“I thought your meeting was here!” I say, muffled by the swells of her giant white coat. It’s fake. I’d never let her buy real seal.
“Oh no, honey, the designer we’re showcasing has a studio downtown, so we thought it’d be best to—it wouldn’t have been a problem if it weren’t for the traffic! We got stuck coming back. Gridlocked! I swear, if it wasn’t thirty degrees out, I’d think we were still in LA.” Taking my face back in her hands, she pries me from her shoulder, gives me one of her searching looks. Are you okay? Today went fine? And even though it’s enough to make me break down right here, I hold still—fine—letting my eyes flicker back whatever they need for her to believe it. Somebody clears their throat. Receptionist. I turn to see her standing stiffly in the doorway.
“May I have your coat, Mariah? Everybody’s waiting.”
Mom bites her lip. Besides the red hair, and vaguely Midwestern accent, punctuality is her most distinguishing feature. “Oh,” she says, “oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize we still have to—don’t worry about the coat. Should I go right in?” She steps forward. Receptionist doesn’t budge. My mind’s fritzing—still have to what?—but I turn to Mom anyway, so we can share that dumb look we share when people are too much.
My mom confuses people. Not on purpose—she’s just so beautiful, so obviously a former model, that orienting her existence with your own temporarily sucks up all your bandwidth. The definition of stunning. It doesn’t matter that her normally pristine skin has that pink, peeled look from scrubbing off her makeup in the car. Face on, hair down or not, she always looks the way she used to, the same Mariah Black who once sprawled across magazines and taxi tops. Receptionist is powerless.
Except Mom won’t meet my eye. And the smile she switches on for Receptionist isn’t her wispy model smile, but apologetic. Pleading. “I’m so sorry,” she repeats.
A pause, like Receptionist is debating this. Then she slides from the doorway. “Follow me.”
As we creak after her, I whisper, “What was that?” but Mom gives me a look so sharp I grab her fluffy faux sleeve. “Mom…”
And I remember how relentlessly attentive Receptionist was toward me as I sat captive in this ugly room. The poke of her curiosity while I flicked through magazines, watched traffic, compared to how she threw down Mom’s name. Not Welcome back, Mariah! or Ms. Black, the ferociously capable editor who will bring The Magazine back from the brink of irrelevance, but Mariah. Some girl who got knocked up and destroyed the band.
The door I’ve been watching this whole time squeaks open, revealing a conference table. Alien, expectant faces. “Forgive me,” Mom breathes, sweeping into the room. My palm registers a goodbye squeeze just firm enough for me to realize I won’t be swept in with her.
“But,” I stumble. “But I want—”
The door shuts in my face.
* * *
I’m not crying, but Receptionist brings me a cup of water anyway. I sip slowly, sitting as far as possible from the window.
Clacking away, Receptionist says, “Nobody’s allowed in brainstorming sessions but the editors. It’s like, a confidentiality thing.”
I glare down into the cup.
It’s not fair. I’ve needed Mom all day. She didn’t say anything about brainstorming while she was getting ready this morning. In fact, she said, It’s one meeting, Koda. One meeting and done. Why did I believe her?
The paper cup is getting soggy in my fist, the rim beginning to sag. Receptionist watches me run it across my sore lips.
Then she turns away and starts typing, practically shouting over the clacks of the keys. “What’s your favorite song of your dad’s, KR? I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”
It takes a sec—very few people call me KR, and they’re all assholes—but I refocus on her, accidentally sinking deeper into the couch. It’s long and crimson, like Makeup Lady’s mouth.
“Um.” I avert my eyes from Receptionist’s, their feverish glimmer. “To be honest, Quixote isn’t… they’re not really my thing?”
Abruptly, her clacking stops, and I default to staring at my fingernails. A move so foolproof that even teachers usually get the hint to call on somebody else.
Except there is nobody else to call on. Swallowing the lump in my throat, I add, “It’s just… the screaming? I like ‘Drown.’ ” This is true, but doesn’t seem to satisfy her. For a while, neither of us says anything. The only sound a muffled shhhh that I don’t immediately recognize as coming from the radiator.
It’s not like I haven’t tried to comprehend my father’s music. I’ve streamed their albums, stalked message boards. Educated myself on the two categories of Quixote songs so I’d know how to react whenever somebody brought them up, not that anybody who knows me ever bothers. First, the raw stuff. “Headbangers,” fans call them, though there aren’t many. “Drown,” Quixote’s biggest hit, would fit into this category, but it’s mellower, and given my father’s interview aversion, it’s the closest fans can get to understanding what they’ve dubbed Mack’s condition. Depression, I guess. Darkness folding like water over your head. Except the lyrics are incomprehensible, and as for the other category? Who knows. Fans call them “scrapbook songs.” Lyrics you might find pasted into diaries, carved like initials in a tree. And they are gentle. Tender even, but as hard as I’ve tried to lose myself in the murky chords and howling harmonies, guilt stops me every time. As far as Mom knows, I’ve only ever heard Quixote on the radio. When she couldn’t switch stations fast enough.
Then there’s the other feeling I get listening to their music. This feeling like—like my father’s called from someplace with zero cell service, and there’s shouting and static chaos, a message I can’t make out, even though it’s for me. And that feeling? It’s deeper than guilt. Deeper than anything. I don’t like it.
Eventually, Receptionist gives up on me, and I find myself staring at the ROCK cover on my phone again. It is pretty iconic. My father’s black hair, the spark in his flinty eyes. Like I don’t have more important crap to worry about than him. Unpacking. Altitude sickness. School—I start Monday. But I can’t get my father off the screen, the photo shoot out of my head. Could they Photoshop a dimple onto me?
When Receptionist skulks over to collect my cup, I pretend I’m texting.
Mom finishes brainstorming within the hour, coat tossed over her shoulder in a stab at nonchalance. While she lingers at Receptionist’s desk, patiently reciting the details of tomorrow’s schedule that we both know Receptionist should’ve confirmed earlier, I give one coat sleeve an experimental hoist. Its weight surprises me every time.
I forget about my own coat until we’re almost on the elevator. “Oops,” I say as Receptionist emerges from the waiting room with it. “Thank you.” Mom’s mouth pulses. Even her non-smiles are smiles, but mine’s the real deal: a peace offering. Receptionist’s eyebrow ring is so cool.
She thrusts the coat at me. “Everybody likes ‘Drown.’ ”
* * *
Driver takes so long bringing our car around, my toes practically shatter in my boots. He starts to get out, but Mom waves him off, jerks the door open. I slide into the car’s stuffy backseat.
Mom climbs in next to me and doesn’t say a word. Not even to Driver, so he can turn the heat down. She stares straight ahead, folded into herself.
Once we’re moving, she says, “That was unbelievable.”
I don’t answer. My forehead is pressed to the window, attention locked on the shops we creep past. Café, designer optician, Thai restaurant, another café. The night swarms with New Yorkers hefting shopping bags, wreathed in their own breath. As we inch toward the intersection where street meets avenue, a dog cocks its leg to pee on a bicycle. Pigeons peck at a pile of barf.
“… shouldn’t have uttered a word to you,” Mom’s saying. “I don’t care if she was being friendly, making conversation. That’s not her job. Back home, nobody would have…”
Pizza place. Organic health food store.
A cat boutique with kitty mannequins draped in crystal-encrusted collars. GENUINE SWAROVSKI, brags the handwritten sign.
Of course everybody likes “Drown.” There’s clapping. Isn’t that the point?
Mom yanked me onto the elevator like she was afraid I might start belting facts. Really wowing Receptionist with my Quixote IQ. Which is—what? Two albums. I do know that. I know that when Quixote’s debut, Sheer Folly, dropped in ’97, something in my father did too. The second came out two years later, his voice on half the tracks and that Sadie chick’s scraping through the others. They had to release it unfinished.
I know that Mom and I were halfway across the country, in North Dakota, when my father died by suicide. Mom said she heard the news on TV.
Gentle pressure on my knee. “Honey.”
I turn to see Mom gnawing the cuticles of her free hand, shadows under her eyes from the city’s lights. “You promise the photo shoot went okay? Nobody bothered you, or said anything out of line like that?”
This is my chance to confess everything. Makeup Lady, the cigarette, Photographer harassing me to act like him. Smile like him. Fifteen minutes ago, that was all I wanted. Now the truth jams in my throat.
Mom’s been negotiating this feature deal for weeks. Eight, to be precise, ever since those pics the paparazzi—pazzos, she calls them—snapped of my friends and me swigging smoothies out of unmarked cups hit the gossip sites. IN DADDY’S FOOTSTEPS, one caption read. Like I’m this big party girl. Anyway, I didn’t really care about the photos. A new tide of celebrity meltdowns and birth announcements was all it took to wash them away, but Mom saw them differently for some reason. Mom panicked. Absolutely freaked, like I’ve never seen. She said if we didn’t take control of my so-called narrative now, prove to the world that I am not Mack Grady, I’ll be screwed. Paparazzi chum for the rest of my life.
So I’m not mad at Mom for setting this up. Not exactly. I just wish she’d prepared me for the fact that people—randos, absolute strangers—might actually care about me here. Like maybe the feeding frenzy has already started.
Then again, the band was based in New York from the beginning. I guess I was just supposed to know.
I’m sure today was a fluke. A random exception to my otherwise lifelong anonymity, fed by excitement surrounding a ROCK feature that won’t be out for months. Scientifically speaking, Receptionist and the others would be labeled anomalies—a deviation from the rule. In reality, they’re New Yorkers with nothing better to do.
Mom’s hand is still on my knee. I squeeze and she squeezes back, the shadows gone now that we’re moving faster. “The photo shoot went fine,” I say. “Promise.” She smooths sticky hair back from my face.
Definitely anomalous. No use thinking of today as otherwise when there’s dinner to choke down, and a locker to find on Monday, enduring this new job assignment that’s gobbled up all of Mom’s attention. Tomorrow will be easier. Tomorrow, Mom’s got the day off, a whole blissful twenty-four hours to pretend everything’s the way it should be. The way it’s always been. Me in LA, and my father here. Five hours, three time zones, and over two thousand miles away.
CHAPTER 3
MY NEW SCHOOL IS HIDEOUS. One look at its gothic brow has my stomach doing backflips. Kids slam doors to Jags and Mercedes, rushing past me up the marble steps, but I’m frozen. Shivering beneath my backpack and layers of eiderdown.
Can’t fake sick. Driver’s already pulling away from the curb, and now that Mom’s working late again, we’ve reverted to old rules. No fever? No vomit? You’re going. I won’t see her until tonight—she was gone when my alarm went off at six—which means I have nothing to hold on to as I drag myself up the steps, a Latin-emblazoned banner flapping above the entryway. No final forehead peck to reassure me that everything’s going to be okay. Only Mom memories. Mom residue. The same words she shipped me off with every morning in seventh grade, when I officially transitioned from homeschooling to an alien universe, with lockers and class periods and kids my age. Try, honey. You’ll feel better when you get there.
The Latin on the banner translates to: Truth calls the… wisest is… love… there. Trying.
And I don’t feel better.
The interior matches the exterior, more curlicues and clammy marble. A spiral staircase twines upward, the wing before me a tunnel of doorways and trophy cabinets. Everywhere I look, there’s another kid, another face that means nothing to me. I take a tentative step forward. There’s a smell of eraser crumbs. Antiseptic.
When trying fails, there are alternatives. Picture your happy place—Mom’s top trick for when The Magazine’s demands overwhelm her. My happiest place used to be our old pool, practicing flip turns with Lindsay without water shooting up our noses, but after the way we left things—the way I left things—she’s the last person I want to think about. So I reach deeper. Grope around inside for something, anything, familiar.
Behind me, the hall churns with whispers. Stares crawl up my neck.
Okay. This must not be the type of school that gets many midyear transfers. They probably think I’m some delinquent. Head down, I struggle upstream, but the marble floor, soaked in fluorescent light, makes me dizzy. I have no idea where I’m going. Two boys shove past me, and I shift my backpack to my other shoulder, mumbling, “That’s okay,” before realizing they haven’t stopped to say sorry—only to gawk. A girl traveling with her pack tips heart-shaped sunglasses up for a better look at me. Rude, but this is hardly my first time playing new kid. I smile to show I’m friendly.
She shrieks and grabs her friend’s arm. They shriek together. I smack into a cabinet of wrestling trophies.
And so begins my second first day of senior year.
* * *
They want to know if “Rose” is a middle name and what California’s like, if it’s just sexy surfer bods engulfed in wildfires like you see on the news. They ask how many instruments I play and how I did on the SAT and what my preferred brand of pick is, whether I think Rocinante, Quixote’s follow-up, is as brilliant as Sheer Folly or overrated like (my friend, my cousin, Ms. Gonzalez the chemistry teacher) claims. They crowd around me to show off their pigeon necklaces. The band’s symbol—long story. They clutch my coat sleeves and beg for selfies, even though there’s apparently a strict no-phones-during-class policy and four kids get sent to the office just for asking. They invite me to eat lunch—you’re in first wave too, Koda Rose!—pronouncing my name like it belongs to something rare and wonderful, a fat-lipped fish species with one extant member. They chant, “Sit with us!” “No, us!” “Us!” Ms. Gonzalez takes one look at me and intervenes. “There’s a seat right there, Koda Rose.” Back row. A tall girl’s haven. Except the desk I lower myself into is so far away that the whiteboard is a blur. One of the girls from the hall shoves a notebook in my face and whispers, “Copy off me.” I take a pencil from my bag and the lead snaps immediately. Nobody else is wearing a coat.
When the bell rings, I shoot for the door. First period down. But second period? Third? Reruns. In the cafeteria—located on the school’s fifth and highest floor, a deafening cavern that smells like wet meat—kids bombard me with questions while I dissect my turkey and cheese.
“Can you sing for us?” somebody asks. The girl with heart-shaped sunglasses, only she’s not wearing them now, her blond hair fizzing from a braid that reminds me of Lindsay’s.
“Yeah,” says her friend. “Is your voice as good as your dad’s? Better?”
Another kid whacks her and explains how that isn’t possible. She whacks him back. I peel what remains of my sandwich from its biodegradable baggie.
When I started school in Beverly Hills, kids were curious about me at first. There was the occasional awkward question, or pity stare during the suicide unit in health class, but even those stopped eventually. They had to. I mean—okay, Quixote was pretty cool, revolutionary, if you believe the articles, but who’s that into the music their parents listened to? I pick a flax seed off my bun, add it to the
pile on my napkin, and when I risk looking back up, I realize the tussling has stopped and the table’s ringed with expectant faces. My chest starts to burn.
“So?” the girl says.
Lie, and they’ll demand proof. Tell the truth, and they might turn on me like Receptionist did. Just as I’m scanning for an exit, Mom’s whisper floats into my head.
Try, honey. She’s right.
These are my new classmates. Potential friends. I could really use a Latin buddy.
“Actually,” I begin. Thirty kids lean in. Thirty! At least. Something moves inside me—this unidentifiable flicker that could be my father onstage, the lights and screaming fans. For the first time, surrounded by all these strangers, I want to know how that felt to him. I want to know if his breath shortened and throat spasmed, all slicked up in that pukey way. Maybe he hated his newfound fame as much as I do. Maybe.
I exhale. “Actually, I… don’t sing. At all.”
It blows their eyes wide open.
“Wait.” Sunglasses Girl laughs. “Are you serious?”
I say I am. Only the other girl, the one who asked the question, steps closer. Suspicion narrows her eyes. “What about guitar? Sadie taught Mack how to play. Did she teach you?”
At the mention of Sadie, everybody shuts up. This reverent hush that whips across the surrounding tables. More faces turn—I lose count of how many.
“No. I…” My mouth feels like when I got my wisdom teeth out, full of bloody cotton. “I’ve never met Sadie. And I’ve never taken music lessons, or anything, either. I want to be a scientist. Well—a marine biologist, technically.” Nobody reacts. A good sign? I rush on. Words pile up, spill into my lap. “At-at my old school, we had senior projects? Anybody could do an independent study on anything they wanted, as long as they had a teacher sign on as their advisor. Mine was going to be about the endangered fin whales that’ve been spotted recently off Newport Beach.”
The Mythic Koda Rose Page 2