Five Years of Fame [COMPLETE]

7. An Awkward Conversation

Spring, Month 2

A/N: in case you're confused, Rhys is pronounced 'Reece'

Olivia was thankful for the long drive that lay before her. She threw her suit jacket in the back seat and unbuttoned the top buttons of her collared shirt as she headed west out of the city and west out of the state.

The suit hadn't felt like a necessity but Sue refused to let Olivia walk into that board meeting, sign her name to that oh-so-important piece of paper, in anything less than a three-piece suit. Aware that buying people gifts was a way she showed love, Olivia let Sue buy her the suit. And it had made a difference. She had matched Jon and his nameless associates when she bent over his large wooden desk and scrawled out her name on that dotted line.

Her brain was having trouble catching up to her reality. She could still feel the pen in her hand, the paper underneath her fingertips, the grip of Jon's handshake along with the rest of his staff as they formed a line to congratulate her. And yet it still felt like a dream.

She had a suitcase laying on her bed, waiting to be filled, and a plane ticket with her name sitting on her nightstand. It was real.

The familiarity of the road helped balance out the aura of surrealism Olivia found herself living in. She had driven this route a million times, at least once every few months since she had gotten her license and several more times in a greyhound bus with Dani taking up more than her share of the double seat.

It was blue skies driving out of the city on the turnpike but the late winter sunshine didn't last. The clouds met Olivia as she crossed the state line and entered New York.

It felt like an omen, a foreshadowing of the conversation she was driving all this way to have. If the sun was shining, they would have been having lunch outside. But the rain was going to force their lunch and their conversation inside, where walls and crowds converged.

The college was another hour past the state line. Rhys would have corrected Olivia multiple times and called it a university. But it said so right on the sign that greeted visitors: Rochester State College. Not even 'State University.' Olivia had never tried to correct her dad. It was a point of pride that he had been granted tenure at a university, even if it was just a state college.

Olivia hurried from her parking spot in front of the music department building and pulled open the doors before she could get too wet. The unnatural glow of fluorescent met her and she wandered past classrooms filled with students her age.

With the thought of the contract she had only that morning signed, and everything it represented, Olivia forced her shoulders back, standing as tall as she could, fighting back the feeling on inadequacy she always felt on college campuses.

She stood at the back of her dad's classroom, at the top of the stairs that led down to his speaking platform at the bottom of the amphitheater-shaped classroom. This, too, was another point of pride for Rhys Keller. The other music teachers had rooms that would resemble any old choir room or classroom at a high school or community college. He had been given the only classroom in the building that one might mistake for a classroom at an Ivy League.

"And so you see, the slow, incessant octaves in the left hand are the ringing bells from the village church. These bells were only rung when a parishioner died. Even with his level of hearing loss, Beethoven could hear those deep, dark tones. Even more so he could feel them, in his body and in his soul. They were coming for him. He was sick. He was dying. He knew it. And so while the right-hand plays living lovely little triplets, even Beethoven himself couldn't run away from the inevitable. Death."