Spring Break

"Spring Break?" Ryan was stunned.

In the West, schools had a break around Easter. That was Spring Break, usually held in late March. It was roughly equivalent to the Qingming Festival holiday, but lasted about a week.

"That's right. For our last Spring Break in high school, the seniors are planning a group trip to Panama City Beach. You should come too." Abigail invited him.

"I see..." Ryan fell into thought. Joel had told him before that, as a popular tourist destination, Florida had nightclubs by the score and a thriving DJ industry. And then there was the Ultra Music Festival, held in Miami during Spring Break. He had to check it out. With a group trip, the cost per person wouldn't be all that much. However he looked at it, this was a rare opportunity.

From the corner of his eye, Ryan saw Abigail trying to persuade Taylor to join them too.

"I might not have time then," Taylor said, shaking her head.

Ryan, sitting nearby, made his decision too. "Joel might line up another nightclub gig for me then. If I don't have anything else planned, I'll go."

It wasn't exactly a lie. College and high school students across the country would be on break then, so nightclubs were bound to be busy.

At Ryan's refusal, Abigail's disappointment was plain to see. Taylor's expression, meanwhile, gave nothing away.

After dinner, Taylor waved over a server and paid the bill. She also left a generous tip, making the server beam so broadly that her grin nearly reached her ears.

Taylor's mother had left early that afternoon. Abigail had originally planned to drive Taylor home in her own car, but Taylor took the initiative and asked Ryan to drop her off, saying it was on his way. She clearly had something to tell him.

A few minutes later, a two-door Dodge Challenger pulled up in front of Taylor.

"Your ride's pretty flashy," Taylor remarked casually as she opened the door and got in.

"I spent almost all the money I made modeling last year on this car." Ryan started the engine. The original Ryan had spent all his earnings as soon as he made them, leaving himself with no safety net. When work dried up, he'd been forced to leave New York, and never managed to return. Around then, Trey had visited his mother. At her suggestion, he'd gone to Nashville and entered Nashville Star, hoping to use Taylor's connections to get ahead. That was how things had led to where he was now.

Ryan pressed down hard on the accelerator, and the car raced through the night.

On the way, Taylor brought up Abigail. Just as Ryan had expected, Taylor said her friend had a crush on him.

"She wanted me to find a way to get the two of you alone together," Taylor said, revealing the truth without hesitation.

"Sounds pretty good," Ryan said, pretending to mull it over.

"You're not allowed to hit on her, be alone with her, or sleep with her. And that includes Spring Break," Taylor said at once.

"Are you jealous?" Ryan teased.

Taylor spoke slowly. "I just don't want her to get hurt."

When Ryan returned to Trey's house, he didn't go to his room. Instead, he went to the study, turned on the computer, and, unlike before, didn't focus on quickly and perfectly reproducing the songs in his head. He aimlessly tried out the various features in the DAW software, testing the different plugins one by one. Naturally, this also meant using Trey's credit card to pay a few bills.

Wearing headphones and completely absorbed in his work, Ryan didn't notice someone quietly open the door and come up behind him.

When Trey saw Ryan expertly using her credit card to pay, then logging into her email to delete the payment notification, her face twisted with anger. A moment later, though, she looked more amused than anything. In the end, she simply turned and left without disturbing the engrossed Ryan.

At three in the morning, Ryan finished a brand-new remix of Tremor and uploaded it to social media.

The next morning, Ryan was at school, sitting in the library with his computer open. He saw that Taylor had posted a new social media update as promised. She'd summed up the previous day with a series of photos: returning to school, a close-up of her diploma, watching the football team practice, and dinner with her best friend. Ryan appeared in three of them.

In the caption, Taylor described the day's activities, then casually mentioned her new EP coming out midyear and her new album planned for the second half of the year. She also announced that next week she'd be opening for a country band at a concert in Nashville's Bridgestone Arena. Only at the very end did she introduce and tag Ryan, saying his "party music" was great. Finally, she added a short link to a preview.

It was only two insignificant sentences buried in a long post, but the effect on Ryan was obvious. In the dozen or so hours since Taylor had shared his music the previous night, the number of followers on his Myspace had jumped into four figures, and it was expected to reach ten thousand in the next few days.

Taylor's boost had helped, but the song's quality was another reason Ryan had attracted attention so quickly. He saw lots of comments asking when "Tremor" would be available, so he decided to upload it to all the major paid download platforms that night. None of those platforms minded having too many songs, and their upload requirements weren't strict. He could complete the entire process simply by registering as an independent musician.

Just then, Abigail arrived at the library with a few other girls and spotted Ryan sitting at the computer. After exchanging a few words with her friends, she parted from them amid their giggles and walked over to him.

"Good morning. What a coincidence—here to look something up so early?" She came over and tapped Ryan on the back.

As Abigail chatted with Ryan, she put her backpack on the table and took out her books, placing them one by one on the shelf. The last things she pulled out were several notebooks, which she handed straight to Ryan.

"I was just looking for you. These are my class notes from the past few years. I don't need them anymore, so you can have them." Abigail smiled.

Ryan was a year below the soon-to-graduate Abigail, so her notes were incredibly valuable to him. He accepted them without hesitation and opened one in front of her, flipping through a few pages. He quickly realized that quite a few of the class notes were scrawled so messily they'd be hard to make out.

"Are you free this afternoon?" Ryan suddenly asked.

"What?" Abigail hadn't heard him clearly.

Ryan held up the notebook. As a transfer student, he needed to put in extra time to catch up with his classes. But he didn't have much time at night, so he needed to find a way to get ahead more quickly.

For the next two weeks, Ryan kept to an extremely regular routine. He went to class in the mornings, spent two afternoons a week practicing with the football team, two afternoons getting tutored by Abigail, and two afternoons working on remixes—including Tremor and remixes of popular songs. They might not have been as catchy as the originals, but they quickly improved his command of the software.

At night, Ryan and Joel showed up at the nightclub on schedule. They took turns performing during the four-hour sets. Ryan brought out his "Tremor," and the club's popularity soared in a short time. It had reached the point where people had to call ahead to reserve a table. The club manager had been grinning nonstop lately, and his extra pay for Ryan kept going up day by day, from $100 at first to $300.

Meanwhile, Ryan's Myspace following officially passed ten thousand. Tremor had been uploaded to several paid platforms under his name as an independent musician. Thanks in part to Taylor helping spread the word, it reached nearly a thousand paid downloads in a single day at its peak, even though it was still only a rough first version.

As Ryan took his first step in his DJ career, Spring Break drew closer and closer...