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❝He's the boy she left behind.
She's the girl he let go.❞
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Before she became one of music's biggest up-and-coming artists, Evelyn "Evie" Chase was a nobody at the bottom of the Roosevelt High School food cha...
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Los Angeles, California | Two Weeks Later
Evie
To say the past few months had been the craziest of my life would be an understatement—and I was someone who'd gone from your typical high school student to a household name within the span of ten months a couple years ago.
Between hitting what I had thought was rock bottom in terms of anxiety and life management, enlisting in some pretty unconventional solutions to avoid admitting I needed help, returning to my old hometown and old high school donning a disguise in an attempt to take a break and "reset" myself, accidentally "befriending" the people I couldn't stand from when I lived there before, mildly enjoying my time in secret as I began finding genuine friendship and having feelings for a boy I'd never known before until I was eventually caught and outed by, essentially, my professional nemesis, and hitting my real rock bottom while the world turned against me thinking I was a corrupted party-crazed, pill-popping, alcoholic, or possibly pregnant teenager who'd been given way too much money and power at the age of seventeen. . . late July through October was a wild ride.
I saw now that there was a lesson in it all—a few, actually.
One—that anxiety was a circle, or some oblong shape where the ends connected, and that attempting to convince myself that it was a straight line and I'd never end up back to where I began only led to disappointment and, eventually, more panic.
Two—that the most exhausting part of it was the daily, pretty much hourly, dance between hopefulness and hopelessness, confidence and self-doubt, forgetting intrusive thoughts and having them return at the most inconvenient times, feeling guilty about how I feel then realizing I don't have to, accepting who I was then hating me for it.
And three, most importantly—even if it was scary as hell to put my stock in people when it felt like all I did was lose them. Even if I thought I was perfectly capable of handling things alone. I didn't have to. I didn't know everything, I never would, and I needed to accept support from those closest to me sometimes.
But learning didn't mean ready execution. It didn't make me magically better. There was a long road ahead of me, and I just had to navigate it while managing my career and public image. A walk in the park, right?
"That sounded great." My producer's voice echoed through the speakers of the sound booth.
I took off my headphones, brimming with nervous pride, and put them around my neck. "Really? Can I hear it?"
Per my request, JJ signaled Andre, our sound engineer, to queue up the playback. I slipped my headphones back on, and soon, heard my voice mixed with the steady beat we had in the pre-chorus. As I allowed my eyes to slide closed, I leaned back against my stool, bobbing my head to the music. For my new album, we were playing with more of an R & B sound to mix with the indie one I enjoyed, a little less poppy than I'd had for the first one. The new direction felt like a natural progression for me and sounded a lot more mature.
