ivy ; malachi barton

chapter two ; scared of my guitar

"im so scared my guitar, if i play it, then i think to hard. once you let the thought in, then its already done, so i lay in your arms and pretend that its love." scared of my guitar; olivia rodrigo

evelyn ❦

"I DON'T KNOW if I'm going to be able to top Vicious." I sighed, reading the words I'd messily scrawled across my page, my guitar sitting in my lap. "It won me five Grammys. How am I supposed to do any better than that?"

Mckenna laughed, sitting back in my fluffy chair. "You aren't supposed to top it. You're supposed to serve, like you always do, but independently. Not one judges your current music by the music you made in the past. If it's good: it's good. If it's bad: it's bad. That's it."

I strummed lightly to a song I'd just written. Scared of my guitar, it was titled. "I know, you always say that. But vicious was in the top 1 spot for 6 consecutive weeks, hits different won pop record of the year and get him back won best alternative track of the year. I was sixteen. How the fuck could I get better?"

"Well, you'll get tons of exposure from Zombies 4. Let the light in is having another season, descendants 4 announcement is nearing and the new ghost busters movie is coming out soon! You'll be riding the publicity wave for months anyway. Then, when it's fizzling out, you announce the new album. Get the right people listening, and you're set." Mckenna advised me. I laughed at the blonde girl, in awe of her obvious media education.

"I'll keep that in mind, Kennie." I giggled, continuing to lightly brush my hands over the strings of my guitar, the undetermined rythme of the new song floating through the air. I had no clue about the title of my new album, or even when it was going to be released. But my publicity team was encouraging me to write a new hit single, and release it, as soon as possible.

Mckenna and I often wrote music together. She featured on my last album in a song called the blue, which turned out to be a massive hit. We weren't trying to produce anything serious today, I was just showing her a snippet of something I was playing around with.

Kennie let out a sudden loud exhale, flopping down and sprawling herself across my bedroom floor. "It's a shame that Malachis such a bitch. He's so gorgeous. And you have to spend the next however many months with him in New Zealand - it could have been the perfect 'forced proximity' love story."

"God, he's the last person I want to be forced into proximity with. I'm honestly terrified to read the whole script - if I have to pretend to be in love with him... I'll die." I laughed, laying myself across her torso, looking up at the ceiling.

"Did you see his red hair? It looks scrumptious." The blonde girl giggled. I smacked her abruptly, causing her to yelp and pull away from me, still shamelessly laughing. "I'm sorry! He's still a cunt. Just... a beautiful cunt."

I hated to admit it, but Mckenna was right. Malachi had a god awful personality, but he was a breathtakingly pretty boy. I wasn't proud of it, but I had had a small itsy bitsy crush on him for an... extended period of time. Ariana teased me about it for ages, since the two of them had grown up together and were pretty much siblings. Somehow, I'd never met Malachi before the night of his birthday. He was close friends with my brother and practically related to my best friend, but still, I'd never met him.

It had been a while since that night, though. We'd had very limited conversations, and that was including other cast members of zombies 4. It was awkward, to say the least. We had heaps of press things coming up, so if we wanted to avoid a scandal, we needed to sort out our shit as fast as we could.