Mr. Moneybags | jb

Chapter 1 - London

Hello new life! London: far away from LA, New York or any other center for music, far away from the industry and the fuss, just me and nobody here knows who I am, about what happened to my family and how fucked up I really am. Nobody will push me to go back to music, pursue my talents or wrap me in cotton wool because they feel sorry for me. This is awesome! Also, nobody will ask questions about the money or anything, because I'm planning to live a normal college life. I can feel this will be awesome and my life needs some serious change, so this new chapter is gonna be beyond awesome.

Tomorrow I'm gonna start my MBA at Ivey business school and nothing's gonna stop me from acing it. Canada will be one hell of a experience. Never before have I lived here - and I moved a couple times thanks to my parents jobs, but Canada is a first. Also London is completely new to me. So far I had only been to the country on vacation and London wouldn't exactly be anyone's first stop. To me it was perfect though - Small compared to the places I lived before and the best part: I don't know anyone who lives here and they don't know me. Oh and did I mention no music? Nothing to remind me of the past! I finally got a fresh start, that was long over due.

My apartment was small, but enough for me. I had a living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath. The past couple of days I spend decorating it and I was already in love with the place. Not one instrument in sight - awesome! Out front I rented a spot to park the Mini Cooper I got myself for my time here. This was the only luxury in my life right now and I was a little proud at how down to earth I managed to set myself up.

During the next couple of days they held an introduction week at the business school, giving us all kinds of information about the school, professors, organizational matters and so on. We learned that apparently Rachel McAdams is from here (I love the notebook;)) and *sigh* Justin Bieber. Didn't I say no music please? Also we got to meet other students and they took us out to explore London a bit. There was not much to do here though, but there were a couple okay bars. Also we went to explore Toronto, which was a two hour drive from London and they took us to see the Niagara Falls. People were thrilled, me not so much as I had been there before, but I like waterfalls so it's always nice.

I quickly bonded with a couple of girls from my class. One of them - Lily - was originally from here, so she knew her way around the place and had friends here from high school and so on. To me it felt great to know a local. That could come in handy. Also she knew all the good spots. Then there was Sarah, who was originally from Vancouver. The three of us got on really well from the beginning and bonded really fast. I was glad to have found myself some people so soon.

Eventually classes commenced and I must admit I really enjoyed business - a lot more than I anticipated actually. The reason I had chosen to enroll for an MBA was that I thought I could follow my fathers footsteps one day maybe and become a CEO. Before this I studied music management in London - the real London in Britain and an MBA felt like the natural next step.

The girls and I made it a regular to hit the bars on Friday or Saturday nights. All of us were single apart from Chelsea, who was introduced to us by Lily. They knew each other since high school and Lily made it an effort to include Chelsea as much as she could in whatever she was up to seeing as Chelsea was the mother of an 11-year-old daughter. She had been a teen mom and Lily didn't drop her but tried to show her what our life was like and include her as best as she could, which I found amazing.

Chelsea dated a guy named Jeremy who also had been a teen father once upon a time as I learned, but now he also had two more children who were around Allie's age. They lived a nice and quiet patchwork family life with their kids and it seemed to work out just fine. All three kids were really sweet and well raised and got on with each other just fine it seemed as Jeremy and Chelsea were engaged to be married. Jeremy's eldest son didn't live with them as he was probably living his own life by now - he must be around my age - and I had never met him so far. Apparently he was too busy and successful to come visit every once in a while. Other than that I didn't know much about him.

College life was nice. I enjoyed it very much and really got a chance to settle in. At some point I had made myself a home in this place and for the first time in forever I felt like I would be able to get on with my life and find a way to live with what happened a year ago. The whole no music thing was helping a lot.