Don't Stop The Music

- thirteen -

CHAPTER XIII

- close encounters -

[Liam]

Next rehearsal, Liam couldn't help but notice they seemed a little thin on the ground that week.

"Where's Scottani?" he asked, half hopefully.

"He can't make it this week," Dom said, swinging his legs underneath the table. "He texted me this morning. Lost his voice."

"Nice," Liam said, brightening a little.

Chen smiled wryly. "At least pretend you're disappointed, Keats," she said.

"Shame, I have nobody to work with," he said. "Does this mean I practise with you guys instead?"

Dom looked at Chen and shrugged. "Yeah, why not. Let's see if you've improved any since last week."

"I was so good last week," Liam said indignantly.

"I'm sure you were," Dom replied, grinning.

Chen took them through warm-ups and then they split into groups like normal. Liam had been listening to the song a lot this week and was pretty confident he knew all its tricks. The first few run-throughs were a bit shaky: it was hard for him to just carry the backing music when Chen and Dom were both singing the melody and the accompaniment was already slightly dissonant to begin with, but between the three of them they managed to sort it out reasonably well, and when they added in the bass and the rhythm Liam was starting to see it all fit together.

That was one of the most satisfying parts of learning a new song: when they put it together for the first time and you realised that all the things you'd been learning, no matter how weird it sounded on its own, fit in perfectly as part of the larger picture. It was easier once he realised what his parts were supposed to sound like.

"Nice job, guys," Chen said, when they wrapped up for the session.

"I think you've nearly got it," Dom said, nudging Liam with his elbow. "It's gonna sound so good when Scottani gets back."

Liam grinned, his self-confidence restored. He was pretty happy with this week: it turned out it wasn't all that bad once he'd gotten used to it. Chen sat down at the old piano at the back of the room and started playing some kind of improvisation while the others were packing up.

Dom watched her playing for a while, and then jumped unexpectedly into the seat next to her. "Remix!" he shouted, playing some enthusiastic chords over the melody. Chen took it surprisingly well, altering the notes to fit his chord sequence, and then adding her own chords at the bottom, synchronising the two tunes into a complete song, upbeat and jazzy and lively. Wolfgang joined in, dropping a simple beat, and Tweety hummed a bass line, and the room came alive with music.

Liam laughed. He didn't know how to improvise like they did, but it was just nice to watch the others work, watch the way they made stuff up instinctively, shifting their own parts to match the others. It was a little messy, wild and rough around the edges, but who cared? It still sounded good.

He was still humming softly to himself when he came out of the canteen, crunching his way through an apple, still on that ecstatic high he got from rehearsals. The others were working backstage again – they'd been spending increasingly more and more time there these days – so he'd just got something quick to eat, figuring he could make a start on his homework in the lunch period.

His work was starting to pile up now that term was in full swing: he had a worksheet of thirty physics questions to do for tomorrow, two essays to write by the end of this week, and another one due the week after. Why did he take two essay subjects? It had seemed like a good idea at the time–