Tenney Shares the Stage

Sing Your Mind

Tenney tells herself it isn’t really a lie when she says she’s fine. All through dinner and dish duty, her mind keeps drifting back to the song she and Logan wrote together that afternoon, and even more to how strange and moody he can be, even when he means well. She’s putting away the last of the clean dishes when Mom catches her sliding a sticky, crumb-splattered bowl in among them. Tenney flushes and dunks it back into the sink, where the rest of the dinner dishes are still soaking.

Mom leans against the counter, watching, and asks gently if she’s okay, noting that Tenney seemed a million miles away at dinner. Tenney forces a smile and blames it on having a song stuck in her head, something Mom, a songwriter herself, understands well enough not to push. Mom gives her shoulder a squeeze and heads for the living room, letting Tenney know she’s around if she wants to talk later.

Mom clearly wants to talk about Logan, but Tenney isn’t ready to hear it. She reminds herself that signing on as his musical partner means learning to work with him no matter what.

Alone, Tenney thinks about something Portia said earlier: the best way to heal from anything is to do what you love. That’s exactly what Logan told her to do, too. So she decides to work on the lyrics on her own. She heads for the glass door that opens onto the backyard, but the grass outside shimmers with chilly evening dew. So much for writing outside.

Tenney cuts through the living room instead, past Mason showing Mom something on his phone, Waylon snoring beside Dad, and Dad coaching Aubrey through a new tune on her accordion. None of them notice her pass on her way upstairs.

Shut inside her room, Tenney pulls her guitar from its stand, loops the wide leather strap over her head, and walks the floor testing each string back into tune. Her eyes land on the small window by Aubrey’s desk, one she almost never looks out of. Through it, a patch of blue-black sky and a cloud of silvery oak leaves offer a view she decides she likes.

Tenney settles her fingers on the strings and plays through the tune she and Logan built that afternoon, proud of what they made together. But uneasy memories creep in, too: Logan bolting after their meeting with Portia, the dismissive way he called her ideas “cute,” the shrug he gave when he decided, without asking, that she should be the one to write the lyrics.

Tenney admits to herself that she did want to write the lyrics; Logan just never bothered to ask. Deep down, she isn’t sure their partnership feels like a real team yet. She sets the guitar down and grabs her songwriting journal from the nightstand instead.

Curled up on her bed, Tenney flips to a blank page near the back and, without softening a word, scrawls out everything she’s been holding back, that Logan doesn’t listen, that he’s rude, that he flips moods without warning, that she can’t tell what he’s thinking or trust him. The list keeps going until her hand cramps and two full pages are covered in messy, honest handwriting.

Once the feelings are out on the page, shaping them into verses feels almost easy. Tenney tears out her brainstorm notes, snips the lines apart with scissors, and spreads the pieces across the floor, sorting which belong in a verse and which in the chorus. She counts out the beats in each line and strings her favorite thoughts into a verse that scans, then does the same for the rest. The chorus lands on exactly what she means. She’s tired of his moodiness, but she still wants this to work. She revises until the words stop needing to change.

At her desk, Tenney types up the finished lyrics and titles the song “The Nerve.” Rather than wait for their next rehearsal, she opens a new email, types Logan’s address, and labels the subject line “New Song Lyrics.” Guilt needles her as she rereads the words one last time. She reasons that if they’re going to trust each other as partners, she owes him this kind of honesty, even secondhand. Before she can lose her nerve, she clicks Send.

Tenney is changing into her pajamas when her phone shudders with the cymbal-crash ringtone she picked just for Logan’s texts. “Got the lyrics. Good job. Let’s meet at your dad’s store tomorrow after school and keep working on it.” Tenney is startled by how short his response is. She’d all but confessed everything that frustrates her about him in that song. She can’t tell whether he missed the message entirely or is simply choosing not to react over text. Either way, she’ll have to wait until they’re face-to-face to find out how he really feels about her lyrics.