Out of My League (Madison Musicians Book 2)

by Jennifer McCoy Blaske

  Yes, as a matter of fact I had plenty. What did I do to deserve this good fortune? How could I concentrate during rehearsal when someone who looked like that was playing the guitar right next to me? Would I ever be able to actually talk to this guy instead of gurgling and grinning stupidly every time I was in his presence?

  But I didn’t imagine that Melanie could help me with any of that, so I simply gulped and said, “Nope. See you Monday.” I clutched the score against me as I pushed open the door and started walking back along Church Street.

  Well.

  This would be a new adventure, all right.

  Two

  I sang along with the radio all the way back to Orchard City, parked the car, glided across the dorm parking lot and floated up the stairs to the second floor of Clara Anderson Hall, feeling giddy the entire time.

  “Scott Stewart,” I said out loud as I got to the top of the stairs. Even his name sounded lovely.

  And I was going to be working with him for several hours every night next week. Sitting just a few feet away from him, creating musical fusion with him, seeing his gorgeous self play the guitar as he casually tossed his head back to keep that beautiful hair of his out of his bluish-green eyes?

  I didn’t know whether to feel insanely lucky or absolutely terrified.

  I went into my dorm room, which, not surprisingly, was empty. My roommate Lizzie was around so infrequently it sometimes felt like I didn’t even have a roommate. I tossed my backpack on the floor next to my desk and twirled around, knowing I was being completely silly but not caring one bit. After dancing and laughing and yes, actually leaping around the room for a few seconds, I struck a pose, feeling flirty, and looked at myself in my dresser mirror.

  And in an instant, all my illusions and excitement of the upcoming week were shattered.

  The girl looking back at me in the reflection was a very ordinary girl, and she certainly didn’t look flirty. I supposed you could call her pleasant-looking at best. There was nothing noticeably wrong with her. She wasn’t underweight or overweight or extremely tall or extremely short. There was nothing particularly striking or noticeable about her. She just looked like a normal, average person.

  And there was the problem.

  Guitar players who have gorgeous blond hair tumbling around their perfect faces are not normal and average. They live in a different universe, The Land of Beautiful People. He probably had girls falling at his feet every day. And not girls who looked like that girl in my mirror, but other girls from his universe. Girls who looked like they belonged with someone like him.

  So, not only would I have to get in line behind all the other girls vying for his attention, but Scott would probably have a good laugh if I ever managed to get to the front of the line. Not a cruel laugh, just a genuinely amused one, like when a little kid does something funny. “Ha, ha, how cute. This average-looking girl with no particular charm or beauty is interested in me. How sweet. Let me give her a little pat on the head before sending her on her merry way. Okay, so who’s next in line? A Victoria’s Secret model, perhaps?”

  The more I thought about it, and the more closely I inspected myself in the mirror, the more depressed I felt. What was I thinking? I had been so blinded with infatuation that I was completely detached from reality. It was almost as bad as having a crush on an actual rock star. What chance did I have of actually getting him to notice me, let alone like me?

  What made it even more ridiculous was that I’d hardly had any boyfriends, let alone any of Gorgeous Rock Star status. The closest thing I’d even had to a romantic relationship was an on-and-off relationship with Jeremy Smith during my senior year in high school. We mostly went out with friends, went to senior prom together, kissed a few times, and never really kept in touch once we went our separate ways after graduation. We never officially broke up because there wasn’t really much of a relationship in the first place. And Jeremy was . . . well, he was fun, he was cute, but he was . . . kinda like me. He was on my level. Ordinary

  Scott Stewart was not on my level. He was definitely out of my league.

  I felt so discouraged I was almost starting to wish I hadn’t taken the job. What started out looking like a fun week of starry-eyed swooning was now looking like it would be nothing but a week of frustration and hopelessness.

  Crap.

  I was still staring at the mirror as if I could somehow will myself to change if I concentrated hard enough, when my roommate Lizzie came in the room.

  “Hi Annie. Is something wrong?”

  “Uh . . . no.” I squinted at my reflection and shook a piece of hair with my fingers as if I had been fixing some minor detail as opposed to bemoaning the entire package that was me. “I was just . . . there was a, uh . . . piece of lint in my hair.”

  Lizzie headed to her side of the room and neatly set her shoes in her closet and hung her backpack on a hook on the wall that was next to the framed cross-stitch sampler her little sister made for her that said, ‘Because I have a sister, I will always have a friend.’

  Lizzie was really close to her family. She went home almost every weekend just because she missed them and wanted to go to church with them on Sunday morning. Her ‘daddy’ was the preacher. Not the pastor, or the minister, but the preacher.

  I don’t know if it was some religious thing or what, but Lizzie and her younger sister and their ‘mama’ all had long hair almost all the way down their backs. My parents and I met them the weekend I moved into the dorm. Lizzie’s mother had brought a huge container of tomato sandwiches for lunch that day. More than enough to share with my family. Yes! Tomato sandwiches. They were just tomatoes, white bread, and mayonnaise. I had never even heard of such a thing. My parents had gushed about how delicious they were and how kind and generous it was of Lizzie’s ‘mama’ to think of us, as if there was nothing strange about a sandwich that . . . well, had nothing in it.

  Of course, Lizzie’s mother also brought a container of chocolate-chip pecan cookies that were amazing, so they made up for the soggy sandwiches.

  Lizzie was probably the best roommate I could have hoped to have been assigned to, and not just because she was never around. She was very sweet and soft-spoken, and the kind of person you could never picture getting mad and losing her temper. She kept her side of the room impeccably neat, with her bed always made first thing in the morning, and she never had a pile of clothes thrown over her desk chair like I usually did. Right then my chair was home to two shirts and one pair of jeans, which was actually a smaller pile than usual.

  In addition to going home most weekends, Lizzie was in the college work-study program and worked in the College library four evenings a week. She sometimes stayed there to study when her shift was over.

  So, we didn’t see each other very much at all, which was probably just as well because I don’t think we’d have had a whole lot to talk about. I don’t even go to church, so there wasn’t much to talk about there, and I wouldn’t even bother bringing up Stranger Things. At best, she would have had no idea what I was talking about, and at worst she would have given me some sort of lecture—sweetly, of course—about how it was a satanic show.

  “Things were slow at the library tonight.” Lizzie sat on the bed, took a hairbrush off her night table and started brushing her hair. “It was nice. I got most of my studying done during my shift and didn’t have to stay late. So, what have you been up to?”

  “Not much.” I slung my backpack over my shoulders, “Just the usual . . . stuff. Hey, I’m gonna go over to the practice rooms for a while. See ya.”

  Lizzie’s brush paused in mid-air. “Oh . . . okay.”

  I stomped down the stairs a lot less joyfully than I had floated up them a little while earlier. I hoped I wasn’t too abrupt with her, but I just didn’t feel like talking to anybody right now.

  And anyway, I didn’t think that Lizzie could relate to having a crush on a guy that was totally out of your league. I doubt she even thought about guys, except for maybe the
ones she grew up with in her little country church. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if she had an arranged marriage lined up with one of them.

  So, there was no point in talking to Lizzie about Scott or why I felt so discouraged right now. She would never understand, and she certainly couldn’t help.

  ****

  The practice rooms in the music building must have been designed for focused concentration and zero distractions. They were just large enough for one piano and possibly three standing performers and their music stands. Most of the rooms had no windows. Each cell had boring beige carpet and matching beige walls. The brown doors had one tiny window toward the top, so you couldn’t even look into the hallway. Not that anything interesting was likely to be going on there, either.

  Whether it was due to the prison cell design of the rooms but I usually did practice with focused concentration. Most of the time I could buckle down and get to work for a good chunk of time, until I needed to stretch, walk around a little to go get a drink, and get right back to work.

  Tonight, however, I was full of distractions of my own making.

  As I played my major scales in four octaves, I kept wondering if Scott had a girlfriend, and if so, what she looked like. Perfect, no doubt. As I played my Bach French Suite from memory, my mind kept drifting to what I could possibly say to him at our first rehearsal. I needed something . . . anything to show him how witty I was. Unfortunately, my mind kept coming up empty on that one. As I worked on the accompaniment for two Italian arias, I tried to give myself a pep talk that hey, I may not look like a model or be a guy magnet, but I had good qualities, and there was no reason a hunk like Scott Stewart wouldn’t find me witty and attractive.

  The trouble was, however many times I gave myself that pep talk, I couldn’t get myself to really believe it.

  ****

  “So, what do you think I should do?” I asked Christy as we walked together along Neville Street the next morning. I had told her all about my encounter with Scott and how I spent the rest of the evening going back and forth between being elated and frustrated. “Do you think I have any chance at all with a guy like that, or should I just forget about it and not even bother getting my hopes up?”

  “Wow, are you pessimistic.” Christy adjusted her backpack on her shoulders as we walked. “You just met the guy last night, spent less than sixty seconds in his presence, and you’re ready to give up? How’d you ever get to be such a good piano player when you’re such a quitter?”

  I bristled. “I’m not a quitter. I’m a realist. That’s just how life works. Girls who look like this—” I jabbed my thumb at myself “—don’t get guys who look like that.”

  Christy turned to me and made a face. “Oh, please. Listen. You’ve got to turn the same approach to your piano playing as you do to your . . . guy-snagging.”

  “Guy-snagging?”

  “Yes.” She kicked a pebble that was laying on the sidewalk. “Look, have you ever gotten a new piece of music and it has looked really big and scary and impossible?”

  “Yeah, all the time. This score for Godspell, for one. So what?”

  “So, what did you do? Did you say—” she put on a whiny voice “—‘oh, I’ll never be able to do this, I should just quit and give up, that’s not how life works, girls that look like me can’t play beautiful songs on the piano’?”

  “I don’t sound like that.” I huffed at the very idea.

  “Well, whatever. You’d never do that with a piece of music, right?”

  I thought for a moment. “No, I guess not.”

  “Exactly. So, what do you do instead?”

  Was that a trick question? “I work on it,” I said. “I break it down, and focus on one section at a time.”

  “Ah-ha!” Christy swooped her index finger into the air. “So why can’t you do the same thing with this Scott guy?”

  I thought the answer to that was obvious. “Because I know how to learn a piano piece. I have no idea how to get a guy’s attention.”

  Christy sighed. “There you go, being pessimistic again. Were you born knowing how to play the piano?”

  “No, but—”

  “Of course not. You had to learn how. Same thing here. So, you don’t know how to get a cute guy to like you? You can learn.”

  We waited at the curb for a car to pass then crossed the street and continued walking. “Um, you do know that it took me years to learn how to play the piano, right?” I thought it was time for a little reality.

  Christy sounded unimpressed. “Well sure, because playing the piano is really complex, right? You have to learn how to read the staff, and count all those different kinds of notes, and have two hands doing two different things, and then your feet even do something, right? Just learning how to talk to a cute guy will be so much easier.”

  “Really? I’m not so sure about that.”

  “No, think about it,” she said. “It’s biologically programmed into you to want to mate.”

  “Mate?”

  “Flirting, mating, it’s all related,” she said with a wave of her hand.

  “Okay, so how exactly do I learn these human mating rituals?” I asked. “Do they offer crash courses here at Orchard City, or were you planning to give me daily lessons?”

  Christy laughed. “I’m very flattered that you think I could be your personal tutor in the fine art of flirting, but that wasn’t what I had in mind. You don’t even need a teacher. You can learn pretty much anything on the Internet. Look at Elle. You know all those cute crocheted animals in our room? She learned to do those just from watching some YouTube videos.”

  “You’re comparing me to your roommate?” I said. “Seriously?”

  Christy’s roommate, Elle, not only had flawless skin, naturally blond hair, and a great smile, but she seemed to naturally excel at everything she did. She got straight As her first semester and didn’t even seem to study that hard. She did yoga regularly, and could put her foot behind her head.

  Freaky.

  When Christy turned nineteen a few weeks before, Elle baked and decorated a cake for her complete with buttercream swirls and pink roses. In fact, I had thought she was pretty intimidating when I first met her, but that feeling quickly passed as I got to hang out with her more. She was so genuinely kind and unassuming that it was easy to get along with her, despite her many unique gifts.

  “Elle can learn anything effortlessly,” I said to Christy. “It’s not a good comparison.”

  We arrived at the front of the Trustee building. Christy stopped walking and turned to face me. “Look, Annie, you’re going to be spending a week with this guy. Why not spend the week giving it your best shot? If nothing works out between you two, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. But it wouldn’t it sad to not even try?”

  And with that, she headed up the steps to her class.

  ****

  As I sat through a discussion of the Dred Scott Decision during US history and dutifully did sight-singing and dictation with the rest of my music theory class, I kept thinking about what Christy said.

  My official reaction, of course, was that it was ridiculous. How could something as silly as reading a page on the Internet magically transform me into some sort of femme fatale within one week? Yes, the Internet was a wealth of unlimited information. But it couldn’t do that.

  But, a voice inside me kept saying, what if it really could?

  What if it were possible for an ordinary person like me to learn how to become the type of girl that this Scott creature would even pay any attention to, let alone actually like? What if Christy was right, that it was just a matter of learning a few skills, of doing some research?

  In fact, the more I thought about it, I seemed to remember hearing about a reality TV show that was on a few years ago where a group of dorky guys went to different clubs and things and learned how to pick up girls.

  Of course, they were guys learning how to attract girls. Not the other way around. And I imagine that the reality show took
place over a period that was longer than seven days.

  And for heaven’s sakes, it was a reality TV show. What did that prove? Everyone knows that those things are completely rigged, or at least heavily slanted. Since when did I make important life decisions based on the fact that maybe, possibly, something similar happened on a reality TV show?

  But still . . .

  What was persistently nagging at me was what Christy said before she left. Even if there was the teeniest, tiniest, most infinitesimal chance that I could learn how to get Scott to not only notice me, but actually like me . . . Well, shouldn’t I at least try? Wouldn’t it have been awful for me to always wonder what could have been? What if, for the next several months, every time I felt equally dull and lonely, I would think to myself, ‘If only I had not been so stubborn and had spent that week at the theater learning the skill of attracting a guy, then maybe I would be with Scott right now, listening to him sing and play a song that he wrote just for me, instead of sitting around by myself folding laundry and binge-watching Netflix. But now it’s too late and I’ll never know.’?

  That would have been so sad.

  But wait! What if it was even worse than that? What if, on my fortieth birthday I found myself single and alone, wondering if the whole trajectory of my life would have been different if only I had taken the time to do a simple Google search? I could have fallen madly, passionately in love with a rock guitar god and had a house full of beautiful, blond, musical children and together we could have . . .

  Okay, maybe that was getting a little cart-before-the-horse. But did I want to take that chance? Was I so scared—or stubborn—that I wouldn’t even look at a piece of completely free advice and at least try it?

  The thought of anyone actually seeing that I was reading an article on how to get a guy to like you felt so embarrassing that I waited not only until I was alone in my room—Lizzie had already left for the weekend—but I waited until it was late enough for it to be dark outside. Not that I actually thought that anyone would pull up a ladder to my second-story dorm window and look at what I was reading, but . . . well, I just wanted all the privacy I could get.