Page 1 of Resonance

Chapter 1

Iwas in hell. And it sucked.

If I’d believed my aunt’s pastor when I was little, hell was a bubbling ocean of magma and stench, where sinners writhed in eternal agony.

My cousin had an equally grim, possibly worse interpretation that it was a table filled with mac and cheese, but your arms were chained so you couldn’t reach it.

I didn’t particularly like mac and cheese back then, but when I’d imagined enchiladas instead, yeah, that sounded pretty bad.

And according to the preacher who stood at the corner of Second and Church every Saturday night, hell was definitely the place I was destined for. Either because of the bright pink tank top I’d been wearing that one time or just for being me. I wasn’t sure. And okay, it could’ve had something to do with the fact that I’d grinned and told him holding up that “Repent!!!” sign was doing great things for his biceps.

But they were all wrong.

Hell was a single step in a dingy bar called the Sparrow in East Nashville. That single fucking step had launched a hundred music careers and probably slayed more. It was sticky with years-old drinks spills, forgotten lyrics, and missed chords. Cigarette smoke wafted through the air and clung to post beams as I waited at the edge of it, sweating through my T-shirt with a panic attack barreling down on me like an F5 tornado.

I couldn’t even hear what the guy ahead of me was playing because my heart had grown legs and was trying to kick through my sternum.

Hell, see.

My hands slipped over the glossy veneer of my guitar when I picked it up and slung the strap around my neck as the guy onstage bobbed his head at the end of his set, then turned and shuffled off. The grim smile he gave me in passing felt like an omen, and the smattering of applause that accompanied his exit battered my eardrums like the flapping of crow wings. Too loud, too much.

Swiping my palms roughly on my pants, I took a deep breath and tried to quell the frantic race of my pulse.

I could do this.

I could.

My voice was more than passable, my songs were at least decent, and I could do this.

I put my foot on the step. The stage was small, with two spotlights that poured hot white light on top of a wooden stool and the microphone in front of it. I’d chosen this bar because of the intimate setting, because I thought it’d feel more like playing in someone’s living room, which Ihaddone in the past. But I’d definitely underestimated the power of my stage fright; I might as well have been standing on a gallows with an entire country as an audience.

My gut churned, a sour reminder of the burger I’d eaten earlier rising to my throat and lodging there. That’d been a really bad culinary decision.

I’d anticipated nerves. I always had nerves. But this was on a different level that all my self-motivation talks over the last few weeks collapsed under the strain of. And the sad thing was the place wasn’t even packed.

With my thready sense of calm quickly unraveling, I powered onto the stage and stalled out again three feet from the mic. The faces of the crowd blurred and swam as they quieted, their expressions ranging from curiosity to disinterest to amusement the longer I stood there faltering. All the energy that usually ran rampant in my body and found an outlet in fidgeting vibrated chaotically and became pressure looking for release.

Put one foot in front of another. Get to the mic. Do this. Do it.

I hadn’t realized I had an inner cheerleader, but I hated him immediately.

I searched for a safer place to settle my gaze and found the bartender, one hand on a tap as he filled a glass with beer. Okay, that could work. He was just doing his thing, and I was gonna do mine. Which was to get on this stage and play a fucking song.

Just one.

No big deal.

Except I didn’t seem to have any memory of how to do that. Guitar strings? What were those? Notes? Sound? Never heard of ’em.

I took another step, looking down at my feet. When I got nervous or overwhelmed, I got clumsy, and I had no plans to make my stage debut sprawling on my ass.

Then the bartender glanced up at me and paused, raking me up and down with his eyes, the ambivalence in his gaze fading and replaced with something that looked like deep sympathy.

The pressure inside me imploded and wrapped around my chest, choking the rest of the air from my lungs.

And that step I meant to take forward? The one that would carry me to the mic where I would dazzle the audience with my new, fresh sound and carefully penned lyrics written late at night and first thing in the morning before my shifts at Grim’s? It turned into a stutter step sideways and then a full turn back around before I even realized it was happening.

I fled the stage, stumbling over a cord, a step, something I couldn’t see.