but rigorous collegiate-level engagement with and mastery of music theory.” His gaze sweeps the room, landing on me. “Challenge us. Make us think. Miss Vance, you’re first.”
Double gulp.
I gather my notes with hands that are only slightly shaking and make my way to the front. My combat boots sound like drumbeats against the polished floor, each step announcing my arrival to the firing squad. As I walk, I feel all their gazes, their eye rolls, their sneers, their smirks.
Fuck them. You know this. You’ve lived this.
I set my notebook on the podium, gripping the edges until my knuckles go white. Then I launch into my defense of harmonic dissonance in punk rock, giving the example of The Clash’s “London Calling” and the Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia.”
“They’re two songs whose chaotic chord progressions are the sonic embodiment of societal collapse,” I say. “They show that dissonance in punk isn’t a failure of musicianship, but a deliberate political and musical choice.”
I go on. I make the case that, in punk, the “ugliness” is the point—a rejection of the polished, palatable mainstream.
That you can’t separate the music from the fury and the world that birthed it.
It’s a hard sell, because this is a room full of people who play classical instruments and masturbate on weekends while debating Bach vs Tchaikovsky.
But for a few glorious minutes, it works.
My raw passion carries me through the examples, and I feel almost brilliant.
A girl in the front row—Claire, a violinist with perfect posture—nods along as I break down the tritone in “Holiday in Cambodia,” her expression genuinely interested.
And for one dangerous second, I let myself believe that maybe I belong here.
Then the Q&A begins.
Dr. Atwood folds his hands. “An interesting thesis, Miss Vance,” he says, and I know immediately that I’m fucked.
“But I’d like to probe deeper into your harmonic analysis of ‘London Calling.’ You identify the opening bass line as utilizing a descending chromatic progression.
Can you describe, in technical terms, how that progression functions within the song’s overall tonal center? ”
My thinking stutters to a halt.
I know the feeling of that bass line. I know it in my bones, in the way it makes my chest tighten and my pulse quicken.
I know it’s dark and menacing and unstable, a musical manifestation of dread.
But the technical language—the Roman numeral analysis, the voice-leading rules, the functional harmonic vocabulary—it’s a foreign language I’ve only half-learned, and under his cool gaze, every word evaporates.
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
My brain is a scramble of static.
Fuck! Say something! Say literally anything!
But all I can hear is The Critic’s voice, that grad student who’d made me feel so smart until I showed him a crack in the armor. You’re just a three-chord hack with a good face.
“It’s… chromatic,” I finally manage, my voice faltering. “It moves down by half-steps, creating tension. It destabilizes the tonic.”
“Yes,” he says, his tone condescendingly patient in a way that makes my skin crawl. “But how does it destabilize the tonic? What is the relationship between the chromatic descent and the song’s harmonic rhythm? Are we discussing a true modulation, or is this a prolongation of the dominant?”
I don’t know! I don’t fucking know!
And if I don’t know this, I fail the presentation. If I fail the presentation, my grade craters. If my grade craters, there’s a pretty damn good chance I’m off scholarship. The dominoes are already falling and I’m standing here, silent, the girl from Camden who doesn’t belong here.
And soon, who may not be able to afford here…
I fumble through an answer, stringing together half-remembered textbook terms, and I can see the exact moment he stops listening. He doesn’t interrupt me—he’s too polite—but that’s almost worse, because he just waits, with infinite patience, for me to finish digging my own grave.
I try a different approach—talking about how the bass line feels in performance, how the audience responds to that instability, the visceral reaction it creates. Because maybe if I can bridge the gap between what I know in my gut and what he wants to hear in academic language, I—
“That’s anecdotal, Miss Vance,” he says, killing the idea. “I’m asking for harmonic analysis, not performance observation.”
The dismissal is surgical.
He asks another question. Then another. Each one more precise than the last, designed not to explore my ideas but to expose their weaknesses. By the fifth question, I’m sweating through my shirt, my voice cracking, my armor disintegrating in real time.
I glance down at my notes, desperate, and catch movement in my peripheral vision. Claire, who’d been nodding along minutes ago, is now studying her laptop with the kind of intense focus people use when deliberately avoiding a meth addict on public transportation.
When he delivers the killing blow, his voice is kind. “Your analysis, Miss Vance, is, as usual, instinctive but technically unsophisticated.”
Kind, sure, but the words land like a fist to the sternum.
I stand frozen at the podium as he continues. “You have genuine passion, which is commendable. But passion without technical rigor is simply… noise. So I’d encourage you to spend more time with the foundational texts before attempting analysis of this complexity.”
The other students—the ones with perfect grades and years of formal training, the ones who grew up with Steinway grands in the living room and parents who could afford private tutors—stare at their notebooks. Their collective silence is a deafening confirmation of my fraudulence.
I’ve been publicly branded.
A musician who can’t even speak the language of music.
Dr. Atwood’s tone is final. “Thank you, Miss Vance. You may sit down now.”
I gather my notes with shaking hands, nearly dropping the entire notebook. I make it back to my seat on autopilot, my face burning, and I don’t look up for the rest of class. Because if I make eye contact with anyone, if I see the smallest glint of pity or condescension, I will shatter.
Back in my dorm room, I’m unraveling.
I pace the cluttered space, my boots leaving fresh scuff marks on the already-filthy floor. The room looks like a crime scene where the victim was “basic adulting” and, worse, when I get the idea to make a coffee to calm myself down, there’s a fuzzy green-gray bloom inside the cup.
This. This is what I am. A disaster nobody wants to deal with.
I set it down harder than necessary, ceramic clinking against wood, then resume pacing, a caged animal wearing a track in the floor. As I do, I find new ways to confirm I’m a fraud. A hack. An unsophisticated mess who scraped by on raw talent and is now being exposed.
And the worst part is he’s right.
I am instinctive.
I don’t have the technical vocabulary.
I learned music by ear, by feel, by stealing my stepdad’s old guitar.
I never had piano lessons or theory tutors or a childhood where I could “explore my artistic gifts” instead of figuring out how to eat, and now I’m paying for it. Because while the university—all universities—talk a big game about inclusion and equity, the reality feels like a cruel joke.
I go to my guitar, my fingers brushing the curves. I should play. Playing always helps. It’s the one thing that makes sense when everything else is chaos. But when I pick it up, cradling the familiar weight, my hands won’t cooperate.
I move to the window, pressing my forehead against the cold glass. Campus spreads out below—students crossing the quad, backpacks slung over shoulders, moving through their lives with the easy confidence of people who belong—and I feel like a prisoner looking out at the world.
My crime?
Fraud.
In this moment of profound worthlessness, my desperate brain flashes to the one recent moment I felt seen and wanted. Ben. The kiss. It had felt real and I had felt electric and, for just a few stolen minutes, like I wasn’t alone.
What if that was real? What if I could reach out and he’d just… show up?
For a fleeting second, I let myself grasp for that possibility. But I should know by now that hope is the most dangerous drug, because it makes me vulnerable. It makes me soft. It makes me the kind of girl who gets gutted when the guy she’s falling for realizes she’s not worth the effort.
I already decided at the party the kiss had to stay fake, and I can’t backslide now, not when I’m feeling this raw and broken. So I push away from the window, my reflection ghostly in the glass, letting my cynical, self-protective instincts reassert control.
No way. He’s an engineer. All clean lines and logic. He builds things that work. Why the fuck would he want you?
My amp hums because I can’t fix it. My presentations are “unsophisticated” because I never learned the proper language. My dorm room is a disaster because I can’t keep my shit together long enough to do laundry. My shows are carnage, manic unrestrained energy.
All of it coalesces to prove that I’m fundamentally, irreparably broken and chaotic in ways Ben—someone who troubleshoots problems with methodical precision, whose entire world operates on logic and order, who’s scared of his own shadow—could never understand or accept.
And if he got any closer, if he saw past the performance and the fuckable punk-chick heavy on makeup and provocative threads, he’d see the same messy, fraudulent thing the professor did, that every guy does, and he’d leave.
The Fanboy recoiled from my tears.
The Adrenaline Junkie was disgusted by my fear.
The Critic weaponized my insecurity.
Frank sees me as a liability.
Joel thinks I’m unprofessional.
And I know with gut-wrenching certainty that if Ben got any closer, the same thing would happen. Because with all these guys, the persona is desirable, but the person is a liability. That’s the rule, and rules don’t break just because you want them to.
But still, there’s this horrible flicker of hope I can’t quite kill. And as I sink onto the bed, desperate for someone to hold me and help me, I grab my phone. My fingers hover over the screen, a needy plea forming in my head.
But what would I even say?
Look, we need to talk about that kiss.
No.
Ben, I really need you…
Fuck no.
The words shimmer there, half-formed, a confession I’ll never send.
Because if I text him, then what?
He shows up, sees the disaster zone of my room, watches me spiral into the anxious mess I actually am underneath the leather jacket and stage presence, and then he… what? Decides he’s into that? Decides the messy girl is just the recipe when he can’t talk to normal girls without running?
No.
He’ll run.
The Kellerman Retreat.
Or, even if by some miracle, he stays for longer than five seconds, he’ll do what they all do. He’ll realize the fantasy doesn’t match the reality. And when he does, it’ll hurt worse than any of the others because I let myself hope.
I toss the phone on my bed, hard, because as the first tear comes I realize I’m angry. At the professor… at myself… sure. But also, fair or not—OK, not—at him. Because him and the idea of us isn’t a lifeline. It’s a trap that will gut me the second I let my guard down.
I need to shut this down.
Now.
My resolve hardens, cold and sharp. I need to remind him—and myself—what this is. A transaction. Business. He gets his social shield, I get my human scarecrow. Clean. Simple. Safe. So when I pick up my phone again, I punch out a short text that will slam the door shut on this forever.
Cass:
Tomorrow. O’Neil’s. 10:00 p.m.
Cold.
Firm.
Logistics.
I hit send before I can second-guess myself. The message delivers with a soft whoosh. There. Done. The line is drawn. We’re back to the arrangement, back to the safe, emotionless transaction where nobody gets hurt because nobody gets close enough to do damage.
Because I’m damaged enough already.