AMBROSIA
1
Lifeblood Era
The 31st New York Artisan Fair
June 26th
I sit with my back to the wall and my thighs in glass shards. Around me, drying, sticky champagne glues wood splinters, broken table legs, and the drenched tablecloth to the parquet floor.
The glass stretches out under my knees, calves, to the soles of my feet. All of it – flayed, ruining the illusion of my flesh-colored tights. My ten-grand dress with the high leg slit hangs from my body in wet tatters and my baby-yellow five-inch heels are on the other side of the hall that goes on and on in black-white necrosis and confused bodies.
Next to me, Summer is drinking champagne straight from the bottle and I don’t think she’ll set it down until it’s empty. Her gown’s outer tulle layer looks all soaked paper towels, torn and tangled with itself. One of her shoulder straps is gone, but she’s kept her heels. Mascara and eyeliner flakes have caught everywhere on her wet face except for her eyes, which are dry.
Ahead, close enough to touch if I reached across the remnants of the beverage table, Nova fidgets with a stray glass shard and cries freely, letting it all run from her cheeks to her chin to the floor. Her lashes are holding on by a thread and her dress has peeled enough to reveal double-sided fashion tape on her chest. Her wailing comes in waves, high tide swelling up and low tide receding to hiccups. Our best singer or not, she’s been doing that for so long I’m surprised there’s still air left in those lungs.
Ruby grasps at Nova’s shoulders, sometimes her face when she tries to make her look up, and says either “It’s alright, okay?” or “It’s okay, alright?” or “Stop crying.” It might not sound very comforting, but in this one and only instance, it is. Ruby’s still holding her white award statue in one hand. The red polish on her perfectly oval nails is so bright against it I can’t look away. It’s chipped now, and she’s swollen-knuckled like me. She’s also shaking, which I’m not.
“We’re okay. Stop crying.”
People I know are somewhere in the carnage. If I really wanted to, I could probably find them. Standing up would drive glass into my feet, though, so I sit.
“We’re okay. Hey? We’re okay.”
Marten is gone – I think – I don’t know where to. Maybe he’ll stay like that forever. Maybe we’ll stay like that forever – drinking and sobbing and grasping and sitting.
“Stop crying. Please.”
Black-shirted security guards are wedged in every entrance and exit, blocking the wood-paneled double doors, lingering on the red carpet until police arrives. Does the public know already or are our managers, the fair directors, W-Media executives, still running the fool’s errand of trying to keep this out of the tabloids? Off social media? You couldn’t pay the photographers off with the smiles of their loved ones.
“We’re okay, alright? We’re okay.” Ruby softens her shoulders and lifts her head for the first time in a while. She looks at Summer and me for confirmation.
Summer finally breaks with the bottle but keeps her fingers locked around its neck. She looks back at Ruby’s lipstick smeared mouth, alert eyes and stray hairs plastered to her forehead, and laughs like a chip in a champagne flute. “We’re gonna get sued to shit.”
Lifeblood Era
Day of the 31st New York Artisan Fair
June 26th
I step out of the Radiance Entertainment dorms at the ass-crack of dawn. I don’t sit down on the narrow concrete stoop, even though I’d really like to, because it’s the flat end of today’s temperature curve and I’m in shorts. Since it’s sorely June, I get to watch the last stretch of sunrise. My eyes are dry and itchy and one of them twitches when the light hits it, so I stand on the stoop and squint at the parking lot. The wind doesn’t sweep up my hair because a wool hat covers me from forehead to nape. I try to think about nothing.
I woke up fifteen minutes ago, the way I usually do, with Marten Janssen casting his voice to my phone and jostling me out of a light sleep. “Campus at five, no need to get ready,” is what he said. Click. End of cast. He used to start his messages with “Good morning,” and sometimes he’d add my name too.
I don’t think ‘campus’ is the right term – always feels too ‘academia’. It’s really a parking space, a square of concrete and cobblestone snugly obscured by the Radiance dorm’s off-white façade.
I zip my windbreaker up. I didn’t change; I’m in the same top I slept in. I rolled off the mattress, grabbed nothing, and all but fled past the row of electric outlets next to the door. Marten does mean it when he says there’s no need to get ready. We only get picked up at campus when it’s not part of a public appearance.
There is no ‘we’ right now. I’m out here alone, earlier than the rest of Moxxy, and don’t think I haven’t noticed. I need to talk to Nova, Ruby, even Summer, but there’s a reason I left my phone on my bed. I couldn’t call, cast, or text without everyone in the Radiance building receiving a ping.
The car that eases onto campus through the gap between the apartment blocks is understated and black with tinted windows. At fifteen, I thought if I really made it, a limousine would be my mode of transportation even to the grocery store, but that didn’t entirely check out. I only move in limos half of the time and I don’t go to the store at all.
The car stops and the passenger window slides down. Marten makes eye contact and that is really all it takes. Just me knowing he’s there – watchful eyes under his square frame glasses, sand-colored stubble beard, phone permanently glued to his right hand – ushers me along. I note how long it takes for the heels of my feet to touch down while I’m in flats. I make my way to the car with my signature large steps, climb onto the backseat and pull the door shut.
The driver – a new one, no doubt – can’t help but twist his neck to steal a glance. He’s meticulously shaven, so much so that he seems to have cut his chin. I give him a little smile and he turns back around, shoulders almost up to his ears.
I wonder if he’ll tell party guests and future dates about how he carted around Ambrosia that one time. I wonder if he’ll make a point out of how weird it was to see her at the no-need-to-get-ready-stage.
Unlike our driver, Marten doesn’t turn around. “We’re doing hair first,” is the first and last thing he says to me before the car picks up speed.
Year of the 24th New York Artisan Fair
January
When I was fourteen, by a spell of serendipity, my aunt died in a car crash. Now, hear me out. As hard as this tragedy hit our family – and it did, really, I cried my eyes out – it was the reason my mother would finally listen to me when I told her that I had to become a singer.
For the past three years, I’d presented my mom with self-made PowerPoint slides as to why she should drive me four hours out of town to audition for Radar Talent. The way that usually went was that she said “not now, Katya” or “I’ll think about it” before she turned back to the TV screen that autoplayed Moore Family vlogs – ‘MOIRA’S FIRST DAY OF SECONDARY SCHOOL’, ‘MASON’S DENTIST ADVENTURE (HE CRIED)’ – that she claimed to hate but never skipped when the algorithm put them on for her (“Well, now it’s running”). Sometimes she asked me – in the middle of my presentation no less – to translate what Maeve Moore had just said to her daughter, and then I had to invent something because I wasn’t ready to admit that the Moore matriarch’s Irish accent escaped my grasp of English.
When my aunt died, though, she had barely been in her thirties, fallen victim to a drunk driver on the wrong lane with no fault of her own. That’s just how easy it was – you could make plans for the evening one morning and then, without provocation or anything to deserve it, slip down a fatal stairway at noon. My mom understood this, then, better than anyone else. She was very quiet in the kitchen as she boiled pearl wheat for funeral kolivo and still during the procession to the church, shuffling along behind a cross and a censer wielding priest, she bent down to me and whispered that she’d drive me to the capital if it was what I really wanted.
So, on a school day, mom drove me four hours out to Sofia. I sat in her Honda’s passenger’s seat, leaned against the window and studied the width of my nose and the height of my cheekbones. Every time, I came to the conclusion that I was beautiful. At fourteen, I was the most confident I’d ever been.
The reason why I had no choice but to introduce myself to the only Radar Talent agency in Bulgaria, though, was that I was a singer. When the dazzling silhouette of American pop-icon Calidora crossed my screen for the first time, I stole my mom’s credit card and downloaded all of her songs thus far. When no one did downloads anymore, I’d pay for the premium version of music streaming subscriptions, so I could play her songs on purpose instead of just hoping for them. I stayed up until 5AM, glued to my tablet, the night she won Greatest Solo-Achievement at the 18th New York Artisan Fair awards, and by thirteen, I could sing her entire discography by heart, without knowing for sure what the lyrics meant.
After we pulled into the parking lot near the Radar Talent building – the letters on it each a big red sculpture – mom turned the engine off and didn’t move from her seat.
“You have to come in with me. I’m not sixteen yet.”
She sighed in relief. “Right.”
I’d done my homework. Doing research at the kitchen table together with Nikol, we’d found that Radar Talent (“Get on our Radar!”) was owned by W-Media, which also owned Bonfire, which was the label that Calidora signed with just a year before her global breakthrough. I wanted a global breakthrough and I knew exactly what I had to do. I was the centerpiece of our local church choir. I played piano. I’d taken dance lessons and joined a theater group. I had the range for Radar Talent.
At the reception desk, I told a lady with ruler-straight bangs my first and last name. My address and postcode. I told her about my qualifications. I didn’t tell her that I was beautiful, because she could see that. Since Radar Bulgaria operated on an open audition principle, all I had to do was walk in and introduce myself and just like that, I was registered. My mom paid the handling fees and I got a slip with the number 7322.
The waiting room resembled a hotel lobby, with countless sofas and armchairs filled by countless mothers, some fathers, and their beautiful daughters, some sons. With the number 6531 on display over the wooden double doors, mom and I went for lunch instead of waiting in a room full of nerves.
“How do you feel?” she asked me over the last burger I’ve eaten to date.
I raised my flat hand, to show her I was trembling. With that, I gave her the fiercest grin I could muster.
“Nervous?”
“I’ve never been more nervous in my life,” I said.
When number 7322 was called into the audition hall, my mom squeezed my hand very tight before she let me go. I walked through the double doors with my stomach sucked in and my chest puffed out. What I expected to see was a jury à la TV talent competition, but there was no stage, no lights, and no jury. What the audition room did have was linoleum flooring, white walls that reminded me of a doctor’s office, and a bored-looking man in business casual sitting behind a gray desk that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a classroom.
I said, “Hello.” He didn’t stand up, we didn’t shake hands. He leaned on one elbow while looking at his files.
“Says here you’re a triple threat,” he said.
I didn’t know what that meant. I stood there, quiet, stomach lurching.
“You can sing, act, and dance,” he elaborated.
“Yes.” I didn’t like him much, but I gave him my loveliest smile.
He told me he wanted to see it, I asked what, he said all of it.
Radar Talent’s website explicitly encouraged applicants to prepare acts in their areas of expertise, so that was exactly what I’d done. I started with Calidora’s “Devotion” and sang my heart out without any music to back me up, hyper-aware of each warble and trill. Business Casual told me to show him the next act, so I danced. I’d cobbled the routine together myself from various online videos, turning it a bit more modern and a bit sexier than what you’d find in dance class. I did this, too, without music, and never felt more awkward in my life. He told me to go on, so I acted out a scene from On the Vim, which I thought would be refreshing and daring since I technically wasn’t old enough to watch that show, but if the mumbling rehearsals in the lobby were anything to go by, it wasn’t as refreshing or daring as I thought.
Business Casual asked if I was done. I said I could also play the piano, but forgot to mention it before because I was so nervous. I tried to play it cute. I don’t think I succeeded.
“There’s a piano in the music room,” he said, “but your time’s up.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It doesn’t hurt to mention that right away next time,” he said.
I went home without a call-back. During four more hours in the car, mom went above and beyond telling me how talented I was, that just this once we could pick up McDonald’s on the way home, that ‘next time’ must mean that they wanted to see me try again, but I cried anyway.
She was right, though. They did want to see me try again. I knew – I knew that I wouldn’t get anywhere in this business without tenacity – Calidora had said so many times herself – and I would show them just how much tenacity I had.
I tried again. Mom drove me four hours out to Sofia, and paid the handling fees. I said I could sing, dance, act, and play piano.
I tried again. Mom drove me four hours out to Sofia.
I tried again. Mom drove my four hours out to Sofia.
I tried again.
2
Lifeblood Era
Day of the 31st New York Artisan Fair
June 26th
When we arrive at the prep studio, Marten and I get straight into the elevator to the ninth floor. The pull is making me drowsier than I already am and I try to keep my eyes from falling shut. It’s still five in the morning.
The elevator dings, the doors slide open, and I keep walking, Marten’s steadily guiding presence behind me. Usually, my stylings can be done wherever there’s an electric plug, but this floor is for bigger, longer, more permanent procedures. The linoleum hallways make the prep studio feel like an office complex, but the room Marten steers me into has more floor space than any office could dream of. There are ceiling-high shelves of colorful tubes and tiny pots. Each of the four corners is equipped with a sink, a mirror, and salon chair.
Jared is already here, leaning against the eggshell-white wall with crossed arms. Tired, disgruntled, because he’s also been called in earlier than usual, just because I decided to wreck my Artisan Fair look less than a week before show time. His assistant, a woman with a dark bun who can’t be much older than me, fusses with a little white tube on the tray next to the sink.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.” Jared turns to Marten behind me. “Wig came in clutch yesterday evening. Give us two hours. Three max.”
Sinking into my designated chair, draped in a kind of unnecessary protective cape, I get ready to do nothing. I watch myself warily in the mirror and zone in and out of Marten and Jared’s fragmented conversations. Neither of them talk to me, which suits me just fine. I can’t decide if doing nothing for three hours is a much-welcome opportunity to relax or if I’d rather drive needles into my nail beds.
Jared slides the wool hat off my head and tosses it to his assistant. He tugs on the unevenly cropped tufts of hair that spring from my scalp in every possible direction. His brows work themselves higher and higher on his forehead, which doesn’t crease. In a flush of shame, I dig my index nail into my thumb.
“I got you,” Jared says and I give him a tight smile. Marten sits back in one of the black leather chairs by the door, eyes on his phone.
Jared’s assistant wheels a rolling desk over – on it, standing tall, is my long brown signature mane on a smooth mannequin head. Jared confirms that my hair is short enough not to get in the way, before he slicks it back and cements it with various layers of hairspray.
“Wig department made the whole thing custom in just a couple of days, real hair and all,” he says, as he carefully peels it off the now bald mannequin. “They’re really saving your ass. All of our asses.”
Starting from the back, he drapes it over my scalp, tugs here, tugs there, aligns hairline with hairline and – just like that – she’s back: Ambrosia with a capital A, who shows up second only to the Amazon collective when you type ‘am’ into the Google search bar and on top of the list as soon as you type ‘amb’, beating out every relevant Amber. The only thing ruining the illusion is the front-lace that ends just on my eyebrows, but not for long.
Thus begins the painstaking process of Jared’s metal tweezers plucking thin strands and individual hairs off the scalp until the lusciously dense wig matches my not quite as dense hair structure. He works fast but the hairline takes an hour, the part another hour, and even after that he keeps going back for individual sections while zooming in on the reference picture of me on the tablet his assistant holds up. I don’t talk. I don’t rest my eyes. I hold my stare in the mirror – my brown eyes, my good brows, my good skin – your jawline, baby, your jawline!
When Jared is – thank god, finally – satisfied with his adjustments, the wig disappears and Ambrosia is gone again, leaving something in her wake that I can’t quite define.
With something like a minuscule spatula, Jared spreads glue from the white tube from earlier right on the edge between my hairline and forehead. We wait for it to grow tacky, Marten checks his phone, and then – with the tenderness of cradling a new-born – Jared slides the wig back on, adjusts it, and observes his work from all angles. Both his work and that of the wig team is remarkable. It does look like the hair is sprouting straight from my scalp, down to the tiny baby hairs on my temple.
Jared smooths out the hair – my hair – and presses his hands firmly against the sides of my head, the wig against the glue, and holds it in his palms as he twinkles back at me in the mirror. “That’s not going anywhere, baby. They’ll be none the wiser.”
Moxxy Era
Year of the 28th New York Artisan Fair
February
On the day of my first stage performance with Moxxy, I got extensions in my hair. It had been decided upon earlier that week, during the final rehearsals and costume check in a backstage area somewhere in New York. “In New York” had become a modifier that I mentally added to any- and everything I’d done in the past four months.
“What if we go for more length?” Marten had said during the costume check, standing next to me, chin propped on a loose fist.
Jared, who I’d only met two weeks ago and who also seemed distinctly New York-ish, had held out his hand three, then five, then twelve inches below the tips of my hair. “To here?”
Just before the performance, I saw the vision come together. Hair down to my hips made my silhouette striking but balanced, drawing attention without distracting from my group mates.
“You’re a genius,” I told Marten, and he gave me a goofy little shrug.
“I’m clairvoyant. It’s a gift.”
And I took his word for it, because Marten saw me, really saw me – both as I was and as I wanted to be. As a manager, he was a gambler by design and a visionary by necessity. When I was at the infancy of my career, Marten was at the infancy of his, managing several talents and moving heaven and earth to push one of them into the mainstream.
So in New York, with an hour to our first concert, Jared curled my hair to make the extensions transition seamlessly, a make-up artist blended my eye shadow, and around me, three other stylees stared down their reflections in the vanity mirrors.
Ruby watched her makeup artist’s hands and brushes like a hawk, while her hair stylist weaved her black strands into a long fishtail braid. She was the only one of us trying to make small talk with her team, saying stuff like “interesting choice” and “I personally prefer cream foundation” to distract from the fact that she was positively shitting herself in fear.
Summer was lounging in her chair with one socked foot up on the vanity while playing some sort of game on her phone (for which, mind you, she hadn’t turned the sound off). Neither the stylist sculpting her cheekbone nor the one painting a gradient onto her lip bothered her in the slightest.
Nova’s eyes remained stubbornly closed for most of the procedure. Her perfect brows twitched as if she was focusing hard, but what she could be focusing on I had no idea. She kept digging one of her fingernails under the others as if picking at grime, even though her nails were pristine. In a (rare) quiet moment, the little thwp noises were audible across the room.
The jumpsuits in which we marched onto the elevator platform were skin-tight and our pant legs ended just with our hip bones. For the individualist fun little something, we alternated between long sleeves (me), only one sleeve (Ruby) spaghetti straps (Summer), or a jumpsuit that was altogether shoulderless (Nova).
The waters had been tested, the target groups analyzed. Our first single “MOXXY” – not to be confused with Moxxy, our group, or Moxxy, our self-titled first album – had gone out and garnered an audience reaction appropriate for the marketing plan. The four of us pulled a substantial starting fan-base from our various side-gigs – acting, social media, dance, and modeling – and the buzz that was courtesy of our “diverse and international” branding quickly multiplied that number. The concert hall had filled to the brim with expectations for our stage debut.
The platform whirred beneath my feet, rose through the ceiling, and I emerged on stage together with Ruby, Nova, and Summer. I would’ve felt awkward in my little outfit and heels as I struck a pose in the dark, if not for the fact that the air was thick with screams (for us) and a steady thumping heartbeat drove the impatience (for us) through the roof. The stage was smooth and solid and its surface shone under the impossibly hot lights. It felt like power.
The music set in with a bang and we performed “MOXXY” – the song – promising everyone that we were bold and overconfident and here to stay. If they didn’t know us already, that was fine, because they would soon enough. Costume department had put us in different colors schemes so people could pinpoint each one of us as quickly as possible. If you didn’t know that the one who danced with such fluidity that she seemed to move at a different frame rate than the rest of us was Summer, then you could simply point and say “the one with the blue hair.” If you wanted to know who the one belting all the power lines was, you could ask about the rose-colored ensemble and be referred to Nova. Ruby, of course, was red – eye-catching as the coolest motherfucker on stage should be – and I was gold. Well, yellow or gold, depending on viewer discretion. The name Ambrosia was still new and exciting on my skin, and if that was my name, and if I was going to be a diva, then maybe I could – should – be golden.
Punctuating the end of a drawn out note with a heavy, high-heeled stomp that sent a tremor through my ankle, I heard my name screamed for the first time. The voice was high-pitched and desperate, already star-struck at the birth of my career, and I figured that maybe I was vain after all. I was soaring on that goddamn stage. My legs hurt, my feet hurt, my throat hurt and all I wanted was to hurt more. I called back into my mind over and over that I’d come all this way from my stupid Bulgarian small town, previously on no one’s radar, to finally be home. I knew I could conquer everything and everyone. I could make the whole world fall in love with me, and I would. I was born and shaped to be here and I knew that, on stage between Ruby and Nova and Summer.
I couldn’t stand any of them.
Year of the 27th New York Artisan Fair
August
The first time I met Ruby and Summer was two days after I’d come to New York, two days after I’d been passed into the capable hands of Marten Janssen and (preliminarily) Radiance Entertainment. I was seventeen years old, with four months to go until adulthood.
For a week, Radiance had been running ensemble tests for their junior signees in a dance studio on a double-digit floor. Encased by walls that were more window than plaster, twenty girls brimmed with ambition. It was sweltering, sweat pooling on our skins.
Three men and two women in suits sat behind wooden desks and called out combinations of three, four, or five numbers. If 12 was among them, I stepped into the middle of the floor and left everything I had there. If it wasn’t, I stayed behind by the walls with the rest of the crop and watched a performance – no music, no lights – that I’d already seen upwards of fifty times. Upwards of two-hundred, if in the mirror counted. Even while it wasn’t my turn, I mouthed along to sassy lyrics or bent my waist to the steps that had long gone into my blood. I never sat, I never leaned, I stood out.
I watched the digital clock on the wall. Different from the times before was that today, the board of casting directors waved two or three girls out of the room in hourly intervals. They didn’t return, some of them choked back tears, and every time, the air inside became more sweltering.
We were down to fourteen when I began paying attention to Ruby. The reason was that after the first couple of girls had walked out the door, she employed the same strategy as me. She stood up and continued standing – straight, attentive, unfaltering.
Ruby was shorter than I was but many of the girls were. East Asian, hair in two tastefully disheveled braids that rested on her prominent collarbones. Plastered to her loose flowing tank top was the lucky number 3. Her management was going for cool and modern, clearly. She danced well enough, she sang well enough. I considered her as a potential rival who might steal my spot in the group or a potential ally-flavored rival who might be next to me in it. The more girls were sent home, the more I felt like either one was going to be the case.
Summer sat, before her turns and after. I’d noticed her several times over the course of the last week – it was hard not to, with her gaudy hair – but I only really took her in when the studio was down to nine girls and “Three, twelve, fourteen” were called into the middle.
Summer was shorter than Ruby and quite a bit shorter than me. White, freckled, blue-haired and blue-eyed, clad in a strawberry-red crop top and strawberry-red lipstick that didn’t smear with exercise. She had a pretty face that somehow managed to feel familiar, and the cute-and-quirky image did a lot for her. She was the best dancer in the room, but the rest was unrefined.
Like everyone else, Ruby, Summer, and I performed “Femme Finale” by Radiance’s then most successful girl group Anima. I’d overcome the awkwardness of touching a stranger’s skin and holding onto another girl’s shoulders by day two. For the mock-grinding, it took me two days more. The casting board scratched their chins and exchanged meaningful glances. They asked for redos while switching the girl in the middle around numerous times. I choose to interpret that as a sign that they’d hit a vein.
After a 30-minute lunch break – that the casting directors spent at the cafeteria downstairs and the girls spent stirring in the studio and sucking on their water bottles – one of the directors read out a sequence of numbers from her clipboard.
Group 7-9-15-18 and Group 3-12-14 were the ones asked to present. We both got a room half the size of the studio and we both got a new song, a new choreo, and three hours to learn both. Summer popped her lips at the announcement. Ruby wrapped the hem of her top around her fingers the whole time we were being led to our room, smile plastered on.
I felt fourteen again and I felt betrayed because I thought I’d left group assignments behind me when I dropped out of school. As the door shut and it was just the three of us, Radiance’s unspoken questions hung heavy from the ceiling. How do you perform under pressure? Can you be fast and deliver? And of course: How well do you work together? The last one was what bothered me. Speak of judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree.
Cross-legged on the floor, we looked at the papers in our hands. Lyrics and staves on one, choreography as demonstrated by a gray ponytail woman on the remaining three. It was quiet for a long time, until Ruby said: “They’ll want the four member group.”
I looked up at her and found that the soft skin under her eyes stretched further than I thought and held a light blue tinge. There was no spite or otherwise on her face – she’d made a neutral statement. More than anything, I think, she wanted to relieve herself of the burden of making conversation.
Since Summer kept her eyes on the paper and said nothing, I guessed it was up to me to play the ball back.
“Why so?”
A second passed between her mouth opening and her mouth speaking. “Even numbers. It’s a symmetry thing. Although five has also been successful. It’s like an honorary even number, I guess.” She inhaled, eyes toward the ceiling, then exhaled flatly. “Nevermind.”
Both of us stared at the staves on page 1/4.
“I’m Seo-yun,” she said. “Yun is fine. Or Ruby, now, rather. I guess.” A little awkward laugh. It wasn’t as cute as she intended.
“Ambrosia,” I said.
“Wow,” said Summer, but when I turned her way her eyes hadn’t left the paper.
Ruby gave me a grateful nod. I acknowledged her for humoring me and she acknowledged me for humoring her. It was stable and amicable and also unbearable.
“So, like…” Ruby started for the third time, lifting the papers. “We’re three. One of us will have to be up front – should we pick a main girl, or…?” She tilted her head. It was half of a joke.
Summer didn’t say anything. I didn’t either.
Then I blurted: “I wanted to be a solo-act.”
I’d told them multiple times, but Radiance wanted a group so Marten signed me up for a group. We’re oversaturated with solo-artists, he’d explained to me, sitting behind his desk, groups sell fantastically, just look at Korea, we need to get our butts into gear and catch up to that market.
Ruby gave me a puzzled look, and I felt the desperate need to save myself.
“I’m not good at teamwork,” I added. Saying that felt like blasphemy. Like any moment one of the directors would jump from a shaft in the ceiling with a Gotcha! and fire me on the spot. I backpedaled further, suddenly very invested in the song in front of me. “The choruses and pre-choruses are all of us together, regardless of position, so maybe that’s where we should start, since we all need to have that down. We’re only three people but that also means we only have to coordinate three people. They have to coordinate four. We should be able to do this.”
Ruby answered with a firm nod. Because I’d been reading sheet music for way longer than she had, I helped her grasp the melody and navigate her voice to the right high and lows. We worked through the chorus, singing to each other’s scrutinizing ears.
Meanwhile, Summer lay on her back with one leg crossed over the other, holding one of the pages in front of her face while the others were scattered around her. She mouthed words, but not the words from the song.
“Hey?” I said, but I had to say it once more with feeling before Summer turned her head. “Do you want to join us, maybe? We all need to have the chorus down.”
“In a bit.” Summer laid down her current page and picked the next one up, shaking it out in front of her. “Go on. Don’t let me stop you.”
I sat blinking as she, just like that, clocked out of the conversation again. “We have to harmonize. If we’re not in sync they won’t consider us. We have to practice together.”
“It all comes down to choreography, though.” Unlike Ruby and me, Summer talked with the easy confidence of a native speaker. “They can always playback us.”
“Have you looked at the chorus yet?”
From where she lay on the floor, Summer pushed her hands into the polished hardwood floor and vaulted herself backwards into a seat – a maneuver that was both very impressive and obviously for the sole purpose of showing off. She swiped the hair out of her face and shoved paper 3/4 toward me as if I didn’t have one of my own. “Look.”
I did begrudgingly. The gray ponytail woman presented us with a high energy routine that included a lot – a lot – of floorwork. We were to spin and roll and do seated cartwheels while not only remembering but also performing the lyrics.
“I mean, sure, they want us to sing a song,” Summer said, “but what they really care about are the visuals and those are the visuals.”
I looked at Ruby. Ruby tugged on her earlobe and said, “I guess.”
We rose to our feet, instructions in hand. The choreography began with slow, seductive body rolls but before that we had to position ourselves within the triangle formation.
“Who’s in the middle?” I asked, doing my utmost to sound like I was asking if someone needed something from the store.
“Let me hazard a guess – you have someone in mind?”
On my heels, I rotated towards Summer, brow raised. Despite her height, she looked down at me over her freckled nose.
“You just strike me as a middle girl, is all.” I didn’t know how she made it sound like an insult.
“Why?”
She shrugged.
“No, enlighten me.”
“Why are you mad?”
“I’m not mad. Answer the question.”
She pursed her lips in contemplation and swayed from one foot to the other. “See, I don’t think Ruby needed you to overexplain how to hold a note, you know? I think considering that she’s here she knows that already.”
Ruby said: “Uh.”
“Maybe Ruby wants to be in the middle,” Summer added.
“What is happening?” Ruby’s eyes ticked between the two of us, nervous laughter on her lips. “Are you fighting? Are you fighting over middle girl right now?”
“No,” said Summer after a beat of silence. “I’m suggesting Ambrosia for middle girl. Unless you want it?”
We ended up doing one cycle with Ruby and one cycle with me as the middle girl. I bit back my frustration and tried to drown out everything but motion. Summer insisted that she didn’t want to be middle girl, so why did she have to jump down my throat like that? Ruby was slightly agonizing to talk to, sure, but at least she didn’t go out of her way to be horrible to work with.
Within the next twenty minutes, I decided that she wasn’t just a difficult person but – for whatever reason – antagonizing me specifically. During my turn front and center, I had to witness from the corner of my eye how she forwent the squat that transitioned into the plentiful floorwork and instead dropped herself straight to the ground before matching us again with leg kicks and chest pulses. I grit my teeth and held on – we couldn’t afford to start over and lose valuable practice time – but whirled around to her as soon as we struck our final poses. “What the fuck?”
“Whoa,” said Summer, still sat on the floor. “Can I help you?”
“Don’t think I’ll buy that this was a mistake. This didn’t happen in the run before, so what is your problem?”
“I just thought I’d drop that god-awful squat. Christ, relax.”
My mouth snapped open and closed a few times, I felt my face redden behind my waterproof foundation. “That’s not for you to decide. You don’t get to risk our chances like that. Is the choreo the most important part or can you just change it whenever? Make up your mind.”
“The squat looks like you’re taking a shit,” she said.
I held my breath. “If you fuck this up for us–” I floundered, trying to come up with suitably severe consequences and ended up with: “I will never forgive you.”
“Hey, hey, no need to be so dramatic. I know what I’m doing so don’t you worry your pretty head about it.”
I turned to face Ruby. A crease between her brows, she shrugged.
I rubbed the sides of my face but stopped when I remembered my makeup. “Just stick to the paper.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I willed myself not to answer.
When our allotted three hours wrapped up, we were led back into the main studio in various stages of sweaty, nervous, and agitated. The casting directors had their eyes on their tablets, a few chins propped up on complimentary tablet pens, re-reading their notes on the group before us. “Go ahead,” one of them said and we performed “Glow Up,” the song that would later open the Moxxy album. Like it was a foregone conclusion, I danced center, with Ruby to my right and Summer to my left. Suddenly, it felt lopsided and weird.
They watched us, whispered, and clacked pens to tablets. Summer stuck to the choreography, didn’t even pull a weird face when she popped down into the squat. Ruby, though, dropped out to sync for a second and I could’ve strangled her.
As we breathed heavy in our finishing poses – I was standing tall with my hand stretched toward the ceiling, Summer and Ruby were on the floor, one of their arms hooked around one of my legs each – they asked us to go again. And this time, they wanted to see Summer in the middle. She said “sure,” and I could’ve strangled her too.
When we reached the final pose again – this time with Summer and my position reversed – I had to truly fight the urge to shove her leg out from under her. I figured they’d ask for a third cycle with Ruby in the middle. They didn’t.
Ruby scratched her ear, face red, as the board members rotated the backs of their chairs to us, tablets in hand, leaning into a conspiratorial half circle.
The three of us stood unmoving in front of the director’s table. Almost four years I’d unraveled and rebuilt myself just to be in this room, in a line with Ruby and Summer. In the silence, I clenched the flesh of my cheek between my teeth. Ruby rotated her ankle first clockwise then counter-clockwise. Summer crossed her arms and dug her nail, subtly, in the skin of her elbow.
Ruby and Summer and I looked at each other with familiar uncertainty.
Year of the 26th New York Artisan Fair
March
I’m not worried. I flashed a smile along the line of suited Radar people and projected this message onto the walls of my skull. They can’t send me home. They will sign me with a label. This girl and I have nothing in common.
She’d come out of the review room before I walked in. She was crying, try-hard neutral façade punctured by undignified sobs. That evening she’d pack her shit, tomorrow morning she’d buy a train ticket to whatever Bulgarian backwater village she’d come from. Maybe she’d try to go back to school – a walk of shame back to eighth grade. Maybe she’d try to get a job instead, which she won’t without secondary school qualifications, which in turn made paying Radar back for board, accommodation, and training significantly more difficult.
“We don’t have a label for you yet,” the blonde lady on the review team told me, and I clung to the word ‘yet’ like my life depended on it.
I was sixteen and I had been in Sofia for the past twenty months. My hair had gotten longer, I had gotten thinner, and my face had been reassembled into all cheekbone and jawline. The heels I wore weren’t very high but they still underlined my presence with every daring clack.
The girl and I had nothing in common, because not only did I drop out of school for this, I sweat blood for this, I swallowed bile for this. My body ached when I moved, my head throbbed when I sat, my eyes leaked when I lay. I must’ve earned the right to my dream.
“We enjoy your singing and dancing,” they said. Piano was still on the list of my credentials but no one had asked me to play piano since I’d gotten here. “Your acting is quite good – more blockbuster than art film, I would say, but quite good.”
I was off the hook. They still saw potential in me. “Stefan here suggested that a tangible image might make it easier to sign you,” she said “we’ll brainstorm on some persona ideas and let you know.”
“Thank you.”
“Any questions?”
“Yes,” I said, I lifted my chin and steadied my nervous hands. “What do I need to be considered by one of the international labels?”
By international, I obviously meant American.
After a moment of quiet, a man at the end of the reviewer table said: “Good English, for one.” He spoke in English, to stress his point, and to show that it had only the faintest Bulgarian tint. He must’ve had something to do with the foreign communications department.
“I have that.” English lessons at Radar Talent were more intense and frequent than they’d ever been at school. For years, I’d prioritized my ABC over my АБВ and every evening I sat in my room, practicing my th, w, and h sounds. After all, English was the language of music, showbiz, and media.
“And for two, be better than everyone else,” the man added. “Can you do that?”
I nodded my chin like a soldier, willed determination into my eyes that would be strong enough so that he could feel it all the way where he sat.
“If you mean it then you should say it,” he said, still in English.
“I can do that,” I said, also in English.
“I caught a little bit of an accent there just now. Remember if you want to get out there you need to be globally viable, right?”
I knew that, and I was being patronized, but that was a feeling I’d made peace with.
“I can do it,” I said again, slower, more deliberate, fighting the shapes my mouth naturally fell into to stretch an American television accent over my teeth. It felt silly, it sounded silly – to my own ears – but the man smiled fatherly. “I will be better than everyone else.”
The middle lady clicked her pen. “Very well.”
I walked out of the review room in stride. I kept my head high and my back straight as I breezed past the girl crying in the hallway. Very soon after, my team had found an image for me.
3
Lifeblood Era
Day of the 31st New York Artisan Fair
June 26th
With new hair but the same shirt, shorts, and sneakers, I emerge back into the hallway. A minute ago, Marten left to grab me breakfast and returns just as I step out, as if planned down to the second. He hands me a frozen mango yogurt from one of the VibeFood vending machines dotted throughout the building. He doesn’t say “here you go” and I don’t say “thanks.” I wedge my nails under the soft plastic lid while Marten steers me back to the elevators. VibeFood yogurt is busy food – if you eat it sitting down or standing still, you’re doing it wrong. Of all their low carb, no sugar fruit yogurts, mango is my favorite. It can’t exactly tide me over until my next meal but it will.
The prep studio is not as dead as it was a few hours ago. To our right, another studio door swings open and my chest grows tight. Nova, pursued by her manager, is also early to get her hair taken care of. Nova can’t afford to stop in her tracks but she slows in the doorway when she spots me. My eyes find hers, brown against browner. Would you look at that, I try to tell her. They could’ve done me and you in the same room, but they didn’t. You’re not surprised either, are you?
“Hi,” says Nova to me and Marten, because silence would be just as suspicious as a secret handshake or a coded message. Nova is still wearing her glasses, which means she’s about as far along in her Artisan Fair prep as I am. They’ve put her hair in the same box-braids tinged pale pink that constituted her signature look for Moxxy’s first year and a half. Someone is shooting for nostalgia.
“Hi,” I say to Nova and to Audrey Hall: A white American lady in either her late thirties or early forties.
“Ungodly hour,” says Marten to Audrey.
“I’m used to it,” says Audrey to Marten.
Neither of them stop to have this conversation, so Nova and I don’t either. We walk past each other, gradually pulled apart by managerial gravity. I look at Nova, who looks at me.
I raise one brow, which means Are you okay?
She squeezes her lips, which means nothing.
I turn to face forward, because I can’t afford to linger, and neither can she.
I let Marten’s orbit pull me into the elevator and watch him press the button for the fifteenth floor. I don’t turn around to face the hallway until the doors slide shut.
A concept, my confidante
The first time I saw Nova, she wasn’t moving. She was a full-screen image on TGM’s website. Perched on top of a flight of white stairs, her long legs stretched across three and four steps respectively while she coolly cocked her chin. A crop of long, rosé-colored braids spilled over her shoulder and into her lap. The pantsuit she wore was of a matching pastel pink and the open blazer left a triangular strip of skin all the way down.
Hot, I thought. Why, I thought.
Summer, Ruby, and I were crowded around the tablet screen our coordinator had handed to us. Moxxy was going to get a fourth girl and for the first time I felt that all three of us were, if not on the same page, at least in the same book.
Technically adding a fourth girl wasn’t a problem. We hadn’t gone public yet – the Moxxy brand barely existed, and couldn’t be further from set in stone.
TGM was a modeling agency and Nova was obviously a model. The fact that Radiance had now signed her as well, had shoved a model into a group of singers, wasn’t what bothered us. None of us were one-trick-ponies. I, too, was signed with Radiance to cover my music and with Atlas to cover my acting. You wouldn’t get very far with only one market you could corner.
What bothered us about the addition of Nova was that they slotted a whole new person into a group that was already connected only by a single hinge. What bothered me was the way she looked in the photo. Cool, confident and sexy. Bold and untouchable. She looked like a diva, was the problem, and that was my turf.
What might’ve bothered us, but what Ruby, Summer, and I failed to articulate, was the why her and the why only now.
I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t notice that Nova was the only Black girl in our group. I’m not going to pretend like our “diverse, international” image hadn’t looked very pale before. I’m not going to pretend that she wasn’t the darkest girl I’d ever seen Radiance, TGM, or Atlas sign. People would be talking, posting, analyzing. Our debut could be trending. Social media would trip over itself trying to figure out if Moxxy was progressive or regressive or both. Nova was the last girl to be added and I’m not going to pretend that I couldn’t see what they were doing.
I didn’t say anything about it, of course.
The second time I saw Nova, she sat in on the briefing about our schedule of the two months leading up to our debut. She awkwardly left a chair’s space between her and everyone else, except for Audrey Hall, who was always cemented to her side. She sat there, and she propped her chin up on her slender wrist, elbow on the table, and listened quietly. Nova wore glasses, which I found profound, somehow. It wasn’t something that people knew – she never wore them for public appearances, whether fashion shows or paparazzi appointments. The only exception was an office-themed photo-shoot (that I may or may not have found while scouring her catalogue on TGM’s page) for which the glasses were fake.
The first time I saw Efe instead of Nova was on the day we filmed the music video for “Glow up”. She walked into the prep room – followed by Audrey – while I haphazardly fanned my eyelash glue dry. Her fists were clenched and her back was rigid. She wore sweatpants and a loose t shirt that she – presumably – had slept in.
I watched as her hands relaxed into open palms. She slid her glasses off, folded the sides, and handed them to Audrey before letting her team help her out of her pajamas and wrap her in the self-advertising brand ensemble that had been prepared for her. She said “yup” or “okay” when asked to lift an arm or step into a pant leg and stood mostly still otherwise.
I didn’t assume she saw much, but her eyes – as if by default – tried to scan the room anyway, and so it occurred that her gaze met mine. At least I think it did. I wondered how I looked to her. I wondered if she thought that I was a diva, shallow, or conceited. I wondered where she thought I was from. I wondered if she could see I’d been staring. I wondered why I’d been intimidated by her before and now I had to backtrack, do the mental walk of shame to figure out: How come? I also wondered, above all, why I liked her more now that she didn’t seem larger than life anymore, but like a clenched jaw in human form. I wanted to think that it was just empathy, though I’d learned to unclench my jaw a while ago.
I couldn’t pinpoint her deal. She wasn’t palatable like Ruby or difficult like Summer or opportunistic like me. I think I could’ve befriended her sooner if I’d tried, but I didn’t. I stuck to Ruby, which was easier. I stuck to Ruby, but I kept watching Nova.
Lifeblood Era
Day of the 31st New York Artisan Fair
June 26th
On my back on the aesthetician’s table on the fifteenth floor, I’ve exchanged my clothes for a white towel. Another, smaller one wraps around my newfound hair, keeps it out of my face and spills it over the edge of the table. My face is wet and slippery and my eyes are closed. I focus on the sensation of metal rods sliding along my jawline and cheekbones to run electric currents into my skin. I can hear them buzz, since it’s quiet.
It doesn’t hurt. The tingling is odd but you get used to it. Some people find it relaxing.
I think it’s soothing – not because of the tingling, but because I know it tightens my pores and smooths out fine lines before they have a chance to crystallize. It sharpens the edges of my face and makes me look awake and healthy even when I’m running on three hours of sleep.
It would be easier to have my wig glued to my head after my skin procedure, but Marten has decided today’s order of events as consciously as the flavor of my VibeFood yogurt. The container has by now found its way to the bottom of a bin.
Two months ago, I sat in Marten’s office with a tight chest, halfway leaned across his desk to point out the lines between my brows. “You can still see them even if I don’t move my face at all,” I said, distraught, and I begged him to do something about it. He laughed a little at the twenty-one year old living in fear of turning twenty-two, and agreed to authorize a Botox session.
“Just keep in mind” he said to me, still bemused, “smile lines aren’t avoidable, but frown lines are.”
Marten Janssen is a gambler and for a long time now, he’s been betting all his money on me. Once it became clear that Moxxy wasn’t going to be a one-hit-wonder but a rapidly growing enterprise, Marten let go of his remaining clientele. So did Ruby’s and Summer’s managers. Audrey Hall had done it a while ago. It might sound cruel to leave your other girls stranded by the wayside, but for one it was common practice, and for two it was business.
I twitch when the last electric current pinches my face. Next, the aesthetician wheels in an LED light tube to flood my face and chest in red light. She hands me safety goggles and I slide them on.
The light treatment sucks because there’s nothing to do and the goggles make sure there’s nothing to look at either. I should relax, use this twenty-minute window to catch up on rest. I wonder if Marten will leave, maybe get himself something to eat, a coffee, or a phone call. It bugs me that he can see me in my tube but I can’t see him.
I try to relax, I really do. Meditation, mindfulness, what have you. The process is harmless and warm and will plump my skin. I try to fall, sink all the way into my tiredness, but the Adderall won’t let me.
I think Marten is going to stay and wait.
Since Marten and I have spent more time together than I have with my immediate family, I’d ask him in particularly quiet minutes if there were any shows he watched, singers he followed, or if he had a family of his own that he’d taken with him when he moved closer to the Radiance building. He’d laugh, stretching his 38-year old skin, and say “this is about you, not me.”
He was right, of course. His pay-check hinges on me, not the other way around. Therefore, I’m still convinced that Marten’s incentive to see me succeed could’ve been second only to my own. And I still believe that, at some point, Marten Janssen had my best interest at heart.
Lifeblood Era
Month of the 31st New York Artisan Fair
June
The conference room was on the fifth floor, below the streaming rooms and above the doctor’s offices. Marten was there, Audrey too. Jonathan Guerriero and Edmund Milton – Ruby’s and Summer’s managers respectively. Radiance executives and board members that I’d seen but didn’t know by name. Between all the chairs, nobody sat except for Ruby, Summer, Nova and I. They paced around the room, gesturing with their full range of motion, and speaking all at the same time.
Marten was grasping at his hair, a nervous frenzy, and talking loudly. He said: “Are you happy?”
He said: “This is on you. Both of you.”
Behind all this: the skyline of New York
Nova said, as before: “It wasn’t us.” She sat as if pulled taut by a string from her head to the ceiling, and spoke with difficulty – like a robot – both hands clamped around her seat. I would’ve held one under the table had they not sat us as far apart as possible.
Audrey said: “I know what you sound like when you lie. If you danced even half as well–”
Someone else said: “They aren’t going to change the winners for Group Achievement last minute. They can’t do that.”
Someone (Jonathan Guerriero) said: “Let’s hope not.”
He stood against the wall behind his protégée, who sat hunched over with her eyes glued to the tabletop. Ruby hadn’t said a word the whole meeting. She counted the little scratches and imperfections on the otherwise smooth white lacquer and willed really, really hard that none of this concerned her.
Someone said: “Has someone checked in with the Fair department yet?”
Someone replied: “Apparently they’ve been told to be ‘really careful’ with Radiance this year.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means higher up fucking hates us. Wouldn’t be surprised if none of us are going to be sitting here in two year’s time. Unless we can turn this around somehow.”
Marten said: “How? They won’t let us win now. There is no way.”
Nova said: “Not winning an Artisan Fair award isn’t a death sentence.”
Someone said: “It is when everyone banks on you winning.”
Someone else said: “Well, Group Achievement isn’t the only award.”
Audrey said: “Group Achievement is what matters.”
I was there, arguably. To the extent that I sat in the room and heard everything that was said. My brain took the sentences and held them and didn’t know what to do with them. The whole time it tried to peel me out of the room, pull me through the floor, cut my physical body away from me like a moldy spot.
Someone (Edmund Milton) said: “Summer’s Social Media award is in peril as well.”
“Her numbers are up a quarter.”
Someone else said: “A quarter?”
“It’s not just about the numbers,” said Edmund. “You all know that.”
Summer didn’t talk either. She had her arms tightly crossed, looking more like an upset teenager than when she had been one. She pressed her sneaker against the edge of the table, tilting her chair back until Audrey – perhaps overstepping her Nova-specific managerial authority – kicked it back into position, followed by a stern point at Edmund.
Marten said: “Look at what happened to Calidora.”
I said, slowly, methodically: “Calidora’s hosting a very successful talk show.”
Marten said: “Do you wanna host a fucking talk show? Is that the extent of your aspirations now?”
I said: “Stop yelling.”
Marten looked at me, pressed both hands into the table and leaned way too close. “Look at me, Rose. Ambrosia. It was you, wasn’t it?”
I said nothing. I looked past him.
“Wasn’t it? If you’re not lying, why aren’t you looking me in the eyes? Wasn’t it?”
I said nothing.
“That’s what I fucking thought.”
Lifeblood Era
Day of the 31st New York Artisan Fair
June 26th
I said, at some point many months ago, that they can do whatever they want with the dress. I nodded at sketches – more in acknowledgment than in approval – and said “cool” when someone presented fabric samples in my peripheral vision. Tailors and costume department measured and fitted me even though everyone knows my numbers don’t change. So, in theory, the Artisan Fair dress doesn’t come as a surprise to me.
It is beautiful, of course, stunning even. Its color is that of vanilla ice cream, almost translucent in places and bedazzled in others. It’s going to glitter in photoflash. This is where I drop my towel. Four years ago, standing naked in a room full of strangers would’ve felt bad and uncomfortable. Any time after that, it felt routine and trivial. Now, it’s bad and uncomfortable again.
Diligently, Marten watches the team that revolves around me like planets around the sun. I don’t try to ask or remember their names, because it’s different people every time. Today, a woman in her thirties, black rimmed glasses and undercut, gingerly peels the vanilla dress from the mannequin and holds it out for me. I step into it with help from a man whose hair is slicked back and whose clothes fit too tight. I wonder if they’re used to dressing celebrities, or – like with the driver from our miserably early morning – I’m the highlight of their day.
As predicted, the creamy color works great with my tan and I look regal and luscious. The dress fits me well because it’s also all edges. A powerful slit all the way up to my hip-bone splits the floor length skirt and allows me to step my entire leg out into the open. The torso consists of two rectangular panels of fabric that start on each shoulder and meet in the middle to cover my chest. A girl with a braided ponytail and one particular fly-away hair that I can’t stop looking at cuts a piece off a roll of double-sided fashion tape to prevent any slip-up that might come with the terrain.
The dress costs more than I have in my bank account. I’m not broke – there is money in there – currently about $4000. Profits from ticket sales, streams, meet ’n’ greets are only filtered back to us after going through W-Media itself, then Radiance Entertainment, their execs, board of directors, HR, what have you. And then there are a lot of people (managers, stylists, tailors, caterers) and a lot of electricity and water bills (not to mention plane tickets) that need to be paid.
I observe myself in the mirror while my satellites are tweaking here, pulling there, retouching my already styled hair and sweeping it over one shoulder and then the other. They don’t speak to me unless I need to lift my arms or turn around. They rarely look me in the face but never take their eyes off the dress and I wonder how many of their salaries it is worth. I wonder how much they’re paid to wrap me in vanilla fabric today, I wonder how they came to this job and what they originally wanted to do. I could speculate and fantasize, play out their stories in my head but, in the end, I won’t ever ask and I won’t ever know and it really doesn’t matter.
A concept, my sister reading the news
My sister’s name is Nikol. She’s five years older and even on weekends she’d wake up before me. When I’d stagger into the kitchen to pour myself some cereal, she’d already be sitting at the table, reading the news on her phone. When I asked, she’d say that it’s important to know what’s going on around you, locally and globally, but I never met another teenager who read the news every morning and watched them every night. Nikol used to be the child who’d pick adults’ brains with “why”s and “how”s until they begged her to watch TV and became the woman who couldn’t pick a place to eat until she’d made a pro-and-con list of every available option. Nikol always wanted all the information and only then, she’d feel in control.
I love Nikol, of course, but to me that always felt somewhat self-destructive.
Listen, I’m not stupid. I was a good student in everything but chemistry and a great student in geography and history. I know several things about several subjects and I’m more than capable of forming connections and coming to conclusions, and sometimes, god forgive me, I reflect on things. Information is control in the same sense that knowledge is apparently power but neither has ever improved my life the way laser body-hair removal did.
My sister’s sad sixteen-year-old frame would sit and sigh at the kitchen table, knowing everything about the world’s latest human rights infringements. Sit and sigh was all she did, because what else could she have done? I’m sorry, but information only brings sadness and over time, that sadness grows inconsolable and then that’s it for you. It leads to anxieties and worries and doubts which lead to nothing in return, because having knowledge when you don’t have power is like becoming a martyr while no one’s looking.
I don’t need to know my options. I don’t need – don’t want to know what’s coming for me because it’s coming whether I know about it or not. The only difference is whether I panic for hours, days, weeks in advance. I want to know as little as possible. If I could, I’d flush information out of my system like a fever.
Year of the 27th New York Artisan Fair
May
To my credit, I tried to read the words. I really did. I stood bent over the finger-thick stack of paper, my hands pressed against the white desk, and I feared that any second, a bead of sweat would drop from my nose and audibly onto my future.
The English was not the problem. The English was never the problem. The vocabulary was there – I knew what “administration”, “conduct”, “liable”, and “failure to perform” meant. I knew how to use those terms in a sentence, but I couldn’t trace exactly how and why they had been used in the paragraphs in front of me. I didn’t know what “indemnify” or “forum selection” meant, but like hell I was going to tell them that.
Clawing into the table and sweating over my contract was not the figure I meant to make in front of my Radar mentors and the six (!) Radiance executives that had come from New York (!) to sign me. I could never read well when people were watching me do it, waiting for me to finish. I must’ve looked clumsy and overwhelmed and I was deathly afraid that any moment, the Radiance people would come to their senses and snatch the paper out from under my nose. I’d made the mistake of picking up the pen they put down for me too eagerly and now it was stuck between my middle and index finger. I wanted to put it down but I couldn’t now – because what if they understood it as me having second thoughts? Or me being too stupid to multitask – read and hold a pen at the same time?
I’d been with Radar for three years. That was long enough that the music service that held my workout playlists had become incorporated into W-Stream+ and I had to start paying for a whole subscription even though I had neither time nor energy to watch movies, TV, or live-streams. I desperately had to get my move on. Sure, Radiance wasn’t Bonfire, but at the end of the day it was a W-Media label all the same. W-Media was the other party of the contract; it said so in serif font, black on white, and it usually constituted the very next word after phrases such as “rights reserved to” and “property of.’
I wasn’t eighteen yet, but after much labor we’d gotten my mom to sign Radar’s special case custody release form last year. It effectively ended legal guardianship of an underage client early, provided said client remained a protégée of Radar Talent. That way, we hadn’t needed to cart my mom to Sofia to sign a permission slip every time one of my mentors suggested that my chances would be better if my lips were fuller or my cheekbones just a little bit more prominent. I could sign my own contracts.
Since I couldn’t put the pen down and I evidently couldn’t read, I slid the top paper from the stack and lined it up edge to edge beside it. I passed my eyes over the second page, across “pay-out,” “automatic renewal,” “at-will,” and “non-disclosure,” and calculated the appropriate time it would take to read three and a half paragraphs of legal barrage. Then I set that page aside, too.
For twenty minutes, I pretended to read the Radiance Entertainment contract and sweat bullets in the absolute silence of the meeting room. Whenever I came across a tell-tale sleek black line with an inviting still empty blank space above – I left my name there, and tried to make it look as hieroglyphic and wise as my mother’s.
