They Stole My Songs

Chapter 5

I heard the show through the wall and through my headphones. The roar when the lights dropped. The scream when Scarlett rose up through the stage floor in her sequins. Twenty thousand people on the other side of a storage-room wall, and every one of them louder than me.

The first half went the way Dylan had designed it. The track carried the choruses. Scarlett mouthed and danced and pointed at the crowd in the right places. And underneath her, in the walls, in the bones of the building, was me, riding every hard part, taking every climb, so that no one would ever know there had been a climb at all.

In the booth I had a routine. Water bottle at my left hand. The set list taped to the wall with the hard songs starred. All of them mine, all of them starred. Between numbers I could hear the crowd chanting her name in the pauses, Scar-lett, Scar-lett, and I timed my breathing to it and waited for my next entrance that nobody would ever know was an entrance.

The torn ear cushion on the headphones shed its foam in little black flakes, and between songs I picked the flakes off my cheek. When the big amps came on, the cable from my microphone carried a faint hum up into the music stand, and I could feel it in my fingertips if I rested them there. On the grainy monitor, the crowd was a grey field that rose and settled between songs.

Forty-five minutes. I sang them beautifully, and in some deep and treasonous place I felt almost at peace, and I hated that place for it.

"Glass Halo" closed the first half. From my little black room I sang the bridge alone under her silhouette, and twenty thousand people rose to their feet for a woman standing in a follow spot with her mouth almost moving correctly, and I thought: I have built a cathedral and I am the wall.

Then the band left for intermission. I took off the headphones. My shirt was soaked through. Somewhere above me, twenty thousand people were buying beer and T-shirts with her face on them, and by every measure Sterling Records used, the night was a complete success.

The second half began the same as the first: darkness, a heartbeat of bass, her silhouette rising.

Then the heartbeat stopped.

It was a surge, I found out later. One of Ferreira's old feed lines giving up all at once, completely and without apology. In my headphones: a burst of static, then nothing. On the grainy black-and-white monitor in my booth, the giant screens went black. The teleprompter died. The backing track, every safety net woven out of my own deleted voice, was gone, and the talkback was dead.

And Scarlett Vale stood alone in front of twenty thousand people, opened her mouth, and made the small, honest, terrible sound of a woman who has never once had to sing her own songs.

It lasted nine seconds. On a stage, nine seconds is a year. Through the wall I could hear the crowd's sound changing, the murmur that starts to look for someone to blame.

I was already standing. I don't remember deciding to stand. My body had worked at Sterling Records for three years, and my body knew what my job was: when something of Scarlett's broke, I fixed it, and I disappeared.

Noah met me at the booth door.

He didn't waste a second on surprise. He took the spare handheld announcement mic off its charger, put it in my hand, and closed my fingers around it. His face was very calm, which scared me more than the silence had.

"Not from in here," he said. "Not underneath. Go."

"Maya Reed," I said, because it was the only true thing I owned that night, "answers phones."

"Not tonight she doesn't."

I pushed the stage door open myself, and the light took me.

The floor out there was crossed with cables and strips of gaffer tape, and my boots sounded too loud on it. The lights were hot on my face, hotter than the booth had ever been. The silence from the seats was so complete that when Scarlett breathed, I could hear the sequins move on her dress. My palms were wet around the microphone.

I walked out in my black stagehand clothes, hair stuck to my neck, past eight musicians frozen over their instruments, past Scarlett, who stared at me with her mouth still open. Twenty thousand phones were already up and filming. There was no version of the next four minutes that stayed secret, and some cold, clear part of me understood that Dylan knew it too, wherever he was standing in the dark.

So I didn't do the small thing. I didn't rescue her song for her.

I sang mine.

No band. No track. Just the first line of "Neon Heart," at kitchen-table volume, the way I wrote it the winter my mother started chemo. My voice shook on the first words, honestly shook, because I was twenty-five years old and terrified and standing in the light.

Then the bridge came. My staircase. The chord dropped to the six, where the lyric lies.

And twenty thousand people got to their feet, not all at once, but in sections, in waves, and by the final chorus they were singing it with me. Near the front, a man in a work shirt was holding his phone above his head and crying without bothering to wipe his face, and beside him a girl had climbed up onto her seat to see me better. Every word I had written in stairwells and supply closets, sung back at me by a crowd that could fill a small city, in an arena where, twenty minutes earlier, I had not officially existed.

The jumbotron found my face, thirty feet high, wet and plain. Scarlett stepped back, one step, out of her own follow spot. The band, bless professional musicians everywhere, quietly laid down their instruments and listened.

When the last note ended, the sound that came back at me was not applause. It was bigger than applause, and for the length of it, it was mine.

On ten thousand livestreams, in the chat running beside my enormous face, the same five words were being typed so fast they blurred into a single line of light:

WHO IS THE RECEPTIONIST?