Free Playing Autumn (Breathe Rockstar Romance Book 1) by Mina V. Esguerra Page B

They had a mix-up over where exactly this would happen and had ended up with both of them waiting for fifteen minutes on opposite sides of the campus. Haley decided to run to her mom instead, and she cut across a maze-like covered walk to get there. The walkway sort of abruptly ended with a corkboard, which she almost bounced off of in her rush. She disturbed half the fliers on the board, but one of them caught her attention by falling right into her hand—BREATHE MUSIC FESTIVAL FOR YOUNG MUSICIANS. Learn from the best and all for free—if you’re good enough! Prove to us that you are.
    She kept the flier in hand as she negotiated the rest of the maze to find her mom’s car. And then it took her another couple of days to gather up the nerve to try out for a slot.
    So Haley understood completely when a student felt completely perplexed by this arrangement, being holed up in a hotel and asked to perform twice a day or more. She knew that it was part of her job as a mentor to settle them in. Her favorite spot for mentoring was by the window in the small library beside the coffee shop in the Lake Star Hotel.
    When she first started volunteering at Breathe Music, the Lake Star Hotel looked like a lodge, an imposing log cabin with the occasional stuffed deer head peering at her. Inside the library, looking out into the garden, was nicer. Since then they had renovated and now the entire hotel looked like a library, but she still chose the same spot for her three-hour session with Mia Anders, sixteen-year-old singer/songwriter.
    Mia had a wonderful rasp to her voice, Haley noticed immediately. The kind that filled songs with depth, and when done right lent an impression of experience despite being so young. The students were scheduled to perform several times during the weekend’s activities, and technically the least a mentor should do was help the student with each song. That was all.
    “Are you two together?” Mia asked, in what Haley was learning was her direct way, after Oliver made his scene and then left their room.
    “We’re not,” Haley said, still a bit shaken.
    “Does he know that you’re Hot Piano Girl?”
    “I don’t…I’m not…” Haley stammered through this, not sure how to defend herself. “How do you even know?”
    Mia shrugged. “The list of mentors was up on the site. I looked you all up. You’re a fan of his, aren’t you? You did covers of his songs. You have like two million hits on them.”
    “What? No…what? It can’t be that much by now.”
    “Oh, it is. Like, last week. You don’t look at your channel?”
    Haley shook her head.
    “Because the comment threads started up again once I posted that you were going to be mentoring this weekend.”
    A familiar tension collected in Haley’s neck. Those videos, they seemed to her to have been made another lifetime ago. She would have deleted them, but it was easier to go off the grid and stop looking. Another reason why she wanted out of this festival. Maybe the main one. Criticism she could take; encouragement led to hoping, and expecting.
    “Did you know each other before he became famous? He’s from here, isn’t he?” Mia consulted her phone and started to go online. “No, but he would have left when he was in his early teens…and you’d have been really young…”
    “Mia, can we not go on the Internet while we’re in session?”
    Haley earned herself a glare from the teenager, who slipped the phone back into her pocket. “Well, you got to make out with someone during our session.”
    “And you totally saw that it was accidental and I had nothing to do with it. Let’s talk about you now, okay?”
    Mia did try to talk about herself, but the next hour was also spent talking about other people. It was a tic she seemed to have. She said things such as: “...like Taylor Swift, but more awesome,” when describing the song she wrote that got her into the festival. “...like Lea Michele, but less melodrama,” about her short