If a Pony Catch a Pony

Chapters

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue

Chapter 1

If Symphony were here, she'd probably want me to start off by telling you all about my childhood and how I first started playing music when we were just fillies and I didn't know any better than to just plop myself down in front of a piano and bang on it until someone made me stop. Of course I didn't stick with the piano, but that's a different story, and anyway I doubt anypony really cares that much about how I started playing cello. It's hardly earth-shattering, even if it ended up with me getting my cutie mark and all.

So instead of the story of how I found my special talent and all that Trotwood Clopperfield stuff, I'm going to start at Canterlot College, and why I wanted to drop out and move back to Manehatten. It was the Friday before they let us go for Hearth's Warming break, and everypony was at the big assembly at Canterlot Stadium. Nopony cared that it was cold as Windigoes' breath and even starting to snow a little. They all got together to have one last, huge party before they went their separate ways for break. Princess Celestia would even put in an appearance every year. That's how you knew it was a big deal, and you should feel terribly sad about not seeing all your best friends for a whole month afterwards.

My roommate, Amethyst Star, had tried to get me to go, but I brushed her off. I said I had some other stuff to do, and that I would show up later. At the time, I thought I meant it, but standing up on the hill, looking at the stadium off in the distance, I could even hear everypony starting to sing, and all of a sudden, I wanted to be anywhere else in Equestria. I mean, I've had to play plenty of Hearth's Warming songs in my music classes, ever since I was just a filly, and some of them are even really good. But nothing ruins a good song faster than a giant crowd spontaneously deciding to sing it. Most ponies don't actually know all the words, so half of them are just mumbling in tune, while the other half sing as loud as they can to make damn sure you know they know the words and are great singers to boot. But the worst are the ponies that try to harmonize in those situations. As if what this big, off-the-cuff group sing along really needed was a few warbly fourths of whatever notes the loudest ponies in the group happen to be singing.

So I decided that instead of going down to meet up with Amethyst Star and Lyra Heartstrings and whoever else she happened to be hanging out with these days, what I would do instead was go to meet with my math teacher, First Order, who had asked to talk to me before I left Canterlot. Like most of my other teachers that year, he was giving me a failing grade, and I guess he wanted to make sure I knew how I had completely blown it. I don't mean to be too harsh on him—he wasn't a bad pony, even if he really played up the whole absent-minded math teacher stereotype. I certainly didn't relish the thought of failing his class or anything. It was just that I didn't feel like I had any motivation to do well in it outside of just not failing. Which is really no motivation at all.

First Order pretty much lived in his office, so I had a good idea that I'd be able to find him there, even though classes were already over for the day. The math building was all the way on the opposite side of the campus, though, and it was starting to get so cold that I almost decided to go back to the dorms and get this new scarf I'd just bought before I headed over there. What I did instead was just break out into a run. I probably looked crazy, galloping across the campus like a madmare, but I wasn't really thinking about it too much. I just wanted to get to First Order's office and get our talk over with, even if I slipped on the wet walkway and broke my neck in the process.

When I got to the math building, I couldn't get inside and out of the cold fast enough. Which is not to say that it was a whole lot warmer inside. Most of the buildings on campus are about as old as Celestia herself, and are only heated by fireplaces in the winter. Out in the halls, you can still see your breath in front of your face. Fortunately for me, First Order's office was about seventy stories up, and I kept sort of running up as many flights of stairs as I could before I was completely winded. That kept me warm enough, and by the time I finally got to his office, I was fairly comfortable aside from being out of breath.

When I knocked on the door, I thought for a minute that I had interrupted some horrible experiment that First Order was doing. It sounded sort of like he was writing at a blackboard, but dropped his chalk then crashed into a whole row of desks trying to pick it back up before it rolled away.

"Wh--yes, who is it?" he yelled through the door after all the noise had stopped.

"It's Octavia. You told me you wanted to talk to me before I left for break."

It was quiet for a minute, then First Order opened the door just a crack and peeked out at me, like maybe I was lying about who I was or something. Boy does it drive me crazy when professors act all quirky and absent-minded like that. So many of the really good ones do it, too. The mediocre ones always seem like the most boring ponies in the world, but the good ones are the complete opposite. They always go out of their way to be as eccentric as possible, like their brains are so caught up in unraveling the fabric of the universe that they can't remember to brush their manes or open a damn door without destroying the whole room in the process.

"Yes, yes, Octavia. I did want to talk to you. Come right in." Right in. That killed me. Like he hadn't kept me standing out in the freezing cold hallway while he crashed around his office for an hour.

When I got inside, it looked like everything was more or less in order, so I had no idea what all the chaos before had been about. "Please, have a seat," he said, and pointed at a chair across from his desk. "Would you like some tea? I just put the kettle on."

"No, thank you," I said. "I'm afraid I can't stay too long, but I did--"

"Fine, fine. Like you said, I just wanted to have a few words with you before you left for break." I tried to ignore the fact that he interrupted me like he couldn't possibly care less about anything I had to say. "You know, of course, that I won't be giving you a passing grade."

"Yes...I was aware of that." I was trying not to sound like I didn't care, because in a way I did. But not in the way he wanted. I just didn't like letting anypony down, even with as much practice as I had had at it recently. As far as actually doing well in math, the truth was it hard to think of anything less important to me.

"You strike me as quite intelligent, Octavia. I know the music faculty is very high on you. Very high indeed. That's why I can't understand the lack of effort you've put into my class. To be brutally honest, you're the only one of my students who seems to have had this much trouble."

He looked at me for a minute, like he expected me to say something, even though he hadn't said anything I could really respond to. I was already starting to regret showing up. I wished I had just gone back to my dorm room, or even to the stadium with all the terrible singing.

"I know that it probably seems to you like math and music couldn't be farther apart, but that's really not the case. In fact, there's quite a lot of interplay between the development of the two. Mathematicians and musicians have always inspired one another to some extent."

That killed me. Not once have I ever had a music teacher try to tell me how important math is to music. But take a teacher of a subject like math that most ponies don't want anything to do with, and they'll find a way to relate it to anything that's actually interesting. He gave me that look again, like he expected me to say something, so this time I did.

"I realize that a lot of music theory is very mathematical," I said, which was basically true--I mean, I understood the concept and all, at least. "But when I play music, I don't notice that. I mean, I'm not thinking about scales and harmonies and things like that while I'm playing. I'm just playing."

I'm not sure he knew what to do with that. He kind of nodded, and I thought he might actually respond, but instead he just changed the subject.

"So how are things in your other classes?"

"Not good," I said, right away. I don't know why. I had no desire at all to talk about it. "I mean, my music classes are fine, but everything else..."

"I'm sorry to hear that. I really am. But I can't say I'm exactly surprised, either. I've seen this more times than I care to think about. Students who could excel, but get so focused on their favorite subject that they neglect everything else."

Wow, did I ever want to leave.

"So what are your plans now? Do you think you'll be able to apply yourself more next year?"

"I don't know," I said, even though I did know. I had already decided that I probably wouldn't come back to Canterlot College. Even if they didn't kick me out for my grades, I couldn't stand the thought of spending two more years there, getting lectured by stereotypically crazy professors about applying myself to subjects I hated. "I mean, it's hard to say right now."

He nodded again, and my mind started racing, looking for any excuse to get away. I wasn't that lucky, though.

"Octavia, I never feel good about failing students, even when they deserve it. But I don't always sit them down and talk to them about it. I'm doing this for you because I know you can do much better than you have this year. I've done this for a long time. I can tell the difference between a student who CAN'T do better, and one who just doesn't choose to. You're the latter. It's too late to fix things this year, but if you come back with a different mindset after the break, I know you can be as successful in all of your classes as you are in your music classes now. I would just hate to see you let apathy get in the way of your ambitions..."

He trailed off, and I knew it was probably my only chance to get out of there. All I wanted was to go back to my room and listen to this record I had just bought a week or so earlier. Right then, it all seemed a million miles away.

"I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me," I said. It sounded trite, but it was all I could think of. "I really do. And I'll remember it next year. But I need to get going now. I have a few things I need to take care of before I leave."

"Yes, well, just remember that whatever math class you end up in next year, I'm always available to help students who want to improve."

"I'll remember that," I said, getting up to leave. "Thanks again for your help."

He nodded, again, and kind of murmured something I didn't understand. I was glad, because it was another of those eccentric affectations that drive me so crazy, and it was the last bit of motivation I needed to get the hell out of his office. I closed the door behind me, and for some reason I was scared to death that I would slam it and knock the blackboard off the wall or something. So I shut it as lightly as I could, then started back to my dorm feeling completely miserable. Nothing feels quite as bad as letting down somepony you don't even care if you let down. It's one of the lowest feelings you can imagine.

Chapter 2

When I got back to the dorms, they were so empty and quiet that I started walking a little more heavily since I knew there wasn't anypony around for me to disturb. I've always liked the sound of hoofsteps echoing in an empty hall. The reverberations have this sharp, crisp sound that you very rarely hear from even percussion instruments. Of course that's because orchestras don't play in rooms shaped like long skinny boxes, but that's not important. I just like the sound, even if a lot of times I'm horrified of making it because I hate being disruptive when I think a lot of other ponies are trying to study or sleep or something.

I wasn't surprised to find my room empty. Amethyst Star was a real socialite, so I knew that if anypony was still down at the big party at the stadium, she would be. I thought that might give me some time to finally listen to my new record, so I went over to my bookshelf took it out. It was one Symphony, my best friend from Manehatten, had written to say I should listen to. I wasn't really sure why—it was a recording of the Trottingham Philharmonic, who aren't considered the best orchestra in the world by any means, performing some adaptations of early Equestrian music. It wasn't the sort of thing I would ever have noticed myself, but I trusted Symphony's taste, so when she got excited enough about it to send me a letter just telling me to get my hooves on it, of course I did.

Dorm rooms are usually the worst places to listen to music, though. You can't even get any privacy in a dorm bathroom, so naturally the bedrooms are even worse, with ponies stomping up and down the halls all the time, and feeling free to just walk right in if they're bored and you left the door unlocked. That's especially true when your roommate is one of the most popular ponies in the college. Amethyst's friends were constantly going in and out, talking about inane things like the new dresses that just showed up in the high street shops or who they had a date with that weekend. So much of that kind of stuff went on that I hadn't even bothered unwrapping the record yet. I knew if I tried to listen to it, I'd just end up angry about all the interruptions.

It had been so long since I used my record player that it was actually a little dusty when I dug it out from under my bed. Fortunately, Amethyst hadn't been using it—she has a tendency to be clumsy with other ponies' stuff, since she's rich enough to replace anything she breaks. But even though my record player was kind of old and shoddy at that point, I wouldn't have dreamed of just replacing it. It was one I had bought a few years ago in Manehatten, back when Symphony and I were first old enough to have some money of our own and could go out and buy records for ourselves. Once a week, we'd go to this dark little record store, with a really snobbish stallion about the age I am now who was always sitting behind the counter reading a book and ignoring the customers. They didn't have a lot of new, popular stuff, but they had every obscure classical recording you could think of. Neither of us really knew much of anything when we started going there, but by the time I left for Canterlot, we had really developed our tastes. So we'd go spend all of our money on records, a lot of which we'd never even heard of before, but just bought because they were cheap and something about them caught our attention. Then we'd go back to my house and listen to them all on this cheap little record player I'd bought. One day when we were really bored, Symphony wrote a few lines from a poem she had been reading on the inside of the cover. After that, we'd both write little stuff like that in it whenever something seemed important to us. Sometimes it was poetry, sometimes it was quotes, sometimes it was just the juvenile, overly serious stuff we'd come up with ourselves. But to be honest, once I got to Canterlot, looking at what we had written there was about the only thing that made me really happy. That's why I was so glad Amethyst had never gotten her hooves on the record player and bent the arm or gouged up the platter or anything. She would've been all apologetic, and would probably have bought me a much nicer new model to replace it. But even though it would've sounded better, I wouldn't have wanted to use it. I don't think Amethyst has ever even heard the phrase 'sentimental value' in her whole life.

I had only listened to about two minutes of the record when I heard somepony lightly tapping on the door. I knew immediately who it was going to be, because the only other pony in the entire college who would have skipped out on the Hearth's Warming party lived next door. Suddenly, I was glad I had decided to listen to the record on headphones, even though I knew that wasn't going to save me. The door opened and even though I tried to avoid eye contact, I couldn't ignore the lavender unicorn creeping into my peripheral vision.

Twilight Sparkle had to be the most socially inept pony in the whole school. Don't get me wrong, she wasn't horrible or anything. A lot of ponies thought she was stuck up, since she was not only antisocial, but had been studying magic directly under Princess Celestia since she was a filly. I can't say I was wild about her myself—when she finally did make an effort to come out of her shell, it was usually at the worst possible times, like when you wanted to just sit by yourself and listen to music. But at least she seemed to actually want to be nice. That was something you couldn't say for everypony in Canterlot. Maybe not even most of them.

As soon as she was in my room, Twilight started talking, before I could even take my headphones off to hear what she was saying. For a minute I considered just leaving them on to see if she'd take the hint, but I didn't want to be that rude. Still, I took my time, lifting the needle off the record very carefully and everything.

"Twilight, I didn't hear anything you just said."

"Oh, sorry!" she said, looking a little flustered. She always looked a little flustered, honestly. You could tell she saw everything as an assignment she was going to be graded on. Because of that, every time she made some minor social faux pas, you ran the risk of her coming completely unglued.

"I was just surprised that you weren't at the stadium with everypony else," she said. "I kind of thought I was the only one who didn't go." She almost looked ashamed when she said it. It made me feel awful for her and resent her at the same time.

“I just didn't feel much like going,” I said. I hadn't told anypony about my decision to leave Canterlot College yet, and wasn't even sure I was going to. Honestly, it really wasn't any of their business. But of course I wasn't going to tell Twilight Sparkle about any of that. "I kind of just wanted some quiet time to listen to this record."

"Oh, I completely understand," Twilight said. "I spent so much time preparing for my final exams that all I wanted was some time to myself."

"Same here." Of course that was a total lie, or at least the part about spending time preparing for finals. The only ones I had worried about at all were for my music classes, and those came so naturally to me it was hardly like work at all. I don't think I even opened a book to study for any other subject. I started to put my headphones back on when she spoke up again.

"So what are you listening to?"

"Just a record," I said.

"I know that," she said, and kind of started nosing around the room, mostly looking at Amethyst's stuff. "But what kind of record?"

"Oh. It's a recording of the Trottingham Philharmonic. A friend back in Manehatten recommended it to me."

"How is it?"

"The first minute was great." I don't love being sarcastic or anything, but she really wasn't taking the hint. If I had gotten to her, though, she didn't show it. She was too busy looking at Amethyst's things. She was using her magic to levitate a brush that was lying on the little vanity table we shared. I have to admit, the brush was really pretty, silver with embossed garlands and inlaid sapphires on the back. Amethyst never said anything about it, because she wasn't one to brag about how well off her parents were, but I got the feeling it was an antique that had been in her family for generations.

"You should probably ask before you just start going through Amethyst's things," I said. I wasn't in any mood to give Twilight a lecture on basic etiquette, but I was still a little irritated at how she had just barged in on me. She looked shocked, not like she was mad, but like she hadn't had any idea what she was doing. That was Twilight. She was the kind of pony who would fall down a hole and break all her legs someday because she was too busy thinking about astronomy to notice that there was a huge hole in the ground in front of her. She was going to make a great professor. All the irritating eccentricities came naturally to her.

I started to put my headphones back on for about the hundredth time, but just then Amethyst got back to the room. She came bursting through the door and almost gave me a heart attack. It must have gotten even colder outside. There were still some flecks of snow in her mane, and the cold was radiating off her like she was some crazy ice sculpture.

"Sweet Celestia, it's bucking freezing out there!" Amethyst could be pretty crass, when she wanted to. She hadn't noticed Twilight standing there, and I almost laughed at how surprised both of them looked. Amethyst's mood changed pretty quickly.

"Oh, um...no offense, Twilight," she said. Nopony wanted to risk saying anything bad about Celestia when Twilight was around, what with her being the princess's special student and all.

"It's alright," Twilight said. I think she had mostly looked shocked because she had just been levitating Amethyst's stuff all over the room a minute before. "I need to get going anyway. I still have one more report to finish before I leave for break."

"I don't think she likes me very much," Amethyst said, when Twilight was gone.

"I don't think Twilight knows how to like anypony," I said. "I wouldn't take it personally."

Amethyst went over to the vanity and sort of ran the brush that Twilight had just been fooling with through her mane a couple of times. "It's snowing like crazy," she said, mostly to herself. "My mane is going to be soaking wet. Are you going out anywhere tonight?"

"I hadn't thought about it yet. Why?"

"Well, I kind of have a date tonight, so if you're going to be sticking around here anyway, I was going to see if you could do me a big favor. I have a composition due for my piano class—it's my last assignment. I've written most of it, but I was going to see if you could look over it and maybe polish it up a little bit. And come up with the last couple of measures. It's supposed to be very melodic, but not full of crazy harmonies or anything. Just keep it simple so it won't sound like you worked on it."

"I honestly don't know what I'm doing tonight," I said, because the last thing I wanted to do was get into another damned music theory conversation with a non-musician, "but I guess I can take a look at it, if I have some spare time."

"Really? It'd be such a huge help."

Amethyst was giving herself the once-over in the mirror, and started levitating accessories out of her closet without even looking while she was doing it. Unicorns can do just about anything with their magic if they really want to, but all most of them ever seemed to do at Canterlot College was levitate their personal items around the room. I had sort of lost any urge I had to listen to music, so I got up and started pacing around the room a little. I noticed that Amethyst had left the sheet music for her composition out on her desk, so I half-heartedly picked it up and starting going over it in my head. It was pretty pedestrian stuff, but I had some ideas on how to improve it.

"So who do you have a date with?" I asked. "Somepony from the college?"

"No, she's actually from Manehatten," Amethyst said. I was a little surprised that she was going out with another mare. It's not like same-sex relationships have ever been uncommon in Equestria—not when there are so many more mares than stallions just about anywhere you go. But there are some ponies who are strictly hetero, and I had always figured Amethyst was one of them. I had only ever seen her go out with stallions in the past. "Maybe you know her. Her name's Vinyl Scratch."

"What?" I half dropped, half threw the sheet music back to where I found it, but she looked at me like I had turned the desk over or something. I hadn't realized how loud my voice had been.

"Wait, do you actually know her? I was just joking."

"Y-yes, I know her. I haven't seen her for a couple of years, though. We lived next door to each other for a while. My parents couldn't stand her because she was always blasting this crazy—"

"But she's cool and all? I mean, it's just kind of a casual double date thing that Lyra set up so she could go out with some mare from Ponyville that she won't shut up about."

Part of me said that I shouldn't be getting worked up, because Amethyst probably didn't see a date with Vinyl as anything more than a way to kill an evening. That was the other thing about her love life—there was nothing remotely like love involved in it. She didn't talk a lot about it, but from what she had said, she very rarely dated the same pony more than a couple of times. When she asked if Vinyl was "cool", what she really wanted to know was whether she was going to want things to get serious.

"Unless she's changed, she's definitely not the clingy type. She's way too into parties and trying to get her music noticed. Did she say anything about that—I mean, about how that's going for her?"

"No, she didn't even mention that she was a musician. I mean, I could kind of guess, from her cutie mark and all." She sighed and looked at herself in the mirror again. "How do I end up with so many musicians in my life?" She had finished fixing her mane, and was putting on her coat. "Oh well, I guess I couldn't pass my music classes without you." Even though she sounded completely exasperated, I at least knew her well enough to know she was joking.

"Hey, could you maybe not mention me to Vinyl?" I asked. I had no idea why I said it, and of course Amethyst wasn't going to ask. I doubt she could've cared less.

"Sure," she said. "I'll see you tonight, if you're still awake when I get back."

Amethyst left, and I went and sat back down by my record player. I didn't feel like listening to music at all, though. Really, I didn't feel like doing anything, but at the same time, I had to do something. I knew if I didn't, I'd spend the rest of the night thinking about Amethyst and Vinyl. Even if she wasn't interested in a serious relationship with Vinyl, that didn't mean nothing was going to happen between them. From what I had heard Amethyst say about her dates before, it was almost guaranteed that something would. I got up and paced around the room for a little while, but couldn't stop my brain from going back to the same place over and over again. I had barely thought of vinyl since I came to Canterlot, but all of a sudden the thought of her going on a date with somepony who hadn't spent a whole summer listening to her basically create her own style of music, who hadn't snuck out with her in the middle of the night to go up on the roof of our building and listen to her talk about a new kind of beat she'd just come up with, was making me crazy.

Because it was the only thing I could think to do instead, I decided to go down to the cafeteria. It was about time for dinner anyway, and I hoped that the walk through the snow would clear my head, even if I didn't feel like eating the awful cafeteria food at all. I grabbed the scarf I had bought the other day when I was bored and went out shopping with Amethyst and Lyra. It was made of thick wool, with a kind of bright, mostly red, plaid pattern. Normally I'm not one for accessories. About the only time I wear them is in the winter when you have to to keep warm. But there was something I had liked about the scarf, even though it was way brighter than the black and gray accessories I usually wear.

On the way, I ran into this unicorn named Minuette, who was one of the few ponies at Canterlot College who I genuinely liked. For one thing, she was really nice. I don't just mean she smiled a lot, or had good manners, even though she did. What was different about Minuette was that you knew she really meant it. When she smiled, it was because she actually was happy, and her manners were good because she thought other ponies deserved that from her. When you get a lot of wealthy ponies together in a place, like Canterlot College, you get a lot of fake politeness and insincere smiles, and it can wear you down really quickly. Give me genuine rudeness and unhappiness any day.

What I liked even more about Minuette, though, was that she had the broadest view of cutie marks and special talents and all that of anypony I ever met. Her cutie mark was an hourglass, and she was one of the best students in the college in physics and math. But instead of going down a really obvious path, like trying to get a job at one of the laboratories in Equestria that was researching time travel, she was always looking for some left-field way to use her talents instead. Sometimes she just did it to fool around, like one night when a couple of us were in the bathroom brushing our teeth, and she started lecturing us about the proper number of strokes per minute for each side of your mouth and all. But sometimes it was also pretty creative, and you got the feeling that even though she didn't seem to have any interest in doing anything world altering with her talents, she would probably have a way more interesting life than some of the ponies who act like their entire future is set in stone the second their cutie marks appear.

The food at the cafeteria was always pretty bad, but that night you could really tell the cooks had already checked out, even though most ponies were going to be around until Sunday turning in the last of their assignments. Still, talking with Minuette while we picked through our meals for the edible parts made it a little more tolerable. I wasn't exactly in the mood to open up, what with my terrible grades and Amethyst and Vinyl still distracting me, so we just kind of talked about nothing in particular, and by the time we finished, I was even laughing and feeling pretty good. When we got back outside, the sun had gone down, and the snow was really starting to stick. Minuette used her magic to speed up the snowfall in a small area, just to get enough piled up to make a snowball that she threw at a group of ponies right as they were walking out of the cafeteria. Everypony started laughing and trying to get enough snow piled up to fight back. I have to admit, there was something really pretty about it. There always is when you know everypony is really enjoying themselves and not just putting on an act.

After we fooled around in front of the cafeteria for a little while, Minuette and I started walking back to the dorms, and since we hadn't really eaten much at dinner—and since I think she had realized that I was upset about something, even though she was too polite to just ask what it was—she suggested we go into town and get some good food somewhere, and maybe go to see a movie or something. The movie part didn't sound great to me, but I really didn't want to spend the rest of the night alone, so I agreed. We went back to our rooms to get some warmer clothes, and for some reason while I was getting ready I decided to go over and see if Twilight Sparkle wanted to go with us. When I knocked on her door, it took a minute for her to answer. When she finally did, this weird smell came flooding out into the hallway.

"Hey, Octavia." She said it more like a question than a greeting. We really didn't talk that much, even though we had lived next door to each other for the past year, so it made sense.

"Hey, Twilight. Minuette and I were talking about going into town to get some dinner, and we thought you might want to go with us."

"Oh. Well, I was working on some potions, but I guess I can leave them for a little while. Where are we going?"

"No idea. We'll figure it out on the way."

Twilight's brow furrowed a little, and I started getting annoyed with her again. It's not that I was doing her some great favor by inviting her or anything, but I could tell that knowing which restaurant we were going to mattered way more to her than it should have. I didn't want to get annoyed again, since talking to Minuette had made me feel so much better, so I tried to take control of the situation before Twilight could find something to worry about.

"Anyway, we need to get going, if we're going to."

"Ok," she said, still looking none too pleased with the whole situation. "Just let me get my coat."

The three of us took the train into town. Normally we would've just walked, but it was way too cold for that. Once we were on the train, even Twilight loosened up a little, and by the time we got to the restaurant we were having a pretty good time. My grandmother had just sent me way too much birthday money a couple of weeks before, so I didn't feel bad about treating everyone to desert after we ate. By the time we finished, we were all too full to rush over to the movie theater, so we ended up just hanging around the restaurant a while longer, then heading back to campus.

As soon as we were there, Twilight went rushing back to her room to tend to her potions and make sure her baby dragon, Spike, was still asleep. Even though I had been having a good time, the thought of going back to my room and being alone again scared the hell out of me, and I practically begged Minuette to come back with me so I'd have some company. I think I might have given her the wrong idea, though, because she made an excuse about having plans to get in on some card game in Moondancer's room or something. Actually, it probably wasn't really an excuse, since she invited me, but the only thing worse than having a panic attack by yourself is having one in a room full of ponies you barely know, so I turned her down and went back to my own room.

Chapter 3

Before I left for the cafeteria earlier, I had let the fire in our room's little fireplace go out. By the time I got back, it felt like I was stepping into a cave in the Crystal Mountains or something. Once I got the fire going again, I paced around for a little while, completely failing to not think about what Amethyst and Vinyl were doing on their date. I spent some time starting to pack my things, but it wasn't really helping much. Finally, I decided that the only way to distract myself was to completely occupy my mind. I thought about practicing the cello, but I didn't want to walk back through the snow to a rehearsal room, and I always hated trying to play in the dorm, even though some of the music students did it. So instead, I started looking at Amethyst's composition again, and thinking about how to finish it.

What she had written so far was very basic stuff; just a simple chord progression in 3/4 time with a couple of alternating melodic figures. It had been months since I worked on composing anything that wasn't for a class, with very strict rules that I had to follow, so I let myself get a little caught up in it. All of a sudden, a piece that Symphony had written back when we were still at the Manehatten Performing Arts Academy together came back to me. It had been in a different time signature from Amethyst's piece, but the chords and the melody were similar enough that I could get them to flow together in my head. At first I was merging the two just to amuse myself, but then I really started to like it. Symphony's melodies had always been a little ornate, so I had to simplify them if I wanted there to be any chance of Amethyst's teacher buying that she wrote it herself. But once I did that, the combination of the two flowed much better than what Amethyst had written originally, and it was easy enough to end the whole thing on a simple resolution.

I hadn't even realized how long I had been working until I started to feel the room getting cold. The fire had almost gone out again, since I had completely forgotten about stoking it. I went over and worked the bellows for a minute to get it going again, then tossed on another log. Before long it was going pretty good, and I sat there kind of letting myself get hypnotized by it. Really, though, I was thinking back to this little park in my neighborhood in Manehatten that I used to go to sometimes when I was a filly. There was nothing much there, just a few benches and a really small playground, but I loved the way it looked at sunset. Everything would go kind of pink and orange, and it was one of the most peaceful places you've ever seen. The last time I had been was about three years before, when Symphony and I went one day just as a laugh. I was trying to remember the name of it, but before I could, I got interrupted by the door opening.

Amethyst came in, and even though I was sitting right by the fire, it immediately got cold again. At first, I didn't even want to look at her. I could feel myself kind of starting to shake, and I couldn't tell if it was because I was really angry, or because I was about to start crying. Since neither of those options appealed to me, I just stayed quiet and kept staring at the fire. Amethyst didn't say anything either, and trying to figure out why just made me feel worse. She normally came back from dates a lot later, but that wasn't any consolation.

The silence was getting oppressive--at least for me--by the time Amethyst went to hang her coat back up in the closet. Thankfully, she finally decided to say something.

"Hey, did you end up staying in?"

"No, I went into town to get dinner with Minuette and Twilight Sparkle." It took so much effort to keep my voice steady, I felt like I was speaking for the first time in years.

"Good. I was worried that you were going to sit here by yourself all night."

I heard her lay down on her bed. There was really only one thing I wanted to talk about. I still didn't look at her, though.

"So how was the date?" I asked.

Amethyst was quiet for a long time.

"Octavia, I don't really know what happened with you and Vinyl, but I wasn't trying to--"

Even though I had asked, all of a sudden the last thing I wanted in the world was to listen to Amethyst talk about Vinyl. For one thing, she didn't know her at all. And even if they had really hit it off on their date, she still wouldn't really know her. Even I didn't really know her, and I had spent a lot more time with her than Amethyst probably ever would.

"We lived next door to each other for a while," I interrupted, just to shut Amethyst up. "At first I didn't see her very often, though. She kind of kept to herself a lot back then. Really, I only saw her when she would go out to buy records--which she did pretty often. Then one day, I ran into her in the record store, and we kind of struck up a conversation because she was buying--"

It was Amethyst's turn to interrupt me, at that point. Admittedly, I deserved it. I was being kind of childish.

"Octavia, please. I told you, it was completely casual. I didn't think you would know her, and by the time I found out it was too late to back out. Really, I was mostly doing it for Lyra anyway."

"I know that! Do you really think that makes me any happier about it?"

"What was I supposed to do then?"

Instead of yelling at her more, I did something that was probably even worse. All of a sudden, I jumped up from where I had been sitting, and just ran for the door. I didn't even know where I was going, except out of the room, anywhere away from Amethyst, away from ponies I respected going on stupid dates with ponies that were only going out with them as a favor to somepony else. Once I was in the hallway, my first instinct was just to get out of the dorm entirely, but as I was going down the stairs I started to get some sense of reason back, and headed for the bathrooms instead. I was bawling by the time I got there; I tried to find some comfort in the fact that I had managed to hold it in until I got away from Amethyst; like that mattered given how I had left. I could barely breathe, I was crying so hard.

Once I kind of got a hold of myself, I went and washed my face in one of the sinks. My eyes were red, and my mane had gotten wet from the water splashing everywhere. I looked like I had been dragged me to hell and back, but I didn't really care. I was too busy thinking about how I was going to face Amethyst again.

As it turned out, I didn't have to. I decided that I would go back to the room and apologize and just say I wasn't going to talk about it anymore, but when I got there, Amethyst was gone. I didn't know if she went out looking for me, or just wanted to make sure she wasn't going to be there when I got back. Maybe she didn't know, either. But once I was there, I got a different idea. I had already started packing my things. Outside of my cello and my record player, that wasn't much. So I decided that I was going to get out of Canterlot right then. I thought I could still make it to the station in time to catch the last train, and even if I couldn't, sleeping on a bench there still sounded better than sleeping in my dorm room.

Outside of my cello and record player, I didn't have too much stuff, so getting it all to the station was no big deal. The dorms had these little carts that students could use when they were moving in or out. They didn't really keep them locked up or anything, and it was so late there was nopony to notice me grabbing one and heading out the front door with it. It was still freezing cold and snowing a little, so I put my scarf back on. Still, it wasn't that long a walk, and I was too happy to be getting out of town to even notice it that much.

As it happened, I made it to the station just in time to catch the last train. I hadn't noticed until I got there that the cart had "Property of Canterlot College" stenciled on the side of it, and I was so tired and unhappy that for a minute I got this crazy idea that someone was going to see that and force me to go back to the college to be...I don't know, interrogated or something. Of course nothing like that actually happened. Once my things were loaded on the train, I sat down and waited to board. No matter how hard I tried, all I could think about was Vinyl Scratch and what she was doing right then.

Chapter 4

Almost as soon as the train took off, the swaying motion and the rhythm of the wheels put me right to sleep. I didn't wake up until we pulled into the Neighagra Falls station. The falls were a big tourist site with no night life to speak of, so almost nopony was boarding the train there at that time of night. The only pony that stood out at all was this one older mare. She was wearing a short coat, so I could see that her cutie mark was three orange wedges. That would normally have made me think that she was a farmer or something, since she was an Earth pony. But her coat and jewelry looked really expensive, and she was wearing her orange mane in an up-do style that was still popular among Manehattenite ladies of a certain age, and no pony else. I'm not saying that to be mean--she was actually quite attractive, even if she was old enough to be my mother.

She ended up taking the seat across the aisle from mine, even though there was hardly anypony else in the car. She looked tired, which wasn't surprising at that time of night, but also kind of frazzled, like she had had kind of a rough day. When an attendant came by with a drink cart before we took off again, we both ordered bottles of water. Her accent was definitely Manehatten, very upper-class. After sleeping a little, I was feeling quite a bit better, so I decided I'd try to strike up a conversation.

"Headed back to Manehatten?" I asked her as we were opening our bottles. I doubted my family was as well off as hers, but my accent was close enough I figured she'd recognize it and not assume I had some ulterior motive in talking to her.

"Not nearly fast enough," she said, smiling a little.

"I guess the falls haven't changed since I was there last," I said.

"No, they're still strictly a tourist trap. But, my relatives from Ponyville were visiting, and they all wanted to see the falls before they left. I hadn't seen my neice Applejack in years, so we sort of lost track of time. Of course all the wildly overpriced drinks at the restaurant didn't help with that." She shot me a knowing little smile, and I immediately started to like her.

"I suppose I should introduce myself," she said, offering a hoof. "I'm Clementine Orange."

"Octavia," I said.

"So, what brings you out here so late, Octavia?"

For a minute, I thought about lying to her, but I wasn't quite in the mood to cook up some wild story right then.

"I'm just on my way home from school for Hearth's Warming break. I'm a student at Canterlot College."

"Oh, I adore Canterlot. My husband is always too occupied with running his business for us to visit again, though. I assume it hasn't changed much."

"Not in the two years I've been there," I said.

She laughed. "No, I would suspect not. It's such a traditional place. I could never live there, but I'm glad it exists. So, what are you studying?"

"Music," I said. "I play cello."

"And do you plan on staying in Canterlot once you're finished with school?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "Really, I'd rather go back to Manehatten, but I guess the Canterlot Philharmonic is really what you're supposed to aspire to as a classical musician. Really, though, I sort of like the idea of playing in smaller groups. I've always enjoyed playing in quartets the most, to be honest."

"Well, that sounds perfectly valid to me--not that I'm any kind of authority on music, mind you. Say, one of my friends has a son attending Canterlot College. They're unicorns, so I assume he's studying magic, but maybe you know him. His name is Sky Dream."

Sky Dream. She was right--I had heard the name, but I didn't know him well at all. I did know his reputation, though. According to Amethyst and her friends in the magic program, he was mediocre at best at magic, but he was the best at charming his teachers. Of course I wasn't about to tell Mrs. Orange that, since I was enjoying talking to her. All of a sudden, I felt like lying a little after all.

"Oh, Sky Dream," I said, trying to sound very thoughtful. "Yes, I have heard of him, though like you said, I don't know him very well. My roommate, Amethyst Star--she's a unicorn, too--talked a lot about him. Honestly, I think she had a little bit of a crush."

Mrs. Orange kind of snickered at that, and it gave me the impression that she knew what a fake Sky Dream was. It almost made me feel bad about bringing Amethyst into it. Almost.

"I'll have to tell Star about that," she said, more to herself than me.

After that, we mostly just talked about living in Manehatten, and how it was different from Canterlot. The trip from the falls back to Manehatten wasn't that long anyway, but talking to her, it felt really short. I kind of expected that my stop would be before hers, since the really wealthy ponies generally live farther uptown. It was, and I was a little sad, because I had half concocted an idea that I was going to invite her to get a drink somewhere if we got off at the same stop. I'm not really sure if I was just happy to talk to somepony who reminded me of home, or if I was kind of falling for her a little. Maybe I was just too tired to think straight. Probably a combination of all three. It didn't matter, though, because my stop was before hers, so I just said goodbye and got off the train by myself. It felt a little lonely, because it was almost midnight, and the station was completely deserted except for the ponies who worked there. Still, it was probably better that I be alone than end up making a fool of myself. I can be quite an idiot when I drink, so there's no telling what stupid thing I would have done if I had gone drinking with Mrs. Orange. Sometimes I wish I could be completely celibate, to be honest.

Chapter 5

After I started thinking about having some drinks with Mrs. Orange, I couldn't get booze off my mind. I remembered that there was this hotel called the Brandenburger near the train station, that was kind of run down but would work well enough as a place to sleep for a couple of days before I absolutely had to go home and confront my parents. Since I didn't want to haul my cello and record player all over town with me while I looked for a bar, I decided to get a room there first.

With it being Friday night, there were still quite a few ponies out--a lot of them drunk--and I was getting all kinds of funny looks because of what I was carrying. So to kind of distract myself, I let myself start thinking again about relationships and sex and all. Really, it had been on my mind all night, after everything with Vinyl and Amethyst and even Mrs. Orange. Don't get the wrong idea--under normal circumstances, sex isn't something I spend a lot of time thinking about. To be perfectly honest, I've only had one thing you'd really call a relationship, and it had been with a stallion named Star Gazer. That was odd in itself. I mean, I don't ever really get emotionally attached to stallions like I do with mares, but I'm a complete mess when I actually try to date mares. Like Vinyl Scratch, for example--there was a reason we hadn't spoken in so long. I'm sure there's some big psychological reason for it all; I've never seen myself ending up with a stallion in the long term, so it takes all the pressure off of interacting with them, and we can actually kind of enjoy ourselves. But even with mares I'm not romantically interested in, like Minuette for example, I'm always very conscious of everything I say and do, and what kind of signal it's sending, which still ends up making things awkward. That's why Symphony is my best friend--she's the only mare I've ever felt completely comfortable around. We're more like sisters than anything, and we always have been. That's why trying to have a romantic relationship with her never even entered my mind.

Star Gazer, though, he had always just been fun to be around. Of course like most of the really wealthy ponies I knew, he had a pompous streak, but it usually came out as really biting sarcasm about things he thought were stupid. And since he was legitimately intelligent, the stuff he thought was stupid usually WAS stupid. And anyway, if you got to know him, he wasn't really mean-spirited. In fact, he was generally pretty polite. We had dated for a while, not really seriously or anything, before he met some other mare he thought he could have a serious relationship with, and broke things off. That didn't make me all that sad, because we never really stopped talking. But I did stay attracted to him, and almost all of my experience with anything sexual was with him. Almost. By the time I made it to the Brandenburger, I decided that I was going to look him up before the weekend was over. Like Symphony, he had stayed in Manehatten for college, so I knew he wouldn't be too hard to find.

Speaking of the Brandenburger, as soon as I walked into the lobby, I realized that I didn't really know anything about it. In fact, it was kind of run down. The decorations were about twenty years out of date, and the couple of ponies I saw hanging around didn't look like the type you'd want to get involved with. I was already regretting my decision to stay there by the time I got to the front desk, but I really couldn't stand the thought of dragging my luggage any further. While I was waiting on the bellhop, I made sure the hotel at least had a baby dragon around to send out messages for guests. They did, so I had him send one to Star Gazer asking if he wanted to meet up the next afternoon, and then one to Symphony. I wasn't sure exactly what to say to her, so I decided to tell her I was busy on Saturday, but try and arrange a meeting for Sunday. I hadn't even told her about how badly I was doing at school, so I needed a little time to figure out how to broach the subject with her. It's not that she would be judgmental—she wouldn't, at all. But I hated the thought of her feeling sorry for me. I didn't want to put her through that.

The bellhop finally arrived and took my stuff up to the room they had given me on the second floor. As soon as he was gone, I gave myself a quick look in the mirror. The train ride had made me feel a little grimy, but I looked all right, and so I decided to head right back out and get a drink. I thought about just going to the bar there in the Brandenburger, but I figured I was about as likely to find decent company there as just wandering down a random dark alley. So instead I decided to go to a club where Star Gazer and I had hung out a few times while we were dating, Club Merveilleux. Yeah, it was a dumb name, but there was this singer there, Sapphire Shores, who was really great despite being well aware of how great she was.

Even late on a Friday night, Club Merveilleux was completely packed. I managed to grab a waiter and order a glass of brandy before trying to find an open table. I managed to find one near the back of the room, with a terrible view of the stage. Still, I wasn't really there to watch Sapphire Shores as much as I was to get a little drunk and try to stop thinking too much about everything for a little while.

As soon as I sat down, I noticed the three mares sitting at the table next to mine. They were all Earth ponies, and from the way they were talking excitedly and looking around the room a lot, I immediately assumed they were tourists. Just for fun, I started toying with the idea of trying to strike up a conversation with them. Usually I'm too self-conscious to just walk up and start talking to somepony without good reason, but after a couple of drinks I stop caring so much. I drained my first scotch and soda pretty fast and ordered another. None of the mares at the next table were bad looking, but one, who had a purplish coat and a two-tone pink mane, had really caught my eye. I thought she looked like the smartest of the bunch, and I had already decided that I'd talk to her first. While I was kind of looking her over, though, her friend, who had about a hundred empty glasses in front of her already, caught me and started trying to whisper to her. But between her drunkeness and the noise of the band that was playing, I could practically hear every word she was saying.

At that point, I decided I might as well go talk to them. I got up and kind of slid around between our tables. That put me on the opposite side from the raging drunk, between the cute one and the third, a gold-colored mare with an orange mane who was no slouch herself. I started to talk but the drunk one immediately cut me off.

"Hey! Ihm Berry Punch! Nish to meetcha!"

"Hi," I said, trying to be casual as hell despite her practically falling out of her chair trying to introduce herself. "I'm Octavia. Mind if I join you?"

"Sure, we have another chair," said the red-head. She got up and moved around to the empty chair, which put me sitting between her and the one I had originally been eying.

"I'm Golden Harvest," said the redhead when we were all situated. "This is Cheerilee, and I think you already met Berry Punch."

Cheerilee smiled and leaned toward me just a bit. "Sorry about our friend," she said. "This is her first time in a big city, and...well, let's just say she may be celebrating a bit too much."

I laughed, really trying to turn on the charm, even though dealing with drunks has never been my specialty. "So you're from out of town? How far away?"

"Ponyville," said Golden Harvest, even though I had asked Cheerilee.

"What a coincidence," I said. "I was just talking to somepony on the train earlier who said her niece from Ponyville was visiting this week. So what do you do there?"

"Oh, nothing too interesting," said Cheerilee. "I'm an elementary school teacher, Golden Harvest runs a produce stand in the local market, and Berry Punch here--"

"Hey!" Berry Punch cut in, obviously not listening to anything Cheerilee was saying. "You wanna dance?"

She had been talking to me. Golden Harvest giggled, and Cheerilee gave me an apologetic look. But just when I was about to try and refuse the offer gracefully, it occurred to me that it might not be a bad idea to take her up on it. Sure, there was a chance she was too far gone to even be able to stand up, let alone dance to a relatively up-beat song. But something told me this wasn't her first time being this drunk, and I kind of had a feeling she'd be able to hold up her end of the deal. Either way, I thought dancing with her would be an ice breaker that might end with me getting Cheerilee on the floor next.

"Sure, Berry," I said. "Let's go."

Cheerilee looked at me like I was crazy, but I tried to give her a reassuring smile. Judging by the smile I got back in response, my plan was working.

Berry and I fought our way through the packed house to the dance floor, and it immediately became clear that she was steadier on her feet than her behavior would have suggested. I have to admit, that made me a little more interested in her. She had obviously had a lot to drink, but it almost seemed like she was only pretending to be as far gone as she appeared to be.

She didn't give me too much time to think about it. When we got to the dance floor I took the lead, since I still wasn't completely sure how well she'd be able to move around. She followed, and I was completely shocked not just that she COULD dance, but that she was hands down the best partner I've ever had. Of course that's probably not saying much—I haven't danced with that many different ponies. But I had danced with both Vinyl Scratch and Star Gazer, and both of them were pretty great, though in completely different ways. Berry Punch was in a different league, though. It wasn't just that she knew exactly what move to make at any given time. There was something else there, a complete freedom that always looked like it was about to cause her to go completely out of control, even though it never did. In fact, I think she was always in complete control, just without having to think about it at all. By the time the song ended, I was almost wondering if I shouldn't have been flirting with her instead of Cheerilee.

“Thanks for the dance,” she said, leaning against me as we stopped moving. I noticed she was slurring her words much less than she had been before. “Now get back over there and talk to Cheerilee. I think she likes you, and Celestia knows she could use some company.”

Without another word, Berry headed toward the bar, and I made my way back to the table. Cheerilee and Golden Harvest were talking about something, but went quiet as soon as I got within earshot. I didn't much care—it wasn't like we had known each other more than about five minutes. Golden Harvest seemed to be pretty happy about something, though.

“You must be some dancer,” she said as I sat back down and had another sip of my drink. “I didn't think Berry'd even be able to stand up!”

“Me either,” I said, “but she's kind of amazing. As a dancer, I mean.”

“I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit,” Cheerilee said. “I've known Berry for years, and I've never seen her dance like that before. I noticed you had a music cutie mark—maybe you're just a natural at it?”

I laughed a little. “Well, I mostly play classical music, so I'm not sure that helps me dance to jazz. But I guess it could.”

“Well, there's only one way to find out,” Golden Harvest said. “You should dance with me next!” There was something cute about her enthusiasm, and she wasn't bad looking or anything, but I really just wanted to spend a little time talking to Cheerilee. Still, I wasn't about to let myself look snobbish.

“Ok,” I said, trying not to sound indifferent. “Want to wait until they play another fast one?” They had started a slow song after my dance with Berry Punch.

“We'll just dance to whatever they play after this one,” she said, taking a drink of her beer. “It'll be a surprise!”

Berry Punch made it back to the table with another pint. Judging by the glasses on the table, she had been drinking harder stuff before.

“This mare's one hay of a dancer,” Berry said to Cheerilee as she sat back down. “You should see for yourself.”

I shot a look at Cheerilee to see how she reacted. She looked a little embarrassed, but in the way that usually meant she wasn't against the idea.

“Might as well,” I said. “It'd be a shame if I didn't dance with all of you before the night's over.”

Before Cheerilee got a chance to respond, the band went into their next song. It was a mid-tempo number, and Golden Harvest instantly grabbed my hoof.

“Well, it's my turn now,” she said. She was a little tipsy, but I got the impression this wasn't too far off from her normal behavior. Since the song was slower, I danced closer with Golden Harvest than I had with Berry Punch. Of course she let me lead, and she was good enough, but nowhere near Berry's league. But it was pretty clear that she really wanted to talk, anyway.

“Ok, Octavia, you have to get Cheerilee to dance after this.”

I laughed. “Well, thatwas kind of my plan,”

“No, really!” she said, like I was arguing with her. “Part of why Berry and I wanted Cheerilee to come with us on this trip is that she's too wrapped up in her job to ever date anypony.”

“Well, you all live in Ponyville,” I said. “That may be a little far away for a steady relationship.”

“I know that,” Golden Harvest said, with a bit of a pout. “But while you were dancing with Berry Punch, Cheerilee was talking like she was interested in you, and that's more than I've heard her say about anypony in ages.”

To be honest, the whole situation was starting to get a little less appealing to me. I wasn't too excited about the prospect of being anypony's therapy, especially not when that was basically what I was looking for at the moment myself. But I had been having fun up to that point, and, well, Mrs. Orange had got me thinking about what it might be like to be with an older pony. Cheerilee wasn't that much older than me, but I got the impression she was a lot more mature than the ponies I had been around for the past year in Canterlot--even most of the professors. Knowing what happened later, I should have walked away right then, but instead I decided to stick around.

The song ended, and this time I stopped off at the bar for another scotch and soda on the way back to my seat. I knew Sapphire Shores would be coming out to do her set soon, and once she did, it would be nearly impossible to get any more drinks. While I was there, I grabbed another pint for Cheerilee, too. I had only had two drinks, but I had been drinking so little in Canterlot that it was hitting me pretty hard. That's probably another reason that I didn't have the good sense to leave when the idea first occurred to me.

Cheerilee looked a little embarrassed when I brought her a drink, but she did start opening up more after that. She started grilling me a little, and I told her, more or less truthfully, about who I was and what I did. Of course I skipped the part about being on the verge of dropping out of Canterlot, but I had a pretty good idea I'd never see her again after that night anyway. There was no reason to be completely honest.

Finally, Sapphire Shores came out to do her thing, and Golden Harvest got all excited, and was taking it out on Berry Punch, who by that time looked legitimately too far gone not to get pretty worked up herself. Apparently in the time I had been away from Manehatten, Sapphire had gotten quite a bit more famous, and was starting to do more shows in other cities. Cheerliee told me that, but the way she said it, I got the impression Golden Harvest was the only one who really cared, and had passed the information on to her. Still, the topic gave me an opening.

“Well, don't you want to be able to say you danced at a Sapphire Shores concert before she was the biggest star in Equestria?” I asked, putting my hoof on Cheerilee's. I can never do that kind of thing if I'm not at least a little drunk. Really, that's why I don't drink more often. I couldn't stand myself acting that smarmy all the time.

“Just don't laugh at how bad I am, ok?”

“Don't worry,” I said, still being terribly smooth. “With this many ponies out there, we'll basically have to slow dance anyway.” It wasn't just an excuse to be closer to her while we danced, either. I had only been to Club Merveilleux a few times, and this was at least twice as full as I had ever seen it. It wasn't a huge place to begin with.

Cheerilee started off pretty timid, and for the first few seconds, I thought the whole situation was going to turn into a disaster. She was so stiff and unresponsive when I tried to lead that I was longing to have even Golden Harvest back to dance with. But pretty soon, I could tell she was starting to relax and get into it. With all the body heat in the room and the alcohol in our systems, all of a sudden it didn't matter whether she could dance or not. All you could do was just let go and enjoy the moment.

When the first song ended, Cheerilee brushed up against me a little and laughed. “It's been so long since I've done anything like this,” she said. “I'm always too busy with work to really have any fun!”

“I know the feeling,” I said. “It's the same way for me at college.” I didn't bother telling her that most of the time my idea of fun when I wasn't working on music for school was either to listen to more music or play whatever I wanted for a change.

Sapphire had been talking between songs, but I hadn't noticed anything she said. From what I could remember from the times I had seen her before, it was the typical stuff pop singers say to try and connect with the audience, which of course is just a bunch of meaningless yammering. Just about the time I noticed she had been talking, the band started another fast one.

“Want to keep going?” Cheerilee asked.

“Sure,” I said.

All of the reluctance she had shown when we started dancing was long gone for the second song. Even after she got over her shyness, Cheerilee wasn't much of a dancer. She was really just kind of throwing herself around to the music, and when she bumped into me it was hard to tell if she was doing it to show she was open to physical contact, or if she just wasn't watching where she was going. But by the time Sapphire's band segued into a slow number, I took a chance on pulling her in close to me and just going with the flow.

“It's been a really long time since I've danced with anypony like this,” Cheerilee said, not making eye contact.

“If you'd rather not--”

“No,” she said, “I want to.”

When the slow song ended, she laughed nervously. “I guess we should probably go see what Berry and Golden are up to.”

We actually found the two of them near the back of the dance floor. Golden Harvest was still completely enraptured by Sapphire Shores, and Berry was happily dancing with a stallion who looked like he had no idea how he had ended up in that predicament. Cheerilee said something to Golden Harvest, who nodded at her knowingly, then came back to my side.

“You know, we could go somewhere quieter if you wanted to,” she said.

“Will your friends be all right by themselves?”

“Golden Harvest isn't going to leave until the show's over, and Berry can handle herself even when she's had this much to drink. We're all staying in the same hotel, so we have a place to meet up later.”

We grabbed our things from the table and headed back out to the street. It was freezing cold by that time, and Cheerilee walked close to me to keep warm.

“So do you live near here?” she asked.

“No, my parents live farther uptown, but I haven't told them I'm back in town yet. I just wanted to come home a couple of days early and see some friends before I have to get involved in any family stuff. I'm staying in a hotel, actually.”

Cheerilee kind of smiled at me when I said that, and I decided to take the hint.

“So, if you want, we could just go back there.”

“That sounds lovely,” she said, and rubbed up against me again. If you had been there, you'd understand why I let things get that far that fast.

Chapter 6

When you're drinking in a bar, especially one filled with body heat from a bunch of dancing ponies, it's easy to find that nice, euphoric kind of drunkenness. You know, the kind where everypony's pretty, the drinks taste sweeter, and the band is the best you've ever heard. That all ends once you walk out into a bitterly cold Manehatten night. By the time Cheerilee and I made it back to the Brandenburger, I was still drunk, but the euphoria was gone. I was dizzy and starting to feel sleepy, and all of a sudden I had Vinyl Scratch on the brain again.

We went up to my room anyway, though, and I could tell Cheerilee was still in the same mood we had been in when we left the bar. She excused herself to go “freshen up” in the bathroom, and that at least got me to smile because I'd never heard anypony say it in real life.

While I waited on her to get back, I took off my scarf and stretched out on the bed. I honestly wasn't trying to look seductive or anything. Actually, I was a little worried that I was going to fall asleep before Cheerilee got back. It didn't take her long, though, and of course when she did she took me being on the bed as an invitation. It's funny, I've never been that forward with anypony before, and when I finally was, it was by accident.

Cheerilee giggled a little as we looked at each other. “I can't believe it's me here and not Golden Harvest,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Oh, I'm just used to her being the one who gets all the attention.”

“Well, she's pretty and all, but I could tell I'd have more to talk to you about.”

She leaned in and gave me a little peck on the mouth. “You could tell that just by looking at me?”

“Sure. When I first saw the three of you at that table, you looked like you were just taking everything in and enjoying yourself. Golden Harvest looked like she was looking all over the place for the rich and famous ponies. I could tell you'd be able to hold up your end of a conversation, but she would've been too distracted.”

She had kind of started stroking my hoof while I was talking, and I got the impression that she was ready for me to stop. So I leaned over and started kissing her a little. She responded and all of a sudden we were pressed tight up against each other, and that's when everything went wrong.

I was a little dizzy from the drinks, and when I closed my eyes, the room started spinning a little. And I don't know why, but that took me back to the place my brain had really been wanting me to go since we got back to the hotel. It was last summer, at my parents' apartment in Manehatten. A new family had just moved in across the hall, and my mother was all worked up because one of them had a tendency to play music really loud late at night. I admit, I wasn't wild about it, either, but there really wasn't anything I could do, and anyway I was sure they weren't too happy about me practicing my cello in the mornings. It's not exactly a quiet instrument or anything.

One day, though, the music started up again, and my mother went into her usual spiel about them being so rude and not respecting the fact that other ponies live there and don't want to listen to their damned music and all that. So finally, just because I didn't really want to listen to either noise at the moment, I went across the hall and knocked on their door. I had to knock for about twenty minutes, but finally the door opened. I was expecting to see somepony older, but instead it was this white unicorn who was about my age. She had these big magenta eyes and a kind of spiky blue mane, and I was so caught off-guard by seeing her and not another boring rich kid that I think I probably looked like a hydra had opened the door instead.

Anyway, I asked if she could please turn it down a little, and at first she seemed kind of irritated. But she agreed to after I told her I didn't so much give a damn, but I couldn't stand to listen to my mother go crazy about it anymore. That made her laugh, and we introduced ourselves. When she saw my cutie mark, she struck up a conversation about music. After that, we started talking pretty regularly, and even hanging out a little. There was something about her I really liked, something I couldn't put my hoof on. She never seemed to worry about anything—not the future, or other ponies, or any of the stuff I was always getting distracted by. She was always smiling, this big, goofy smile that looked even more out of place when she was wearing her huge, purple sunglasses that covered most of her face.

We spent most of that summer together, to the point that was I was even neglecting Symphony. We never talked about dating or even anything romantic for that matter, but sometimes when we went to hear a band or see a movie or something, we'd kind of hold hooves or even snuggle up to each other a little. I don't know why we didn't ever talk about what we were doing. It just seemed like the right thing to do, like everything was perfect just as it was and if either of us said anything, it would all fall apart.

A couple of weeks before I had to leave for school again, though, that's exactly what happened. Sometimes after dinner, I would go up to the roof to drink coffee and watch the sunset. Vinyl and I hung out up there at night sometimes, but I wasn't sure if she knew about me going up by myself. Still, one night when I went up after dinner, she was already there. I didn't realize anything was wrong, so I went and tried to talk to her. She was wearing her sunglasses, but I immediately saw that there were tears running down her cheeks. I asked what was going on, and she told me not to worry about it, but when she said that, I could tell it was getting worse. Seeing her like that, it was like I'd been bucked right in the chest. Everything was wrong, and all I could think of was how to make it right again. Before I even knew what I was doing, I was kissing her all over her face, everywhere but on the lips. She let me, for a minute, even if she didn't try to reciprocate. Then without saying anything else, she turned and ran back inside. It was the last time I saw her, and the last time that I had kissed anypony.

And when Cheerilee and I were laying there making out, it was the only thing I could think of. All at once, I felt more lonely than I ever have before, so much so that I was sick to my stomach. I was even starting to feel like I couldn't breathe, so I pulled away for a second.

Cheerilee immediately caught on. “What's wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I barely managed to stammer out. Boy had I ever killed the mood. Of course I wanted to, just maybe not so obviously. “I just couldn't breathe there for a second.”

The way she looked at me, I could tell she knew I was lying. I should've known I wouldn't be able to lie to an elementary school teacher, of all ponies.

“It's not just that, is it?” she asked. “I've seen that look before.”

“What look?”

“The look that says you were thinking of somepony else, and now you're regretting bringing me back here. I wish I could say it was the first time I've seen it.”

We were both sitting up, and all of a sudden the bed seemed about seventeen miles wide. The worst part was, I was still so preoccupied that I was hardly even hearing what she was saying.

“So, do you want to pour your heart about about it, or should I just go?”

“I'm really sorry, Cheerilee.”

“Don't be,” she said, getting up and walking toward the door. “I've been there, too. But I'm no more interested in being your solution than you are in having the problem solved.”

I was about to offer to pay for a taxi so she didn't have to walk all the way back to her hotel, but she was out the door before I could say anything else. After she was gone, I laid on the bed for a long time, but I wasn't feeling like I could get any sleep. Now I had to get my mind off of both Vinyl and what an idiot I had just been with Cheerilee. At first I got up and just paced around the room a little, looking out the window whenever I would pass by it. Eventually, though, I decided to go take a bath and see if that would finally relax me.

There was an electrical outlet in the bathroom, so while the tub was filling up, I hooked up my record player and finally started listening to the record I had been trying to play earlier when Twilight Sparkle interrupted me. At first, even after I got into the hot water and felt my muscles start to relax, I wasn't getting a whole lot out of it. But as I lay there feeling the alcohol sweat out of me and letting the embarrassment become a little less intense, I finally started to understand why Symphony had been so excited for me to listen to it.

Like I said before, nopony considered the Trottingham Philharmonic to be the greatest orchestra in Equestria. But the early Equestrian music that they were playing on that record was perfectly suited to them. It wasn't full of the kind of baroque counterpoint that became popular in the classical period. Instead, it was straightforward and almost dirge-like. But there was a delicacy and a tenderness to the melodies that I don't think the more prestigious Equestrian orchestras would have been able to capture. As good as an orchestra like the Canterlot Philharmonic or the Baltimare Symphony Orchestra is at the big, grandiose classical arrangements, they tend to sound a little mechanical when it comes to the more personal stuff. For whatever reason, though, the Trottingham Philharmonic was spot on during those parts.

I couldn't help smiling as I thought of Symphony listening to it for the first time. Her appreciation of music had always been different from mine. I could like something--and I mean, really like it--but nopony would know because I didn't get outwardly excited about it. Symphony, on the other hand, would make sure you knew. She wasn't the type to evangelize or anything--she wouldn't drive you crazy trying to get you to like what she liked. But she certainly didn't try to hide when she was impressed by something. It wasn't just that she would talk your ear off about it, or try to explain to you what some important critic had written about it. No, she would feel what the composer wanted her audience to feel, and more importantly, she would show that she felt it. If a piece was sad, she'd start to look like she was almost in pain the longer she listened to it. If it was happy, she'd smile and maybe close her eyes and kind of nod along to the rhythm. Of course that meant that, in our circles, nopony ever took her that seriously. Almost everypony who likes classical music and fine art and all that thinks that you have to be terribly serious and academic about it all the time, as if the ponies who made the art and music that we're all so serious about appreciating never so much as cracked a smile. Which you know is completely untrue if you've read anything about the lives of the great classical composers, but most of us pretend that we don't know any better, because we think it makes us look smarter, I guess. But really, when I thought about Symphony, I always thought of her as being smarter than all the ponies who were very careful never to show if art actually affected them emotionally.

Eventually the first side of the record ended, and I had to get out of the bath to turn it over. At first I planned to get back in afterward, but once I was out, I just wanted to curl up and keep listening while I fell asleep. Symphony was always right. It never ceased to amaze me.

Chapter 7

I must have eventually fallen asleep listening to that record, because the next thing I knew I was waking up to sunlight coming in through the window of my hotel room. I was completely starving, even though I had eaten so much the night before with Minuette and Twilight. When I looked out the window, I saw that it was that kind of weather where the sky is completely blanketed in clouds, but they're so white that they actually amplify the sunlight coming through from behind them. The snow that was falling in Canterlot the night before was also starting to catch up to me. So far it was just a light, sparkling dust in the air, but I knew it could get worse at any time.

Since Canterlot is so close to Cloudsdale, the weather there is almost completely controlled by the pegasi. Manehatten, though, had always been more of an Earth pony city, and the ponies living there had always kind of prided themselves on not accepting assistance unless it was a matter of life and death. Without a big force of pegasi to clear the clouds, a light dusting of snow like the one that had started overnight could develop into a full-blown blizzard within hours. I decided to do what I needed to do early in the day, just in case things did get worse.

After I wrapped up in my scarf again, I headed downstairs. The hotel lobby looked even worse during the day than it had at night, but I didn't stick around long. I checked to see whether Symphony or Star Gazer had responded to the messages I had sent them. There was nothing from Symphony yet, but Star had already gotten back to me, saying we should meet for lunch and a movie that afternoon. I was a little surprised by how happy I was to hear from him, but I chalked it up to how desperate I was just to see a friendly, familiar face again.

After that, I went out to try to find some breakfast. I've never liked eating near train stations. On one hoof, you have the ponies who are about to set out on a long trip, who look about as excited as you'd expect for having to be cooped up on a train for hours. On the other, you have the ones who just arrived and are tired and surly. It's about as much fun as eating at a wake. So instead of going to one of the places near the Brandenburger, I took a taxi to the neighborhood with the record store where Symphony and I used to spend all our money. I remembered there being a little diner nearby, and hoped it would still be open.

Fortunately, it was. I got a seat at the counter and ordered some buckwheat pancakes and coffee. I had been in Canterlot so long that I was a little surprised by how curt the waitress was with me, but it also helped remind me of the fact that I was back home. In Canterlot, ponies in the service industry treat you like royalty even if you're a bum. In Manehatten, they treat you like a bum even if you're royalty. If you grew up here, you appreciate how refreshing that is.

While I was eating, my thoughts started getting a little out of control. I kept thinking about what a mess I'd made of things with Cheerilee the night before, but I felt more embarrassed than sorry, which worried me a little. I tried to force myself to work out what I wanted to tell Symphony when I finally saw her, about how bad things were going at Canterlot, and why I thought they were going that way. The problem was, I didn't have any idea how to answer that question. I was thinking back to talking with First Order the day before, how he said that I was smart enough to do well in any class and all that. At the time, I hadn't really thought that he was wrong about that. I've never felt like I wasn't smart, and whether it was right or not, I definitely took some PRIDE in being smarter than a lot of ponies. But even a lot of the ponies I knew I was smarter than did way better in school than me. It's all a means to an end for them. I've always loved learning, pretty much for its own sake, it's just the stupid social hierarchy of school that I can't stand.

By the time I finished breakfast, I was so confused and frustrated that I decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood before I went back to the hotel to get ready to meet Star. Since most of the local elementary schools and high schools had already started their breaks, I expected to see a lot of ponies around, but really it was almost deserted. The dusting of snow from earlier was starting to turn into bigger flakes, and the sky was getting darker. All at once, I got so lonely I could barely stand it, and started to imagine the snow getting heavier and heavier until everything was swallowed up in white and I was the only one left. That scared me enough that I decided I needed to get back inside, and so I headed for the only place I could think of, my old record store.

Fortunately the store was still there, and at least on the outside still looked exactly the same. The rickety old wooden door hadn't been replaced; it still squeaked the same as always when I opened it, and still rang the same pointless little bell that the oblivious stallion behind the counter ignored because he was too busy reading. The walls were still lined with the same worn old shelves that looked like they had been passed down from business to business, that you couldn't imagine ever having been new. Some things had changed, of course. There were more pop records on the shelves than there had been the last time I came, and the stallion at the counter was different, younger, even though he was just as unconcerned with acknowledging customers as the one I remembered from before. The room was drafty, but the low light, the cramped space, and the soft music playing all made it feel warm and inviting.

There was only one other pony in the store besides the clerk, an older stallion who was digging through the jazz section and looked completely lost to the world. I went right to the classical racks and started flipping through records, not really paying attention to any of them. More than anything, I just wanted to be somewhere familiar, and not completely alone. After a couple of minutes of browsing without actually looking at anything, I had started to calm down, and decided I should buy something for Symphony, for when I finally saw her again. School had kept me from finding time to discover a whole lot of new music, and it took me a little while to even get an idea of where to start looking. Finally, I remembered this band that some of the students in the music department had really gotten into, called National Hunt. I wasn't too sure about them, personally. They were definitely virtuoso players, but the way they combined Equestrian folk music with classical composition had struck me as a little contrived when I first heard them. Still, I was interested in getting Symphony's reaction to them, because like I've already said a hundred times, I always trust her taste. If she saw something in them, I'd probably get it if I just thought about it a little more. And at any rate, they were based in Canterlot, so if nothing else I could pass off the record as an attempt at sharing some of the local flavor with her.

It took a little digging—the shop had never been very organized—but I finally found what appeared to be the only National Hunt record that they had. I looked around a little bit more, hoping the nostalgia would put me in a little better mood, but after ten minutes or so, I realized that it had done all the good it was going to do, so I took the record up to the counter to pay. The stallion there laid his book down, and shook his shaggy mane out of his eyes, then looked down at what I was buying.

“National Hunt,” he said. He had one of those very bored voices where you can never tell if a pony is just making an observation or judging you. “Not a lot of ponies around here know about them.”

“Oh, I just got back from school in Canterlot,” I said. “They're really popular there, at least with music students.”

He laughed at that, or more accurately, snorted. Like most hipsters, he sounded like laughing really put him out. “I wish we had their second album here. They've already gotten a lot more adventurous since they released this one.”

“I'll have to listen to it,” I said. I really didn't want to get into a conversation with him about it, since I could tell he knew more about them than I did. “I'm mostly buying this one for a friend.”

“She should like it,” he said, approvingly. “That'll be twelve bits.”

I paid, and got out of the store as fast as I could. The snow had let up a little, but the sky was even darker than it had been before, and everything was that sludgy kind of wet that happens when it starts snowing really quickly, before the ground is cold enough for it to stick properly. It was getting close to noon by then, so I headed back to the hotel to get ready for my date with Star Gazer. I was still looking forward to it, even if the day hadn't gotten off to the best start. As I was walking, though, something happened that really cheered me up. As I got closer to the train station, I was walking behind this unicorn filly and what I assumed was her older sister. The filly was lagging behind a little, kind of hopping on and off the sidewalk as she went, and the sister wasn't really paying any attention. As she went back and forth between the sidewalk and the street, not paying any attention to the fact that she was causing ponies to practically fall on their faces trying to keep her from running into them, she kept singing that song “If a pony catch a pony coming through the rye.” She was in her own little world, and her sister couldn't care less if she caused somepony to fall and break all their legs, and somehow it was such a perfect little scene that I couldn't help but feel better watching it.

Eventually I made it back to the hotel, even though the train was getting pretty packed since it was Saturday afternoon and everypony was going somewhere. Even though I had taken a long bath the night before, I hadn't really done anything but lay in the hot water, so I got in the tub again and actually washed up this time. I had just enough time to get my mane and tail dry before I had to head back out to meet Star. He wanted to go to this little hole-in-the-wall place that all his friends at school were head over hooves about, that mostly served simple stuff like sandwiches and hay fries, but did it in a very frou-frou gourmet kind of way. Just the kind of thing he would be into, but I didn't mind too much, since I had drank enough the night before that even after a big breakfast, something greasy and unhealthy sounded like just what I needed.

When I got there, Star hadn't shown up yet, so I just kind of hung around outside waiting for him. The place was small and completely packed with tables, so there wasn't any good place to wait inside. Fortunately, he was along pretty quickly. I was glad to see that, at least outwardly, he hadn't changed much. He had started wearing his mane slicked back into kind of a pompadour, which was new, but other than that, he was the same old Star Gazer, tall and kind of round-faced, but still attractive in a boyish way.

“Octavia!” he said when he saw me, and I could tell from the sound of his voice he was genuinely happy to see me. That was the odd thing about Star. If he didn't like you, he could be quite the snob, but when he did, he was really nice. “Sorry to keep you waiting. My parents wanted me to help put up Hearth's Warming decorations this morning, and you know how my mother is. Nothing can ever be perfect enough.”

There's never been a greater understatement. Star Gazer's mother is one of those rich old mares who never worked a day in her life, and instead put all her energy into nitpicking everything her children do. It was a wonder Star wasn't a total basket case, growing up under her hoof the way he did. I couldn't even start to imagine how miserable she would make it on everypony else in the family, decorating the house for Hearth's Warming. She certainly wouldn't have been getting involved in any way other than issuing orders.

“I told mom and dad that you were in town,” he said. “They'd love for you to come over and help with the rest of the decorating, if you're free today.” His parents—or at least his father—had always liked me pretty well. I think they were more upset than Star was when we broke up. It didn't sound terrible seeing them all again, to be honest, but I had a feeling I wouldn't be able to deal with his mother for too long, so I made up an excuse.

“I'm not sure yet. I sent a message to Symphony last night, but haven't heard back from her yet. I think maybe we're getting together tonight.” I shouldn't have lied, but I didn't want to start the afternoon off by alienating the first friend I'd seen since I got back to town.

We went on into the restaurant and only had to wait a few minutes for a table. We spent some time just gossiping about ponies that we went to high school with, and as usual Star made me feel comfortable enough that I just spilled everything to him, about my bad grades, what happened with Amethyst and Vinyl, even my stupid talk with First Order. I would've even told him about Cheerilee, if he hadn't kind of tried to steer the conversation to a happier place after I made it obvious that things weren't going well. Poor Star, he never did have a clue how to deal with me when I get all morose. It's a big part of why we split up, if you want to know the truth.

After lunch, we headed over to the theater. Now I'm not much of a fan of movies under the best of circumstances. It's not that I'm one of those technophobic ponies who hates every new thing that relies on electricity in some way. Really, it's less the movies that I dislike than the actors in them. But I do think that actors are even worse in movies than they are on stage. At least on stage, an actor has a good reason to ham it up. She has to make sure the entire audience can hear her and knows what the hell she's doing. In movies, that's not necessary, but the actors everypony thinks are the best still do it anyway. Everypony says those actors are so great at provoking emotion and all that, which is crazy if you ask me. If you have to see some actor getting all worked up to feel emotions, you don't need to be going to the movies—you need to be going to a psychitrist.

Star, being Star, was a huge movie fan. He saw it as very cutting edge to be a movie buff since a lot of really academic art critics still thought of movies as very commercial and unintelligent. I had suggested he get the tickets since I had no idea what was worth watching; or, more accurately, what he wouldn't spend the entire time picking apart for not being cool enough. He had picked the new movie by a director called Western Sun that apparently all the movie fans were losing their minds over. Star had to tell me all about him on the way to the theater. He was an Earth pony from Appleoosa who had only made one movie before the one we were seeing, which had made this actress named Sky Rocket into a huge star overnight or something. His new movie had Sky Rocket in it again, and this time she had written it with him. None of that really filled me with hope, but I could tell Star was all worked up about it, so I tried not to bring him down.

When we got to the theater it was completely packed, and if Star hadn't already bought tickets, I would have suggested that we just skip it and do something else instead. I can hardly stand going to movies in the first place, but going when the theater is packed and everypony is shuffling around or eating too loudly or asking their friends to explain what the hell just happened is nearly unbearable. I stuck it out though, and tried to just keep looking happy about everything. I think Star knew better, but as usual he was too polite to say anything.

The movie was so bad you wouldn't believe it. It starred Sky Rocket as this very quirky, confused high school student, even though she was obviously old enough to be out of college. This very smart, quirky older stallion came to teach at her high school, and of course she fell head over hooves in love with him because she was so quirky and precocious, but so mature that the other ponies her age were just too dumb and boring for her. Of course the stallion immediately fell for this rich older mare who he met at an art gallery or something—to be honest, I was only half paying attention. Anyway, Sky Rocket's character and the older mare kind of fight over the quirky teacher in very contrived, quirky ways until it looks like Sky's wrecked everything for all of them. But of course everything all works out in the end with the teacher and old mare getting together, and Sky finding a nice, quirky boy her own age who I guess was so unbelievably quirky that even she hadn't noticed him. Everything about it was contrived and unrealistic, but the worst part was the jokes. As nearly as I could tell, all the humor was just based on the characters making references to books or ponies you'd need a college education to know about. But there weren't really jokes—they would just mention a name or a book or whatever, and everypony in the audience would laugh. It was the phoniest thing you've ever seen in your life.

When the movie was finally over, I wanted to get away from the theater as fast as possible, so of course Star had to run into a mare he knew from school, named Pretty Vision. He introduced us quickly, and Star told me she was studying fashion design, which given the way she was dressed didn't surprise me at all. They immediately launched into a conversation about the movie that was so pretentious that I almost just walked away from them. Pretty Vision said that “of course” the movie wasn't as good as Western Sun's first, but that Sky Rocket was “angelic.” Angelic, for Celestia's sake. They went back and forth like that for about a ten hours, always getting louder every time one of them would make what they thought was some brilliant critical observation about the movie. The whole time, I stood there not saying anything (I couldn't have gotten a word in even if I'd felt like it), and trying to look interested. Really, I was embarrassed for all three of us.

Finally, Star and Pretty's symposium came to an end, long after everypony else had gotten on with their lives. Star said he didn't have anything else to do before dinner, and asked if I wanted to stop off at this little bar he'd heard about and have a drink.

“Are you sure you don't want to catch up to Pretty Vision and invite her, too?” I asked.

“Oh, come on, Octavia,” he said, and I could immediately tell I'd offended him. “Haven't you gotten over that yet?”

“Gotten over what?” I knew damn well what he meant, but I wanted to get him back a little for making me listen to their stupid improvisational film criticism.

“Everypony is guilty until proven innocent with you. Pretty Vision is perfectly nice, if you'd bother to get to know her before condemning her.”

He was right, in a way. Not about Pretty Vision, necessarily—she might be perfectly nice, but she came off as a pretentious idiot. But ponies in general. I really do make it quite hard for anypony to get on my good side, but that's because even when they do, they end up dating my next door neighbor who I have a crush on or something.

“Come on, let's just forget about it and go get that drink,” I said. All of a sudden, I didn't feel like having even a playful argument with him. The bar was a little bit out of our way, so we took a taxi, and on the way I started doing something I almost never do, namely putting on a little bit of a coquette act. In fact, it was something I've only ever done around Star, though I don't think he knew that. Even though he knows me too well to think that that's what I'm really like (underneath my harsh exterior and all), he always kind of went for it. It made me mad that he liked it, if you want to know the truth, but I always played it up anyway. Maybe I was just lonely enough that I didn't care, or maybe there was part of me that secretly liked playing that role. Regardless, Star wasn't responding to it. I'm sure he was still upset that I had burst his Serious Film Critic balloon before. At least by the time we got to the bar he was starting to cheer up a little.

“Twilight Sky told me about this place,” Star said as we were getting out of the taxi. “He read about it in the Neighborhood Nicker, but he hasn't actually been here yet.” That explained it—Star didn't really care as much about getting a drink as he did about being able to tell everypony he discovered some trendy new hangout before they were all going there. By that time I didn't care, though. I was over being mad at all the pompous asses at the movies and just wanted to relax and talk to an old friend over a couple of drinks. Of course that didn't stop me from buying a pint of beer to offset the martini Star ordered.

“So you were saying earlier that you didn't plan on going back to Canterlot in the Spring,” Star said when we were sitting down. “Are you just planning on moving back here?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I guess so. I mean, I like it so much more here, and I need to stay in college if I want to have a hope in hell of ever playing music professionally. But I'm just so tired of the whole stupid academic lifestyle. I'm sick of vapid roommates and math teachers with stupid messed up hair who make a huge scene when you knock on their doors, and never being able to find a place to yourself where you can just listen to a record and relax for a little while. I want the education, I just don't want to jump through all the meaningless, petty social hoops to get it.”

“I just wish you could realize that you bring a lot of this on yourself, Octavia,” he said, with this sage as hell look on his face. It would have made me furious if he weren't right about what he said next. “It's like I was saying about Pretty Vision earlier. The minute you see somepony for the first time, you've already decided how you're going to feel about them for the rest of your life. At best, they get to say one sentence before you either fall madly in love with them them or condemn them. All you've really wanted to talk about today is how much you hate your roommate or your math teacher or the ponies at the movie theater. You're one of the smartest ponies I know, but you're so focused on music and the one or two ponies you actually do like that the best anything or anypony else can hope for from you is just polite tolerance of their existence. I seriously wonder sometimes if you've ever just enjoyed anything in your life, without making it one of the cornerstones of your existence for Celestia's sake.”

I should have been angry, but he was right. He really was. I had gulped down most of my beer pretty quickly, and even though I wasn't drunk, I was feeling weirdly energetic all of a sudden. “Look, I know you're right. I know it. Everything would be better for me if I could just deal with all the stupidity I have to deal with every day, instead of letting it eat at me the way I do. I know that. And by the way, you're wrong about there only being one or two ponies I like. I like Vinyl. I like Symphony. There was this unicorn at Canterlot named Minuette who was great to hang out with. And I like you. That's at least four, and—“

“You could've fooled me,” Star cut in.

“What?”

“You could've fooled me. About liking me, I mean. Every time we're together, you bounce back and forth between picking fights with me and getting all meek and doe-eyed.” That killed me. He had never had a problem with me being “meek and doe-eyed” before. “Half the reason I've never gotten completely fed up with it is that I'm still trying to understand why in hell you want to be around me.”

“Because you're practically the smartest pony I know, and hanging around with you has always been easy,” I said. I wasn't in the mood for any more games at that point. “And to be honest, you're the only stallion I've ever thought was really good looking. That doesn't hurt.”

“But you don't act like you think I'm smart. You never have. Don't get me wrong, I'm not desperate for your approval or anything, but it would be nice every now and then, given our history together, to feel like you don't think I'm a complete idiot.” I had no idea where he was getting that from. Honestly, I think he was still just upset that I didn't fawn over his ability to speak glowingly about bad, unrealistic movies with horribly contrived plots.

“I don't know how else to show it except spending time around you. Trust me, I don't go out of my way to hang around with ponies I think are idiots. If I did, I'd never have another free night for the rest of my life.”

He was quiet for a while after that, sipping his martini and looking around at the art on the walls, which I have to say wasn't that bad. It was better than anything you saw on the walls of trendy bars in Canterlot, that's for sure. I wasn't done yet, though.

“What I really want to do is just get away from everything for a while. Before I go back and finish school somewhere, I mean. Somewhere quiet, away from big cities and trendiness and pretentious phonies and everything. I just want to go live in a cabin somewhere for maybe a year or so, and play my cello and listen to records and read books and do all the things I never have time to do because I'm too busy having to do all the stupid things I have to do to make sure I don't get kicked out of a school I never really wanted to go to in the first place!”

“Octavia, take a breath.”

I stopped just long enough to swallow the last of my beer, and set the glass down a little too hard. “Don't you think that sounds good, though? Just run away for a little while, take some time to appreciate things before we have the spend the rest of our lives working and only getting to have fun when there's not something more important to do?”

“Wait, are you trying to drag me into this now?”

“Sure, why not? We could leave right after all the Hearth's Warming celebrations—just get on a train and go somewhere like Hollow Shades, or even Ponyville. We could probably afford that for a year, between the two of us.”

Star laughed, and the sound was the first genuine thing I'd heard from him all day. “Not after my parents cut me off,” he said. “Which they would do in a second if I did anything that crazy.”

“But it's not crazy at all!” I was getting really worked up all of a sudden, I had to admit. “There's nothing crazy about going after something you want.”

“What you're talking about isn't going after something you want. It's the exact opposite. You're running away from doing the things that you have to do to get what you want. You said as much yourself. The longer it takes you to finish school, the longer it will be before you can actually play in an orchestra.”

For some reason, that completely knocked the last of the enthusiasm out of me. It wasn't so much that I really wanted Star to go with me or anything. When I was saying it, it sounded pretty good, but the whole idea had come out of nowhere, and I had sort of included him in it without even realizing that I was. But once he shut it down so completely, I realized how horrible it would have been if he had come with me.

“I should've known you wouldn't understand,” I said, standing up before I even realized what I was doing. “You're way too good at all the meaningless crap to ever want to give it up.”

Star was saying something as I stormed out, but I don't even know what it was. I actually wanted to stick around to argue with him, but I mostly wanted to be out of the bar before he saw how hard I was crying.

Chapter 8

Walking and taking the train both sounded like more trouble than I wanted to go to to get back to my hotel right then, but I didn't want to get a taxi, either, because I didn't want any drivers seeing what a mess I was. I decided to walk until I got myself together enough to deal with an easier form of transportation. The streets were a lot more crowded than they had been earlier, of course, because it's impossible to have a breakdown without a crowd showing up to spectate.

It took me a couple of blocks to realize how much harder the snow was coming down than it had been earlier. The flakes were big and wet, and if you looked up at just the right angle, it looked like they were coming down in a big spiral. The feeling I had outside the record store earlier came back, the feeling that I was just going to fade into the snow and never be seen or hard from again. I kept having to look down at my hooves to make sure they were actually on the sidewalk. Eventually I had myself so scared that I ducked into a train station just to calm down.

Since I was there anyway, I bought a ticket and took the train back to my hotel. By the time I got there, I had managed to get myself back together enough that I wasn't embarrassed to go to the front desk to see whether Symphony had responded to the message I sent the night before. She had, and as I read it, I had to fight to keep myself from bawling right there in the lobby. I have no idea why.

“Octavia! I can't wait to see you again! I'm also busy with family stuff on Saturday, so let's get together Sunday. Meet me at the ice skating rink around 1:00, and we'll go from there.”

Symphony had always been crazy for ice skating, and every winter we spent a lot of time at the rink in the park near her parents' place. Really, I spent a lot of time watching her and fumbling around just trying to stay upright, but it was always fun. I had half a mind to send her another message right then, trying to get her to ditch her family stuff and meet me there right away, but I didn't want to seem desperate or anything, so I just wrote back that I would be there, and went back up to my room for a bit. Almost as soon as I was there, I started pacing around like I had the night before. I was thinking about Vinyl Scratch again, what she had been doing in Canterlot in the first place, whether she had come back to Manehatten after her date with Amethyst, or if she was staying with friends there. I knew that nothing good was going to come of me obsessing over her more than I already had in the past twenty-four hours, but in a way I still kind of wanted to. At least I had enough common sense left to try not to. The problem was, I couldn't think of anything else to do with the rest of the night. I had ostracized Star Gazer, and I didn't really want to go out to any more bars after the mess I had made of trying to pick up Cheerilee the night before.

All of a sudden, I had this idea, though. I hadn't really wanted to go back to my parents' neighborhood just in case someone they knew saw me and told them about it, but for some reason the park that I used to play in when I was younger had popped back into my head, and I was thinking about spending the rest of the night trying to find it. I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was called, and I didn't even remember exactly where it was, but I figured if I just went back to the neighborhood and wandered around a bit, everything would come back to me. I wasn't even sure why I wanted to go there so badly. My best memories of it were from when I went there in the summer, and it would be completely different with snow and clouds everywhere. But the idea had grabbed hold of me, and I didn't have anything else to do, so I bundled up in my scarf again, grabbed my saddlebags, and headed back down to the lobby.

Before I left, I sent Symphony another short message, just to confirm that the time she suggested worked for me. I even started writing one to Vinyl Scratch, just to see if she was back from Canterlot, but I decided not to, and threw it away at the last minute. I could tell the front desk clerk was irritated that I had wasted the paper, but I went ahead and paid half of the rate for sending a message, and that calmed him down a little.

The train station was getting pretty crowded, since it was around dinner time on a Saturday night, and the snow from earlier in the day had let up a little bit. The car I got into was packed, which had never stopped bothering me despite the fact that I had lived in big cities my entire life. Fortunately, I was stuck near the door, next to these two fillies, which killed me a little. When I was a filly I always wanted to be right next to the door on trains, too. You could tell they were pretty well off, just by how their manes were styled, and they were having this very serious conversation. There's nothing more serious than a conversation between a couple of fillies. One of them was an earth pony and the other was a unicorn, and neither of them had their cutie marks yet. From what I could hear, they were talking about their families' Hearth's Warming plans. The unicorn was going out of town, and I could tell she wasn't too happy about it. The funny thing, though, was that the Earth pony was obviously jealous of her, even though she wasn't going to come out and say it. She kept trying to get the unicorn to say more about what she was going to be doing at her grandparents' house or whatever, even though she clearly didn't want to talk about it.

As we got closer to my stop, the train started to clear out a lot, since more ponies were going downtown than uptown. The two fillies got off at the same stop as me, and I thought about asking them if they knew where the park was. I didn't, though, since they both looked so preoccupied. I was pretty sure that it was north of my parents' place, or at least in the opposite direction of my old elementary school. And I knew it was in a part of town that wasn't completely filled with apartment blocks or skyscrapers, since my main memory of the place was of watching the sunset there. So I started by getting as close to my parents' apartment as I felt comfortable doing, then just heading in the direction I thought was most likely to get me there.

That worked about as well as you would expect. Every time I would see something that felt familiar—a building or a particular intersection or whatever—I would get excited and start walking faster, but then within a block or so, it'd be all wrong again. Even when I went back and tried heading in different directions from the points that felt right, I'd end up somewhere that I didn't remember ever seeing before in my life. It was frustrating and depressing, and even though I hadn't gone that far from my parents' neighborhood, I was starting to feel more and more lost the longer I looked. At one point I was almost certain that I had remembered where the place was, but all I found was one of those sad little concrete playgrounds with a hopscotch board painted on the ground and a couple of those short fences made for fillies and colts to be able to jump over while they're chasing each other around. I sat down on the bench there, even though it was made of metal and felt like sitting on an iceberg. It was just after five o'clock, that last gasp of twilight before it gets completely dark. All of a sudden, I was thinking about everypony back at Canterlot, and what they were doing. I thought about Amethyst again, and how she would know by that time that I wasn't coming back. I had no idea if she would even care, but I started feeling kind of guilty thinking she might have been worried enough to tell somepony at school and had them contact my parents. I had been working up an appetite with all the walking I had been doing, but when I thought about my parents sitting at home worrying about me, all I wanted to do was drink. Fortunately, that was easy enough to do anywhere in Manehatten.

The problem was, I still didn't want to go to a bar, or at least not just any bar. The only place in town that sounded good to me was this hole in the wall called The Lantern Club, which also happened to be the last place I had seen Vinyl Scratch before I screwed everything up by kissing her. Because her whole DJ thing was still so new, she had trouble finding anywhere she could perform in front of an audience that wasn't just her friends. But The Lantern Club was always willing to take a chance on different kinds of entertainment, and they gave Vinyl—or DJ Pon-3, which was the stage name she came up with—her first shot. It had gone over pretty well, and before long they had her performing there regularly. The last time we had talked, before that night on the roof, was over a couple of drinks after she finished a set.

Maybe I wanted to go back to the club because I thought Vinyl might be performing there, but I think I knew that I was still much too close to what happened the night before to have anything like a productive conversation with her. Really, I think I just wanted to go somewhere in town that I had really great memories of. The Lantern Club was the place where I had always felt closest to Vinyl. When I watched her DJ in her bedroom at her parents' place, she was always nervous, and her hooves looked so uncertain when she was crossfading tracks and playing with effects and all that. As soon as she got on stage, though, all that uncertainty vanished. She was so good in front of a crowd—so different from how she was when it was just the two of us. I loved seeing her that way. It was the first time I realized I was completely crazy for her, and not just attracted to her.

The Lantern Club was in the Burrows, the name that had been given to what used to be a wasteland between the mass of businesses downtown and the ritzy apartments uptown. When I was a filly, the neighborhood had no culture at all. That was already changing by the time I finished high school, though, and it had really exploded just after I left for Canterlot. Most of Manehatten changed slowly, if at all, but the Burrows were a big exception. There was a different feeling in that neighborhood. Uptown sparkled in the winter, but it was completely quiet once the sun went down. Downtown was always noisy and dirty, and smelled like liquor and food and debauchery. The Burrows were a different story altogether. It was like watching a pony give birth, so much noise, but also promise and even a kind of innocence.

Even though it was freezing cold out, I decided to walk to the club. For one thing, it was still pretty early, and walking would make it at least a little bit later when I got there. For another, I had suddenly gotten very miserly with the money I had left, even though I wasn't about to run out or anything. It was just that I had started to worry a little about what would happen if my parents really lost it when I told them about my decision to drop out of Canterlot College. If they kicked me out, I was going to need something to live on until I could find a place to stay. Anyway, the cold was good for me. I've never been able to feel too terribly depressed when I get really cold. It's like my body has to devote all of its resources to functioning, so I can't even really think about anything except what's right in front of me. Being hot is so much worse. When you're hot, all you can do is lay there and obsess over the worst things.

It took a little less than an hour to get to the Burrows, and then a few more minutes to find the Lantern Club again. I had only ever gone there with Vinyl, and she seemed completely at home in the Burrows from the minute she set hooves there for the first time. For me, it was a little harder to navigate. Even though I liked the creative spirit of the place, I never felt completely comfortable there. If you didn't know Vinyl came from a wealthy family, you'd never guess it by looking at her. I definitely don't mean that as an insult. She could fit right in with the cool ponies in a way that I had never been able to. I was always too reserved and, I'll admit it, judgmental. Vinyl didn't care. She wanted to have fun, and brought that attitude with her wherever she went.

As I suspected, the Lantern Club was mostly empty when I got there. A couple of scruffy looking stallions were setting up the stage for whoever was going to be performing, and there were a couple of older stallions at the bar. I hate showing up to bars too early, but I was ready to get in out of the cold, and wasn't in any mood to eat again, so I decided I didn't really have a choice. The club was tiny, and there were only about three tables, so I started a tab with a pint of dark beer and sat down at one of them. Some ponies really look down on you for drinking alone, but I've never cared one way or the other. It's just another of those stupid social conventions that everypony thinks is some kind of sacred dogma.

By the time I finished my first pint, the club had put on some music, and the place was starting to fill up a little. I grabbed another, and got back to my table before anypony could steal it. It surprised me a little that the music they were playing was the same kind of stuff Vinyl did as DJ Pon-3. I'll admit, I had always kind of thought that she was off doing her own crazy thing. That was the first time I realized that she was part of something bigger that was happening in Equestrian music. It was a bit of a scary feeling. I watched the way the ponies in the club subconsciously nodded their heads to the beat that was coming out of the speakers as they talked and drank. Of course music clubs had existed in Equestria for decades, but this was different. At places like Club Merveilleux, you drank and socialized, or you danced to the instrumental numbers the band was playing to warm up, which was just another way of socializing. Then when Sapphire Shores came out, that was when you really let yourself get lost in the music. That segregation didn't exist at the Lantern Club—not when they were playing this new kind of dance music that seemed to set the rhythm for everything that was going on inside the club's walls. As different as it was from what went on at Merveilleux, it was completely separated from what happened at the classical concerts I had been to and even played in. It was hard not to feel like what I had given my life to was quickly being swallowed up by something it could never hope to compete with.

By the time I finished my second pint I was starting to feel my body tingle a little, a good sign that I was on the right track. The club was really filling up at that point, and I got started on my third beer, which I decided would be the last before I moved on to the harder stuff. I was feeling warmer and more relaxed by then, and started eyeing the ponies who had come in. Most of them looked more like Vinyl, their manes carefully styled to look like they hadn't even thought about styling them, but there were also a few who looked like the kind of wealthy hipsters Star Gazer hung out with. It was a weird crowd, the kind of crossover between rich and poor that you don't see very often in Equestria. It was hard not to feel like some big change was coming, even if it might mean that what I had spent my whole life working for was about to become obsolete.

My third beer disappeared pretty quickly, so I went back to the bar again, this time for a scotch and soda. You could tell most ponies who came to the club didn't order cocktails, because the bartender was terrible at making even the simplest ones. I couldn't complain too much, though, since he loaded the drink with scotch and skimped on the soda, the complete opposite of what bartenders in the upscale places in Canterlot did. Of course the scotch was cheap here, but it would serve my purposes well enough. When I got back to my table, though, there was a mare standing next to it, almost looking like she was waiting on me. The alcohol was starting to slow down my reaction time, so it took me just long enough to identify her as Pretty Vision that it got the situation off to a nice, awkward start. When all the pieces finally came together, I still wasn't sure I could trust what I was seeing.

“Hi, Octavia,” Pretty said. She was dressed in a different outfit from the one she had been wearing at the theater a few hours earlier, which struck my increasingly addled brain as hilariously funny. Fortunately I still had it together enough that I just smiled at her.

“Pretty Vision, right?” I asked. “I didn't expect to see anypony I knew here. Want to sit down?”

“Sure!” she said. I had to admit, she seemed much nicer when she wasn't talking about a stupid movie with Star Gazer around. “So did you come to hear The Hoof Beats?” I had no idea what she was talking about, but I tried to add it all up.

“Is that the band that's playing? I don't know anything about them. Actually, I just came here to have some drinks because I used to hang out with a a friend of mine here before I left for Canterlot.”

“That's cool,” she said. “The Hoof Beats are kind of starting to take off, so I thought I'd come and see them here before they go on a tour of Equestria and get really famous.”

Just then, the noise in the room picked up a little, and Pretty whipped her head around toward the stage to see what was happening. Four ponies with shaggy manes all wearing simple black suits and ties had come out onto the stage, and everypony was starting to cheer for them. Pretty Vision jumped up out of her seat and was off toward the stage without another word, but as curious as I was about what the band played that got everypony so worked up, I didn't see how getting closer to the stage would help me appreciate it in the least. It was something Vinyl had chided me for the first couple of times I watched her perform there. She was always saying that the only way I could really get what she did was to be right in the thick of the crowd, dancing and getting completely lost in the music. But that went against everything I had ever been taught about how to appreciate music. Really understanding what a musician was doing meant listening, thinking, engaging with the music on an intellectual level. That didn't mean you couldn't get lost in it, but it did mean you couldn't do a lot of multi-tasking. I even tried to explain that to Vinyl, though I couldn't go quite as far as I wanted to, since I thought it would have been a little too much to tell her that the real reason I treated her music the same way I treated the classical stuff that I studied was that I wanted to give her the same respect I would give to any composer. Maybe I should have said that, but it always just felt too much like a stupid, smarmy come on.

As soon as The Hoof Beats started playing, I could tell that they were going to hold very little interest for me, even in my increasingly impaired state. Their style was so simple, just a couple of simple chord progressions that they alternated between for three minutes at a time. They threw in some sloppy vocal harmonies, which really drove everypony nuts. At first I wondered if their repetitions bothered me in a way that the ones in Vinyl's music didn't just because I didn't know them or feel anything for them as ponies. But when I thought a little more, I realized that wasn't true. When Vinyl would let a beat loop for minutes at a time, it was because she was trying to tap into something primal in the audience, which is a completely legitimate compositional technique. But with the kind of music The Hoof Beats played, it just seemed like a lack of skill. By the time they got to their third song, I had finished my scotch and soda, and really wanted another, but so many ponies had crowded in by then that the club was completely full and there was even a crowd on the sidewalk.

Then, things got even worse. I was thinking so much about the band and the crowd and how I was going to get another drink that I didn't even notice another pony I knew had worked his way over to my table, until he sat another scotch and soda down in front of me. It was Star Gazer.

“Hey, Octavia,” he said. “Looked like you needed another one of these. At least, I assume you still drink scotch and soda.”

“Star,” I said, way too drunk to sound remotely intelligent. “Um...thanks.”

“Can I sit down?”

“Sure.”

He could barely even pull out the stool enough to sit on it, there were so many ponies around.

“About earlier,” he said. At least, I think he did. The band and the crowd were so noisy, and I was so far gone, that I was only half convinced that he was really there and talking to me.

“We really shouldn't talk about it anymore,” I said.

“Ok, if that's what you really want.” It wasn't, but this just wasn't the time or place. I started in on the fresh drink. “Why did you come here?” he asked. “I didn't think The Hoof Beats would be your thing.”

“They're not. I just have good memories of this place.” My lips were numb, and I was slurring like hell, even though I was being really careful to pronounce everything just right. I also wasn't sure whether I was shouting or talking normally, but Star nodded, so I figured he was following me either way.

“Look, I'm supposed to be meeting Pretty Vision here,” he said. “I don't guess you've seen her, have you?”

I should have seen that coming, and I really didn't even want to talk to Star after what had happened earlier in the day, but it still completely took the wind out of my sails. It also kind of made me hate both of them. I tried to stay calm about it, but I was already having to work so hard at controlling my voice that when I responded, I probably sounded like I had was trying to talk for the first time after having someone describe speaking to me in writing.

“She ran up to the stage when they started playing.”

“Oh, great,” he said. He didn't even bother making fun of me. “Well, time for another epic battle.” He sounded put out as hell, but he still got back up and started shoving his way through the crowd to get to Pretty Vision.

The room was so packed, and I was so drunk that I didn't feel much like leaving, even though I desperately wanted to get the hell out before my happy memories of being there with Vinyl got completely ruined. Since I couldn't, though, I just sat there, finishing my drink, trying not to pay attention to the music and kind of watching for Star and Pretty Vision in the crowd. They had found each other, and were kind of dancing as much as anypony could in such a crowded room. Mostly, they were just bobbing up and down, but also rubbing their flanks together at the same time. It shouldn't have bothered me. I didn't really have feelings for Star or anything. But I hated seeing him wasting his time with somepony who I felt sure wasn't as smart as him. The more I thought about it, the faster I pounded my drink down, but even when it was empty, I didn't feel any better—just more confused by what was happening around me. That was when I noticed that Star had left the drink he had ordered on the table, too. I vaguely remember now feeling an overwhelming need not to be sober again for the rest of the night, and going after Star's drink like it was the only thing I ever really wanted in life.

After that, everything is fuzzy. I remember the band stopping, ponies starting to go outside, and me blindly following them, because I had this instinctive need to be back out in the cold. The big crowd was already segregating into groups again, and I swayed back and forth between them, hearing some laughter and laughing along even though in retrospect I'm pretty sure it was at my expense. And then I saw what I guess I was looking for, a little island of rich hipster ponies huddled together, and right there with their backs to me on the edge of the group were Star and Pretty, cuddled up in a way that was partially for warmth, but mostly for affection.

I stumbled over to them, almost right into them, and wedged myself between Star and the pony on the opposite side of him. I know no one would believe me, but I wasn't even angry at him. I don't know what I was thinking, but it wasn't that. I guess I just wanted to feel like I wasn't disappearing from everypony's life. I don't know if Star will ever speak to me again after what I did, but I do at least know he'll never forget me.

“Star!” I was yelling at him, even though I was right up in his face. “Did you ever find Pretty Vision?”

“Oh, Celestia. Octavia, this really isn't the time...”

“Oh, looks like you did!” I turned to the pony I had just shoved out of the way. He looked pretty angry. Like all of Star's friends, he looked like he took himself very seriously. “She's standing right next to him!” I said, like I was letting him in on some great secret. He didn't find it funny at all, even though I couldn't stop laughing about it personally.

“Hey, Octavia,” Star said. His tone had changed. Now, instead of being angry, he was talking to me like I was a filly. It should have made me mad, but I was so far gone that everything was hilarious to me. “Why don't I call for a taxi to take you back to your hotel? We can talk about everything tomorrow, when you're—“

“No! Tomorrow's too late! Too late.” Star was about to interrupt, but I kept plowing ahead. “I can't help your parents decorate, because I'm hanging out with Symphony.”

“It's ok, Octavia. Really, let's just get you a taxi, and—“

“I can't help you, but I know someone who can! You should ask Pretty Vision! Your parents would love her. They never liked me, but they'll love her! She should decorate their house!”

Some of Star's friends were laughing, but boy did Star and Pretty Vision look upset. Especially Star. I had never seen him so angry.

“I'll be right back,” he said, and it took me a minute to realize he wasn't talking to me. He started pushing me away from the rest of his friends, toward the street.

“I don't know what the hell you're trying to do here, Octavia, but if you weren't completely plastered, I'd be bucking furious.”

“I'm just—“

“Don't talk to me anymore!” He was yelling, and I was pretty sure his friends could hear us. Up to that point, everything had seemed pretty funny, but when he said that, nothing was funny anymore. A taxi happened to be going by, and Star flagged it down, then practically shoved me into it. He told the driver where I was staying, and slipped him some cash. Before I could even figure out what was happening, the driver was pulling away from the curb, and Star was already walking back to his friends. I had just enough presence of mind left to realize that I was in a taxi with a driver I didn't know, and that I should try to keep my emotions under control. He dropped me off at the hotel, and pulled away as soon as I stumbled out onto the curb. Didn't even try to help me get out. That's Manehatten, in a nutshell, but I don't really blame him.

I was feeling really sorry for myself at that point, and I was still having to fight really hard to keep the tears back, but I really didn't want to go back to my hotel. I didn't want to go anywhere else, particularly, but I really didn't want to go there. Instead, I just started walking down the street. Most ponies in Manehatten have seen so much that they just ignore a random drunk walking around, but a few did sneak a glance at me, probably because they could hear me sniffling and crying and all. With the snow falling, and me being all drunk and crying right there in front of everypony, just aimlessly walking around with nowhere to go, I started to feel like I was in one of the stupid movies that Star liked so much, where there was always some mare who you were supposed to think had led a very tragic life because even though she was very well off and didn't have any real problems, she didn't know how to connect with other ponies and so had to keep to herself and be all quirky and fascinating in private. That's why I hate movies so much. They encourage you to sympathize with their stupid, self-absorbed characters. Like being a cute, tortured hermit is the greatest thing you can aspire to.

Eventually, I didn't want to walk anymore. I didn't want to sleep, or cry, or think about Star or Vinyl or Symphony or my parents and how much I had let all of them down. Most of all, I didn't want to feel sorry for myself and turn into one of Western Sun's vapid, quirky little virginal recluses who was secretly waiting to be saved by the one pony smart and interesting enough to finally break down all the walls she had built around herself. For a minute, I thought about just sitting down right there on the sidewalk and waiting until I sobered up enough to go back to the hotel and sleep off the last of my drunkenness, but even that seemed too artificial. If I was going to hit bottom, I wasn't going to do it like an unrealistic character in an annoying movie. Instead, I turned around right there and started walking in the opposite direction. I still felt a little sick and dizzy, but all I had done for the past week was worry. I knew how to get around while I was feeling that way.

Chapter 9

When I woke up the next morning, I didn't even remember falling asleep. The first thing I noticed—I have no idea why—was that my scarf was missing. I didn't remember taking it off at the club the night before, though. At first I was a little frantic and started tearing the room apart looking for it, but then it just seemed unimportant. It was just something I had bought in Canterlot—not some irreplaceable heirloom.

My head and stomach were still hurting a little thanks to the drinking the night before, so I jumped in the shower and stayed there until I had used up all of the hot water. I slipped a little getting out and almost killed myself, and for a second I thought I was going to throw up, but I just sat there in the floor for a while and kept it all together. While I was sitting there, though, I got pretty worried again because I had completely forgotten that I was supposed to be meeting Symphony, and I had no idea what time it was since there was no clock in the bathroom and I hadn't looked at one when I got out of bed.

Fortunately, I still had a couple of hours before I was supposed to meet her, but instead of just waiting around the hotel, I decided I would go ahead and go to the skating rink right then. Ever since I got back to Manehatten, I'd been trying to reconnect with some kind of happy memory, something to get the taste of Canterlot out of my mouth, and every time it had failed. The skating rink was kind of my last chance, and just in case things went bad with Symphony once she showed up, I wanted to make sure that I had a little time there to myself to just sit and feel good about things.

You had to get off at one of the bigger stations in Manehatten to get to the skating rink, and as soon as I did I started to feel happier. There were vendors everywhere selling hot food, and all the Hearth's Warming decorations were pretty and inviting—not the kind of chintzy, tacky stuff you see in most of the big cities these days. Best of all, though, there were ponies everywhere even though it was a Sunday morning. It was a typical Manehatten crowd. Everypony looked like they were in a hurry to be somewhere else, parents were shoving their kids along, all that. But it was the first time that year that I had felt like a big holiday was coming up, and that ponies were looking forward to it. I grabbed one of those miniature chocolate waffles from one of the vendors and scarfed it down as I was walking up the stairs to street level. I hadn't even realized how hungry I was until I got something in my stomach.

The streets were even better than the station had been. They were even more crowded, but everypony seemed at least content to be there, if not excited. I noticed for the first time that the sky was completely white, and the snow was back to the kind of sparkly dust that it had been when I first showed up, only now it seemed right instead of foreboding.

The skating rink was the best, though. Like everywhere else so far that day, it was completely packed, mostly with fillies and colts, but a few older ponies, as well. The huge tree they put up at one end of the rink was there, like it always was, but this one looked even healthier and taller than any that I could remember since I was a filly. I started down the stairs to the seating area around the rink, where they had some benches and tables, and started looking around for a place to sit. Most of them were taken, but I did finally find a place, one of the small tables made for just a couple of ponies to sit at. Even though I still had at least an hour before Symphony was supposed to show up, I sat down to make sure we'd have a place to talk when she did get there.

Normally in situations like that, I'm bored out of my mind, but this time I wasn't. I was kind of having the time of my life, just watching ponies skate—or in some cases, try to skate, but falling all over the place, their legs shooting out in all directions. It was the exact opposite of everything that had been bothering me last night. I'm no athlete, but I've always kind of respected the way nopony can look all pompous and phony while doing athletic things. Sure, there were the mares on the ice who obviously practiced and were wearing frilly little skirts and all, but at worst they just looked a little out of place for being able to stay upright longer than anypony else. They didn't look like they were going out of their way to put on a show just by being there.

I got so wrapped up in just sitting there watching the skaters that I didn't even realize what time it was until, out of the corner of my eye, I got a glimpse of a mare with a yellowish coat and purple mane coming toward my table. Symphony. Out of nowhere, my stomach dropped and I felt nervous as hell. I had almost managed to forget what I was going to have to tell her when she showed up. I couldn't even look, and I was almost hoping it wasn't really her.

“Octavia!” It was definitely her. Nopony else I knew in Manehatten ever sounded so happy to see you. I stood up and tried to put on my best face for her. Even with all the nerves, it really wasn't that hard.

“Symphony!” As soon as I opened my mouth, she was hugging me so hard I could barely breathe. I almost started crying again, but I had gotten it all out of my system the night before.

“I've missed you so much! Why aren't you still living here?” I guess that would have been the perfect time to just spill everything, but it would have been too out of nowhere. And anyway, I wanted the happiness of being with my best friend, in what felt like the best place in all of Manehatten, to last as long as possible before I got into all that.

“I've missed you, too. Believe me, if I could have dragged you to Canterlot with me, I would have.”

Symphony finally let go of me, and then went to buy us a couple of coffees before she sat down. That was when I realized that I had forgotten the record I bought her the day before. That really did almost make me cry, for some stupid reason. It wasn't like that was the only chance I was ever going to have to give it to her. When she got back, she still had her huge, ear to ear grin on her face. It was such a rare thing to see. In a way, I couldn't believe she really came from Manehatten.

“So how's everything in Canterlot? I can't wait to hear what you've learned. My classes are finally starting to get into a little more advanced stuff, but it's all been a little boring so far.”

“Canterlot's not much different,” I said. “Loads of music theory and analyzing the great compositions and all that. I could go for a little more practical application of what we're learning.”

She really got a kick out of that. “Really? Are you finally starting to get interested in composing?”

“Nowhere near as much as you, but I guess I wouldn't mind giving it a shot someday, if I ever feel like I have something worth saying. I mean, right before I left, I actually finished a composition that my roommate was working on for one of her classes, and I kind of enjoyed it.”

“See, you go off to Canterlot and you start helping your friends cheat on their assignments, you get interested in composition...it's like I don't even know you anymore!” She was just joking, of course, but even then, hearing her say that stung a little. We kept the small talk and catching up going for a little bit, and thankfully she kept avoiding all the really big topics. Finally, though, she got around to one of the subjects I was trying to avoid.

“So how's your family doing?” My first instinct was just to dodge the question, but I knew we'd have to talk about it eventually. I thought I might as well take the opportunity and get it over with.

“To be honest, I haven't seen them since I got back into town.”

“But haven't you been here since Friday night? Where have you been staying?”

“I'm staying at a hotel until tomorrow morning. Look, there's a bunch of stuff I haven't told you—stuff I should have been telling you for the past year, but I had no idea how to start. Things aren't really going all that well in Canterlot. I...don't think I'm going to go back after break.”

Symphony didn't say anything right away. She was just sitting there looking kind of shocked. “I don't get it. I thought...I don't know. I guess I just thought you would have told me if things were going bad. Not that I could have helped or anything, but...”

I almost thought she was going to start crying at that point, so I started talking right away. It was the last thing I wanted to see. “All my music classes are great. The faculty loves me, or at least that's what I've heard. But everything else is terrible. I can hardly stand anypony there, I'm failing or almost failing every class that's not about music, I'm fighting with my roommate because somehow she ended up going on a date with Vinyl Scratch, of all the ponies in Equestria...and the worst part is, I thought I could fix it all by coming back here and falling right back into my old routine, but instead I've just got drunk and made an idiot out of myself a couple of times, and now I've made Star Gazer hate me, and I even forgot to bring the record I bought you.”

“Octavia, slow down.” I stopped and looked over at Symphony. Before I thought she was going to cry, but I could see then that she wasn't. She was just looking at me, kind of concerned, but not as surprised as she had been before. “First of all, you should know by now that you can tell me anything, any time. I'm not upset that you didn't. Honestly, I'm more worried, because you always have before and I don't know what's so different this time.”

“I was just tired of letting everypony down. I wanted to know I still had somepony who wasn't completely disappointed in me.” I was starting to realize how childish I sounded, but I was hoping that I was getting it all out of my system. I could tell Symphony was thinking hard about something, and for a minute neither of us said anything. Finally, she looked down at the table and started talking.

“Try not to be too mad at me for what I'm about to say, but it's something I kind of wanted to tell you before you left for Canterlot. I guess I should have, even though I don't know if it would have stopped this from happening or not. As much as I love you, and as much as I could never ask for a better friend, I've been worried for a long time now that you were getting so negative toward everything that something like this was inevitable. It was happening when we finished high school—you hated half the teachers and pretty much all of the students except Star and me. Half the time, it even seemed like you resented music, which I could never figure out, because you're about the most talented pony I know.”

“That's not true, Symphony—you're so much more talented—“

“No, I'm not. And I don't know if that's the problem—that you just sell yourself short on everything, and so you end up angry and resentful. I had always hoped I could pull you out of it just by showing you that somepony really cared and thought the world of you, but I guess it hasn't worked.”

“Symphony, this would all have been so much worse if not for you.”

“But I can't be your only friend, and I feel like that's the point it's getting to. I don't know what happened with Star, and I don't know why Vinyl reacted the way she did before. But I do know that, for whatever reason, I've watched you go from somepony who was so passionate about music, and so great at it she got a cutie mark, to somepony who almost seemed to be trying to sabotage herself.”

“I'm not trying to sabotage myself. Like I said, all my music classes are going great. But it's not because of some stupid picture on my flank. It's because that's what I want to do with my life, it's what I love. If I could make that mark go away, if I could stop feeling like one of Star's pompous hipster friends, I'd do it in a second. I don't care if everypony knows what I'm good at. I'd play the cello in the damned closet if I had to. I'd play even if I was the worst cellist in Equestria. But I'd be choosing it, not the other way around.”

I had gotten myself so worked up that I was almost panting. Symphony was staring at me, her gray eyes all wide open but still as smart as ever. She's lying when she says I'm a better musician, and I'm nowhere near as smart as her. Never have been. I knew what I was in for, and I was dreading it, but kind of wanting to hear it at the same time.

“Wait, is that really where this is coming from? You think having a cutie mark means you're showing off?”

“Not showing off, not intentionally. But, yeah, it makes me feel like, somehow, we have to parade around what we're good at. Especially when mine is so literal.”

“No, listen, Octavia. You're telling me that since you have a cutie mark—something everypony in Equestria gets eventually—you feel like you're constantly bragging about being a great musician. Even though you want to perform music in front of an audience as a career. And you're letting that wreck your chances of graduating from the best university in Equestria? Look, I understand that you don't want to be like Star's friends, I really do. I'm glad. I don't want you to be like them, either, because you've never had to draw attention to yourself to be interesting and wonderful. But you can't let yourself hate the possibility of that so much that you just give up.”

“I haven't given up, I—“

“No, you have! You may still be doing great in your music classes, but that's not going to matter if you flunk out of school because you didn't try at anything else. And then when you do you can blame your teachers for being horrible ponies that you didn't want to reward by doing well in their classes, because that would have made them look like good teachers! Guess what, some ponies are annoying and pretentious and self-obsessed and desperate for attention, and they tend to congregate in performing arts departments. But if you love music and love playing for ponies as much as you say you do, you'll get over that and take the bad with the good, and stop making excuses for failing when the only reason you're failing is that you've chosen to.”

Boy was I glad I had cried so much the night before. Instead of bawling, which was kind of what I wanted to do, I just sat there, staring back at Symphony. I must have looked angry, because I could see her determination start to fade.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Tell me I'm wrong.”

The thing was, she was right. I knew she was right. I wasn't at the point just yet where I was willing to take her advice—I wasn't about to go galloping back to Canterlot right then and undo all the problems I had spent the first two years causing for myself. But I was willing to consider it.

“No, I'm not going to tell you that. Because you're not. But even if I do decide that I want to go back to Canterlot, which I'm not sure I do, I may have dug myself too deep to climb back out.”

Symphony wasn't looking at me anymore, and I could tell she was upset. I felt like hell for ruining her day, when she had been so happy to see me. But then she surprised me again, looking up at me and giving me one of the prettiest smiles I've ever seen. “That's all I want,” she said. “Just don't give up. Especially not because you're afraid ponies you've never met will think you're sompony you're not. If they really listen to you play, they'll know better.”

We didn't talk for a while after that, just sitting there watching the skaters and drinking our coffee. After nearly twenty minutes, Symphony finally smiled at me and took my hoof. “So, are we going to go skating or not?”

“Come on,” I said, “Let's go.”

My skating hadn't improved since the last time I tried, but Symphony was as good as ever, and stayed right by my side the whole time. I could hardly stop laughing the whole time I was wobbling around on the ice, even though I still felt a little sick and hungover. We kept skating until we could hardly stand up anymore, then returned our rented skates and made plans to see each other again after I talked to my parents the next day. At first I was afraid to go back to my hotel, afraid to be by myself again, but for the rest of the day I didn't worry about anything. For the first time in years, everything felt right.

Epilogue

There’s always been one major reason I prefer music to any kind of storytelling. The ending of a piece of music is almost always a matter of form over function; or at least if it isn’t it sounds like the composer is too clever for her own good. Too often, though, writers, feel like they have to wrap up a story so that you'll think nothing else of any real importance ever happens to any of the characters for the rest of their lives.

I don’t know what’s going to happen for the rest of my life, but I like to think that weekend in Manehatten isn't going to be the most interesting thing. I do know that after that day with Symphony, things did start to change a little bit. The next day I went home and had it out with my parents. Of course they gave me a guilt trip like Equestria has never seen before, but in the end they at least tried to be understanding. At least they didn't say they were disappointed in me. Give me justifiably angry any day.

Symphony kept on being great, as always, but she did wear me down telling me that I just had to go back to Canterlot and finish school. Sometimes, it felt like the only thing she wanted to talk about. But I did talk to the bureaucrats there, and they said I could come back, even if it was on the condition that I'd be out on my flank if I didn't show a pretty big improvement by half way through my third year. They even offered to move me to a completely different dorm with a new roommate and everything. I'm still not sure I could ever face Amethyst Star again--I definitely don't want to. I keep telling myself I have all the time in the world to decide whether I'll go back, but in the end I guess I already know what I'm going to do.

Maybe the best thing that happened on break, though, was that Vinyl Scratch sent me a letter. I’m not going to go into what it said, because right now I'm treating it like some kind of sacred treasure, and not even talking to anypony about it. Only Symphony knows I got it, and I won’t even tell her what it said, so you know I'm not telling anypony else. Maybe that’s immature as hell, I don’t know. But to be honest, I’d sleep with it like a kid with a plush toy if I wasn’t worried about it getting all torn up.

Of course that's not everything that happened, but you probably don't care about me getting really sick after I finally went home, and how I actually did end up talking to Star Gazer again, and other stuff like that. Or maybe I just don't want to talk about any of it anymore. To be honest, none of this is anything I was really crazy about reliving, but at the same time I felt like I had to force myself to go back through most of it if I ever wanted to make any sense of the whole stupid ordeal. That's not to say I have--not by a long shot. But at least it feels a little less painful and embarrassing and pointless now.

So no, none of that is an ending, but that’s the thing. If you ask me, endings are for music. Stories never end, never really.