SAY DON'T GO || A Taylor Swift Story

08.

A/N: hey y'all!! Just wanted to let you know that this is probably the last update I'll post for a while. I'm back to my usual life schedule now, and it's gonna be hectic for a couple months, so updates will be few and far between.

~

09.25.23

Presley McAllister definitely did not try to overhear her drum major telling her band director that she tried to kill herself. Yet somehow, that was exactly what had ended up happening after their rehearsal that fateful Monday.

Rehearsal had been normal—at least, as normal as it possibly could have been for the fact that the band had just preformed at a Kansas City Chiefs game the day before. Ms. Hart had taken a large portion of rehearsal time to talk about the performance, and no one had seemed happier about the way that things had gone than Raine Valerie Copeland, one of the drum majors.

In Presley's mind, it was weird that Raine Valerie was a drum major. She was in Presley's grade, and they had been in a number of classes together since they were in elementary school. Still, they had never been close with each other, and they definitely hadn't been close enough for Presley to know that Raine Valerie was going to be a drum major as a freshman.

Presley hadn't even thought to join marching band when she was in eighth grade, but as soon as she joined as a freshman and realized that she could have auditioned the year before, she wished that she had done so. So far, marching band had been one of the best parts of high school for her, and she was obsessed with everything about it, from the football games to the competitions that they would soon be partaking in during the winter.

The one thing that threw Presley off about the band was the fact that there was a freshman on the leadership team, a group that otherwise consisted of juniors and seniors. And in middle school, Raine Valerie had never struck Presley as the leadership type. She'd been nice enough, but she was always quiet and kept to herself, not nearly as extroverted as someone that Presley would have expected to be a drum major.

But somehow, Raine's entire demeanor shifted whenever she was around upperclassmen in the band. She was mature for her age, sure, but she acted much more carefree and outgoing around those people. And in some way, they seemed to be the only people that Presley had ever seen get that side out of Raine.

Maybe this was why, Presley thought as she listened to the muffled crises coming from Ms. Hart's office. Presley really wanted to just leave, but Ms. Hart had been mad enough yesterday when she didn't have Presley's medical forms, especially because they were already supposed to be turned in long before the Chiefs game. Presley had promised that she'd bring them in during rehearsal the next day, and had only remembered to give the form to her director at the end of the rehearsal.

As soon as she overheard Raine Valerie start to tell Ms. Hart about what happened the night before, Presley had strongly contemplated leaving the form somewhere and just going home. But she knew how hard it was for her parents to get it, and plus, she would be kicked out of the marching band if she didn't have the form that allowed her to compete. It was already bad enough that she had been allowed to go to the Chiefs game without it; she couldn't let the whole thing happen again.

So Presley stood there at the door, the piece of paper slowly starting to get damp from the sweat on her hands as she overheard everything said between her drum major and band director. There was a part of her that couldn't help but be worried about Raine. The other freshman had never been super social towards people her own age—she seemed to get tired of them quickly, especially when they were in eighth grade. Presley assumed that Raine had spent the previous year trying to gain older friends in high school while everyone else lived up the rest of their eighth grade experiences.