Rock It

by Jennifer Chance

  She curved her hand around her giant coffee mug and glanced out of the huge bank of windows overlooking the sunbaked landscape of one of the largest cities in the south, and tried to keep her breathing steady. Pull it together! She was good at her job. She was good at presentations. She could turn this minicrisis into a landslide success if she wanted. Only, she no longer knew what she wanted, or even who she was. Dante’s words from the night before were haunting her, though he couldn’t know he’d set off a whirlwind of chaos not just in the emotion area of her brain, but in the career sector as well.

  She didn’t like her job. She didn’t like her boss.

  She didn’t like what Dante had reminded her of, that she’d replaced the music in her life with meetings and memos, and was losing the one thing that had always made everything good. What was she really doing here?

  Who was she? And what was she meant to be?

  Her mind clicked through the realities of what would happen if IMO dropped her. She might have to leave Boston. She certainly couldn’t afford rent, and Erin couldn’t afford to have her freeload. She might have to change careers. As it was, unless her RockerGrrl initiative continued to score, she was at best a laughingstock in the entertainment repping industry. At worst, she was a troublemaker who was willing to put the health and safety of her own client at risk for a publicity stunt to take the world’s attention off of her. The feedback from the RockerGrrl stunt was still overwhelmingly positive in the public eye, but Lacey knew not everyone would think she’d done the right thing. Still, she’d taken the risk. And it had paid off.

  Now she just had to figure out what to do about that.

  Rustling on the other end of the phone was her first warning, and she looked expectantly into the cam. “Are we good to get started?” she asked brightly. Until she knew for sure what direction she wanted to go, she had to begin the way she wanted to end: with confidence, ease, and as much nonchalance as she could manage.

  “Keep it short, Lacey.” Brenda’s voice oozed acid over the cam. “We all know that you’re about to plead for your job, and I hate it when people embarrass themselves.”

  “Now, Brenda …” Jim’s voice was soothing, and Lacey kept her smile steady. She didn’t know who else was in the room, but it was clear someone was. Maybe Brenda’s new intern, asked to watch and learn how not to do her job?

  “Oh, come on.” Brenda was clearly on a roll from an earlier conversation. “I knew she was going to be trouble the first moment I set eyes on her, Jim. You remember that, right? I told you not to hire her. But I tried. You can’t say I didn’t try. If I’d known what a colossal waste of time she’d turn out to be, I would have given her the shit assignments.”

  Jim chuckled, and Lacey lifted an eyebrow, still playing it cool. “You did give me the shit assignments, Brenda.”

  “Not nearly as shitty as you’re going to get, if you make IMO look bad,” Brenda retorted. “Unless you start explaining what the hell happened last night, you won’t see an act of greater style and substance than a birthday clown for the next three years. You have my word on it.”

  Lacey stared at the webcam, but the tiniest spark of fire kindled somewhere deep inside her. She knew she shouldn’t engage her boss, but the prospect of a double whammy of joblessness and homelessness was suddenly making her a little reckless. And there was something she wanted to know from the Barracuda, after all.

  “So how did you find those scrapbooks, Brenda? Since we’re all among friends here?” Lacey leaned just a little closer to the webcam. “They were locked in my desk drawer. You couldn’t have known they were there.”

  “Anything you bring onto company property is the company’s, Lacey, you know that.”

  “Brenda.” Jim’s voice held a warning tone, and Lacey felt the conversation take a sudden shift. “What is she talking about? You said Lacey’d given you those books willingly.”

  “Oh please, Jim.” Brenda’s voice was scathing. “Like it even matters how I got them. She’s sick. Her client is her obsession. She won’t be the first screwup I’ve encountered, and she won’t be the last. But I’m not about to let IMO go down because a junior agent doesn’t have a sense of personal boundaries. Somebody’s got to draw the line, and that somebody is me.”

  Jim’s silence spoke volumes, and Lacey tried to keep her face carefully neutral. So Jim didn’t know about Brenda’s snooping? Or maybe he did know, and this was just another in a long line of offenses. Either way … interesting.

  Brenda clearly sensed the danger as well. “Jim, seriously—”

  “Why don’t we get this started?” Lacey interrupted, her smile bright and helpful, very nonpsycho junior agent to Brenda’s superfreak spy. “Can you all see my screen?” At Jim’s grunt of assent, Lacey pulled up the Internet to the Dante Falcone fan page, and started scrolling down the screen. She expanded the page to its fullest size, flipping off the webcam—and resisting the urge to flip off Brenda as well.

  “What is this?” Brenda demanded, as the screen recalibrated. “Who are those people?”

  “Fans,” Lacey said crisply. “We’ve been tracking social engagement since the beginning. We trended up, then spiked after the scrapbooks, and spiked again after the RockerGrrl initiative.”

  “Initiative?” Jim asked, and Brenda talked over him.

  “Don’t even act like that was something you planned,” she scoffed.

  “It was planned from the very beginning,” Lacey said crisply. “And on the heels of it, to leverage the increased attention, we launched a giveaway wherein we said we’d provide VIP tickets to the Daytona show to anyone posting the best combination of our sponsors and Paradiso. And—well, you can see for yourself. It’s proving to be an interesting test.”

  “VIP tickets don’t come cheap,” Brenda grumbled, but there was no steam in her words, and Lacey kept going. “So far we’ve increased our likes and follows by twenty-three percent in the few days this campaign has been live, with two noticeable spikes after the scrapbook and now RockerGrrl episodes. But what’s really important is the engagements. Beyond the clicks and links, we have seen a surge of comments and discussion, and users are signing up for newsletters and forums to learn more and stay connected. We can capitalize on those results for our corporate sponsors and get their advertising agencies to create outreach campaigns to reach out to their new audience base.”

  “Do you have supporting data results for this?” Jim cut in. “Something you can send me?”

  “Absolutely,” Lacey said breezily. “I can shoot you a spreadsheet after this call.”

  “Well, this is the first worthwhile work I’ve seen out of you since you’ve joined us,” Brenda huffed. “So congratulations, Lacey. You can lose your job after the tour. In the meantime, I can spin this to help us save face. Keep on this.”

  “Yes,” Jim said, his voice strangely inflected in a way Lacey couldn’t quite read. “Keep on it.”

  They disconnected, and Lacey sat stock-still for a moment more, staring at the empty screen. She’d done it, just that quickly. She’d bought herself a second chance.

  But what would she do with it, now that she had it? Nothing had ever felt more right to her than Dante’s soft, sweet embrace after he’d brought her to the most mind-blowing orgasm of her entire life. At this point, she didn’t know what she missed more: his gorgeous smile, his strong arms around her, or the way he’d made her teeter on the precipice of shattering ecstasy for what had seemed like hours before skillfully plunging her into a whirlpool of sheer euphoria.

  She missed all of it, truth be told, and she hadn’t even been away from him long enough to reasonably miss anything. But even saying the word “Daytona” over the phone just now had triggered a new, nagging pain. Daytona signaled the end of the tour, the end of the show, the end of her relationship with Dante. He was a rock star, and she was just … a girl. A fan. Someone he could chuckle about over beers with his friends, but not someone real. Not someone he cared about beyond the next few da
ys. He’d always remember her fondly, she suspected. But that’s all that she’d be. A memory.

  And she had to accept that.

  Dante sat on the wide balcony, overlooking the gorgeous and almost people-free shoreline. He couldn’t imagine having this view and not being on the beach every day if he lived down here, no matter the season.

  He smiled wryly and fiddled with his guitar a bit more. Then again, there’d been a time that he couldn’t imagine not wanting to play in front of stadiums packed full of screaming fans, either. He was only twenty-four years old. He wasn’t exactly due for a midlife crisis quite yet.

  But this morning, he didn’t have just his future to mull over. He had Lacey to think about too. As if she wasn’t on his mind twenty-four seven, there was the issue of her boxes of scrapbooks, which he’d been lugging around with him, unable to let go. The boxes sat on his veranda table now, still unopened, silent reminders of the woman who’d slipped her way into his life and his brain like a song he couldn’t quite work out.

  At the very least, he needed to get those books back to her. She’d already told him to burn them, but he knew better than all of that. The scrapbooks she’d put together may have been an over-the-top expression of fan appreciation, but they were still a snapshot of her history, the teenager she’d been. They had value as that.

  And they were hers.

  After trying but not succeeding to work for another few minutes, Dante finally set aside his guitar and reached over, pulling the nearest box closer to him. He should probably at least look inside the boxes, make sure everything was there. Not that he’d know what “everything” was, but still. He should check.

  The scrapbooks had been shoved inside haphazardly, which immediately struck him as wrong. The least he could do was rearrange the books so they were in chronological order. He emptied the contents of both boxes on the outdoor table and chaise beside him, then sat for a moment more, staring at them.

  Dante Falcone—Dream Team!

  Dante Falcone—Grammy Year!

  Dante Falcone—The Magic Continues!

  Dante Falcone—The Wonder Year!

  Dante Falcone—Sweet Sixteen!

  And on they went. There were fifteen scrapbooks in all—fifteen!—some much shorter than others. The Wonder Year apparently had been a very big deal, as it merited a Part One and Part Two. And the books progressed in girlish bling up until the most over-the-top of them all, Lacey’s Sweet Sixteen scrapbook. That was the one that had made the biggest splash on YouTube.

  Now with all of them spread out in front of him, however, Dante didn’t know where to begin. At the very beginning seemed almost trite, or self-aggrandizing—come, look at the history of the rock star from his very beginnings, and trace his path to greatness! But to start at the end and work backward felt wrong as well. He noticed the date on the last book: Dante Falcone—Paradiso World Tour. So that would have been a little over three years ago, when she was still, what? A sophomore in college? A freshman? The book itself was more sophisticated, as befitted a young woman who pieced it together over school breaks and holidays. But it was every bit as thorough as the others, and he suspected it was probably up-to-date until the moment Lacey had gone from dreaming about rock stars to thinking about working with them on a day-to-day basis.

  “Well, this is just stupid,” he muttered, and he picked a book at random. Not the fabled Sweet Sixteen, but one that looked a little more polished. Dante Falcone—Emergence. He smiled at the innocence of the title as he flipped open the cover. Emergence, huh? Like he was a butterfly coming out of his cocoon? Lacey had no idea—

  He stopped.

  The scrapbook’s first page showed what looked like a much younger version of himself, sitting with the members of the band. It was Paradiso, but the first incarnation of Paradiso, staffed mainly by the journeymen rockers the label had offered him after the Dream Team ended its run. Still, although they had been around the block a few times, the musicians had been young and still willing to experiment … and even more willing to go with what the studio wanted, to see what there was to be seen as international rock stars with just enough of a pop sound that their music could reach everyone from tween music savants to grandmas rocking in their SUVs.

  But this picture—he remembered this gig. It had been in Philly, so maybe that’s how she’d gotten the picture. Hell, she shouldn’t have even been there—she’d have only been eighteen at the time, and that nightclub wasn’t in the best part of town. She could have been wandering by and just happened upon them, but he didn’t think so. There’d been some promo, after all. It was more just a low-stress thing to try out some new music, see how it felt, how it played.

  They’d gone for a bluesy vibe that night, he’d sung more, the band had responded to his mood. They were good guys, and they could tell that something was shifting, even then. His manager was urging him to adopt an even more masses-friendly sound, and even though Dante was resisting that, he felt the pressure. Still, the guys he was playing with then—they were willing to let him just play out whatever he wanted to play out.

  He missed those guys. They’d eventually gone their own ways, except Steve—nature of the business. The life of the constantly touring rock band was not for the faint of heart.

  But … Dante frowned at the picture harder, the unguarded, laughing expression on his own younger face. He missed that guy, too. And he wasn’t quite sure where he’d lost himself along the way. He turned another page, saw another spread—newspaper clippings of his first major tour, where the label had worked him out by booking him along a string of East Coast clubs, while releasing a single that was just intended to “test the waters.”

  He smiled, thinking on it now. The single had done more than test the waters. It had gone on to multiplatinum sales, and for a while that summer you could hear it on every radio station in the country. His sound was just evolving then—but clearly he’d hit on something big. He’d known it as much as the studio did. And everything had started to shift again.

  “Yo, man—whoa. Walk down Memory Lane.” Dante looked up, unsurprised to see Steve Gwynn ambling through the wide-open glass doors out onto his private balcony. For this stopover, the last of the Dream It tour, the entire band had ranked the sweet digs. Dante had seen to it. Which meant that his longtime friend was only a few floors down, with an equally awe-inspiring view, but without the open-air balcony. Naturally, Steve had gotten a spare key to Dante’s suite almost immediately.

  Now Steve slung down his own guitar and settled into the chair nearest to the books. “These are—Jesus. I didn’t realize she’d been so thorough.” He flipped open the closest one. “Dude, I totally remember that show. You look like you’re twelve.”

  “What?” Dante looked over. “Give me that,” he said, pulling the scrapbook out of Steve’s hands and squinting down at the photo almost completely surrounded in a starburst of pink and purple sequins. Dante & Lacey Forever! read the caption, and an impossibly young sixteen-year-old boy looked soulfully at the camera, his hair fluffed up without too much product, his black jacket slung open, a white wifebeater underneath, the tough-guy look softened by the honest-to-god armful of puppies that the photographer had thought to pile in his lap. He could hardly remember the shoot now—they’d gotten several “teen heartthrob at play” shots, he supposed. But at this point, the shoot had been over and the puppies had been wiped out. They’d slumped over his legs and halfway up his stomach, and he hadn’t had the heart to move for fear of waking them. One of the puppies actually had been snoring, he remembered now, the thought surfacing out of the dimmest reaches of his mind. He’d forgotten all about that. But the photographer had looked over, frozen, and then had tersely ordered everyone to their places—lighting, makeup, backdrop all in place—and he’d shot the image that had made it onto every calendar produced for him over the next two years.

  “Yeah, well,” Dante said now, turning the page over. “Life of a superstar.”

  “You’re not kidding.
Rio, man, remember? That was a gig I’ll never forget.” Steve held up another scrapbook, this one from when Paradiso was fully under way, and Dante laughed.

  “Impressive, since you were drunk the whole time.” He felt the easy grin stretch his lips, but he was looking back down at the book on his lap. Lacey had cut out every image from every magazine, it seemed, pasting them into the book. But beyond the lace edging and stickers, he began noticing something else, too. Lacey had written little notes in the margins, addressed to him. As if she’d hoped he’d read this someday. And something—something about them triggered a memory that he couldn’t quite put away.

  Dear Dante, one began. I know you can’t possibly be getting enough sleep with your tour schedule. You need to take better care of yourself!

  Dear Dante, another one continued. I thought of you when I saw the sunset. Remember your song from …, and on it went. She’d been there with him through all of it, even though she was just a kid, a million miles away. How had she seen more in him than he’d even seen himself? And did he still have that music within him anymore, strong enough to do something with?

  “Yo, Earth to Dante,” Steve said amiably enough. “You want to get to work on the new set you outlined, or what?”

  He blinked at Steve, then shook his head. “Nah, man,” he said. He looked out over the clear blue sky and water once more. “I was thinking about another thing I wanted your take on. Something I’ve been noodling with in my free time. Something new.”

  Steve picked up his guitar, his grin a mile wide. “I live to serve.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five