“Yeah, he said it was cool.”
“It’s just, you know, she’s sort of mainstream.” I said this like it was something bad.
“We’ve had a ton of people asking about her. You know how it is when a big name comes through town, everyone remembers how much they used to like them. It’s been ten years since her last concert here.” Like I needed to be reminded.
Maya came up beside me, saw the display, and said, “Oh, my mom wants to go see her. I heard it’s her last tour.”
“Really?” I turned to Maya in surprise
“Yeah, I heard that rumour, too,” Jeremy said. “She’s gonna quit touring to do a show in Vegas.”
Last tour?
“Dizz?” It took me a second to realize that Maya was talking to me. She gave me a quizzical look. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” But as Georgia’s face loomed in front of me, I had trouble stringing words together. I looked away quickly. Behind me, Lou’s head was down, as if he was trying to pretend the conversation wasn’t happening.
“I wonder how old she is?” Maya asked, nodding at Georgia’s poster. “I feel like she’s been around my whole life, but she looks so young.”
She’s thirty-eight, I wanted to answer. Barely twenty years old when she had Lou and she hadn’t aged. She still looked the same as she did in the photos Dad had given me. Her skin had retained its youthful glow. Whatever magical elixir famous people drank, she must have had it in litres. She and Dad must have been an unlikely couple: a beautiful ingenue and the older rocker musician.
“Lou! How old do you think Georgia Waters is?” Jeremy called. Lou looked up, his eyes like a deer in headlights.
“Uh, I don’t know. Forty, maybe?”
“Nah. No way is she that old. Look at her. I say thirty-five at the most.”
Maya screwed up her mouth, surveying the poster. “It looks like she had some work done. Botox for sure.” Her eyes flicked to my face, a small frown creasing her brow. “Your hair is like the exact same colour as hers. Did you ever notice that?”
Breath caught in my throat as Maya inspected the poster more closely. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lou stiffen at the cash desk and look up. “She’s definitely had some work done,” Maya said with finality.
“Might just be airbrushing,” Jeremy added.
Maya turned her attention to a text on her phone and moved away to thumb back an answer. I exhaled with relief and wished Jeremy had never thought to put up a display. I’d have to avoid standing anywhere near it until the concert, for fear someone would see the resemblance. Not that anyone would make the leap to Georgia being our mom. Two kids, living where we did; nothing about our lives screamed “celebrity offspring.” As long as we kept our heads down, nobody would ever find out who our mom really was.
Not unless we wanted them to.
I threw a worried look at Lou. Now that Jeremy had taken it upon himself to make a wall-sized display of Georgia, we wouldn’t be able to escape her.
Jeremy went back to stapling the fans together, the click and crunch of paper loud between us. For the first time ever, I was happy for the escape to Vintage Village.
- 16 -
Lou
The bus into the city was almot full, but no one had to stand yet. It lurched forward, chugging to the next stop. It was Wednesday, my day off, and it stretched in front of me, empty. I’d almost stuck around the store because I didn’t have anything to do, but then I realized that if I did that, I was only digging myself deeper into a hole. I needed to get out.
But go where? Do what? The main library downtown was open on Wednesdays. I decided to go there, hang out, grab a coffee, and drag home a bag of books. Kinda boring, but it was better than hanging around the store all day. As the bus got farther into the heart of downtown, I started noticing more people my age walking around. Lots had backpacks and laptop bags slung over their shoulders. I peered out at rows of brick buildings lining the street. Banners with the university’s emblem waved in the breeze and marked them as campus buildings. I reached up and pressed the signal to get off at the next stop. The sign on the bus announced my decision: Stop Requested.
Okay, so now what? I thought as I stood on the street corner and the bus pulled away from the curb. I looked like any other university kid in my runners and jeans. I even had a backpack to bring home the library books, but I still felt conspicuous, trying to get my bearings. I’d never walked around the campus before. It didn’t look much different than anywhere else, except for the rush of people who came out of a building all at once and dispersed, walking to their next class. I stood to the side and let them pass. Across the street was a coffee shop. May as well go there, refuel, and walk around for a while.
The Bean — that’s what the coffee shop was called — had long communal tables with outlets in the middle of them so people could plug in laptops or iPads. Everyone had buds in their ears as they typed or read. I scanned the room with a furtive glance and noticed someone was reading The Elders of Warren. I blinked, not believing my eyes. It was an obscure book. The author never wrote anything else. The girl reading it had white-blond hair and glasses and was sitting by herself at one of the tall café tables across from the counter. She sat hunched over, craning her neck like she wanted the book to swallow her. She was almost finished, only a few pages yet to be read. The ending of that book is the best. I watched her jealously, wishing I could read it again for the first time.
“What can I get started for you?” the guy at the cash register asked.
“Uh, medium coffee,” I said. “With room.” Funny how language has changed. Who’d have known what “with room” meant twenty years ago? Dad hated ordering coffee at places like this. He’d get all fumbly and worry that he was ordering wrong. “What about just an old-fashioned cup of joe?” he’d ask. “Why do they all have these goddamn names? Macchiato! Frappuccino!” And don’t get him started on what they cost.
As he passed it toward me, the coffee sloshed over the sides of the cup, dripping over my hand. I swore under my breath. So much for the “with room.” I grabbed a napkin to sop it up, but when I reached for the cream, I looked up to see the girl was watching me. Our eyes met in one of those uncomfortable moments where she’d been caught and was embarrassed. She quickly tucked her eyes back into the book and I knew she wouldn’t look up again. She didn’t look like the flirty type. Enjoy the book, I said in my head, meaning it. Not many books ended like that one.
I felt anonymous walking around the campus. I didn’t know where I was going, so I wandered, taking it in. A class was let out of an old building with carvings all the way up the front. I stood to the side, sipping my coffee, watching the students spill out. I’d never been inside a university classroom before. Was it a lecture theatre? Or just a normal classroom? Must have been two hundred people coming out all at once. “Want to grab a coffee?” I heard a guy ask a girl. It was that nervous kind of question, a risk. He probably had sweaty palms.
“I can’t. I have an English class.” She sounded truly disappointed, so I sent silent words of encouragement to the guy. Maybe next time, buddy.
And then, something tweaked in me. English class. What was stopping me from sneaking in with her? Could I do that? Sit in, see if I liked it? While the two of them talked for another minute, I pulled out my phone and googled “Is it illegal to sit in on a university class?” The answer filtered through quickly. Turned out, it wasn’t.
So, when the girl turned to leave, I followed. Her class was a block away in a brick building with a bunch of steps out front. Kids were sitting outside, enjoying the sun on their faces. She went through the double doors and up some more stairs to the second floor. There was a long corridor with rooms on both sides. Some were offices, labelled with the names of the professors. She stopped at a classroom with frosted window panels and opened the door.
The tables were arranged on risers. At the front of the room was a podium with a screen behind. The girl went to the back of the class and found her spot. I
got nervous I’d sit in someone’s spot. Were they assigned? So, I grabbed one of the seats on the end. Most of the kids in the class pulled out laptops or tablets. I only had my phone, so I held that in front of me, like I was going to take notes with it.
The prof came in, a woman, younger than I’d have expected. She was short and dressed in a suit, like she was trying to look older. She stood at the podium, waiting for people to get settled.
The class must have been an intro to English because the students mostly looked my age. The walls were bare, except for a mural of the university logo: a torch with some Latin words underneath it.
The prof was about to speak when the doors behind her opened and banged shut as a student entered. The white-blond hair was instantly recognizable. It was the girl I’d seen in the coffee shop, the one reading The Elders of Warren. I stared at her. This was exactly what would happen in the book. Life was chance and fate; things don’t just happen.
She scanned the room and her eyes fell on me. There was an empty chair beside me, and I thought, for a second, that maybe she’d grab it. “Sorry,” she muttered to the prof as she found a spot a few rows from the front. The professor smiled, waited until she was settled, and then started talking.
“So, Catcher in the Rye,” she began, eyeing the students. “Thoughts?”
A few people raised their hands. The prof picked a woman in the front, listened to her comment, and then repeated it so we could all hear: that the book was male-centric and she found it hard to relate to Holden, the main character. I’d read Catcher in the Rye about a year ago. It was one of the first books in the stack under the desk. A disenfranchised guy, skipping school for the day, which I guess was rebellious for the time it was written. I’d never talked about it with anyone. It was just one more book lodged in my brain, but hearing the comments made it come to life again.
The blond girl from the coffee shop raised her hand. I was close enough to see a thin gold bangle on her wrist. Delicate. “I didn’t think Holden was hard to relate to. No offence, but I think a lot of young people feel the way Holden does, sort of disconnected from society and what people expect from us. It’s not about being male or female.”
The discussion went on, more people contributed, and I found myself leaning forward in my chair. Once, I almost shot my hand up to add something, but then wondered, What if the prof realizes I’m not a student? Will she kick me out? So I didn’t say anything, but the question I wanted to answer nagged at me: “How did Holden grow up? Did he turn out like the hypocrites he hated?”
The hour flew by. I looked at my phone. I hadn’t checked Insta or Snapchat once since I’d been sitting in my chair. “Next class, we’ll start discussing Trainspotting,” the prof said. There were a few groans as people packed up, stuffing laptops into their bags and grabbing their jackets. I waited till the aisle was crowded enough that I could blend in and disappear. The blond-haired girl was in front of me. She’d put her hair up during class, exposing her neck. I stared at the gentle slope of it, the pale, flawless skin. The Elders of Warren peeked out of her bag. Had she been late for class because she wanted to finish it? The wizard battle at the end was epic.
“See you Friday,” the prof called. My auto-response was to look at her and say the words back. Too late, I remembered that I was supposed to be keeping a low profile. She tilted her head at me with a small frown. I ducked and walked quickly to the doors, scanning the crowd in the hallway, looking for a flash of angel hair, but she was gone.
- 17 -
Dizzy
It was Thursday and the Georgia Waters display had been up for almost a week. I’d thought it would get easier to see it, but every time I walked past the poster of Georgia, my insides twisted. There she was in bold colour, laughing, oblivious to the people she’d left behind. Or was she? What had gone on in the last ten years? Did she think about us? Was she going to visit us when she came to town? Questions that, on a normal day, I could push aside kept bubbling to the surface. It wasn’t lack of money that kept her away from us. She probably had a private plane; she could have flown to visit anytime she liked. But she never had.
“I can’t wait to take that down,” Lou muttered, his eyes flickering to the display as he did the daily totals at the cash register.
“I thought you didn’t care about her.” I rested my chin on the top of the mop. It was just the two of us. Dad had gone to jam with the guys at the bar where Barney did security.
“I don’t. But I don’t need to look at her a thousand times a day either.”
“Do you think she ever wonders about us?”
His face got sullen. “Probably not.” The concert was getting closer and we hadn’t heard anything from her; no offer to meet, not even tickets to see her show. Maybe she was afraid of opening the door, even a crack. Worried we’d want something from her she wasn’t able to give.
A copy of each album we had in stock was displayed on the table. But not the ones that were in Dad’s office. The private recordings she’d done stayed safe on his shelves; well, most of them. I’d found a few others and the collection had grown to ten records. A couple had GW written on them, but others had no label until I’d made one, printing Georgia Waters in big block letters on the waxy, white sleeves.
I’d brought a couple of them upstairs and put them in my dresser drawer so I could listen to them in the privacy of my room. The way she sang, it was like she was singing just for me. I could lose myself in her voice and I knew this was the most real part of Georgia. The ache and intensity that came through her music couldn’t be hidden; she laid herself bare.
As I mopped the floor, an idea started to spin in my head. I moved the mop around the floor in circles, letting my thoughts unravel. What if I made a mix using those old recordings? The ones no one had heard before? Erika had said to tell a story with my music and this was my story. I wanted to hear Georgia in my music. But would people wonder about them? I lived above a record store, I reasoned, and had access to all kinds of rare records. Anyone who’d seen Dad’s private collection wouldn’t be surprised he had unreleased recordings by Georgia Waters. I could try to disguise her voice, but part of me wanted people to hear it. I was tired of hiding.
“That spot’s clean, Dizz. You’ve been there for five minutes,” Lou said to me as he tidied up the front desk. The cash-out was done. “Make sure to turn off the lights and set the alarm when you’re done, okay?”
“I’m going to spin for a while,” I told him. I hadn’t realized how slow I was mopping. I still had half the store to do.
He had a load of books under his arm as he loped across the store to the stairs. “I’m going upstairs to read.”
As usual, I wanted to reply. More than ever, he was locking himself away with books. When I’d got home from school today, he’d been staring into space trying to come up with deep, meaningful observations about the book he’d been reading. It was good he was using his brain, but Lou was way too smart to be stuck behind a record store cash desk all day. Dad knew it, too. I wished Lou had something he loved.
I tossed the mop into the closet as soon as I heard the door to the kitchen shut behind him. Who cared about cleaning when there was mixing to be done? The floor didn’t look that dirty anyway.
I went to Dad’s office. Besides Georgia’s secret recordings, his shelves were full of rare albums that had never made it to record stores and one-offs that Dad had recorded with friends. There was a whole collection of bootlegged copies that he couldn’t sell but couldn’t destroy either. I grabbed a few of Georgia’s I’d found and took them to the turntables. I put on the first record, slipped on the headphones, and dropped the needle.
Her voice came out, low and whispery at first. She was singing one of Dad’s favourite songs, late Bob Dylan called “Make You Feel My Love.” I’d heard it a hundred times, but usually with Dylan’s gravelly voice that sounded like scraping burnt toast. My mom’s voice had power. Even quiet, the strength of it came through, bare and raw. Goosebumps r
ose on my arms as I listened. I closed my eyes and let the song wash over me.
DJ Erika had said to use music that had meaning. No family had music that mattered more than mine. Music had shaped all of us: me, Dad, Lou, and Georgia. I could use one of Georgia’s unknown songs but what about the rest of us? What songs mattered?
I went to the Blues section. I wanted to pull a record that screamed Dad. I found a band I knew he liked and sifted through their records until I found a live recording he played sometimes. With percussive foot stomping and one bass guitar, it would be the backbeat. I yanked it out. I spun around the store, my eyes dancing from section to section. What would represent Lou? His favourite music was reggae. With a dash of the right song mixed against my mom’s voice, it could work. It would be a crazy mash-up of styles, but if I beatmatch everything the way Jeremy had shown me … I let the thought trail off. I felt like Dr. Frankenstein, putting body parts together to make my music monster.
With the flick of some switches, the gear on the table breathed to life. I picked up the headphones and slipped them back over my hair. A buzz of electricity hummed in my ear, speaking to me. Georgia’s voice would start, strong and pure. I also had a song Dad had recorded with a band when he toured. His sax stretched across her melody. Lou’s reggae music was a bridge between everything, and then finally my song choice: a dance song stripped down to just its wicked beat.
It took hours to get the mix the way I wanted it. A mix was never finished. There was always another tweak, one more area to smooth over or a place to add something, but if I kept playing around with it, I’d ruin what was good. Pulling my hands away from the turntable, I stepped back. I’d recorded the final mix on my computer. It had taken a whole night to create, but it would take only seconds to upload to my Mixcloud account.
I hesitated, holding my finger over the Upload button. Once I pressed it, the mix would be out there. People could listen to it, comment on it, and share it. Would anyone recognize the voice? Too tired to talk myself out of it, I watched the bar fill to the end as the song loaded. The confirmation ding was like a starting pistol. The mix was out there.
Spin Page 6