Want It Back

[Please note that NO CHARACTER or SITUATION is “you” or anyone you know, even if it sounds like it – there are bits and pieces of experiences I have had, but no passive-aggressive intent should be inferred – I was just dumping things out of my brain as fast as possible to get to 50,000 words by the end of November!]

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It doesn’t matter

If you want it back –

You’ve given it away,

You’ve given it away…

– Amanda Palmer, “Want It Back”

Chapter 1

Allie sighed as she slammed shut the door to the practice room. Once again her bandmates had arrived late, farted around, and left her to shut off the lights and lock up. The “you’re kidding me” moment of the night was that when the new drummer arrived at 8:05pm (to give him his due, ALMOST on time) he walked in and exclaimed, “You’re here!”

“Yes, I agreed we would meet at 8 o’clock, so I arrived by 8.”

“But I didn’t expect that,” he replied. Allie supposed that it was a good sign, even if a bit annoying that he assumed *she* would not be on time – she was vaguely aware that he also apparently played in a local community orchestra. Classical players worked on the assumption that saying “rehearsal starts at 7:30” meant “be in your chairs with your music stands and parts open and instrument ready to play at 7:30”, not the rock band assumption that you started rolling in sometime within 15 minutes of the stated hour.

Still, one band member arriving mostly on time didn’t make much difference when the others texted 15 minutes later that they were stopping at Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee and would be there “shortly.” Allie loved having a good practice session, but not that it usually ended at 10:45 PM or later. She tried to get up at 5:30 AM to arrive at her day job by 8, so getting only five to six hours of sleep if she was lucky left her feeling trashed in the morning.

Was it time to look for a new band? She doubted that would do much good – she had been in a goodly number of other bands, and none of their players had seemed better able to be efficient with their time. At least this band’s members didn’t also waste it guzzling beer or taking smoking breaks. And while she appreciated the promptness of classical players there was too much about that world she hated – the perfectionism, the competition, and the resistance to anything written after the early 20th century, to name a few things.

As these thoughts went through her head, Allie used her phone’s display as a weak flashlight to make her way through the darkened hallway – once again practice had gone so late that the energy-saving timer had turned off the lights. The old fraternal building creaked gently in the night. The larger rooms upstairs were now used by several dance studios, and she considered herself lucky to have been able to rent her office/practice studio so cheaply.

At the control panel for the security system she punched in the activation code once to arm the building’s motion detecting system, then again to turn it on with a 40 second delay. Allie turned, slung bags containing her viola and a small MIDI keyboard over her shoulders, and headed for the steep exit staircase in order to get out of range of the motion detectors before she triggered the alarm that would summon an offsite security team to investigate.

With no warning the strap on one of the bags let go. Allie swore and turned quickly to pick it up, then ran for the stairs still mindful of the seconds remaining before the alarm engaged. While it might have made more sense to go back to the panel and reset the alarm, in the past that had thrown the system into a strange configuration that had taken calls to the monitoring service and 30 minutes of screwing with the controls to alleviate. She didn’t want that hassle this late at night.

She didn’t notice the raised bit of ripped carpet that caught her foot as she got to the top of the stairs. As her body fell head first through the air, in her flailing one of the bags flew into range of a motion detector.