by Ash Parsons
The assembled journalists wear one of three expressions: delight, professional boredom, disdain.
Do they realize we can read them as easily as they think they read him?
The song is going to be a massive hit. Anyone can hear that. It may even surpass his record-breaking single, “Armored Heart.”
That was his breakout song. The moment everyone knew they were listening to a star.
Joshua wrote “Armored Heart” for me, sitting on the janky sofa in my grandma’s trailer, strumming chords and jotting down lyrics. Trying to make me smile.
We don’t talk about that. Artie told Joshua to stop telling that story.
The Birdies want to imagine he’s singing to them. Or to Angel Rey, and never mind the time line. They want his voice intimate in their ears as they make fan art, or reblog fan works, or make GIFs. They watch the video over and over, and comment about it. A song that is for them now.
This new song, “Forever or Never,” was written by committee. A perfectly orchestrated hit with that essential bit of “Joshua magic.” The song of a lovestruck boy, promising an all-or-nothing devotion.
Joshua had winced when he saw how they’d changed his lyrics. “Vanilla trash,” he’d called it.
Of course the changes remained. Artie handled that situation as she does all situations: masterfully. Protecting Joshua’s “brand” above all else.
I’d like to breathe fire at all of it. Ignite everything and let it be consumed. The fake girlfriend. The rehearsals, the interviews, the fan meet and greets, all of which wear him down. The individuals who wait for hours to smile for a picture, to hug him as they vibrate with emotion or tears, that make him feel more and more isolated by their wanting.
All of it.
I feel the sneer on my lips and turn away from the room, facing the mirrored wall. If someone were to take my picture, they’d use it to say I don’t like the new song.
I press my forehead into the cool glass so I don’t have to see how frayed I look.
Mere seconds later I feel someone standing next to me and open my eyes. In the mirror I see Artie reflected, standing behind me.
She takes my elbow and leans in close.
“Public face, sweetheart.” Her voice is a low hiss by my ear. “Joshua needs you.”
I try to pull away without looking like I’m doing it. I return her fake smile in the mirror.
“It’s okay—he has you.” Anger surfaces in my voice, a tiny bubble dredging up from a swamp, bursting at the surface. “And Angel.”
Artie doesn’t care about me. And I’m not convinced she really cares about him.
She smiles wider, refusing to take the bait. “Damn straight he has me. From the start.”
Which is true. Artemis Malfa has managed Joshua Blackbird from the beginning. She nearly created him, showing up in Georgia with contracts and promises. She’s fifteen years older than us but already a lifetime wiser.
She’s the ringmaster. Her job is to keep everything going, no matter what it costs.
One night early in the first tour, maybe a month in, I didn’t go to the arena. Angel Rey was going to be there, their first “date” since the tour started. It stuck in me like a poisoned dart, so I stayed in the hotel and watched TV instead.
There was a show on about the history of the circus. It was something I’d never thought of: how far it went back, how it had changed over the years. How circuses used to be the prime entertainment of the day.
Something about the combination of the old photos and film footage, and the idea of a circus as a living entity, a changing art form with a history full of people, trapeze artists and animal trainers, ringmasters and roughnecks, the people performing or the people watching, all trying to get away from their reality for a few hours. It just grabbed ahold of me.
I ordered a bunch of books and read more and more. I continually read and reread and think about it. Some of the people, long dead, are more fully real to me, more present, in the books and through how they lived their lives, than my mother ever was, even before she kicked me out.
I didn’t realize at first how many parallels there would be—between the circus and the machine of Joshua Blackbird.
Now I’m mostly obsessed with a single person, Lillian Leitzel, a tragic aerialist from the twenties. I don’t know why she fascinates me so much. I recognize something about her. And I guess I just need an escape.
Run away with the circus all you want. You can’t outrun who you are or what you need.
Artie glares at me but turns back to the room as the new song ends. She smiles, touching her earpiece. No doubt listening to Santiago, Joshua’s personal bodyguard.
Artie crosses in front of the journalists and stands at the emergency fire doors on the opposite end of the dais. When the double knock comes, she’s ready.
Her voice is pitched to attract, a carnival barker reaching for marks.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” she shouts. “Joshua Blackbird!”
The chorus of “Armored Heart” blasts from the speakers on the dais.
Artie whirls and presses onto the crash bar hard, launching the door outward.
An explosive glare of daylight blinds us.
Two figures step in and immediately to the side of the door. These are Joshua’s “friends from home”—two bros, Dan and Rick. They’re from Marchant and were two grades above Joshua and me. When the first tour stopped in Atlanta, they finagled backstage passes and somehow never left.
Joshua sometimes hangs out with them, and Artie likes the story it tells. Joshua as “just one of the guys.”
They’re fake friends. A couple of clowns as boring and accommodating as furniture that blends with everything—they laugh when you crack a joke and ask nothing more than to sit on the periphery of it all.
The drummer, Speed, is the next through the door. He’s handsome, with nearly poreless dark-brown skin and onyx eyes ringed by tightly curling lashes.
Everyone calls him “Speed” because he’s always in motion—bouncing, rattling, drumming—like a hyperkinetic kid after drinking caffeinated cane syrup. He was the last musician to join Joshua’s official band, “discovered” in an online video contest that Artie dreamt up.
He and Joshua became genuine friends almost immediately.
The rest of the band trots through the door: Quinn, Stevie, and Jordy. They move onto the stage and wait at their seats.
A lithe figure moves into the sun’s glare, delineated by the nearly impossible radiance outside. An inkblot against the light.
Then he’s in the door and moving to the dais. The audience can’t help but applaud.
His presence travels through the room, a heart-stopping frisson. Everyone holds their breath, watches, admires, in spite of their familiarity with his face and form, the inhabitants of this room a microcosm of the wider world and how everyone reacts to him.
Helpless in the thrall of Joshua Blackbird.
3
CONJURE A HOME
As Joshua enters, I hear the muffled shrieks of the Birdies who wait in the alley behind the ballroom.
It sets my teeth on edge.
Santiago, Joshua’s bodyguard, is the last to enter. He closes the fire doors and then waits at the side of the dais. Arms crossed, he glares out at the room, eyes sweeping the front row of journalists, then checking the entrances, aisles, and edges of the room for threats.
The sight of him is immediately reassuring. Ever since Dallas, Santiago is a constant, looming presence in Joshua’s periphery. He’s an ex-marine, all bulk-corded muscle and vigilant eyes.
On the dais, Joshua pulls a chair out and sits. He takes off his sunglasses and hunches behind the mic. His posture speaks for him.
He’d rather be anywhere else.
Even though his face is tipped down, the power of his presence is palpable. A moment
, suspended in the air, sparkling as we watch the spotlights illuminate perfection.
And we respond with a held breath. A heart catch.
It’s not just fame. It’s not just his heartbreaking voice, startling good looks, or brooding, haunted eyes.
It’s something more. Call it charisma.
As one, the room watches Joshua Blackbird, caught in an enchantment.
He’s tall and lightly muscled with a handsome face, finely drawn features, like a portrait, or a high-fashion photograph, young masculine beauty almost inhuman, at times. Changeable hazel eyes, at this moment appearing green. High cheekbones, dark-winged eyebrows, and equally dark hair not an affectation, just a perfect punctuation of his last name.
Some fans are completely incapacitated by him.
Joshua tips his head to the side, looking for me. He spots me standing with my back pressed against a mirror in an inescapable room of reflections.
He looks so tired. Almost emptied out, like I’m seeing an echo of who he is in his eyes. Until he smiles at me, just a little.
For a moment, my heart is incapacitated as well.
A popping of flashes around the room, a strobe effect like being in a club, as the photographers capture the rare half smile.
As if a spell has been broken, journalists start shouting questions.
Joshua smiles at them professionally, shaking his head a little, like he is trying to wake up. His unstyled Mohawk falls in chopped layers over his eyes.
The close-shaved sides of his head are still startling. It makes him look simultaneously older and somehow more vulnerable.
The fans all cried at first, few weeks ago, when he shaved off his shoulder-length hair, leaving a short swath down the middle, floppy sometimes, Mohawk-spiked others. Some journalists called it rebellion, the evolution of the artist, rejection of his audience. Gossip bloggers called it a sign of mental imbalance or an act of continuing grief for his father. The result of strain and stress.
They were both right for a change.
As the shouted questions continue, Artie climbs onto the dais and holds up a hand. Then she points into the crowd.
The journalist, a young woman, calls out the first question.
“Feeling good about opening night tomorrow, Joshua?”
A softball, lobbed straight and slow, easy enough that a little kid could knock it out of the park.
“Great. It’s going to be a great show. I have the best band and dancers. They make me look good.”
Although it sounds a bit aw shucks, it’s sincere, and comes across that way.
Even the borderline-hostile journalists nod at the perfect hit of the promotional target.
Artie continues pointing, faster and faster. The questions stay easy. She’s picking and choosing her favorites to warm him up, like a trainer starting punching drills at a laughably easy level.
They ask about the album, the tour, the opening bands and guest performers, about Angel Rey: Will they do a duet soon?
Joshua answers each question well.
Artie’s mouth tightens, and she points at another journalist, a man with the glint of razors in his eyes.
“What’s your favorite part of the meet and greets?” he asks, smirking.
They all know Joshua tried to stop doing them. In the end, Artie convinced him they were necessary.
Joshua leans into the mic.
“The fans,” he answers, clean sincerity again.
He sits back and smiles, and it hits them again as the flashes pop. As if he has just walked into the room for the first time.
Magic.
The smile that launched a thousand Tumblrs.
Most of the reporters smile back helplessly. Artie smiles, too, a scythe of satisfaction. She points again.
“Are your brother and mom coming to the show tomorrow?”
A simple question. A normal question.
Ty and Livie are in Georgia, living in the mansion Joshua bought for them.
Joshua’s lingering smile slips. He glances down.
It’s like a droplet of blood hitting the water. In their seats, the journalists still.
“I . . . I think there’s something going on,” Joshua stammers. “A school dance or something.”
He looks younger. No, he looks his age. The surrealism of the situation hits me like an electric shock.
He shouldn’t be here at all. This isn’t normal.
“We’ll see,” Joshua concludes lamely. His fingers tap on the table. As he sits farther back, slumping down, a sliver of skin shows through a small tear on the chest of his dark T-shirt.
Another familiar sight. A memento from a fan’s tearing hands.
Then I see it. Joshua’s hand on the table trembles. It’s subtle, like how a guitar string moves when it’s plucked. An almost invisible, vibrating tension.
Joshua must have felt it, because he lifts his hand off the table, scowling.
Artie glares at the reporter, her red nails gripped tight on Joshua’s shoulder. Her hand falls away as he pushes his chair back and stands.
He takes a step, moving into the arc of light cast down from a halogen bulb. His complexion takes on a sallow cast. The circles under his eyes jump out in contrast.
He’s always been slender, but now he’s tending toward too thin. Worn thin, like a fraying rope, rubbed raw with all our handling.
I push through a few of the crew and standing journalists, moving to the bottom of the steps, where Joshua can see me when he turns.
The other band members stand by their chairs and wait for Joshua to lead them off the dais.
It’s like someone empties the room of all sound, except for the hum from the speakers.
“Joshua, are you okay?” a reporter, a man, calls. He looks like a TV dad. And I see how his question changes the perception subtly, as it ripples through the room.
Is Joshua okay?
I mean, on second thought, just look at him.
This time Artie doesn’t answer for him or prod him for a response. She follows him to the steps and waits as he walks down them.
At the bottom, Joshua’s hand brushes past mine. His is cold.
Santiago appears in front of us. The rest of his security team takes up formation, and we cross to the door that leads to the hotel elevators.
Artie returns to the stage and starts speaking into a mic, thanking the journalists for their time and offering to answer any additional questions they might have.
Joshua keeps his face tipped down as he walks, watching the heels of his bodyguard in front of us.
A single journalist pushes up and walks beside us to the doors. She paces our steps outside the bubble of security. Her voice is pitched conversationally, intimate as a friend.
“Joshua, are you homesick?”
He doesn’t look at her when he answers.
“This is home.”
We leave the ballroom, stepping into the cold elegance of the hotel hallway.
4
INNER WORKINGS
We step into the hallway and make it about five steps before the too-bright flare of a camera-mounted light glares in our faces.
“That was a short press conference,” the guy yells as he’s pushed back. “Not feeling it today, bro?”
I could learn his name if I wanted to know it. He’s a lead reporter on one of those TV tabloid shows. The kind that features an assembly of “reporters” sitting around a “newsroom” sharing gossip, pronouncing judgment on everything.
Cutting knockoff fame from the whole cloth of actual celebrities.
Him and hundreds like him, the favored by Artie and the not-so-favored, are an omnipresent lens casting a mirror ball strobe of flashes. Reporting the rumors, the thinly veiled guess who? gossip items, endlessly picking at Joshua. At what happened in Dallas. Cutting a
t the wound. Reopening it.
It’s always something. Before the Boom Room, it was the airport waitress, talking to the tabloid TV show about how Joshua wouldn’t take a picture with her, how he pushed her, knocking a stack of dishes to the floor in the process. Which he did. The worst part of it, the cell phone video of him yelling, sounding unhinged. Crazed. Which he was, and yet it was rational in that moment, which they didn’t show. Couldn’t show . . . all the stacked pressures that led to that break.
Don’t show the strain. Just show the dislocation. Then call him a spoiled brat. Or an entitled monster. Or if the tone is sympathetic, it’s gaspingly so, full of gross devouring of his pain and receiving in return the feels.
Artie lies to us and maybe herself. She says it will be easier on the road. It’s as if she’s forgotten about how it really is: the slow drag of tired feet on a forced march.
The paparazzo presses forward and is shoved back again, less gently this time.
Santiago stands in front of us, watching his team perform its job to perfection. We move toward the elevator as it dings.
One of Santiago’s security team is the last to board, moving his hands and his body to block as much of the photographer’s shot as possible.
The doors close.
Silence reigns in the elevator, except for the classical music playing softly through the speakers.
At the top floor, the elevator doors open again.
We file into the hall, past the ornate gilded table and its profusion of exotic flowers, past a private receiving room and a gym behind glass, to the presidential suite.
The security guard on point steps aside as Santiago uses his key card to enter. We walk into the room as the team does a sweep. Santiago personally checks Joshua’s bedroom.
Then the security detail exits. All except for Santiago, stationed by the door. As discreet as he can be while never leaving the room.
Joshua shuffles to the deep leather sofa and falls into it, propped in the corner, an orchestrated collapse. He’s slouched low so his head is held up by the corner of the sofa.