the 1 | chaennie

3. Tim McGraw

September saw a month of tears

And thankin' God that you weren't here

To see me like that

But in a box beneath my bed

Is a letter that you never read

From three summers back

It's hard not to find it all a little bitter sweet

And lookin' back on all of that, it's nice to believe

-

At fourteen, they made the move to London, buying a house in Kensington, the Edwardian terraced house hosting five bedrooms, a white facade and a few short steps leading up to the polished wood of the black front door. It had a gold knocker and a black wrought-iron fence, the wide streets lined with Audis and BMWs, and in complete contrast to the farm that Rosie had grown up on. She was enrolled in a private school for girls in Barbican, in the centre of London, the annual fees an extortionate price, and Rosie was thrust into the middle of upper-class girls, most of whom looked down on the daughter of a stockbroker. It was a competitive environment, and although Rosie was comfortably wealthy, with enough talent to make some of the girls jealous, and pretty enough to be a threat, she found that she wasn't all too popular there. She only made one friend, but that was enough for her.

On her first day, towards the end of the school year, she was sat next to an American girl in English class. Her name was Talia, the daughter of an American politician, and soon enough they became best friends. She wanted to be a swimmer, hoping to make it to the Olympics one day, and Rosie was likewise just as ambitious with her music, her sights set on making it to the big stage. Talia was to Rosie what she imagined a sister would be, and they were inseparable, at school and outside of it. It was Talia who first introduced her to country music, the Nashville-born girl a huge fan of the likes of Faith Hill and the Dixie Chicks, and Rosie became a fan too. After a trip back home to Nashville during the summer holidays, Talia brought her back a pair of cowboy boots.

Looking back on that, so much had changed. It was a different life entirely, and not a bad one either, and sometimes Rosie would think back on how naive she'd been, and how she'd wished that things had stayed as simple as they had been. When she was fifteen, the most pressing concerns in her life were whether she would pass a Math test, if the field hockey team she played on would win their next match, and writing songs about love. It seemed silly to her when she was older, that she ever thought she knew what love was when she was barely a teenager. Most of the songs she wrote back then were largely based on the girls in her class, gossiping about boys they knew, about their heartbreaks and first dates, and Rosie found herself completely on the outskirts of those conversations. In a school full of girls, she never had much experience with boys, so she made it up, from movies, from wishful thinking, and anything else that struck her as something worth writing about.

It wasn't all about boys either. She wrote songs about her family, about friendship and school, of all the times she was bullied and ridiculed for her music. She wrote every day, about the trivial things that were so important to her at the time, and she played her guitar for hours at a time, until her fingertips bled and blistered. Yet, she never gave up. She played the songs for her parents, and over the phone when Alice called, and for Talia. The four of them were her biggest supporters, and Rosie found herself settling into London nicely. School was hard sometimes, but not as bad as it'd been at the boarding school in Melbourne, and there was a sense of purpose, with all the record labels and people dabbling in music crowding the city.

But still, she heard nothing, and she was beginning to wonder if maybe she'd passed up her only opportunity to sign a record deal. She knew that she'd been right to turn the offer down though; she wasn't made to sit on a shelf until other people deemed her ready. Rosie was ready now, she just needed to make someone listen. Talia listened to her though, and was endlessly supportive, soothing Rosie's frayed nerves when she fretted about the future, her eyes set on one prize, while she worked at her own. Rosie spent hours at the school's swimming pool, sitting on the benches lining the shimmering turquoise water, the smell of chlorine strong in the air, writing new songs as she watched her friend swim laps.