Excerpt: Something out of Nothing

Chapter 1.

The bass was so loud it reverberated through her chest. The melody swirled through her head and her body moved in perfect time with the music. She could feel ten sets of eyes on her. They were always there, someone was always watching. It was just a matter of time until one of them tried to make their move. Right on cue, a boy approached and Lila was no longer dancing alone.
The flashing strobe lights of the club illuminated the faces of the teenage pair. It revealed a young girl, just 16, with fiery red hair but hardly extraordinary in any other way. She never understood why everyone was watching her, but they did and she wasn’t complaining. Attention was her drug of choice. The boy was wholly unremarkable as well, but he could dance which is more than can be said for most.
As the song went on, their dance intensified and the movements of two became fluid as one. The chatter of people faded into the music and it was if they were the only two in the room. It was as if electricity was jumping between the two, heat erupted upon every touch. As the song came to an end, the boy breathlessly introduced himself as Mike. The girl smiled mischievously, turned, and disappeared into the crowd to find her next victim.

A few blocks down the road there was a bar. Anthony Rainier sat at a table with a few of his friends. It didn’t matter that he was still three years short of legal drinking age. They’d stopped carding him months ago. He was a regular now.
The drunken laughs of the teenagers at his table filled the room, but Anthony hadn’t gotten his thrills yet.
With what passed as a goodbye to his companions, he staggered out of the bar and into the club.
In the corner of the room, he lit up and took a long drag on his cigarette. Anthony wasn’t much of one for dancing, but it didn’t really stop him. Even drunk, he could capture more than a girl’s eye. For now, though, he’d just watch.
Finally, Anthony put out his cigarette and went to strike up a conversation with one of the better-looking girls on the dance floor. Not totally drunk yet, he was able to move mostly with the music. As a musician, his sense of rhythm was more of an instinct.
Without a word, he moved closer to the girl and she turned towards him. He knew it would be fun night.

Far away from the dancing and the drunken laughs Niko Bates sat alone in his brother’s apartment. The silence gripped him as he sat in his darkened room. So many thoughts ran through his mind. Thoughts about anything, everything, nothing. This was the kind of person Niko was.
The boy was half insane, really. Always so unsure of what he was saying and what he was doing, but he always ran the extra mile anyway. At 17, he was worried he hadn’t quite done enough, though he dreamed bigger than most and worked harder to get there. What Niko wanted, he’d get. He just didn’t know it yet.
Notebooks littered the floor. Some full, some torn, some forgotten. Most of them were labeled with two dates spanning a few weeks, but sometimes their contents was the product of a single day’s labor. All of them were filled with poems, lyrics, and short stories. Years of work had spanned every emotion Niko thought he was capable of. Recently, though, Niko’s writing scared him. It brought the darkest caverns of his mind into light.
On this night, he was particularly caught up on what he was supposed to do now that high school was over. It’d been a week since graduation and he had no plans of college, and he was beginning to regret it. For Niko, it was always supposed to be about planning for the future, but he’d reached the end of stage one. He had no idea where he would go – or could go- next.

Maxx Binds sat at his computer working furiously. This was it. He was sick of doing nothing and being stuck in this godforsaken town. But now, high school was done and he was free. No more education for him, not yet at least. Maxx wanted to live a little before wasting his life. That’s the way he saw things. He lived in the moment, not that he wasn’t looking ahead a little. Just sometimes his headlights didn’t reach quite far enough into the darkness.
It was such a simple start to the beginning of his dreams, a few copies of a black and white flyer. “Needed:” it read, “Guitarist and/or Vocalist with dreams of making a name for themselves,” a long with a phone number to call for more information.
Even though it was well past 10:00 at night, Maxx was feeling motivated and set out to hang the flyers. Lampposts, fences, storefronts and billboards were adorned with the modest black and white flyers. As he hung the last one, he stepped back to admire his work. He couldn’t wait to tell Lila. Maxx knew he should’ve talked to his sister first, but she wouldn’t have believed him. He needed proof that this was real, not just another scheme that was leading nowhere.

So there they are, those that would become a broken family. It seemed so unlikely that four so different could become one so completely. Brought together by melody and rhythm and held together by dreams and friendship. All four ridden with imperfection and burdened with lives they wish they’d led differently, but never realizing that if you don’t change where you are headed, you will end up where you are going.