Long way round

chapter 9

Two weeks later.

Well, the party at Sigma Beta Theta had gone well. It was really the one and only highlight for Beca over the past two weeks. Well, being on friendly terms with Chloe was always a highlight, and the redhead had done her best to cheer Beca up. Though everything thing the redhead had done hadn't lasted much longer than it took Beca to depart Chloe's company, unfortunately. But the SBT event had gone well, so that proved, to everyone on the Bellas including Beca, that what she had done for the ICCA Finals wasn't just a fluke. And apparently her last minute reworking of the "Call Me Maybe"/"Someone Like You" mash-up had been a hit as well.

Still, every time she had to walk into the radio station and see Jesse, she felt like someone was stabbing her with a jagged knife. That was why she had decided to call in sick today. It wasn't one of her DJing shifts, of which she seemed to be getting more than Jesse got now. So instead of confronting him at work she'd called Alice, who Beca thought had a little crush on the sophomore Treble, and asked her to work in her place tonight. The young freshman intern had gladly accepted, so Beca was trying to break herself out of the funk she'd been in. And what better way to break out of a funk was there than to sit around in the late fall sunshine in Georgia and try to mix up some new beats for her shift at the station the following day.

At least, that's what she kept telling herself. She told herself that every time she started up one track and tried to get lost in the chord progression. Every time she picked up a second tune's bass line and tried to blend them together and just felt it wasn't working so she shut it off, she told herself that line. And so, after nearly two hours of sitting on a blanket, Jesse's blanket if she realized it, in the freshly mown grass, Beca had saved two mixes to her thumb drive. Two.

Pulling her headset off in disgust she fell backwards to lay on the blanket and look at the spreading branches of the oak over her head and try to figure out what she was going to do to pull herself out of this slump. Whatever she was going to do though, needed to be done quickly as she had to meet with Stacie the following night to talk about what they were going to do for Regionals. And as of right now, Beca had a whole lot of nothing.

Unlike their previous captains, the current leaders of the Barden Bellas wanted to venture out of the comfort zone they had established at the previous year's ICCA Championship. Both she and Stacie felt strongly that, though they'd never admit as much to Aubrey, the Treblemaker's had the right idea. Cynthia Rose had hit the nail on its head the previous year when she had said "The Trebles never do the same song twice." And neither of the current captains wanted to do repeat sets with the current team. They had fudged that a little bit for the SBT gig because it was so close after the start of the new school year, and with picking up three new members the group had been hard pressed to improvise their old routine by mashing it up and mixing in the new song setup that Beca had created for them.

But with Regionals only about three months away, the captains had to come up with something new for next week's set of practices. Thankfully, up to this point in time they had been having their hands full making sure the new members were up to scratch on the singing parts. But they had basically taken that as far as they could without actual sets to sing, and Stacie had chewed her ass out after practice two days ago about "getting her shit together".

The taller brunette had apologized as soon as she'd really thought about what she'd said, but still, just because she was sorry for it didn't mean that she had been wrong. And that was, to a small part of Beca's mind at least, part of the problem. Everyone was walking on eggshells around her. Of course they all knew about the breakup, one look at her afterwards had confirmed it to everyone but the new girls, who didn't really know her. And each and every one of them had been ready to murder Jesse with their bare hands if he had tried turning the Treblemakers against the Bellas as his previous predecessor, Bumper Allen, would have done.