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theinfamousillusionist

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OC: Lily

Lily spent her weekdays teaching terrified teenagers how not to kill anyone with a two-ton machine. She was remarkably good at it, too—patient, attentive, and nearly impossible to rattle. Stall at a green light? It’s fiiiiine. Start it again. Clip the curb while parallel parking? Now you know where the curb is. She had a strange talent for making mistakes feel temporary, like nothing in the world was truly catastrophic as long as you still had another move. This philosophy worked wonderfully in the passenger seat of a student-driver car. Unfortunately, Lily applied it to absolutely everything else. On weekends, Lily played drums in a local band, and unlike driving instruction, she was terrible at it. Not charmingly sloppy. Not secretly brilliant. Terrible. During one show she shanked the rim of her snare so hard that a stick launched from her hand and sailed somewhere beyond the monitors. Rather than move the remaining stick to her snare hand, Lily apparently decided that the snare simply no longer existed. For nearly half a minute she continued the song using nothing but hi-hat, kick and the occasional wildly enthusiastic crash. The bassist eventually turned around with an expression of genuine horror. Lily smiled back and kept time as best she could. They finished the song. Technically. After the show, while everyone was loading out, Lily arrived carrying her cymbal bag and wearing the sheepish expression the band had learned to fear. “Okay, before anybody gets mad, we did finish the show.” Nobody had been mad. Now they were concerned. “Also, I maaaaay have forgotten to pay the meter when I parked the van.” Silence. “And it may have been towed.” More silence. Lily rocked onto her ridiculous gold platform flip-flops and pointed down the street. “But there’s a taco place like two blocks away! We can walk there while I call the towing people.” The guitarist stared at her. “Lily, all our gear is sitting on the sidewalk.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Okay. Tacos after.” Nobody ever seriously considered replacing her. Lily remembered birthdays. She drove everyone home. She brought extra cables, extra sticks—thank God—and food to rehearsals without being asked. She was the first person helping somebody through a bad week and the last person stacking chairs after a show. Fans even started cheering whenever she successfully made it through a difficult fill, which embarrassed her enormously. Lily would probably never become a great drummer. She might never become a good drummer. But whenever something went catastrophically wrong, she'd grin, sweep her hair out of her face, and somehow convince everyone that the night wasn't ruined. “It’s fiiiiine. We’ll figure it out.” And, infuriatingly, Lily was usually right.