Free Decked with Holly by Marni Bates

even sleep my way through this living nightmare, because the coffee I had ordered from room service now had me wired. Which left me supercaffeinated and unable to make any noise in the room, in case it woke her up.
    In my own damn suite.
    It would have been one thing if I liked the girl. If we had met by the pool, struck up a casual conversation, and I had invited her to hang out in my suite . . . that would change things. Instead, she had commandeered my bathroom before openly speculating on whether I was sexually involved with my two best friends. Generally speaking, I prefer sane girls to crazy ones who demand pepper spray before they’ll take me up on an offer that, frankly, they don’t deserve.
    Oh, yeah, she was a real treat.
    I found myself glaring at her sleeping figure until she let out a pained groan and tossed around under the covers. She really had it bad: Not even a superfan could fake turning that sickly pale to meet me. I studied her carefully and was relieved to see that she didn’t look quite as deathly ill anymore—even her lips were starting to look more normal.
    But while she might be looking less awful, the only real benefit of having Holly Disaster around was that she had effectively eliminated the deafening silence in the room. Now I just needed to tune out the moans and whimpers long enough to compose a song. Absentmindedly picking up my drumsticks, I began tapping out a beat that sounded sort of like her: a bit sharp and staccato, but with a pulsing, jagged edge to it. It sounded nothing like anything else ReadySet had produced before . . . but it wasn’t bad. Switching over to guitar the instant lyrics started coming to me, I lunged for my notebook and started scribbling:

    You’ve got me seasick. I don’t know how you do it,
But my legs aren’t steady, they just won’t hold
The deck is buckling and it’s ready to fold
And I can tell, it’s my personal hell,
It’s been torture for us both
Someone’s got to stop, stop the boat.

    And, okay, maybe it wasn’t quite as good as Tim’s stuff, but I didn’t think it was terrible, either. Not once we added in Tim on vocals and Chris on guitar. I scrawled madly across the pages, desperately trying to write the chords I was seeing for each instrument. I had to be able to replicate it perfectly back in LA. Tim would kill me if he ever found out that I had forgotten exactly how the bridge was supposed to go.
    So I kept at it, tweaking old lyrics and adding new ones until the finished product actually looked producable to me. It might not be the cutting-edge indie-rock sound ReadySet was known for, but it was solid. Definitely something to keep in mind if the movie sound track contract came through. Rumor had it that the film under discussion was loosely based on Tim’s boyfriend’s best friend, Mackenzie, and how her embarrassing attempt at performing CPR on a high school football player (after she had accidentally body-checked the jerk with her backpack) launched her into YouTube fame.
    Mackenzie probably wouldn’t be thrilled to be the center of any more speculation. I doubt there is a girl less predisposed to be part of the glitter and shine of Hollywood than Mackenzie Wellesley, geek extraordinaire. Not that there is anything wrong with her. In fact, if she hadn’t been so obviously hung up on a guy from her high school, I might have asked her out myself.
    Thankfully, I realized early on that anything beyond basic friendship with us would be a royal failure. A long-distance relationship was the last thing Mackenzie would agree to—especially with a rock star. She had more than enough notoriety without dating me.
    But my song sounded about right for her loosely based biopic. And even if the studio hired some starlet who would be in treatment for drugs, alcohol, or anorexia in a few years, the music should at least be good. I tapped the cover of the notebook thoughtfully. I