Music had always allowed her to let her guard fall. She was typically cautious, knowing who (or at least what kind of person) was around her at all times, but the sound of the violin simply made her forget her reality; that she was a has-been washed away in Verona, of all places – that her career got shot down so drastically that she couldn’t even stay in the country. She was merely surviving, and at least her inner geek took her somewhere else, even for a moment.
Hearing the vaguely familiar voice etched a small smile on her softened features. There were only a few people in Verona she liked, or at least was fascinated by – Richard, Juliet, Patrick, Lysander solely because they were both immigrants, and a couple other girls she’d spoken to here and there (she could never remember their names, only faces.) Her current company was among the few she couldn’t bring herself to be too rude to.
“Yeah, it’s kind of my secret identity. Just call me Lacey New Jersey,” she joked, lowering the violin. “It’s my favourite song to play. I would always get yelled at for playing the same song over and over, but I can’t help it. Anyway, what about you? Are you a super secret musician?”
“B minus. I think that was supposed to rhyme.” Jacques snorted at the title. “I couldn’t have a secret identity if I tried to--yeah, tact, shutting up, being coy? Must have been sick the day we learned those. And not a musician unless you count the stupid number of covers I used to annoy my roommate with in high school.”
In fairness to said roommate, Jacques had, at sixteen, a habit of playing when he couldn’t sleep. Even though he’d been good enough at the songs he chose, he couldn’t really fault Richard for having none of it at three in the morning. The boys’ school had made a fairly poor decision planting the sad insomniac with the irritable insomniac.
“I work the business end of it--producing people, that stuff. Uh--it’s kind of an underground label, nothing too many people know about. But I’m around music enough, whether or not I’m an artist myself.” To be honest, he was best suited to sit back, to immerse himself, he thought sometimes. People needed ears for their sounds to mean something, and he got them that. Maybe he wasn’t quite so useless as people--namely his father--would have thought.
“But I’m pretty sure teachers live to suck the life out of fun things. That would’ve just made me play it more, to be honest.”