You Exist In My Song

chapter 15

a/n: as promised here is the 15th chapter! more of shit hitting the fan, but alas...holy mother of god. enjoy!

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Summer, four years ago

"If you actually make it big in Hollywood, what would you do?" fourteen-year-old Virginia Dawson asked, her eyes focused on the clear blue skies that spread across the horizon. "Wrong answers only, if you catch my drift." She let out a laugh that sounded like music to his ears. Everything about Ginny could easily be transposed into music. Her smile, her eyes, the way her forehead crinkled when her test results were lower than her expectations.

He could not pinpoint which of her quirks that would earn a lot of his classmates' ire yet also respect. Only Virginia Dawson that could elicit such polarizing response from anyone. Yes, a lot of their classmates' response to her vary from dislike to grudging respect. But one could not deny that she was a force to be reckoned with. Ginny may not be the most popular girl in school who sat on top of the food chain socially speaking. But she did rule the nerdy academic social scene, build another hierarchy outside the social food chain and comfortably sat on top of it. Armed with her stellar grades, string of academic accomplishments and her goal to be the first ever sophomore running for Student Council President, Ginny was built for things so much bigger than the small town Clover Springs could ever comprehend.

Most of their peers would say that she was...a force to be reckoned with. It was just another term for bossy, ambitious, hard to deal with, harsh and definitely unapologetic. Through her, he found out that the world had a hard time dealing with ambitious girls who wanted more. More than the simple small town life that Clover Springs offered. But Axel understood where she came from, someone who tried to carve her place in this microscopic and homogenous society made of Clover Springs' townspeople with the only way she—a young Chinese girl cut off from her heritage—knew how. He wanted to tell her that she was definitely much more than a stereotype of Asian kids while not having to compromise her identity. He wanted to laugh at himself, having the audacity to even think that he got his shit gathered compared to her, the most put together teenager in their whole graduating class.

"Hey! Are you even listening to me?!" her demanding voice snapped him out from his train of thought. "I'm actually sparing my time from rehearsing my debate arguments before camp starts in a week."

"Is it so bad to just, I don't know, take a break from your whole ass schedule?" he could not help but to ask. Lying on his house's backyard in the start of summer break was more than enough for him to forget about anything school related. But Ginny would not be her if she did not obsess over her academic career. More than anyone he knew that she was desperate to get out of town. Academics was her tool to carve that pathway out, aside from it being one of the pillar of her pride and self-worth.

"Isn't that what I'm doing? Anyway, tell me if you meet anyone cool in the auditions. After that producer dude called you to meet in his record label, you must meet someone famous. And you haven't answered my question!"

"Ginny, you're asking way too many of them."

"Okay let me rehash this for you," Ginny replied. Somehow she sounded as if she was readying herself to present her argument and it was one of the things he found so endearing about her. 

"First, what would you do if you actually make it big in Hollywood, wrong answers only. Two, do you meet anyone famous in LA when you visited the record label?"

Several weeks ago, Axel's videos of covering songs in YouTube was discovered by one of the most important producers in the music industry. He had been scouting talents in Internet on a whim and discovered Axel's channel, which already had twenty-thousand subscribers. The numbers were already enough to make a fan base, but clearly still had a lot of room to grow. He would be lying if he said he was not excited to see what was in store for him. Finally, his dreams of sharing his music with everyone slowly started to come into fruition.