Page 18 of Take My Crown

“Pretension?” I try to stay respectful to a teacher who is clearly looking for any excuse to throw me out of his class, but I had just laid my soul bare to a room full of hostile strangers and this is his reaction? “I wrote that song from myheart.”

“And that’s exactly the attitude you need to move past,” Mr Metcalf states. “When we create music, we are expressing our soul, yes, but all too often we allow our emotions to cloud our judgement. We fool ourselves that because something has meaning tous,it therefore has meaning to our listeners. This is not always the case. I’m going to give you the same advice I gave Declan a moment ago. Push yourself outside your comfort zone. You can go a lot deeper than those superficial lyrics and you’re going to need to if you want to excel. You may return to your seat.”

Grateful to be out of the spotlight, I head back to my seat, handing back Declan’s guitar with a whispered thank you.

“Now then,” says Mr Metcalf. “For your next composition assignment, I want you to find a partner. You’re going to work together to create a piece of music. It can be a song or purely instrumental in any style of your choosing, whether that be classical or contemporary. But I want it to be completely collaborative, the pair of you working together to bring out the best in each other. I am familiar enough with all your styles to be able to identify if one of you slacks off, with the exception of Miss Archaic, but I’m sure as Head Girl we can trust her to respect the requirements of the assignment.

“What you are aiming for is to deliver something which is greater than the sum of its parts, the pair of you working to both your strengths to create something neither of you can come up with alone. You will spend the rest of this lesson planning out your ideas and then your homework will be to finish the composition. I leave it to you to decide who you’d like to work with.”

Great. Just what I need–having to work with one of these stuck-up preppy snobs. I am going to be the last one picked, just like in PE class yesterday. Not that throwing a ball between two people really needed much skill, nor was it enjoyable.

“Hey, Declan. Want to team up?” I roll my eyes as a blonde girl turns in her chair and drapes herself over his desk in a way which just happened to thrust her rather ample bosom in his general direction.

“No, thanks. I thought I would work with Ivy this time.”

My eyebrows shoot up when I hear Declan say my name. “Seriously?”

“I never kid about something as serious as music,” Declan tells me. “You need to ignore anything Metcalf says. That song of yours is dope. I think we’ll write something amazing together–if you’re up for it.”

“Sure.”

I smile sweetly at the blonde girl who looks like she has just sucked on a lemon as she turns away to find someone else to team up with.

Declan shuffles his chair along, pulling out a notebook and placing it on the table so I can see his notes. As he moves, I notice the Head Boy badge pinned to his jumper, right underneath ‘House Dauphin’ – the people my father claimed ambushed him and gave him that impressive scar.

“Dauphin?” I ask innocently. “Are you actually part of that family or are you just Head Boy?”

“I’m a Dauphin through and through. The Dauphin heir,” Declan says. “Which means you’ve probably heard terrible things about me.”

“Not you specifically,” I answer honestly.

“Look, there’s a history between our houses and you’ve probably only heard one side of the story,” he says. “But there’s always more going on than meets the eye when it comes to House politics. Who knows? Maybe our generation can be the one to heal the rift between our families.”

“Maybe,” I murmur. At the moment, I’m not going to take anyone’s word at face value, but Declan certainly seemed sincere and meant what he said. Possibly. It’s hard to trust the sexy music dude.

“In fact, that can be the theme for our song,” he suggested. “It would fit the brief of doing something which is better than either of us can achieve on our own.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” I nod, as Declan starts scribbling down some notes.

I lose track of time as we start to bounce ideas off each other. I can’t believe my luck in getting the Dauphin Head Boy as my partner on this project. He had a really interesting approach to lyric writing, freestyling and recording himself so that he had a record of those moments of genius which flowed out. I am more of a sit and agonise over every single word kind of writer, so his way of doing things gave us a foundation to build upon while I work on tweaking and improving things.

“All right, everyone.” Mr Metcalf claps his hands to get our attention. “I hope you enjoyed working with each other.”

“Yes, sir,” everyone choruses, some more enthusiastically than others. Declan and I exchange a grin. We reallyhadhad fun together.

“Glad to hear it,” Mr Metcalf says. “Because you’re going to be partnered together for the rest of the term. I expect you to support your partner and work together to improve both your grades. If one of you fails, you both fail. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I guess we’re going to be having some homework dates then,” Declan says.

My stomach clenches with excitement. Suddenly, things are looking up.

Chapter Eight

Archer Knight

Walking into the deadbeat bar, I find the rich assholes I am looking for right away. You can't miss them in this shitty place with broken chairs lining the floor around creaky tables. The bar itself looks clean enough, but no one has painted anything in here in a long time. I eye a talking fish statue on the wall that is playing some shitty music.

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