MIXTAPE: Volume One
After spending time on tour with her famous father, musical prodigy Aria Gray is forced to return to her hometown and is left struggling to find her harmony in the competing notes that is high school: light and rhythmic songs of friendship, burning and intense ballads of love, and the dark and moody tones of tracks that she wishes she could just SKIP.
It’s the year 2000, and the Backstreet Boys are as popular as the screeching dial-up connection of America Online. Awkward, inward, and socially inept, sixteen-year-old Aria is just trying to make it through her junior year (which has to be easier than singing backup vocals in front of sold-out crowds, right?), when hot-jock Brock Miller takes an unlikely interest in her. An interest, that is, that proves to have severe consequences.
Aria must rely on her budding friendships, like that of bubbly blonde Emma Stewart, to navigate through dating the king of high school, receiving threats from the Homecoming queen, participating in extracurricular activities, and dealing with her blast-from-the-past, Noah Walker. That would be enough, except that after the unthinkable happens, Aria is buried beneath the weight of the notes of songs she isn’t even sure are real. She is left struggling to piece together the tracks of her personal playlist, while also trying to figure out which song played first and how to STOP the skipping nightmare that is stuck on REPEAT.
MIXTAPE: Volume Two
Ever since Homecoming, Aria Gray’s mind has been a skipping mixtape. Her thoughts remain stuck on the repeating track of that night: a fuzzy television screen, a stack of paper plates, hands pressed firmly upon her shoulders… the menacing grin.
Things weren’t meant to turn out this way. With Brock Miller’s sentence finally approaching, Aria believed her life would go back to normal. She was supposed to create a new playlist full of memories with her friends. Instead, she is left struggling to hear the notes, and no matter how much she turns up the volume, the songs won’t PLAY.
Emma Stewart is determined to help her best friend, no matter the cost. She knows that Aria needs to find a way to let the music back in. Dancing always worked for Emma. That is, until the tracks to her own playlist suddenly switched tempo, and now she must learn to adjust her body to the changing choreography. But with each step she takes, the notes blend further and further together until the songs start to SKIP and the disc becomes scratched. Then, the tracks just STOP.
How can she dance when there is no music?