The Voice They Didn't Deserve

Chapter 2 The offer

The man found her by the vending machines, still holding her guitar case like a shield, waiting for Talia to finish arguing with the stage manager about whether Mira had technically won something that didn't have a prize.

"That was the best thing I've heard on a high school stage in four years." He said it like a fact, not a compliment, which was somehow worse. He held out a card before she could decide whether to run. Alden Cross. Executive Producer, Rising Voice.

Mira had heard of it. Everyone had. It was the kind of show her mother sometimes watched with the volume low, the kind where regular people turned into names overnight.

"I'm not interested," Mira said.

"You don't even know what I'm offering yet."

"I know what happens after. I've seen it happen."

Something in Cross's expression shifted, recalculated. "Selena Castillo."

Mira's stomach dropped straight through the floor.

"I did my homework before I walked back here," he said, not unkindly. "I'm not asking you to be your sister. I'm asking you to be nobody at all, if that's what you want. We run a segment called Hidden Voices. Contestants perform masked. No name, no face, no story, until the audience votes to unmask, if they ever do. You'd be paid regardless. Real money, not exposure. You keep your life exactly the way it is right now." He paused. "Or you don't. Your choice."

Mira looked at the card in her hand like it might catch fire. "Why me?"

"Because in four years of doing this job, I have heard maybe three voices that made the room stop breathing. Yours was one of them tonight."

"That's still not really an answer."

"It's the only one I've got that's actually true. The rest is contracts and numbers, and I'd rather you hear those from a lawyer than from me in a hallway." He handed her a second card, plain white this time. "Think about it. Call the number if you want to talk terms. Don't if you don't."

He was gone before she could decide whether to be relieved or disappointed.

Talia caught up with her on the sidewalk outside, breathless, hair still damp from whatever argument she'd apparently won or lost with the stage manager. "What did he want?"

"Nothing. Just a compliment."

"Mira. That was Alden Cross. From Rising Voice. I watch that show every Thursday, I would know his face anywhere." Talia's eyes narrowed, the particular look she got when she knew she was being lied to and had decided to let it slide for exactly as long as it took to circle back later. "You're lying to me right now."

"I'm not ready to talk about it yet."

"Fine. But I'm putting a pin in this conversation. A big one." Talia held up her hands, tracking an invisible pin in the air like she was hanging it on a corkboard only she could see, and Mira almost laughed despite herself, despite the two cards sitting heavy in her jacket pocket.

"How mad would you be," Mira asked slowly, "if I told you I was thinking about doing something that might scare you a little."

"Depends on the something."

"I can't say yet."

"Then I reserve the right to be exactly as mad as the situation deserves once I find out." Talia bumped her shoulder against Mira's, more affection than argument in it. "But for what it's worth, whatever it is, you were incredible tonight. Whatever this producer wants from you, he's not wrong about that part."

The apartment smelled like fabric softener and burnt rice by the time Mira got home, her mother already at the stove despite the shift she'd worked that morning, despite the one she had in six hours. Camille Castillo had circles under her eyes that had stopped being temporary sometime last year, and she didn't look up when Mira came in.

"Talia called me," her mother said. "Said you sang tonight."

Mira's whole body went still. "It wasn't supposed to happen."

"That's not what she said. She said you were incredible." Camille finally turned around. "You haven't sung since Selena."

"I know."

"Are you going to tell me why tonight was different?"

"Someone made me," Mira said.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got right now."

Camille studied her a long moment, dish towel twisting between her hands, then set it down and crossed the kitchen to pull Mira into a hug that lasted a second longer than either of them expected, the kind of hug that said more than either of them was willing to say out loud. "I'm glad you sang. Whatever made you do it."

"Me too," Mira said, and meant it more than she'd let herself admit until the words were already out of her mouth.

"You hungry? There's rice, even if it's a little burnt."

"I could eat."

They sat at the small kitchen table together, plates balanced on the one clear corner not covered in mail, and for a while neither of them mentioned the show, or Selena, or the two business cards Mira could feel sitting in her jacket on the back of her chair, close enough to touch.

"You're quiet," Camille said eventually, not looking up from her plate.

"Just tired."

"Good tired or bad tired?"

Mira considered the question longer than it probably deserved. "I don't actually know yet."

Camille nodded like that was an acceptable answer, which it wasn't, not really, but her mother had never been the type to push past a door someone clearly wasn't ready to open. She reached over instead and squeezed Mira's hand once, quick, before getting up to start on the dishes, humming something under her breath that Mira didn't recognize until halfway through the second verse. It was one of Selena's old competition pieces, half-forgotten, resurrected without either of them quite meaning to.

Mira didn't say anything. She just listened until her mother noticed what she was humming and stopped abruptly, embarrassed, like she'd been caught doing something private.

"Sorry," Camille said. "Old habit."

"Don't be sorry. It was nice."

Her mother's smile, small and surprised, stayed with Mira all the way up the stairs to her room.

Later, Mira sat on the edge of her bed, Cross's plain white card resting on her knee, his number glowing on her phone screen where she'd already typed it in. She thought about Brianna's voice in the hallway that morning, same sweater, Castillo, and about the sound the auditorium had made instead, four hours later, for the exact same girl standing in the exact same clothes. She thought about Selena's face the day the scholarship fell through, a memory she hadn't let herself sit with in a long time. She thought about the number Cross had quoted almost carelessly during the walk to his car, casual the way rich people were casual about money that would change everything for someone else.

She typed the message before she let herself think about it too hard.

I'm in. But I need to know exactly what happens if someone figures out who I am.

The reply came back in less than a minute.

Then we make sure nobody does.

Mira read it twice, set the phone face-down on her nightstand, and lay in the dark a long time before sleep finally found her, the shoebox of songs under her bed sitting quiet, like it had been waiting three years for exactly this.

Down the hall, she could still hear her mother moving around the kitchen, the clink of dishes being put away one at a time, unhurried, the same tune from dinner drifting back up under her breath now that she thought no one was listening. Mira lay still and let herself have it, one more minute of a sound she hadn't heard in years, before she finally closed her eyes.