The Voice They Didn't Deserve

Chapter 4 Hidden Voices

The studio didn't look like anything on television, just a converted warehouse with too many cables taped to the floor and a green room that smelled like cold coffee and hairspray, nothing like the glossy set Mira had imagined from the couch at home, volume low, her mother half-asleep beside her.

Mira sat in the corner in her mask, running her thumb along the edge of the black lace where it met her jaw, watching crew members move past with clipboards and headsets like she'd wandered into a language she didn't speak yet. Somewhere behind a black curtain, someone was arguing quietly about a lighting cue. A production assistant with a coffee in each hand nearly walked into her, apologized without really looking at her, and kept moving. Nobody here knew her name, and for the first time in her life, that felt less like disappearing and more like being handed a blank page.

She'd told Talia she'd text the second it was over, and had already, twice, checked her phone for a message that hadn't come yet, some small anxious part of her wanting proof that her ordinary life was still exactly where she'd left it while this new one unfolded around her.

"First time?" A girl dropped into the seat beside her, gold mask sharper at the edges than Mira's, more armor than disguise. "You've got the look. Everybody's got the look their first taping. Little bit terrified, little bit like they might throw up on the host."

"Is it that obvious?"

"Only to someone who had it too." The girl held out a hand. "Dana. What are they calling you?"

"Haven't decided. I'd rather name myself than let a producer stick me with something I have to live with for months."

"Smart, actually. They tried to call me Songbird for the first two episodes. I made them stop." Dana studied her a second too long, head tilted. "I watched the clip they showed the crew before you got here. Your audition tape. You're good. Actually good, not just talent-show good."

"Careful. Sounds like a compliment."

"Don't get used to it. Next time I might mean it as a threat." Dana grinned, easy and unbothered.

"How many tapings have you done?"

"Four. You get used to the lights faster than you'd think." Dana's fingers went briefly to the edge of her own mask, unconscious. "The mask, though. That takes longer. Some nights I forget I've got it on until I catch my reflection in the equipment glass and scare myself half to death."

"Does it ever get less strange? Being someone else for an hour?"

"It's not being someone else. That's the trick nobody tells you going in." Dana said it simply, like she'd worked it out a long time ago and stopped questioning it. "It's being more you than you usually let yourself be, because nobody's watching the real you to judge it."

A production assistant called Mira's number before she could ask what Dana meant by the odd look that followed that sentence, something almost wistful crossing her face before she caught herself and smoothed it back into easy confidence.

Under the lights, the fear didn't vanish, but it stopped being the loudest thing in the room. Underneath the mask, faceless, nameless, she wasn't Selena's little sister, wasn't Brianna's favorite hallway target, wasn't anyone Ridgemont had already decided she was. She was only the voice, and for the length of one song, that felt like enough.

When she walked offstage, her legs were shaking and the crew was applauding, not the polite kind. One of the cameramen actually whistled. A woman with a clipboard mouthed something at her that might have been "wow" or might have been nothing at all, and Mira floated through the rest of the night on the strength of it.

Her first paycheck came two weeks later, folded into an envelope with no note. Mira held it a long time before she did anything with it, turning it over like it might dissolve if she opened it too fast. She didn't tell Camille. She took a bus alone on Saturday to a secondhand store three towns over, one Brianna would never set foot in, racks of coats that smelled like other people's closets, and bought one that fit her properly for the first time in two years, the sleeves not swallowing her hands, the collar sitting where a collar was supposed to sit.

The woman at the register, older, kind-eyed, had looked at her for a second too long while ringing it up. "That color suits you. You should wear things that suit you more often."

"I'm working on it," Mira said, and meant it in a way that surprised her.

She wore the coat home on the bus and caught her reflection in the window glass. She didn't recognize the posture before she recognized the coat, shoulders back instead of curled in, like her body had decided something her mind hadn't caught up to yet. A little kid two seats over stared at her with open curiosity, the way kids do, and Mira found she didn't mind being looked at, not this time.

She almost wore it to school on Monday. She got as far as pulling it off the hanger before folding it back into her closet, telling herself it wasn't the right day yet, though she couldn't have said what would make a day the right one. Some part of her wanted to save it, the way you save something new for an occasion that hasn't arrived, even though nothing about her life had an occasion scheduled anywhere close.

Dana caught her arm the following Friday, backstage again, mask already pushed up onto her forehead in the fifteen minutes crew allowed between segments. "Told you. More you, not less."

"I bought a coat," Mira said, like it explained something, and somehow, to Dana, it seemed to.

"That's how it starts. Little things first." Dana bumped her shoulder. "Wait till you see what six months of this does to a person."

Mira was still holding onto that thought, turning it over like a stone in her pocket, when she heard a voice she recognized outside the loading dock, and every muscle in her body locked at once.

"I'm telling you, I know that voice from somewhere." Ezra, pacing near the equipment trucks, phone pressed to his ear. "I can't place it, but I know it."

"How would you even know a masked contestant on a regional talent show," the voice on the other end said, tinny through the phone speaker.

"I don't know. I just do." His voice had an edge she'd never heard from him, careful and unsettled at once. "It sounded like someone I used to know. Someone I haven't heard sing in years."

"You're not seriously investigating a TV show, are you."

"I'm not investigating anything. I just can't stop thinking about it." A pause, longer this time. "Forget it. It's stupid."

Mira's pulse roared in her ears loud enough to drown out whatever he said next. She didn't wait to hear the rest. She turned and walked fast in the opposite direction, mask still in place, heart slamming against her ribs so hard she was half convinced the sound alone would give her away.

She only knew two things, standing alone in the dark behind the equipment trucks, mask cooling against her skin. That six performances suddenly felt like an impossibly long time to keep a secret from the one person who already seemed to be circling the truth.

And that some small, reckless part of her, the part Dana had just described without meaning to, more you, not less, almost didn't want to keep the secret at all.

She waited another full minute before she let herself walk back toward the lights, checking twice that her mask hadn't slipped, before finally stepping back into the noise of the studio like nothing had happened at all.