They Stole My Songs

Chapter 6

By morning, the video had been watched one hundred million times.

I know because my sister texted me the number, in all capitals, with a row of exclamation points, and then a photo: my mother at the kitchen table in my sister's house, where Mom lives now, watching the video on her tablet with one hand pressed over her mouth. Her next text said, she's been crying all morning, GOOD crying, call us when you can. Mom had never once been allowed to be proud of me in public. A stranger's shaky phone video had changed that overnight.

Sterling Records put out its statement by nine a.m.:

During a technical failure at last night's performance, a member of our emergency support staff provided interim vocals. We thank our fans for their understanding. Scarlett Vale's tour continues as scheduled.

Emergency support staff. Interim vocals. I had held up the second half of an arena show with one unaccompanied song, and I had been promoted, in print, to a fire extinguisher.

By noon, Scarlett had posted a video of her own. Soft light, no makeup, which on Scarlett Vale was a costume like any other. "I believe in lifting people up," she told her front camera. "When the sound failed, I was so proud to share my stage with a young woman from our own team. Everyone deserves a moment." She said the word share the way you say it about a dessert you never intended to finish.

The comments believed her for about an hour. Then some sleepless fan with video software layered the arena recording over the official tour audio, and found that the voice on the pristine choruses of the first half was the same voice as the receptionist's. Identical. Breath for breath. If the woman in the booth had sung the first half too, the internet wanted to know, then what exactly had Scarlett been doing out there in the light?

Dylan called it a "narrative problem." I know because Noah told me, in the stairwell, in the four minutes of the day that were still mine.

"He's got the statement people working in shifts," Noah said. "But that's not why I came." He took out his phone and showed me a long grey list of tracks. "When the surge hit, the multitrack kept recording on its own battery. Mains feed, booth feed, all of it. I copied it before Dylan's people wiped the desk this morning." He looked at me steadily. "One track is labeled BOOTH. It's you, alone, singing every hard part of that show from inside a storage room. Time-stamped. Unedited. Whatever they say you are, this says what you did."

"Why would you—" I stopped. It was a stupid question, and he was kind enough not to answer it.

"Because I deleted you fourteen times," he said. "This makes thirteen I still owe you."

I was summoned to HR at two o'clock.

The woman from HR had the decency to look uncomfortable, which at Sterling was practically a resignation letter. Effective immediately, I was suspended pending an investigation into "unauthorized stage access and breach of performance protocol." I would surrender my badge, my headset, and my building pass. Two security officers would escort me to my desk to collect my personal effects.

"Understood," I said. "Will the investigation be interviewing the fire extinguisher?"

She did not answer, and neither did the two security officers waiting by the door.

My desk was already empty.

Somebody had been thorough. The drawers stood open. Sweater, mug, granola bars, phone chargers: gone. And the deep bottom drawer, where the notebooks had slept under the spare cables, had been pried open, the lock sprung, the metal torn and shining. Empty.

The notebooks were my fair copies, the clean working versions of every song, kept at the office because that was where the work happened. I stood there and did not think about the tour, or the video, or the hundred million people. I thought about dates written small in corners, and whose hands they were in now.

I put what was left into a cardboard box and walked out of Sterling Records between the two security officers, past the fountain in the lobby. Neither of them spoke to me. I kept my eyes forward and matched their pace.

My apartment is four flights up and smells of other people's cooking. I put the box down and stood in the middle of the room for a while, the way you stand in a house after a burglary, knowing something is missing and dreading the inventory.

Then I remembered where songs are born.

Not in demo rooms. Not in desk drawers. "Neon Heart" was born at a kitchen table at 2 a.m., in a cheap spiral notebook from a drugstore. "Static Bloom" was born when I was nineteen, in a bar's back hallway, in the same kind of notebook. The fair copies went to the office. The first ink had never lived at Sterling at all.

I got down on my knees beside the bed. My guitar case was under it, where it had been since I carried it off a bus from Ohio with everything I owned. The lining pocket inside the lid was stiff with disuse. I worked it open with my fingernails, seam by seam, and pulled out the stack: rubber-banded, water-warped, soft as cloth at the edges.

Page one: Static Bloom, dated March of the year I turned nineteen.

That was three years before anyone had heard the name Scarlett Vale.

I sat down on the floor with the stack in my lap and turned the pages one by one, the crossings-out, the dates, the coffee rings. All of it still mine. All of it still here.

My phone buzzed on the floor beside me. An after-hours message from Sterling HR: "A reminder that all materials created during your employment remain company property. Legal will contact you regarding items removed from the premises."

I read it twice. Then I looked at the open guitar case beside me, at the torn lining, at the pages that had never once been inside their building.

They didn't know about the guitar case. Yet.