She was using brushes instead of sticks, working to control the flow so her drumming slid under the music wafting through her mind and buoyed it up instead of drowning it. She started the song over again, for the umpteenth time, then the thought of those jerks flung her into an angry fill, a crash of bass and cymbals. She threw down the brushes – they didn’t work at all for venting. Sid found a Rush song on her iPod and lay on the rug, listening to it over and over as she worked out drum tabs for it, then returned to the drums and attempted to follow Neil Peart’s lead. He was a tough one to keep up with. On the sixth go through, when she was starting to feel like she was making some headway, movement on the stairs made her pause. She didn’t look, decided to keep going and played the song a seventh time before she let James interrupt her. He was being very patient. When the song finished, she laid her sticks on the snare and removed her headphones.
