Chapter Text
When Lily Westbrook returned from college to her parent’s new, cozy townhome in the Illinois suburbs with white siding and a brown-scale roof, the last thing she expected to happen was catching a fatal, uncontrollable case of sleep deprivation thanks to a rowdy rock band that lived next door.
Granted, she was sure that an entire band didn’t live there, because Lily’s father mentioned that a ‘really nice family’ occupied 4607 Deviation Road, but someone in that family was in a band. And said band sure as hell used the basement as their practice spot every night at inhuman hours. Lily was given the unfortunate pleasure of earning the medium-sized bedroom in the basement, allowing her to fall victim to the thumping bass and sizzling cymbals every night.
It had been only mildly annoying at first, with the loud amplifiers keeping her awake so she could be inspired to actually do some of her winter break work. She would video call Rachel, scribble down some film ideas, type up a screenplay for the semester project in her film major, maybe even settle down with a book. But now it had been two weeks since Lily came back from school, and she had tallied nine nights in which the guitar rung through the wall, and that loud, nasally voice belted high notes and low notes and everything in between. Nine nights that she failed to get her eight hours. Nine days in which she could have been fully rested and not feel like she was going to fall asleep as she walked up the stairs. Lily’s patience was fraying like a loose string on a sweater, slowly picking apart her ‘cool’ and rage stitching itself together from the remaining fabric. She was done spending her time off from school slugging around like she was still at school, trying to ignore her mother’s attempts to persuade her from out underneath her red and white-striped duvet.
So, when her mother approached her a few days into December with news of the neighborhood Christmas party, she was reluctant to accept...until her mother mentioned a key piece of information that could have resulted in her approval of the gathering.
“Lily, it’s just next door...you can’t even come over for--”
“Wait,” Lily whipped her head around from the television, where a Buffy rerun played. She didn’t bother to pause it; the remote was on the other side of the room and hopefully this conversation wouldn’t last too long. “Next door? Which next door?”
“4607--the Wentz’s. Really nice family…” Normally, Lily wasn’t a party girl, preferring to stay home and marathon Christmas movies and drink tea over being surrounded by sweaty, drunk adults. But, that fact alone would certainly change her mindset...maybe...just for one night. A grin creeped its way onto her pale lips. “You have to come over...for at least a half hour. It’s not going to be like those college parties, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“No, no...I think I’ll come.” Her mother quirked a brow, in disbelief at such a sudden change in heart. Lily wanted to avoid telling her about her desire to meet a certain family member--if he was even going to be at the party--so she pressed her with questions before her mother could do the same to her. “When is it, again?”
“Saturday.”
“Cool, I’ll...uh...I’ll drop by for a bit, sure.”
A puzzled expression etched itself onto her mother’s face, but she didn’t question Lily. A face of reassurance and satisfaction quickly swapped with the confused one, and the middle-aged woman turned on her heel and trotted up the stairs to the main floor. Lily turned back to the basement’s old, block television, leaning back against the faded green cushions of the couch and crunching a popcorn kernel between her teeth.
Two episodes later, when Lily was yawning from exhaustion from a long and illustrious day of catching up on the previous season of Buffy , the brunette trudged up the stairs. Scuffing her mix-matched socks across the linoleum, she reached into the pantry to snatch up a strawberry cereal bar. As she went to make her way out of the kitchen and down the stairs, she caught a glance at the clock: ‘1:12AM’.
Well, if they’re going to practice, it’s going to be now…
As her covered feet collided with the carpeted steps, Lily opened the packaging on her early morning snack, the wrapper crinkling as it revealed the processed pastry. Lily took a bite as she reached the bottom of the steps and made a beeline for her bedroom (but not after flipping off the lightswitch for the basement living room).
She shuffled her socks along the carpet, placing the half-eaten food on her nightstand before climbing on top of her bed and making her way closer to the cream colored wall. Lily’s bed was placed in a way that the left side was right next to the barrier between the two basements. She gingerly placed her ear against the drywall, holding her breath and trying to catch any sound coming from the other side.
No sounds...am I free to fall asleep? I don’t hear anythi--
Just then, with a loud whang! , a power chord phased through the wall, colliding with Lily’s temple. The guitar continued playing, screeching to a riff that Lily had heard many times before, as she would lay awake listening to the next door band practice the same three songs. She shifted away from the wall, releasing a breath and squinting her eyes from the sudden burst of sound. Lily leaned back on her bed, aimlessly reaching her hand outwards and groping for a crinkling wrapper until her hand landed right on its bull's-eye. She brought the cereal bar to her mouth and took a large bite as the singer joined in with the first verse.
It was going to be a long night.
--OoO--OoO--OoO--
“Honestly, I don’t even know how I’m making it through the day without falling asleep...I swear yesterday I almost fell asleep while I was walking to my car,” Lily complained to her redheaded girlfriend, Rachel. She leaned forward over the camera, twirling her curly locks around her finger. “I’m just so tired all the fucking time.”
“ Go confront them, ” Rachel had always been outgoing and aggressive, much unlike Lily. After all, Rachel’s extreme personality was what had brought them together. Lily had been at one of the few college parties she attended--a Halloween one, at her roommate’s request--and Rachel drunkenly approached her and they talked for hours. From there, a friendship developed into something slightly more than a friendship, but that was a whole different story. “ You mentioned they would be at that party on Saturday, tell ‘em then! ”
“Well--there’s the chance that it could just be one of them.” Lily leaned back in her desk chair, her chartreuse eyes downcast at the carpet. “Or he could just not show up at all.”
“ But, if he shows up, tell him to stop practicing. ”
“It could even be an all-girl band...with a male singer? Or a female singer with a really masculine-ish voice...or--”
“ Lily. ”
“Yeah?”
Rachel stared intently at Lily through the screen, and the brunette raised an eyebrow in reply, ushering Rachel to answer her nonverbal question. “ Promise me that when you go to the party, if whoever the hell is in that band is at that party , you will confront them and tell them to shut the fuck up. ”
Lily nodded. “I promise.”
“ Good, ” And with that, Rachel rambled on about herself, something she loved to do. Lily was used to it at this point: she would tell a story or complain about her strict parents, Rachel would give some basic, obvious advice, and then spiral off into her many misadventures. Every now and again, Lily would smile, add in a bit of commentary and jokes into the usually repetitive story. At one point, Rachel had run out of things to say and the conversation bounced over to Lily once again for a brief few minutes. The two girls talked for hours, and for a while, Lily nearly forgot about the issue of the next-door nightmare as they tumbled back and forth between stories and complaints and questions. That night, for the first time in forever, the band decided not to practice.
Thank God.
--OoO--OoO--OoO--
For the rest of the week, Lily’s life was hell. Sure, the band didn’t practice the night Rachel told her about how their friend, Jake, fell asleep at some party, but they did the following night. And the night after that...and the night after that.
On Wednesday, the day after her call with Rachel, she had been curled up on the couch, typing away on her chunky laptop and sipping Earl Grey. She spent the entire day shopping for Christmas presents and was hopefully planning on a repeat of the previous night. However, the band decided to blast a song with a walking bass line and repetitive drum beat...something about dancing and drinking and mattresses.
On Thursday, she was utterly miserable. Her mother forced her to go grocery shopping, resulting in the sleep-deprived college student dragging her feet across the crystal, white tiles, sloppily grabbing boxes of Kraft mac and cheese off various shelves. She managed to squeeze in a cat nap before dinner, but her bliss was short lived. Her mother--forgetting that she was a vegetarian--prepared a chicken dinner. Lily scowled at it when she saw it, and made herself a grilled cheese as a substitute. She knew that the band wasn’t to blame for her parents’ mistake, but she had already been in a bad mood because of them, so her mind immediately cursed the next-door band at the sore sight. It was like when your school didn’t cancel because of the snow, and you knew that it wasn’t the superintendent’s fault, but every single student shot blame at the school district leader’s face. As if her day wasn’t going bad enough, they played again--a mixture of all the songs she had heard. The beat kept time with her pounding head, and every time she shut her eyes, hoping for the sweet embrace of sleep to take her away, the singer would hit a flat high note and make her jump higher than the Empire State Building.
On Friday, she somehow convinced her parents to let her stay home from their ‘family’ trip to the mall for even more Christmas shopping (how many friends did her mother have?) so she could catch up on sleep. After a cup of morning tea and some microwave waffles, Lily literally spent the entire day fast asleep, curled underneath three layers of blankets. There was no sound. Dinner consisted of delivery pizza and Lily took a quick peek out the window to see the first snow trickling down from the heavens as the sun creeped behind the horizon. Hmm...maybe the snow will bring a motherfucking miracle. She hoped (and maybe even started to believe) that this was magic snow that would somehow, in some way, compel the band to not practice that night. She was wrong.
--OoO--OoO--OoO--
By the time Saturday rolled around, Lily was beyond pissed. She stormed up the stairs at twelve pm, ignoring the freshly laid two-inch layer of snow burying the grass outside, and poured milk in her cereal with as much angst as one can have while pouring milk in cereal. A snow plow hummed outside, clearing the dusting off of the suburban road as she shoved spoonfuls of Lucky Charms into her mouth.
She spent the rest of the day, as usual, watching television, planning out the momentous night ahead of her. What she would say that night would--more or less--determine how the rest of her winter break went. She laid around, watching the previous night’s installment of Lost and at three o'clock, Lily began to get ready. Of course she wouldn’t arrive on time; she planned on knocking on the door a good thirty minutes after her parents left--what most people would call being ‘fashionably late’.
At three twenty-one, she climbed out of the shower, immediately squeezing the sopping water out of her shoulder-length hair. She quickly dried off her body before throwing on a robe and twisting the knob on her closet door. She perused the array of long-sleeved shirts, jackets, and sweaters that hung in the small room, emerging with a tight black shirt paired with a matching skirt and a red cardigan.
Once she applied a bit of makeup, Lily resumed her binge watching position, settling on a movie channel which had just begun a showing of The Princess Bride . The next few hours were spent fussing over Buttercup and Humperdinck and Westley’s fluctuating love triangle, which Lily had done many times before, but she never got tired of the cliche love-hate relationship between the three. The movie ended at six, and Lily eagerly shut off all of the electricity in the basement and bounded up the stairs like it was Christmas. She slipped on some one-inch heels, snatched up her purse, and bolted into the slushy, melting snow, ready to change her life and speak to the infamous ‘Peter Wentz’.