The Masked Truth

Chapter Five

"I'll send you the interview details for tomorrow. The talk show host has a super fan segment for tomorrow and you're supposed to surprise them with tickets to the award show and a few other things, it'll be in the email though."

"Thank you, Ava."

"Have a good night."

"You too Ava, go to the spa or something."

"After this is all over, we're going to spend a whole week in the spa, don't you worry!" Ava seems completely happy and free when she mentions the idea of a spa week.

"My treat of course! Anyways, I've got to go, bye." Ava mutters a few more things before disconnecting the line. I throw my phone on the bed and quickly try and grab an outfit. I end up deciding on the plain black dress I had before. I can dress it up with some jewellery, and if I need to make it more casual, I'll chuck the excess jewellery in my bag for later.

I throw the dress on and run over to my creative wall to find something to spin. A lot of the material on the wall has been perfected. I skip over borrowing something from the new record and opt for a blank piece of paper to start fresh.

I'm not entirely sure what to write, so I open my heart and mind and start scribbling down the first words that come to the page. If they reject it, I'll just get another day to change it around while having tonight off free – which is okay with me. The label respects my independence and my last album sold way more copies than the first one I wrote with the help of Alex. They just wait until something amazing pops out of my brain.

I start my squiggling my pen across the page until the random lines form into words across the line.

"You think you know me, but you're mistaken. I'm not the type of person you can, play, play, play," I mutter under my breath.

"Because if you break my heart, I'll stuff you in a box and send you back to where you came from. I'm not trying to play the fool, mostly misunderstood." The line appears a little long, but I can come back and tweak it later. Any kind of words on the page is better than a blank one staring me back.

"Do you dare to break my heart? I wish you would... If you break my little heart, I bet you would, I bet you could." I'm not super keen on the ending line because I know the structure can be changed, but I don't bother with it just yet, I'm sure the music will help smooth out the structure of the lines. I'm already thinking about a few things around.

Next, I run back to my bedroom and source out my phone. I open the music app and start playing some of the tracks to find a source for the music. Most of the songs follow the same beat of rhythm, so it's easy to borrow and tweak them to adjust for the right song lyrics.

I seek out my guitar and bring it back to the kitchen bench. I start messing around with some older tunes and mixing them in with some of the tracks from the previous album. It sort of sounds good to my ears, well good enough for tonight. This is what the record label wanted, a watered, carbon print of what I made before.

I get caught up messing around on my song that I almost miss the message popping up on my phone. Instead of ignoring it, I quickly spare a second to glance at the screen to see Nathan's name sitting pretty with the message icon.

'Where are you?' – Nathan.

'Stuck working on something, should be done soon.' – Riley.

I tuck my phone into my back pocket and progress further. Because I only have my acoustic guitar with me, I lay down this version instead. I can't spin anything fancy on my laptop, that's not something I've had much practice with. It takes me four recordings to get something I'm impressed with.