Hex Beat - Part 1

When Christine woke on the morning of her fifteenth birthday, something felt different. It wasn’t that ethereal notion of being older and wiser; she didn’t suddenly possess some heretofore-unknown insight that had been absent the day before. The world simply seemed to have shifted slightly, and now everything was a bit askew in a way that was difficult to quantify.

Two weeks prior she had been battling a nasty cold and wondered if this might be some lingering aftereffect, but her head and stomach felt fine and there was no trace of the chills or achiness that had plagued her. This last symptom had taken the longest to abate, rendering her limbs sore and useless as she stared miserably at the purple-atmosphere-fade finish on her Tama Starclassic kit. The Tama wasn’t her first set. There had been the neon-green, plastic drums when she was four and then the children’s starter kit when she was eight. She’d worn through the heads on that second set more times than she could count. That’s when her parents realized she was serious. The Starclassic and accompanying Zildjian A-Custom cymbal pack had been a combined birthday/Christmas/junior high graduation gift in addition to Christine contributing all the money she’d saved babysitting the previous two summers. Playing on the kit felt like going from a Schwinn to a Ferrari, or what she imagined driving a Ferrari must be like. Even just looking at it made her happy, and it was without a doubt her favorite thing in the entire world.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up, waiting to see if the sensation would leave, but it hovered in the center of her chest like a stifled sneeze.

Christine glanced at the clock on her nightstand.

Her parents would have both left for work by now and she had forty minutes before she needed to catch the bus. If she got ready quickly, she could squeeze in a run through of “Janie Jones” before she had to go.