Truth is just like time, it catches up and it just keeps going.
                          --Dar Williams

Jenny Cryczwyk is an independant girl. Resilient. Some would even say
stalwart. Some would even say stout. In fact, many at SCHS did. But not
to her face.

If you asked her best friend [perhaps her only real friend growing up]
Vince, it probably all started when she was seven and her parents split
in a nasty divorce.

There was the slow tense buildup, with occasional explosions of shouting
and violence, which almost invariably ended with the phrase "God damn it,
shut up! Do you want Jenny to hear?"

And of course she heard. And eventually she didn't care. People, she had
learned, were not to be trusted and no matter how often or how fervently
they swore they loved you, they would eventually hurt you.

She wasn't a loner, just... insulated. She was friendly, well liked, even
popular to an extent. But one always felt a sense of distance when dealing
with her. She was on one side of the wall, you were on the other, and that
is where you stayed.

But her guitar never hurt her. It loved her and accepted her, it never
called her fat or ignored her or was busy with other guitars, and it never
screamed unless she asked it to.

So she graduated from secondary school, a 3.75 GPA, and nobody was
surprised when she sped off to study classical guitar and voice at the
San Francisco Conservatory of Music after guilting her father in New York
to pay for the tuition.

A little more comfortable there, among 'her own kind', the walls came
down a little in the intimate atmosphere of the study. Her letters to
Vince back home glowed with stories of various personalities, including
Stan.

Stan was a former student, and a 'big wheel' in the local music scene. She
sat and talked with him in coffee shops, played in jam sessions with him,
went clubbing with him, attended concerts with him, and somehow eventually
fell for him.

In her sophomore year, she quit school to join a band Stan was putting
together -- Dyslexicon -- to play gigs in the city. They'd gathered,
rehearsed, even performed a couple of dates in the south bay. Things were
wonderful. the stage was exhilirating. Then came the phone call late one
night to Vince.

"That fucker. He dumped me for Lara, that bimbo he made the lead singer.
The whore. I can't stay here. Could -- could I crash with you for a little
while? Please?"

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