She succumbed to that dreaded internet virus, the meme. Struck with wonder at her prose, I thought the worst I could do is show the world how horrid my own attempts at fiction are. The rule is simple. Page seventy-seven of the the latest work-in-progress. Go to line seven. C&P the next seven lines/sentences/paragraphs. I've decided not to use my latest WIP, but rather the first draft that I am going to begin a rewrite on Monday. Remember, as you read - this is a FIRST DRAFT.
Her eyes seemed to bore through Kelly now. “The two of you, sitting there, him saying, ‘That’s right, Kelly! See, you can play whatever you want!’ I hated that thing, I didn’t want you growing up thinking it was something special, like he did.”
“Then why did you get me that guitar when I was fourteen?”
“Because I thought, ‘Well, he’ll pick it up and realize he can never really play it, and then I can get rid of it.’ Sure enough, you were just like him, you could play it, couldn’t you. So you wanted all that other stuff, and I kept thinking, ‘Better to let him get it out of his system now.’”
Her eyes were filling with tears, now, but her voice showed no emotion other than obvious anger. Anger at him, anger at his long, lost, musical father. “Then you hooked up those, those others, Jamie Tolliver and Davey Shea, a drunk just like his wastrel father, and that Harlan Truesdale with all his money. And Melissa Ericson, I know what kind of girl she’s always been. Always had her nose up in the air because she was looking up at people from being on her knees. Any girl who’d spend all her time with a bunch of boys, wasting their time, had only one thing on her mind.
“I put up with it, though. Even when you decided to be a bum, and drive around in that awful Tolliver boy’s car and play your music I thought being broke for a few months would teach you a lesson. You were like your father that way. You earn a few bucks, you get people whispering in your ear, and the next thing I know you’re on TV and the radio and now you’re living all alone in Arizona, and it’s all because you think music is a way decent people earn their living.”
The wind seemed to go out of her sails for the moment. Kelly was too stunned, just too goddamn overwhelmed to respond. She was breathing harder than normal, her thin cheeks flushed.
“The day your father died, he was on his way home from one of those horrible auditions he was always going to. Did you know that? Someone had called someone who had called someone else who had called your father, and off he went. He was going to New York, he said. Broadway, he said. All he had to do was go to this audition and play and sing and he said we would have it made. All that he had made was dying under some truck and I was stuck with a three year old child to raise on my own, who ended up just like his father."You can tell me it sucks. It won't hurt.
