Author's Note: Welcome to my story! This is my first Pitch Perfect story, and aside from the summary and the disclaimer that I own nothing remotely familiar, I'm not going to tell you much more. Don't want to ruin it. If you've read any of my other work, you'll know that I'm kind of a chronic un-finisher, but I'm determined to break that streak with this one. I am in school full time, so I blame it on that, and more so to my excitement over a particular idea waning over the time it takes to build up to it. Going to control myself this time and let every chapter be a motivating force. Shout out to Ryleigh for reading a version of this chapter beforehand and approving my idea. Many thanks! If you don't already, go read her stories under the pen name aussiebabe290. She is amazing! Anyway, on to chapter one!
If I had to look at one more dress, I was going to throw a tantrum. A full-blown, little kid tantrum. Wait, let me fix that. I could deal with the looking, but trying them on, then I'd have a tantrum. I was tired, I was starving. I could go for some french fries and a soft drink. And after much whining, that's what I got. Sitting around a table in the food court of the mall, I ate my french fries, the other girls claiming it would ruin their pre-wedding diets and that their dresses wouldn't fit. Well, except for Fat Amy. She got fries too, and a soft drink, and some Chinese.
"So Beca..." Chloe said, getting a little too close for comfort, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. "When do we get to hear your story?"
"What story?" I asked, honestly clueless.
"You know, the real story. The Jesse and Beca story."
"You were there, you know," I reminded her. "The song, the kiss, you were present for all of that stuff. And after you graduated, you pried every detail from everyone. You are very good at that." The other girls smiled, nodding
"Well I'm back at it, kid. The real story. You knew each other before Barden. I can't reveal my sources, but I know."
And I thought that would remain in the past. Jesse and I, we're good now. We're more than good. We're great. We are getting married after all. But my damn blush gave it away. I couldn't work my way out of this one.
Barden University Freshman Move-In Day; the day excited high school graduates say goodbye to homeroom, and for most, home, and start the next chapter in the book that is their lives. It was indeed move-in day, but it was no novel experience, and to call it exciting would be a major overstatement. I'd been on campus countless times since dad accepted a position there. He'd been teaching Comparative Literature at Barden for about two years at the time. As soon as he signed his contract, it was if he'd already filled out my application, got it approved, and signed the admission papers too. It was decided. Beca Mitchell was going to BU come hell or high water. He said the same thing when he taught at Emory up in Sandy Shore. Wherever he taught, as his daughter, I was destined to go there, and education would be free. I wasn't going to argue the convenience of it all, but the last thing I wanted to do was stay in Atlanta. There were memories here, some better than others, but it was severely lacking in …I don't know…culture? Others might disagree, but it was no Los Angeles, California, "the creative capital of the world." That's where it's at, I'd said. And of course, that's where I wasn't.
Instead, on that first day I waited for a taxi. This might suggest some degree of eagerness to get to school, but I was merely escaping any sort of sentimental send off. I'd known my dad would make a big to do about it, his baby girl going off to college and all. He seemed to forget that he'd be there too. Knowing him, we would "run into" each other every day. The whole father-daughter rite of passage deal was awkward enough. He seemed to forget that he'd abandoned me and my mother, and that I was less than pleased about it even years later. Just because I was going to his school didn't mean I forgave him or wanted to act like nothing happened. But he'd become a family man after marrying the Step Monster. And I didn't need, nor want, to hitch a ride to school with dear ole Dr. Mitchell. Sure, his students liked him, but you know how it is. To see a teacher in any role other than professional and in any setting other than the classroom is unfathomable. They're not supposed to have lives outside of school, so they're definitely not supposed to be parental and move their little freshman daughter into her very first dorm room. It would be weird for them, weird for her, so I decided to avoid it all together. Weird was not how I wanted to start.
College, though I'd rather not go, was my opportunity to start fresh. I didn't know anybody attending and they don't know me. "Oh my gosh!" "What am I going to do?" These are things I wouldn't, and never did, say. If my roommate Kimmy Jin didn't smother me in a hug and declare the two BFFs, I wasn't going be devastated. To someone who would rather be out in the real world, in the industry, where raw, unadulterated talent and passion for music is appreciated over one's GPA, I knew that college was not the wonderland dad was always describing. My parents met in college, so of course he thought it was great. My mom described it as fun with a dabble of boring for good measure. That was a different time. I wasn't there to develop long-lasting friendships or make memories that would never fade. I was here to get there. A means to an end. To get to point B, you've gotta get through A.
So yeah, starting fresh. The one good thing about college was that no one has any expectations. They didn't care about my past. That stuff was irrelevant. If I had to be there, I was going to be who she wanted to be. I would be Beca, the girl who could give two shits about what's cool, what's in, what's trendy. I'd met those girls. Most of them were self-indulgent divas without souls; each one a robot clone of the next. Though my dad is always putting down her "hippie mumbo jumbo," if there's one thing I've learned from her mother, it's to rock a free spirit. I was going to resist the temptation to conform, which, I decided, wasn't really all that hard. At that time in my life, I liked 99% of the person I'd grown to be. I was 99% happy with the direction life had taken me so far. Yes, there had been some bumps, some occasions where those percentages were lower, but I didn't think those events were worth changing over. As long as I wasn't hurting anyone and was staying on the right side of the law (the one conformity mom did insist on), I figured I could make my own choices. I believed my mother just wanted her daughter to live a life different from her own childhood; the rigid, military family upbringing. She went through a bit of a rebellion phase, a quarter life crisis if you will. After her second year, my mother dropped out of West Point, a big deal military academy in New York City. Her parents went nuts, and she went to her fun-with a dabble of boring-college. Even though my parents went on to fall in love there, dad wasn't and never had been very receptive of what she did nor the advice that came from it, thus the school thing and the uncertain DJ, music-making dreams. That was only to be expected. But his opinion regarding the relationship between me and my mother meant next to nothing now.
With a wave of my hand at the steadily growing morning traffic, I successfully had a taxi idling at the curb. (That's a lie. I called the cab company twenty minutes before and told the guy exactly where to pick me up. We didn't live in an area big enough for wild traffic and whistling for taxi cabs. It just sounded better in my head). The driver was staring, waiting impatiently for me to get in. I rolled my eyes, a signature Beca move, gesturing at my bags. He returned the eye roll and popped the trunk from the comfort of his seat. I looked back at my neighborhood and heaved my bags into the trunk; except for my laptop and associated mixing equipment which I placed gently on top of this lesser luggage. As I settled into my seat, I found that I had to push down a wave of nostalgia and sadness that I certainly hadn't anticipated. As culture-less as our little slice of Atlanta, Georgia is, I admit it's got its history. It's where my dysfunctional family planted its roots. It's where tearful goodbyes and happy reunions within that same dysfunctional unit became commonplace (maybe now you understand why I had preferred to do the whole "off to college" thing on my own). Most importantly, or at least most important to my "story," it's where marriages thrived then crumbled and where friendships were formed and broken. Some of the best and worst times of my life. I turned to peer out the back window and watched until my little town grew so small in the distance that it disappeared. To drown out the completely pathetic emotions and block out the memories, I pulled on my "I'm clearly busy, don't talk to me" headphones from where they hung around my neck and blasted my music for the remainder of the ride.
I must have nodded off during the course of the trip since the Barden campus was then in site. The driver, who appeared to be in a friendlier mood now, was smiling at me through the rearview mirror. He mouthed what looked to be "good morning," knowing my music was too loud for me to hear him properly. I pulled off my headphones, feeling the heat rising to my cheeks. A stranger has witnessed me sleep. There is nothing about that that's not creepy.
"I don't know how anyone could sleep through that noise,"
I shake my head. "Not noise," I told him, "music."
"If you say so." He smiled again as we pulled into a long line of other taxis. Outside, some muscled volunteers were collecting luggage; piling suitcases and other large items onto dollies to be taken to their respective rooms. While we waited for our dolly-wielding student, the driver mentioned something about his niece, some radio internship she had here, and suddenly I perked up. My luck of course, just as I was about to grill the dude for more details, our Barden bellhop has arrived. I paid the driver and hurried out before anyone could lay a hand on my bags. The yellow-shirted volunteer reached for the smallest of my bags.
"I've got it," I insisted politely, as if I were doing him a favor and decreasing his load. I didn't know how long would be before all of my stuff would get to my room, and I wanted to spend that time doing something constructive, and I'm not talking about getting ahead on any course work or textbook perusing. I slung my bag over my shoulder, taking only one step away before -holy invasion of personal space- I'm nose to nose with...someone. Before me was an overly enthusiastic girl who had "annoying camp counselor" written all over.
"Hi there! Welcome to Barden University! What dorm?"
Man, her voice is annoying. "Um, Baker Hall, I think." I think? I know where Baker Hall is; my dad has shown me how to get there from various locations on campus at least seventeen times this summer.
"So what you're gonna do is, you're gonna go down this way, then you're gonna take a right…"
I stopped listening, partly due to boredom, but mostly because of the scene playing out before me. Of the many cars winding down the roads surrounding the campus, somewhere there was one playing a song I liked, Kansas' Carry on Wayward Son, a single for the band's 1976 album, Leftoverture. I couldn't help but smile at the fond memories it resurrected, all the while ignoring the churning in my stomach accompanying the less than fond memories that also bubble to the surface. That car comes to a near screeching halt right in front of where we were standing at the taxi's rear, and I fight the urge to throw up. A familiar face is singing along to the guitar solo, playing air guitar and all.
Growing up, I lived next door to a little girl and her two older brothers. The older of the two boys was a jock; a genuinely nice guy on whom I may or may not have had the tiniest of tiny crushes, but a jock all the same. He played baseball during the summer months, but basketball was his real talent, his real passion (second only to music and those old records he found in the attic about which he knew all sorts of "fun facts"). During the winter months, the family sectioned off some space in the basement for Patrick's workout equipment, but the rest of the time, his stuff took up residence in the garage. Inside or out, he liked to play this mix CD he'd made, you know, to pump himself up, to get adrenaline flowing. It didn't work though, unless the CD was playing at maximum volume. Even if he wasn't exercising, that damn stereo would be on. I don't have to go into a long history to tell you that, whether hanging out at their house or my own, I heard every song on that CD. Every song, every word, every day. Every day except Sunday, that is. His mother, god bless her, tried so hard to get him to turn it down, but the only reprieve was on "the Lord's day," when the family went to church and later had brunch with their grandparents.
At the time I hated those songs. Being blasted with progressive, glam, and instrumental rock, along with some random soundtrack tunes from the age of 5 to 12 though, they came to grow on me. I wasn't going to quit hanging out at my best friend's house because it was noisy. It would have been noisy anyway. Cute as she was, Emmalyn cried an awful lot. Before their beloved dog, Rico, passed, he barked at anything that moved. In the years post-Rico, sometimes they'd leave the TV on, not because anyone was watching, but just so there would be some sound filling the silent void. That explains why, after hearing this particular song countless times as their children grew up, the two adults in the front of the car seemed neither annoyed nor surprised by the volume of the music or the eccentricity of the guitar understudy in the back seat.
And he stared straight at me. He was looking at me, but his expression never changed There was no recognition, no song-cessation, nothing akin to 'sorry for being a cowardly jackass who couldn't (or maybe wouldn't) admit to his cool junior high buddies that yes, his best friend was a girl, and then bailing out when said best friend was up to her ears in shit that, while she never would admit to it, she couldn't process and deal with on her own, short of locking herself in her room.' Jesse, Patrick's younger brother, Emma's older, and undoubtedly the most solid, loyal, perfect best friend I've ever had, had seemingly forgotten about me. This wasn't exactly new information, seeing as I hadn't received a phone call or email in years, but to think I could be standing right in front of him and not jog a single memory; that hurt. Yeah, life had changed me some, but a true best friend would see through the new makeup, the wardrobe, the big headphones, and see the girl he always knew.
The line of cars picked up speed and he is gone as quickly as he'd arrived. It really must have been a matter of a few seconds, maybe a minute tops, because camp counselor was still talking.
"…your campus map and your official BU rape whistle. Don't blow it unless it's actually happening," she warned. I accepted the items, the whistle immediately taking a place at the corner of my mouth between my teeth. I was tempted to blow it, so tempted, but was able to control myself, walking off in the direction of my dorm.
What'd you think? Not the most interesting of the chapters, but had to set it up somehow. Reviews appreciated :)