They Stole My Songs

Chapter 1

The guard held my badge between two fingers, like something the dog had dragged in.

"Reed, M. Front desk." He read it slowly, without looking up. "This pass doesn't clear you for the winners' corridor, sweetheart."

I shifted Scarlett Vale's spare gown higher against my chest so the hem wouldn't touch the carpet. "I'm with her label. If she tears the first dress, I'm the spare."

"Then she'll send somebody with a real pass." He stepped sideways and filled the doorway with his shoulders, already looking past me at the wall. "No pass, no corridor. Elevator's behind you."

"Sure," I said. "I'll just stand here and hold the dress."

The doors sighed shut. Through them an orchestra was swelling, and two thousand people in borrowed diamonds were getting to their feet. The applause came through muffled, and then the announcer's voice, bright as a dropped coin:

"Song of the Year — 'Neon Heart,' Scarlett Vale!"

So I heard my song win the biggest award in American music through a fire door, holding the spare dress of the woman accepting it. I shifted the gown to my other arm and watched the little security monitor bolted above the doorframe.

On the screen, Scarlett climbed the steps in a spill of silver sequins. She pressed both hands over her heart and leaned into the microphone, shining with tears.

"I wrote 'Neon Heart' in one night," she said, "out of my own heartbreak. Nobody handed me anything. This is for every girl who's ever been told to wait her turn."

The crowd wept. In the third row, Dylan Cross, the producer whose name sat beside hers in the credits, applauded with his fingertips, the way rich men clap when they've already been paid.

The truth was eleven nights, not one, and a kitchen table instead of a piano. It was the winter my mother started chemo, when the insurance letters were arriving faster than my paychecks, and I was twenty-two years old, answering phones at Sterling Records for eighteen dollars an hour.

I wrote the bridge in the stairwell on my lunch breaks, because the break room TV was always blaring and I needed to hear the chords in my head. The c***k in the second verse, the one the critics call "Vale's signature ache," was me singing into my phone at 2 a.m. so I wouldn't wake my roommate, crying quietly enough that the recording only caught half of it.

On the monitor, Scarlett dedicated the award to every girl who had ever been told to wait. I adjusted the dress on my arm and waited too, because the elevator was behind me and the gown was dry-clean only, and neither of us was going anywhere.

My name was not on that song. It was on the badge the guard had just handed back to me.

At eleven, a wardrobe girl with a real pass came and took the gown off my hands without a word. I rode the elevator down with my badge clipped back on my shirt, where it belonged.

By eight the next morning I was at my desk outside the executive suite, headset on, smile loaded.

"Sterling Records, this is Maya, how can I direct your call?"

That was my job on paper. In practice it was everything nobody else wanted to touch. Maya, steam this. Maya, her car is at the curb. Maya, the coffee machine on four is doing the noise again.

At noon, Scarlett swept past my desk between two assistants, trailing expensive shampoo and total indifference. She never looked at me. In three years, I don't think she had ever once looked at me. I was furniture that could carry things.

The fan mail was the worst hour of my day. Bags of it, all for her, and I answered as her, in her voice, with a pen the studio had chosen to match her signature.

Dear Kayla, thank you for writing to me. Knowing "Neon Heart" helped you through your parents' divorce means everything. Your heart is stronger than you know. Love, Scarlett.

Kayla was fourteen. Her real letter, the one under my hand, said she had played the song on repeat the night her dad moved out, and she had drawn a little heart around her return address. I wanted to write back as me: I know, sweetheart. I wrote it the year everything in my house broke too. Instead I forged the signature, sealed the envelope, and laid it in the out tray with the rest of the mail.

At four o'clock, Dylan dropped a folder on my desk hard enough to make my coffee jump.

"She needs a new title track," he said. "Bigger than 'Neon Heart.' Tour announcement is Friday, the board wants a demo before it goes out. You have until six tomorrow morning."

I looked at the folder. "You want me to..."

"Verse, chorus, bridge, scratch vocal, full arrangement notes." He tapped the folder twice, like a judge with a gavel. "And Maya." He leaned down, close enough that I could smell the mint on his breath. "Don't get precious about it. It's a job. Plumbers don't sign the pipes."

"Understood," I said. "One sink by six. No signature." He was already walking away.

Inside the folder was a spec sheet, tempo, key, three reference tracks, and at the bottom, pre-printed, as if it had never occurred to anyone that it could say anything else:

Written by: S. Vale / D. Cross.

No third line. There was never a third line.

That night, after the executives went home and the cleaning crew came in, I sat at the old upright piano in the demo room with my notebook and did my real job, the one that paid eighteen dollars an hour and built a hundred-million-dollar career for somebody else.

The piano had one dead key in the top octave and a bench that wobbled left. The chorus was done by two. The bridge, the one that would make strangers cry in their cars, took me until four. At 5:40 in the morning, with the cleaning crew's radio murmuring down the hall, I sang the whole thing once into the empty room, softly, the way it was meant to be sung.

Then I opened the notebook to the last page and did the thing I always do. Under the final lyric, in the bottom corner, in small, careful handwriting, I wrote the date, and the page number.

Page 214.

Nobody at Sterling Records had ever asked why I did it. It was a habit, like keeping a receipt.

I put the notebook back in the bottom drawer of my desk, where it always lived. Before six, I left the finished demo on Dylan's chair, squared on top of the spec sheet with its two printed names.

At two that afternoon, Scarlett Vale would hear my song for the first time. The paper already said she wrote it.