Page 1 of Crescendo

Chapter 1

Lydia

Melinda found me… not at my most shining moment. Half-drunk on cheap scotch just about drooling on a cello scratching out the same three staccato notes and telling it todo betterwasn’t photogenic, to put it lightly.

I didn’t hear her coming into the house—even outside of my recording booth, the house was overall well soundproofed, or my neighbors would have killed me long ago—until she threw open the door and found me sprawled on the couch holding the cello on top of me like an illicit lover she’d caught me in a compromising position with, elbowing the back of the couch while I bowed the same G#-B-D melody over and over.

“Lydia?” she said, rushing across the room towards me. “Oh, god, look at you.”

“I don’t think I’m inclined to look at me right now,” I mumbled. “Melinda, I’m glad you’re here, bring… bring me the oboe.”

“You are not touching the damn oboe. Have you been drinking?”

I rolled my head back against the couch cushion. “The third shot… may have been a mistake. I’m not twenty-one anymore. What do you know?”

“Have you eaten?”

I gestured airily. “Do you want to hear a song? It’s the worst song that’s ever been made. From the worst musician who’s ever played. Listen to this.”

I played the G# again before she took the bow from my hand, the cruel woman. Ah… fate had abandoned me. It was over for me. I was no longer for this world.

“I’m ordering you food,” she said.

“Push me from the balcony,” I said. “Drop the cello on top of me. Make it look like an accident. Spike down, straight through the brain.”

“What do you want to eat?”

“Fried rice, please.”

I wound up before long at the kitchen table, the booze fading from the edges of my consciousness as the food arrived in record time and Melinda made sure I had about sixteen different drinks that weren’t alcohol. She’d been a mixologist at a fancy restaurant for a few years one time, and the skills stuck with her.

Not like my skills. My skills had all abandoned me, and there was nothing left but spite, self-pity, and a craving for fried rice. That last one, at least, I could address. Melinda was an angel… if I weren’t a washed-up failure of a musician with no future and no prospects, maybe I’d write a song dedicated to her.

The fried rice helped, in one sense. Grounded me and took me out of the airy-fairy world where I was waiting for God’s angels to come down and lift me up towards the heavens, probably to gain momentum for the launch straight down to hell. Instead, I found myself woefully located in the mortal plane, in front of an empty bowl and an empty career. Maybe I didn’t want to be grounded right now.

It wasn’t the first time I’d had a breakdown in front of Melinda, my friend of nine years now who I’d met as a friend of a friend when I first moved to LA—the intermediary friend had abandoned me and moved to Texas for some godforsaken reason, but my friendship with Melinda had been the best thing to come out of it, both of us helping the other find their footholds in the film industry. We’d both been young upstarts then, and while she’d done damn well, it had been me with the meteoric rise.

And the meteoric descent.

She still nurtured her dreams of being a director one day, but for now, she seemed happy working in cinematography, the head of a small team that had helped shoot some of the biggest movies of the past few years. And I’d scraped the heavens with my score on the blockbuster franchiseThe Finders,making lists ofgreatest modern classical of all time,people talking aboutthe transcendental writing of Lydia Howard Fox,like my name was a sacred invocation that, if you said it three times in the mirror, summoned a crashing, dramatic score that would move you to tears.

Well, I’d tried, dammit. Turned out nothing I said in the mirror helped. Nothing summoned anything. Except my friend, and fried rice, so actually, maybe it wasn’t all for nothing.

With the meal dwindling, Melinda looked across the table with her brows knotted in concern, and she got to the raw, bleeding heart of it. “They dropped you?”

“They dropped me, I dropped myself… it’s all the same.” I cradled my glass in both hands, sparkling apple cider with a touch of cranberry and lime. Melinda never did anything without going a hundred and ten percent on it. “It was more or less my recommendation to drop me.”

She pursed her lips. She had expressive features—another thing she and I didn’t have in common. I was a tall, lean whitewoman, long hair, always tied up in a quick bun, usually dressed in loose tailoring; Melinda was a short, chubby Asian woman, short hair, always messy, usually dressed in a hoodie and jeans. She had a smile like she’d just won the lottery. I’d been told my smile looked like I’d been paid to do it, and not paid much.

We were also inverses of each other in that whenever she was in a career slump, I was in a high, and I helped pull her up with a pep talk, going out to the bar with her to let her wail and kick the bar and talk about how nobody would ever love her. And whenever I was in a career slump, she was in a high, coming around to my house to make sure I wasn’t lying on a couch embracing a cello, talking to it.

“This was a huge-ass opportunity,” she said. “The Quiet Onesis a massive franchise. Have you seen the fanbase?”

“And I’d rather bow out of it with dignity and grace than ruin the project for everyone by not being able to deliver. I may be a failure, but I’m at least aprofessionalfailure.”

She shook her head. “Lydia, you’ve been making incredible work. You’re just up in your own head.”

“I’ve beenmakingtrite nonsense. Contrived, hollow, meaningless. All I’ve been making for a while now. God, Melinda,” I groaned, my head in my hands, elbows on the table, just about collapsing into my fried rice. “I know this is the creative cycle. I know this is how it goes. But I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s never this bad. It always gets better by now. I’ve tried everything that normally makes it better, but there’snothing.I think I’ve just… finished. I had songs in me since I was born, begging to be let out, and I finally let the last one out.”

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