13. Mai （17）
Twenty-one years ago
Midnight Thunder had been playing together for a year on the local pub scene, initially performing cover songs to a crowd who weren’t that interested in them.
But in the last few months, things started to change. Their own musical sound became more defined, and at each gig, they now performed more of their own songs.
Mai noticed that some of the audience were the same each week, singing along to their original music.
They were starting to have fans.
The band fell into a routine: practice on Tuesday, then songwriting every Wednesday evening.
“You two are so boring. Why are we here again?” Joel lamented as he sat at Mai’s mum’s kitchen table.
Mai grinned at him. “Because we’re writing music.”
“You two are writing music.” Scotty pointed at Ford and Mai. “We’re—” he gestured to Joel. “—sitting here, being useless. I play drums. In the last three months, I’ve made zero contribution to any song that’s been written.”
“If you help, you get writing credit. So once we’re big, you get paid,” Ford told them for the fiftieth time.
Mai tried her hardest not to gaze at Ford when he spoke, but it was a losing battle. The more time she spent with him, the more she liked him. What had initially been a crush on a cute boy deepened with every minute she was by his side.
Joel snorted. “That hardly seems fair to you two. We’re literally contributing nothing.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s just—“ Ford started, but Scotty interrupted him.
“He’s right. These songs are all yours and Sie’s. We’re sitting here looking pretty, while you two actually write.” Scotty tapped his palms against the table. Even when he didn’t have sticks in his hands, he was always drumming.
“What do you want to do then?” Ford asked.
Joel and Scotty glanced at each other before Joel replied, “You two take full writing credit. And we get our Wednesday evenings back.”
Ford’s grey eyes locked with Mai, and her heart skipped a beat. She never spent time with only Ford; it was always the four of them together.
She nodded and forced herself not to drop her eyes from him. That was something shy Mai would do.
She was Sie.
She didn’t get embarrassed.
“Sure,” Ford said, breaking eye contact and shrugging at his friends.
Mai’s stomach lurched in disappointment, as it did every time Ford’s attention shifted away from her. She lived for those small moments.
“Woo-hoo. We’re out of here!” Scotty exclaimed joyously, jumping to his feet and making a beeline for the door. “See you tomorrow.”
“Bye, guys,” Joel called, following closely on his heels.
“Bye,” Mai added belatedly.
When the two boys left her parents’ house, silence settled over the kitchen, and Mai became very aware that it was now just her and Ford. But as usual, she shoved her growing feelings down and returned to the business of writing songs.
She flicked through her notebook and tapped on some lyrics, with a scribbled title above them. “I really like this one.”
“Summer Days?” Ford queried.
“Yeah. Let’s work on that now.”
They had never been hugely productive when writing with Scotty and Joel there, making helpful—actually unhelpful—comments. And she'd glossed over these lyrics, as she didn’t want to hear their opinion on her words about first love and heartbreak.
When she wrote them, she was thinking only of Ford.
The elation she felt when they were together, the rightness of being with him, compared to the heartbreak that accompanied every new girl he turned up with.
He was a serial monogamist, every few weeks bringing a new girl to band practice or to a gig.
Girls who would stare at him with adoration.
Mai would have to channel Sie whenever Ford locked lips with one of those girls, acting as if she wasn’t bothered at all, even as she fell more and more in love with him.
At seventeen, she knew without a doubt that she loved Ford. He occupied her waking hours and dreams. It hurt when she saw him with another girl. The only thing that comforted her was that none of them were ever around very long before he moved on.
Ford had just dumped another of the never-ending lineup.
Stacey or Sally or something like that. He’d told the rest of the band that she got too clingy.
Mai tried to tell herself it was just a coincidence that the other girl got dumped after she started being bitchy to Mai and complaining loudly about Mai spending so much time with the boys.
Lately, Mai had begun to think that Ford might like her as well. She often caught his eyes on her, and he would smile lazily at her before he looked away. And he seemed to be touching her more—brushing his hand over hers. Handing her things and making sure their fingers touched before he let go.
Now it was just her and Ford sitting in her parents' kitchen, the air felt heavier.
“Cool,” Ford said. Interrupting her whirling thoughts. “Sing it for me.”
Mai picked up her acoustic guitar from the chair and kept her eyes fixed on the notebook.
“It’s very rough at the moment. It needs a lot of work.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Ford replied.
Mai’s eyes rose to his, and her heart skipped at the smile on his face. A warm, genuine smile that she’d never seen him use on any of his many girlfriends.
Dropping her gaze and ignoring her skipping heart, she began to play, singing the delicate verse, then raising her voice in the chorus.
When she finished, there was only silence in the room, and finally, she looked up.
Ford was staring at her.
“That was brilliant.” He grinned broadly. “That’s the best song you’ve written so far.”
Mai controlled the blush that tried to rise at the praise. She’d known she had something when the lyrics and music swirled through her head.
It was like that for her—sometimes she had lyrics only, snippets of words that she knew should be woven into a song. And sometimes a whole song would appear in her head, looping around until it was fully formed.
“Play it again.” Ford pulled a pen out, ready to take notes, like he always did when she sang him something new.
He would write down the bits he thought should be changed, then they would work on it until they agreed they had a finished product and recorded it on a cassette, so they wouldn’t forget it.
When she finished her second run through, he sat there thoughtfully.
Finally saying, “You should leave it at least six beats before you start the chorus. It’ll be more impactful.”
Mai frowned, singing it back in her head and getting to the two beats she'd left before the chorus.
Surely six would be too long? It would sound like dead air.
She strummed her guitar and played the last couple of lines of the verse, leaving two beats, then going into the chorus. Stopping, she started the song again, this time waiting longer as Ford suggested. Frowning, she stopped playing and started again, doing it the way he wanted a second time.
When she finished, she nodded at him. “Yeah. You’re right. It sounds better.”
Mai jotted a note above the lyrics to remind herself of the increased pause.
They went through the rest of the song that way—making small adjustments, changing words that didn’t work, adjusting tempo and key to make sure the song suited Ford’s deeper singing voice.
“Hi, kids,” Mai’s mum, Yvonne, greeted them as she and Darren, her stepdad, walked into their kitchen.
“Hi, Mum,” Mai said, noticing how exhausted she looked after her twelve-hour shift at the hospital. “How was work?”
“You know, the usual. I cooked what felt like three thousand meals, and most of them won’t be eaten,” Yvonne said with a chuckle. She was a cook in the hospital, preparing patient meals on a shoestring budget.
“Oh no. We’ll go upstairs and finish. Give you guys some peace.” Mai hated that her mum needed to work so hard for them.
“Sure,” Yvonne agreed tiredly, gratefully sinking into the chair that Ford jumped up from and indicated for her to take.
Mai’s heart thumped. She was going to be alone with Ford… in her room.
In her mind's eye, she surveyed her room's décor, glad that she'd thought a year ago when she joined the band to remove all the ponies and pink things and replace them with posters of the bands that she loved.
Not that she didn’t love pink; it just didn’t fit with the person she was trying to be. All her clothes that weren’t black had been shoved aside in her wardrobe, and she went through more black eyeliners than she could count in the last year.
Mai sat down on her desk chair and tried not to think too hard about the fact that Ford had flopped down on her bed. She instead set her guitar on her knee and played through the song again. It took them another hour to finish all the lyrics, and both be happy with the music.
Finally, Mai said, “Now you sing the whole thing, and I’ll accompany you.”
Ford nodded. He picked up the notebook and read it through a couple of times, frowning as he tried to make out some of her scrawls.
“Your handwriting is terrible. You should be a doctor,” Ford laughed.
Mai froze. She hadn’t told the rest of the band that she’d applied for medical school.
She went to a different high school from the other three boys, so they had no idea that in school, she was Maisie, a science geek.
Who, when makeup-free, with her black hair pulled back, was quiet and easily overlooked by everyone.
Only a couple of her closest friends knew she was in a band, and even they'd drifted away over the last year, as all of Mai’s time was taken up with rehearsal or schoolwork.
It was always her plan to apply for medical school. She didn’t know why, but she’d wanted to be a doctor since she was twelve and ended up in the hospital with a broken wrist.
Her mum and dad encouraged her to apply for Medical School, never stopping her from playing in Midnight Thunder, but always making sure she realised that very few people made it in the music industry and that she needed to have another plan as well.
“Yeah,” Mai chuckled, hoping Ford wouldn’t notice how fake she sounded.
The other three only ever talked about the band. They’d made a pact to give it three years after finishing school to see if they could make it big, and if they didn’t, they would then go their separate ways.
Mai hadn’t agreed to the pact, and as she spent a lot of the time when they were together quiet—which was her default unless they really annoyed her—they didn’t realise she hadn't.
“Let me just write this down, so it’s legible, then we’ll give it a whirl.” Ford chuckled and picked up his own pink, sparkly notebook, copying the lyrics down in his neat handwriting.
Mai rolled her eyes at the memory of him turning up with his pink notebook for the first time, stating that only one band member could have black covers, so they didn’t get mixed up. It made no sense, but it made her laugh.
When Ford finished writing, he stood up in front of her, using her hairbrush as a microphone, and waited for her to begin playing. She stared at him as her fingers moved over the guitar, and he looked right back at her, singing the song about first love and heartbreak to her.
When they finished, she blinked. It was good.
In fact, it was fantastic.
Ford stepped forward and held his hairbrush microphone out to her. “How does it feel to be the youngest Grammy winner in history for songwriting?” He grinned down at her.
Mai shoved it away, blushing. “Don’t be daft. It’s a good song. I’m not sure if it’ll be that good.”
“You know it will.” Ford moved closer, straight into her personal space, and Mai’s breath hitched.
“I hope so.” Mai worked hard to keep her voice even and not give away how much him standing so close affected her.
When he leaned down and pushed some of her black hair behind her ear, she stopped breathing entirely. Their eyes were level, and their breath mingled.
She wasn’t sure which of them closed the distance.
A few years down the track, he would claim it was her and tease her about it.
But Mai was sure it was both of them, and that they'd met in the middle, his lips brushing over hers, making her drag in a sharp breath.
Ford grabbed her hand and pulled her up into his arms.
It felt so right to kiss him, and Mai never wanted him to let her go.