From her earliest youth, Jessica knew
exactly who she wanted to be. She wanted to be a singer, to spend her days on
top of a stage and just please millions of people with her voice and
personality. She insisted so much to her parents that they finally accepted to
pay for acting lessons and singing lessons. They didn’t really support her
aside from the money aspect, so every single thing that happened afterwards was
done only by that young idealist girl who wanted to eat the world.
She spent every single weekend practicing in
her singing school and at home. Her family didn’t really like it because her
voice was not very good at the beginning. And even when she improved it, it was
still very annoying for people that just wanted to relax at home after long
days at school or at the office. Jessica sometimes left the house and sang
outside, walking to the store or the park. In her mind, she had to keep using
her voice until someone noticed her.
In all the magazines, her favorite singers and
stars told the stories of their discovery exactly in the same way: someone had
seen them in a public space; sometimes it was the supermarket and others in an
ice-cream parlor. The point was that they just saw them around and knew that
they could be amazing artists. As she wanted to be a singer, she decided to
sing in the park sometimes, hoping for people to stop by and just stay for a
while, enchanted by her voice and talent.
Jessica convinced her best friend Anna to play
the guitar while she sang. Anna had been pressured by her parents from a young
age, leading a very different life than the one her friend had. She had been
told that by the age of ten she should know how to play at least three
instruments, and one of those was the guitar. She accepted Jessica’s request after
her friend said that it was the best way to be far from her mother, who was
always telling her what to do, even in summer holidays.
They started doing their small shows when they
were around thirteen years old. They would sing five songs, chosen that same
morning by the both of them. They had to do an act that would attract young
people to the park but also adults that had connections to the artistic world
in order for them to get noticed by a label. Anna was not as optimistic as
Jessica, but she supported her nevertheless, mainly because it was such a fun
time to have every so often. It didn’t happen every day, that would have been
impossible, but they sat on the lawn of the park as often as they could.
Four
years passed, very slowly for Jessica and very fast for Anna. They had only one
more year of high school to go and then they would be sent to college. Their
respective families had been saving for a long time and it would only be the
right thing to do to keep studying and go on to live a life where they could be
someone. But Jessica had already chosen who she wanted to be and nothing could
ever change that. I her mind, she had a year to breakthrough and then, it would
be undiscovered country.
Anna was always checking universities on her
laptop, even moments before their musical outgoings. She would tell all of the
details to Jessica, who never really paid attention. She was too busy
memorizing the lines of several songs or learning about her favorite artists.
She had her room all decorated with several pictures of them as well as of
other artists and bands that had come before. Her aim was to be in one of those
posters in the future, inspiring other young girls to be the best they could
be.
However, life has a way of laughing at
people’s dreams. One of those days, in which they sang on the park, Anna was
late with her guitar, as her mother had decided to argue about the prospects of
university. She wanted her daughter to study to be a chemist or a biologist.
However, Anna wanted to learn something that required more creativity, more
freedom. She had seen a lot of brochures about design schools, film schools and
others like those. She wanted more than what she already had.
As they fought with her mother, she forgot
that time was passing and that Jessica was not the most patient human on Earth.
Once before, Anna had been five minutes late and she had been received by a
furious Jessica yelling at her a bunch of things about decency and manners that
a person in the artistic world should have. She also said some hurtful things
and it made Anna regret her decision to help her friend. Jessica apologized
later but made her promised she was not going to be late ever again.
But she was. Jessica had been waiting for a
while. As winter was coming, the clouds and the sky turned darker sooner than
before. It was the perfect moment for a criminal coming from outside of town to
attack her right there, in the park. He covered her face and dragged her away
from the lawn and into a wooded area, where he gagged her and raped her. A
woman walking her dog found her the following day. Jessica had passed out the
day prior and was still asleep when she was found. Not even the sound of more
people around her and the paramedics woke her up.
Jessica
woke up in the hospital three days after having been found. Some of her bruises
were already receding. Her mother was on the room when she woke up. It was
obvious she had been crying for a long while. Her father came in later and he
hugged her and cried, without saying a word. It was very strange but she didn’t
even try to say anything. It wasn’t that she couldn’t talk; it just seemed
wiser to just listen and wait for the right moment to say the right amount of
words.
That night, the doctor told her what had
happened, her parents had left only minutes prior. She cried in silence as the
man told her that the police had captured the man the day before on a road. He
had been cornered by them, trying to take advantage of another girl. He was so
surprised to see the police that apparently let the girl go and shot himself on
the mouth. The police didn’t even have a moment to properly respond or to save
his life in order to get the criminal to jail.
Jessica nodded. She wasn’t really hearing the
doctor. She was thinking about her career, about her possibilities now that she
had been through something that horrible. She felt physically ill, disgusted
and just tired. But something in her brain made her think that it wasn’t the
end or something like that. She felt that there was more to her story than just
that. She made sure the doctor knew she was going to get out of that hospital
bed soon in order to achiever her goals, by any means necessary.
Sure enough, she started writing songs the
moment she was able to leave the hospital. Jessica closed her room door and did
not come out of there for a whole week. Her mother would bring her food and she
would often tear up but not say a word. Her father stood by the doorframe and
watched her, absolutely stunned that she could be that active after what had
happened. It didn’t seem right, but at the same time, Jessica seemed to be in
her element writing in silence.
Three songs came out of those writing
sessions. She grabbed her video camera and recorded three different videos,
which she uploaded to YouTube on the same day. She sang on them about what had
happened, about how she felt and about what was going through her head.
Her music was a success. Millions of viewers
saw the videos and shared them in less than a week. Soon enough, a recording label
contacted her and an album was planned to be released within the year. And Anna…
She never saw her again. She couldn’t forgive her.
