They Stole My Songs

Chapter 2

Scarlett heard the new song for the first time at two the next afternoon, in Studio A, with her shoes off and a green juice going warm at her elbow.

Dylan played her my demo, my voice, my piano, scrubbed of my name before it ever reached the speakers. She listened with her eyes closed, one bare foot keeping a beat that was not quite the beat, and pronounced it a good start. Then the engineer cued the backing track, and Scarlett stepped into the booth to sing a song she had heard exactly once.

She missed the key change in the bridge by a mile.

"Again," Dylan said.

The second time she found the key change and lost everything around it. She came in early on the turn, flattened the climb, and held the last word of the bridge a beat too long while the track went on without her.

"Again."

On the third take she stopped mid-chorus, ripped off one headphone cup, and pointed through the glass. Not at Dylan. Not at the engineer. At me. I had been summoned with a tray, because the coffee machine on four was doing the noise again, and apparently I was the only person in a nine-story building who could be trusted with a French press.

"This coffee is scalding," Scarlett announced. "It's burning my throat. That's why the top notes keep..." She waved a hand at the wreckage of the take. "Get her out of here. She's throwing off my energy."

"Sorry," I said. "I'm sorry. I'll make it cooler." I said it to the tray, because the tray was at eye level.

Then I did one thing that was not part of the apology. On the stand inside the booth, her lyric sheet sat crooked, printed big, her name across the top in lettering like a movie poster, the bridge highlighted in yellow. I leaned in and straightened it, and for a second I left my finger on the exact bar where she kept missing, the first beat of the turn. Then I picked up the tray and backed out.

Dylan kept his eyes on the console and said nothing. The talent had spoken. The coffee was the problem now.

The engineer, Noah Bennett, quiet, thirtyish, the one who never ate lunch with anybody, was the only person in the room watching me. He watched my finger on the lyric sheet. Then he watched me back out of the studio with the tray, all the way to the door.

The studio emptied for lunch. I made a second pot, cooler, and left it with Scarlett's assistant, who took it without looking up and set it down next to the warm green juice.

That night the office emptied by seven. I stayed at my desk until the cleaning crew's carts squeaked past, and then I took out the phone.

It was a cracked old Samsung with no SIM card, no accounts, no connection to anything, a phone that, as far as the modern world was concerned, did not exist. I had bought it for cash four years ago, before Sterling, in the bar years, when I was still writing songs for whoever would listen and getting paid in drink tickets.

I went into the supply closet, the only room on the floor with a lock and no camera, and I sang the new song into the dead phone, start to finish, the way I had written it. Dylan had already titled it "Glass Halo." My voice, my phrasing, the bridge landing exactly where the bridge was built to land.

Then I dated it out loud, the way I always did. "Glass Halo. Maya Reed. March ninth." I stopped the recording and watched the screen go dark.

My notebook went into the bottom drawer of my desk, under the spare chargers and the granola bars, the way it always did. The stack was thick now: a hundred songs, maybe more, six years of them, copied out fair. Before I closed the drawer, I flipped to the very first page.

It was a fair copy, since I'd recopied the old songs my first week at Sterling, but I'd kept the original date in the corner. "Static Bloom." March of the year I turned nineteen.

Three years before anyone on Earth had heard the name Scarlett Vale.

Friday, the lobby screen lit up at nine sharp: SCARLETT VALE — THE NEON HEART TOUR — 40 CITIES. Staff applauded on cue. Dylan caught my eye across the marble, crossed the lobby with a box, and put it in my hands: press kits, a hundred of them, and a slim folder on top marked LEGAL — FILING COPIES.

"Run these down to Legal before lunch," he said. "And Maya, the tour packet lists three vault tracks for the deluxe edition. Marketing wants them in the kits."

Vault tracks. My stomach understood before the rest of me did.

I printed the inserts myself. I stood at the copier on the fourth floor and watched the deluxe track list come out warm, one sheet at a time.

11. Midnight Static. S. Vale / D. Cross 12. Paper Boats. S. Vale / D. Cross 13. July. S. Vale / D. Cross

Three songs out of my notebook. Three songs out of the drawer under the granola bars, carried off, renamed, and dressed in other people's initials. My hands were steady on the copier lid. I noticed that, and thought about it all the way back down the hall.

In the Legal folder, under the tour paperwork, were the filing copies Dylan wanted delivered: copyright registration certificates, fresh from Washington, for the deluxe tracks. I was not supposed to read them. I was supposed to carry them, like the dress, like the coffee. I read them in the elevator.

Copyright claimant: Vireo Lane Publishing LLC.

Not Scarlett. Not even Dylan. A company. I turned the certificate over, looking for the part I must have misunderstood, and found an address, a P.O. box in Burbank, and under it one more line: Administered by the Sterling Group.

I knew every company in our building. I answered their phones. Vireo Lane Publishing had no office, no staff, no extension I had ever dialed. It existed in exactly one place: on paper, in Washington, owning three melodies out of my own notebook.

The elevator opened on Legal. I set the folder on the receptionist's desk, waited for a signature, and rode back up alone. Three songs, every note of them mine. And according to the United States Copyright Office, they belonged to a ghost.