Taking the Lead (Secrets of a Rock Star #1)

by Cecilia Tan

  “My heart didn’t.” He lowered his eyes to look at me, the green seeming darker and deeper now than before. I felt my own eyes sting a little as he described his old pain. “How could I dare to feel the slightest bit happy he was gone? I punished myself, beat myself up over that little bit of feeling, like the only feelings I should’ve been allowed were sadness and rage. It was so stupid.”

  “You were young,” I said, as if I could help by giving him an excuse.

  He gave me a wry smile. “I know. And I know better now. I tied myself in a knot over it, thinking both feelings couldn’t be ‘true.’ But they were. Learning that didn’t solve all my problems but that was a really big lesson to learn.”

  I lay back down in the crook of his arm. “I feel … sadness and rage. But I think right now I’m angrier about the reporter and my father blabbing on than I am about what actually might have happened back then.” As I said it a little chill of fear made me shiver, though. The thought of suicide was terrifying, a whole unknown angle on the story that I wasn’t sure I could stand. “The thing is, I don’t know the truth and people are going to ask me about it and I don’t know what to say.”

  “Hm. How about, ‘You guys want to know about my parents’ private life? Well, I don’t. What kid does?’”

  That made me smile. I could imagine Axel sparring verbally with reporters. “I can’t say that.”

  “Why not? Wouldn’t it be true?”

  “Well, yes, but …”

  “But what?”

  “But you can’t just shut them down like that.”

  “Or what? They’ll bite you like they’re actually rabid dogs?”

  “Or they’ll keep digging.”

  “I’d say they’ve dug to the bottom of this one.”

  I sighed. “And what if they haven’t? We still don’t know what really happened.”

  “Okay, I guess the question is … do you actually want to know?”

  I turned the ideas around and around in my mind like abstract sculptures, like they might mean something different if seen from another angle. “I guess I do. But I might have to live with the fact I may not ever get the truth out of my father. Even if he tells me, can I believe him? Does he even remember? He’s got all kinds of memory loss from pickling his brain.”

  “Harsh.”

  “But true. I guess the biggest thing is …” I took a deep breath, asking myself if I was ready to say this out loud. Somehow feeling like Axel would listen, really listen, made me brave. “I have to figure out if I’m ready to forgive my father if it turns out it wasn’t his fault.”

  “Or if he claims it wasn’t?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been clinging to the idea that her death was his fault for so long …”

  “And if you’ve shaped your heart around that idea, what happens if that idea’s gone?” He tensed suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. That’s just a good idea for a song.”

  “It is?”

  He sang softly to me then, just improvising the lines and a melody. “I clung to the idea for so long / what happens when it’s gone / my heart’s the shape of something wrong / if it goes away I’ll fall apart.”

  I patted lightly on his chest as he sang, keeping time, until he wound down.

  “If you want to get up and write it down you can,” I said.

  “Nah. I’ll remember it. Or if I don’t, it wasn’t that good an idea. So. You’re angry. Confused.”

  “And clinging to my anger at my dad. But there’s a kind of security in familiar feelings, you know? Being angry at him and tamping it down all the time to hide it sucks. But what if feeling some other way is even worse? Fear of the unknown is always worse than whatever you’re suffering at the moment.”

  “That’s why you like surrendering,” he said. “Because it means you’ve gone to the point of giving up what you know and letting go.”

  “Yeah, well, letting go with you is one thing. The media, on the other hand, won’t recognize my safeword.”

  “Unfortunately.” He stretched against me. “I think we should probably move from the couch to somewhere wider if we’re going to keep cuddling like this.”

  “There you go, messing with your image and being sensible. I have to use the facilities anyway.”

  As I climbed carefully off him he chided me. “You don’t have to talk like that with me, Ricki. ‘Use the facilities’? Just say you have to pee. Come on.”

  I stuck my tongue out, turning back as I reached the door to the hall. “And if I don’t have to just pee? What then?”

  He laughed and I pranced out in triumph. Turns out I was right in more ways than one, though. I got to the bathroom and discovered my monthly visitor had, in fact, arrived.

  One thing at a time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ROCK THE WORLD

  AXEL

  When I got back to Mal’s that night he was pacing back and forth in his living room like an angry panther in a cage.

  “You doing all right, big guy?” I asked as I went to the fridge to get a beer. Beer would usually improve his mood.

  “Call Christina and tell her I’m not going,” he said.

  I stuck my head into the living room from the kitchen. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not going where?”

  “Back to England.” He ground his teeth and looked straight up at the ceiling.

  “Are you being deported or something …?”

  “Call Christina,” he repeated, and then disappeared into his bedroom and slammed the door.

  I opened a beer for myself and sat on the couch to dial Christina’s number. Her chirpy voice mail answered. “You have reached Pempengco Productions! Beep!” Yes, she actually said beep.

  I hung up and dialed again. This time she picked up. “Axel, thank goodness. Sorry to make you wait but I’m in New York and the best thing just happened. Pack a bag. You’re going on an overnight trip to London.”

  “Is this what Mal’s knickers are in a twist over? Why are we going to London?”

  “You remember that movie?”

  I took a swig of beer and leaned back, trying to think of what she meant. “You’ve got to be more specific, Chris.”

  “Remember when you were recording in New York and that producer was hanging around, and us talking about putting a song on a movie soundtrack?”

  “Oh, that movie. I thought the song they took was just filler music, though, not like a huge deal?”

  “Well, that’s true, not like you did the theme song, but that’s beside the point. The point is that we have a last-minute chance for you to be at the premiere in London. Big red carpet thing, huge glitz, giant after-party, and the absolute perfect chance for me to grab Rothschild by the balls.”

  “Talk dirty to me, baby,” I joked. Actually, I loved Christina’s tough mouth and her bulldog personality: that was why she was such a good manager. But I could see why Mal was in a bit of a tizzy. He’d sworn he was never going home again. “You said pack a bag. You mean right now, this second?”

  “The shuttle is coming to get you in a little while, so yeah, you better get moving.”

  I sat up and rested my elbows on my knees, the phone in one hand, the beer in the other. “When you said ‘last-minute’ you weren’t kidding. Are we going to perform?”

  “Only in the sense of you need to make an impression. It’s only you and Mal going.”

  “Why not all five of us?”

  “Because I couldn’t get all five of you on the guest list.”

  “And you’re sure it’s worth flying halfway around the world to shake Errold Rothschild’s hand?”

  She made a noise that was half-laugh, half-pig snort. “The point isn’t for you to shake his hand. It’s to have your photo on his desk, on his phone, everywhere the next morning.”

  “And we’ll be there how long?”

  “By the time you land you’ll have to go right to the premiere pretty much. You fly back Saturday night.”

  I groaned. Not onl
y would the jet lag be brutal, but it would mean canceling my tea date with Ricki. “Mal doesn’t want to go,” I mentioned.

  “Mal will do it,” Christina said. “When you tell him this could be the thing that puts another half million into the band kitty.”

  “You really think this deal will be worth that much?”

  “Net,” she emphasized. “He has to go because he’s the British one and they’ll love that. And you have to go because you’re the face of the band, Ax.”

  I sighed. “I know.”

  “You don’t want to go, either?” Her voice scaled up in pitch. “You know how hard this was to pull off!”

  “No, no, don’t be like that, Chris. I’m psyched to go. I’m just not psyched for such a long flight for such a short trip.”

  “If you want I could try to book us a couple more days there—”

  “No, no, we really need to keep up momentum working on the new material,” I said, cringing a little as I said it. I was only half-lying: we did need to keep up momentum. But in truth what I was thinking about was how this was a terrible time to be away from Ricki. She was vulnerable right now and I hated, absolutely hated, having to cancel on her. Something told me that was not going to work out well.

  “I’ll be meeting you in London, but I’m not going to the premiere. I’m depending on you to make this work.”

  “What do you mean by ‘make this work’?”

  “I mean, you know, land yourself in every newspaper in Great Britain. Or at least all the trades. You know that saying? It’s true: a picture is worth a million bucks.”

  That wasn’t the saying, but I didn’t try to correct her. I started packing a bag while she blathered on more details about the flight and where to pick up our boarding passes. Then I hung up and went to try to convince Mal of everything she had told me.

  I knocked on his door.

  “Come,” he barked.

  I opened the door to find him zipping shut a small suitcase on the foot of his bed. Apparently he’d either heard everything or otherwise convinced himself to go. “Limo’s on the way,” I said.

  “I guess we’ll sleep on the plane.”

  And maybe it’ll keep me from fretting about Ricki. I tried to call her but it went right to voice mail and I figured she had already gone to sleep. By the time she got up, we’d be halfway there. I texted her instead so she’d see when she got up. While I was doing that, Mal drank the rest of my beer and then I threw some of my best “bad boy” clothes into a bag.

  On the flight I started writing the lyrics to a song about flying and fortune and fame, but it was probably too much of a cliché to use. It was that or write about how all I wanted to do was hold her tight and keep the world at bay. Mal didn’t criticize, though. He also didn’t ask how she and I were getting along. I’m pretty sure from the lyrics I was writing, he could tell.

  RICKI

  The next morning I turned on my phone as I was finishing breakfast with Gwen before getting ready to go to work. In came a frantic-looking text from Axel that began in ALL CAPS:

  SO SORRY FLYING TO LONDON VERY SUDDEN AAAAAAH—Will tell you all about it when we get back. I’ll be in the air by the time you get this. Last-minute publicity appearance. I promise I’ll bring you some English tea to make up for breaking our date. Sorry sorry sorry.

  So that was the first thing that went wrong that morning, although I felt pretty mellow about it given how good I felt about his visit the previous night.

  The next thing was at the office. I’d barely gotten to my desk when I was summoned to David Meyers’s office. That could only be something very good or very bad, I thought.

  He asked me to close the door behind me and I half-wondered if this was going to be another chance for a guy to hit on me. But no, he was all business.

  “Ricki, I don’t want you to think I don’t like you or the work you do. Understand this isn’t personal in any way. I consider you a part of my team and I’m actually very protective of my people.”

  I nodded, wondering what he was working up to.

  “I want you to stop beating the ‘more movies for women’ drum.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Like I said, don’t misunderstand me, but you’re new here, you’re still learning our corporate culture. There’s concern that if we are too overt in our diversity campaigns we’ll alienate our core audience.”

  Had he shown my proposal to some of the higher-ups? “By ‘core audience’ do you mean paying ticket buyers or stockholders and executives?”

  “Well, I think at the heart of it is that our stockholders and executives think of themselves as people who love movies. And they assume that the audience will feel the same.”

  I tried to keep my tone even and reasonable. “They do realize, though, that they’re men? And that half the people in this country … aren’t?”

  “Oh, I know, and they know. This isn’t a sexist thing, Ricki.”

  Like hell it’s not … I thought. But I tried to think back over what was just said. “So, wait, you’re not telling me we shouldn’t develop movies for women; you’re just telling me don’t … make such a big deal about it?”

  He sagged in his chair and I couldn’t tell if it was from relief that I’d gotten his message or disappointment that I hadn’t, until he said, “Yes, essentially. I don’t want you taking a lot of heat from above and I want you to have time to grow and accomplish what you want. So the message for now is back down a little, try to fit in, and wait for your moment. I think you’ll have an easier time if you champion certain projects, perhaps, rather than make it seem like you have a political agenda.”

  While I understood everything he was saying, and I appreciated him having my back with upper management, it felt like he hadn’t really listened to anything I’d said in our previous meetings or in the memos I had sent. “Mr. Meyers—”

  “David, please.”

  “David. I don’t mean it as a political thing, unless you want to call it capitalist. It’s just good moneymaking sense to capture the money out of the neglected portion of the market.”

  “Is that what they teach these days at Ivy League business schools?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” I took a calming breath. “Okay, yes, if I weren’t a woman it wouldn’t seem political. I get that. You know what I think? If Steven Spielberg or David Geffen stood up and said, ‘hey, I had an epiphany about how we can make more money! Stop driving women away and court their dollars instead!’ the whole industry would applaud. But they aren’t saying it, and I am.”

  He nodded. “I know. I get it. I get you. But I’m saying back off for a while. Lie low. You’re still on the bottom rung of the ladder here, remember? You’re going to make a tremendous mark on this industry. You are. I’m asking you to be patient, though, and be a team player, and relax, all right? Just chill out on the political stuff. Or,” he corrected himself, “what could be taken as political even if it’s not politically motivated. Understand?”

  “I understand.” I understood he wanted me to sit down and shut up. It was pretty obvious to me that if I were a young male executive I’d be expected to grab the bull by the horns. But because I was a woman I was supposed to be a “team player.” I realized as I made my way back to my office that Meyers had never actually said he was getting static from up above about me. He had never told me he passed my proposal upstairs so I had to assume that this was him fearing the reaction he might get if he did. He hadn’t even tried.

  David Meyers had been a perfect gentleman and yet somehow I was more disappointed about him than I had been about Conrad Schmitt trying to get me to bend over.

  They say things come in threes, right? Well, the third bad thing that happened that day wasn’t to me, but I took it personally anyway. I texted Gwen at midday to ask if she’d even been seen by the casting director yet and got back a very angry-looking reply:

  Seen? Seen?! I don’t think they even looked up from their doodling or crossword puzzles or whatev
er the $%#&$ they were doing while I was up there!

  I don’t know how she could stand being subjected to that. But she wanted to act, she wanted to do it, and if that was what she wanted to do, I wanted to be there to support her. I called her right back.

  “You know what you need?”

  “What?” Her voice sounded thick, like she’d been crying.

  “Consolation sushi. Sakura is friends with the chef at this place with private rooms. Let me see if she’s free.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Gwen said. “I need to learn to thicken my skin.”

  “Well, until you do, I swear, this guy can mend broken hearts with fish, he’s that good.” Plus Sakura had lots of experience with auditions. Maybe she’d have some advice. “Have Riggs pick me up on the way and I’ll get my car tomorrow.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll get myself together. Thanks, Rick’.”

  So the day wasn’t a total loss, since we had an excellent girls’ night out, and Gwen and Sarah got to know each other better, which was a good thing because I had a feeling I was going to need all the emotional support I could get pretty soon.

  I hadn’t realized how soon, though, until Gwen reminded me in the car on the way home that Dad was coming out of rehab.

  “What, tomorrow?”

  “Yes, tomorrow,” she said, leaning back against the car’s back seat and stretching. “Have you talked to him at all?”

  “Of course not. I thought we weren’t allowed to talk to him when he was in there.”

  “Well, once a week, you can. We could even visit, but you know he wouldn’t want that. He wouldn’t want the photos in the paper.”

  “Are you sure? Gwen, did you read the interview he did for TTT?”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I kind of think maybe he didn’t know he was being interviewed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think he was drunk and rambling and someone wrote it down. There’s a female byline on the story. Maybe he didn’t even think she was a reporter.”

  “Hm. I don’t know if that’s a case for a suit or not.” I sighed. “And if the horse has left the barn already, suing them would only make even more people pay attention. There’s no way to win this media game.”