“Your lyrics were…they were…I’m speechless.”
“Well, the girl who inspired them is pretty amazing. Full of surprises.”
“I saw you…” I blurt out and wish I could take my words back when he raises an eyebrow. I lower my voice. “I don’t want to get in the middle of anything. I saw you and…the girl with the red hair in the hallway and it looks like you guys are not done.”
He rubs the back of his neck, but he looks more annoyed than “caught in the act.” “Olivia. You saw me with Olivia,” he explain as if it all made sense. “She’s my ex. My manager is trying to get her back into my good graces because we make for good tabloid stories.”
“Tabloid stories?”
“If tabloids report about your whereabouts, you’re it. You made it. But…there’s a downside to that.” He chuckles and his finger trails down my cheek. I want to lean into his hand, I want to wrap my arms around him. I want…him.
“What’s the downside?” I try so hard to keep my voice even but I’m clearly failing miserably because the way his eyes darken, he can feel how much I want him.
“First world problems,” he jokes, but it sounds flat. He rubs the back of his neck again. Must be one of his tells when he’s uncomfortable. “Sometimes, I wish they didn’t print everything. Words and images hurt. One newspaper published a picture of my best friend shooting himself up a day before his death.”
“What?” In his apartment, before he started baking, he told me about his best friend dying. But he never mentioned it was from an overdose.
“Lucas!” His manager sounds like my mom when she wanted me to clean my room.
“You were absolutely amazing.” He bends down and his lips touch the spot right by my mouth. So close yet so far. “I’ll call you.”
I nod. And step out the audition room.
Because if I stayed one more minute, one more second, I would have blurted out the truth. I would have told him about that one night no one knows about except my parents.
And he would have looked at me very differently.
I almost died of an overdose too.
CHAPTER 18 - JEN
A woman with a bright smile hands me my phone and the rest of my belongings outside the audition room. “Thank you for coming!” She sounds chirpy while I feel like my heart has hit the floor and is never coming back up. My mind is racing and I almost feel dizzy. The woman must think I’m not going fast enough because she gives me a nudge. “The exit is this way. There might be callbacks, we will let you know. Have a wonderful evening.”
The door slams behind my back and flashes erupt. Journalists put microphones in front of my face. It’s hard to catch my breath. Between seeing Lucas again, the heartbreaking songs, the intense dances and thinking about my past, I don’t know what to say when they ask their questions in a mix of French and English.
“How was your audition? Did you see Lucas? Did he look sad? Do you know if he’s back with Olivia?”
Several security guards help move the crowd of reporters and fans waiting, creating a path for me. I hadn’t realized this audition was that important and I hadn’t realized that Dire Blue had such a following. Signs reading Lucas Forever are flown in the air next to Lucas + Olivia = True Love.
They’re blurry. Everything is blurry. A gust of wind slaps me across the face.
Like four years ago.
In Cape Cod.
It was the year Mia got sick. My first year at the School of Performing Arts and everything was so hard. That was before I was so good at pretending to be a bitch, to not care.
One girl tripped me on my way to class. Another managed to get a spider into my bed—I am still scared of spiders. They’re my kryptonite. And they filmed me while I screamed. I got back at them the next day by drawing on their faces while they slept and filming their reactions when they woke up. That stopped them from putting it on the internet.
It was the year before Emilia got accepted, the year before I managed to create a persona. One of them made me cry by being consistently rude, by making remarks about my skin, my eyes, about my parents. When she talked about my parents, she went too far. I slapped her. She reported me to the director and I got suspended.
I worked hard. Harder every single day. The professors were demanding but I was harder on myself than anyone else. They kept pushing for more. I kept pushing for more.
By the time the holidays arrived, I was already doing coke. It’s scary how easy it is to find coke when you know where to look. In my case, the dealer was a former dancer and paying for it wasn’t hard since my parents transferred a big allowance to my account each month. And I always had an excuse explaining why I was regularly falling short on funds, whenever they checked my balance. I told them I went to an expensive concert, that I needed to take extra lessons, that I was helping a friend with her tuition.
I convinced myself that doing coke was helping me. That it was enhancing my performance, making better, giving me the strength to work harder.
All lies. Everything was a lie.
In Cape Cod, I met Kane the very first morning. I went for a walk on the beach, telling myself that I was doing okay. Convincing myself that I was happy.
He was seventeen, I was almost fifteen. We kissed, we made out. He was my first kiss and the first guy I had sex with. Losing my virginity to him was not everything I thought it would be. But he was gentle and nice and made me feel like I was important.
One evening, he asked me if I wanted to chill on the beach with his friends. I said yes and then I kept on saying yes. His friends were bad news. Wealthy but bored out of their minds.
“I bet you never did heroin.”
I hadn’t. But I bragged about doing coke. They laughed.
The dose they gave me was too much for me. My brain fogged up. Drowsiness took over.
My breathing was too slow. Everything was too slow.
When I collapsed, they were all already gone.
Even Kane.
Mom found me on the beach, called the ambulance and they sent me to rehab for the rest of the winter break. Mom and Dad looked like I had used a knife to slice their hearts. Mom couldn’t stop crying over how she couldn’t lose two daughters. Dad kept on looking at me like he wasn’t sure who I was. Kane died a month later from a heroin overdose.
How am I supposed to tell Lucas? Even if we had a chance, if my fucked-up expectations and his own issues didn’t stop us from trying, my past would make him look at me differently.
“Miss!” A security guards looks down with a concerned frown. “Are you okay?”
I wince, unable to speak. I hide my face with my bag and march through, because that’s what I do. I hide my true feelings and march on.
“Jen!” Alisha calls my name from the Place de La République. She stands by the bronze statue of Marianne right by the memorial from the two terrorist attacks that happened in Paris recently. There’s a teddy bear there that always catches my eye—so many deaths, so many tears, and for what?
I shake my head.
“How did it go?” I ask Alisha, who is clutching her bag tightly and whose blue eyes are wide open like she’s nervous and excited and overwhelmed. “Alisha?”
“I didn’t know it was the Dire Blue. And seeing Steve. He looked…”
“Still bald?” I supply, nudging her, trying to calm her down, but really using this as a way to calm myself down. If I help someone, if I focus on someone else’s problems, mine might disappear for a while.
“He looked good, real good and he looked happy to see me, he looked like he was ready to jump up from his chair and embrace me.” She bites her lip, which she usually only does right before stepping on stage.
“And, did he?”
“He didn’t. I didn’t even…I mean I said hi, I asked how he was doing and then…I danced. I was so cold. When he tried to walk me back to the door, I told him it wasn’t necessary.”
“Why? You looked so cozy with
him on Saturday.”
“That’s the thing, I was cozy, way too cozy, I’m not ready,” she blabbers more to herself than to me, and then she takes a deep breath. “Anyways…” She gestures to the crowd still outside the hotel. “That was something.”
“It’s not the first time I got photographed. But it’s the first time I got photographed by dozens of paparazzi at once.”
“Are you okay?” she asks, watching me carefully as if trying to catch me in a lie. “You look like Baryshnikov told you you were the worst dancer in history, which he wouldn’t do because you’re not.”
“It was…” I purse my lips into thinking mode. Finding the right word is much harder than I thought. “Interesting.”
She tilts her head to the side. “Interesting like wow, I can’t believe I slept with Lucas Wills and we’re totally going to date and get married and have babies, or interesting this sucks?”
“Do you have a middle ground for this interesting? Like I don’t know. It was nice seeing him, he wrote a song about us, but I’m pretty sure I still don’t want to get involved?”
She shrieks and tugs on my coat. “Wait, what? He wrote a song about you?”
“About our night. I think. It sounded like our night.”
Her hand rises to her chest and her mouth gapes open. “This is…this is the best news ever. So exciting!”
“Not that exciting. I told you, it’s not going to work.”
Her eyes roam my face and her chin juts down as if I disappointed her or crushed her fantasy. “We’ll see.” She smiles. “By the way, didn’t you notice how Lucas Wills totally looks like that actor in that new vampire show, that revamp of Buffy?”
And he can quote Parks & Rec. And he can make me laugh like no other. And he can weaken my knees with one look. “I didn’t know they were making a remake of Buffy.” It’s hard to let those words out. I want to continue talking about him. I want to ask her if she thinks he could get over my past. I want to ask her if she thinks he is over his own past.
But instead, I shrug in a noncommittal way. My favorite shrug. “His ex is still in the picture. Like she’s got her claws stuck into him pretty tightly, and I’m not doing this.”
“You mean, you’re not doing this again. Because something definitely did happen—and it was more than an awesome night of whoopla. You wouldn’t be so beside yourself if nothing had happened.”
“Whoopla?” I raise an eyebrow.
“I call it whoopla. I stick by whoopla.”
“Fine. Did you and Steve whoopla?”
“I told you, no. The chemistry was amazing and he seems like such a sweet guy. And I wanted to whoopla. But I didn’t.” She bites her lip as if preventing herself from saying more. “It’s not about me, but about you. What are you going to do?” She links her arm in mine and we cross the Place de La République to the sidewalk.
“I’m going to find a place where we can sit and eat and we’re not going to talk about this again.”
“Sure thing,” she says in an I-don’t-think-so tone.
The restaurants around the Place de La République are completely full. People are laughing and talking and living.
Alisha nudges me. “We could go to St Michel.”
St Michel is a neighborhood by Notre Dame. It boasts very touristy restaurants but it’s an atmosphere of its own: the people calling for you to come sit inside in several languages, the smells of traditional crêperies mixed with kebabs, the crowd strolling around.
“To the Greek restaurant?” We’ve been to that place three times and the waiters recognize us now and even though I’m sure they do that for everyone, they always give us a little extra food and wide smiles like we’re friends.
It’s nice to find a spot like this when you’re in a city you don’t know, when you’re far from your family and friends. Even in a city as gorgeous as Paris, being anonymous in the crowd only works if you have places where you’re known.
“We could even take the metro, and then walk down the Boulevard so you can find more plaques to take pictures of.” Her voice is stronger, and I hope I can take some of her strength to continue pretending I’m fine.
“Let’s go then.” Our feet take us to the metro station. It’s less crowded than the time I used it during rush hour. I had to register at the consulate and thought I’d get there faster using the metro. The crowd was overwhelming and it was hard to breathe. Not this time. There are only a few dozen people in our train. The doors close and we pick up speed.
We leave Place de la République behind.
We leave this crazy evening behind.
What I would give to leave my past behind too.
CHAPTER 19 - LUCAS
As soon as the door closes on Jen, Grégoire leans back in his chair with a very loud I-can’t-believe-this whistle. “Who was that girl?” he asks with an edge to his voice. “You and she clearly had a connection.”
“Jen Harrison. You got her name the same time I did. I thought she was someone named Laura.” I can’t help being snarky. I’ve been holding up pretty well considering he’s trying to shove my ex into the band for a music video that’s supposed to put us back on the map. For a music video that is about my dead best friend.
Steve chuckles and he winks at me. Grégoire didn’t give him as much crap for Alisha, but Alisha also tried really hard to not show any emotions, even though she did look like she was in pain and way too destabilized to dance in front of Steve. He didn’t lose his shit when she came in. He didn’t write a song about her.
Even though I hoped Jen would be there, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure if she was a dancer, I wasn’t sure if she’d come. I wasn’t sure about anything.
But seeing her tonight didn’t only send waves of happiness throughout my body; seeing her dance stole my breath away.
She was amazing. Simply amazing.
“She was good.” Olivia’s voice is almost sincere. She stands up and takes a few steps. She can’t stay still when she’s nervous or upset. “She was the best so far.”
“You would need to work with her,” Grégoire points out, and I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or to her. He leans back in his chair. I hate when he gets that entitled expression on his face. Granted, he’s our manager, but right now he looks like the world owes him its soul and its left nut.
“I’m a professional.” She sighs and walks to the other side of the room. That used to make me laugh and I used to tease her about it. Not anymore. “Lucas has a thing for her, everyone can see it. Everyone can also guess the song is about her. The one-night stand who got away? The gossip bloggers had a field day about Lucas trying to get over us, and how he used to jump from bed to bed.”
“Half of it wasn’t true,” I interrupt her. “And what’s your point?”
“Will you be able to keep it in your pants?”
The guys snicker and I shake my head. “Again, what’s your point? I didn’t even agree to sing that song with you.”
Olivia’s shoulders drop and she glances away. I’m not used to seeing her not believing in herself, not believing everything will work her way because she’s Olivia McRae.
Grégoire raises an index finger. His way of asking us to stay quiet. “The point is that you don’t want to jeopardize her career and your career. Technically, you’re going to be her boss if she does end up being the best today, and you know how fast that can deteriorate.” He picks up her composite from her folder and very slowly reads her resume. In a way that makes me want to punch him. In a way that’s so condescending that I want to call him out on it. “She’s graduated from the School of Performing Arts in New York with honors and was the lead during her senior year. She started at the City of Lights Ballet Company four months ago. She has no music video experience, no show biz experience.”
“We didn’t say we wanted someone with music experience,” I point out, unclenching my fists. Mom used to say I needed to use my words instead of fighting. And right
now, words are my best bet. Maybe we can convince him.
Grégoire stares at me—with an eyebrow cocked all the way to the ceiling. I’m not the only one surprised by my calm. “You can’t sleep with her.”
“Can we drop my sex life as a reason why she shouldn’t be hired? Plus, I can do what I want.”
Grégoire shakes his head. “You know nothing about her. Plus, Olivia is right. You’re technically her boss during the time she shoots the video, so it’s not going to happen.”
I grind my teeth and roll my eyes but still don’t say a word.
Grégoire takes a pen and underlines something in the pile of papers in front of him. He does it slowly, carefully and with a smirk that tells me he knew exactly what I was thinking. “The contract states, ‘Romantic or sexual relationships between members of the band and or with staff under contract where one individual has influence or control over the other's conditions of employment are inappropriate. These relationships, even if consensual, may ultimately result in conflict or difficulties in the workplace. If such a relationship currently exists or develops, it must be disclosed to the band, to the manager of the band, and to the recording label in order to decide on the best possible course of action.’” He pauses, gives me one pointed look before continuing. “And we all know once it’s disclosed to more than one person, the press is going to hear about it and once the fans become aware of it, they’re going to hate her. They want you back with Olivia. Anything that goes against that will make them angry. ” He shoots a glare at me, but a glare that carries all the meaning of his last sentence. Fans might hate her. And thinking about what the press did to Benji, how they destroyed him by following him around, waiting for him to slip, I don’t want that for her. Grégoire smirks as if he knows he got my attention. “Now, let’s all sit back down and get to the next dancer. We still have at least twenty to see. Maybe one of them will be better.”
“Whatever.” I sit back down next to him, glancing at Jen’s picture. I read her resume and try to put meaning behind every word. It says she’s been dancing since she was four years old. Did she want it? Did her parents push her? How about leaving New York?
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