by J. C. Lillis
NO YOU DON’T, YOU SAP, says Evil Barrie. I whack her down and hit send, and right away I feel a little lighter, thinking of Ava waking up to that text.
BING BING.
Or reading it now. Because I guess you don’t need sleep if you have the It Factor.
Ava: Hahahahaha, I can’t believe you apologized. Oh wait, I can. Because it’s the most boring thing you could have done, and you love that shit.
I blink at this statement.
Me: Apologies are boring?
Ava: They are when they’re predictable, insincere, and unnecessary. The song’s hilarious.
Me: It is NOT hilarious. It was disrespectful and hurtful.
Ava: So wait. You’re telling me how to properly interpret your diss song?
Me: No! I just wanted to tell you, it is not representative of my actual feelings.
Ava: Do I believe that….? Nope, I do not.
Me: Will you please let me say sorry?
Ava: Yeahhhh, disavow your artistic expression. What all the great iconoclasts do.
I take a minute to form a careful reply, and also look up “iconoclast.”
Me: That wasn’t art. It was ugliness set to a tune.
Ava: So? At least it was real. Ten times better than your Sudden Death song. Though I do have some lyrical critiques. Want to hear them?
I would rather lick a toad.
Me: I’m always open to criticism.
Ava: Your similes don’t land. You give us a bad tooth in line 3 and pair it with I hope that you sink like a yacht. Better line, off the top of my head: I hope that you crack and you rot.
I flip to a fresh page and scribble the lines side by side.
Dammit. She’s right.
Ava: Also, “you’re strategic and contrived” is a clunker. “Cunning and contrived” flows better, plus bonus alliteration. And bad idea to stick that butterfly/moth metaphor so close to your final PIG mention. Unless you want a menagerie in your last verse?
Ava Alvarez is making me regret apologizing to her in private, and if I talk to her any longer I’ll probably start rethinking that public apology, too. I type thanks, stuff my phone in my pocket, and speed through some mantras. I will love my fellow artists. I will use my talents to help—
The porch door creaks open behind me.
“Hey,” Brandon says.
“Hey.”
He shuffles to the edge of the porch and leans against the wrought-iron post. There’s a yellow plate under his arm and a can of tuna in his hand. For a second I think he’s going to offer me a soothing plate of fish but then I see a black and white cat stalk across Abel’s small backyard, padding through the scraggly grass like a huntress tracking prey. She tosses us a glare and disappears behind the shed.
“That’s Franny,” says Brandon. “She’s a mooch.”
I nod.
He clears his throat. “You, ah….wanna talk about it?”
I shake my head, rock gently in the chair.
“That’s okay. I’m not a good counselor right now anyway.” He struggles with the pull tab on the can and I smile a tiny smile—I hate those too. “Abel told me California sun had medicinal properties, but I’ve been out here a week and I just feel worse.”
“What happened to you?”
“My fiancé dumped me for a proctologist.”
“Crap.” Ugh, that was bad. “I mean—I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re right. The whole thing’s like a bad joke.” He turns the can over and shakes a clump of tuna onto the plate. “The thing is, I can’t even blame him. You know how sometimes you’ll be singing alone in your room or the shower and it sounds great, and then you get onstage and you want it to be perfect, so you oversing and second-guess every note and mess up the words and basically come across like a needy disaster?”
“Um, yes.”
“That’s how I am in a relationship.”
“Oh.”
“It’s been two months. I wish I could feel something besides sad all the time. I’d even take anger, you know?” Franny pokes her head out. Brandon makes a tch-tch sound to coax her. “Sorry. I’m rambling. I should be telling you ‘things will get better with time, and often there are hidden blessings in our darkest struggles.’”
“Oh, I believe that already.”
He wrinkles his nose. “You do?”
“Well, officially.”
“Wow. You’re like Abel in…” He peeks at my feet. “…red glitter boots. Which actually, he’d probably wear.”
Franny skulks toward us. Brandon puts the tuna plate in the grass. The cat trots up and starts bolting the fish, glancing up now and then with green eyes the shade of peeled grapes. We watch her, the late-summer breeze raising goosebumps on our arms. I’m more of a dog person but there’s something sort of inspirational about Franny, like she could teach me how to hunt something down and not let it slip through my big clumsy paws.
“Barrie,” Brandon murmurs.
“Yes?”
“I kind of liked your angry song.”
I glance at his profile in the dark. That’s the last thing I expected to hear.
“Thanks,” I say.
“YOU GUYS.” Abel sticks his head outside. “Madame K? As your unofficial PR manager, I need to call your attention to some fascinating new developments.”
“I think she’s had enough, A,” says Brandon.
“But this is major. A game-changing plot twist!” He points a gun-finger at Brandon. “You’re staying, right?”
Brandon rolls his eyes. “I can’t drive on no sleep.”
“Excellent.” He curls an arm around me and shepherds me back inside. “Trust me, lady. You’re gonna want to see this.”
Chapter Eight
“You, my dear, have fans.”
He’s leading me to his laptop and it is a testament to my foolish optimism that the rocks in my gut turn to rainbows at the mention of fans.
“I knew it. I like KNEW you were going to appeal to this specific demographic, right?” Abel turns the computer toward me. “So I checked it out, and voila!”
Abel is on Cassidy Wu’s blog, www.CassTrashesIt.com, which spreads a chill up my arms and down my neck. In the Big Book of Funny-but-Scary Mean Girls, Cassidy Wu’s entry is right under Ma’s. She was on Season 4 of Pop U, got booted at fifth place on a cheating accusation she still denies, and moved back to her parents’ house, where she promptly began the world’s most merciless Pop U blog. I avoid it like the school caf on Fish Stick Friday because the only thing meaner than her recaps (“recraps,” she calls them) is the comments section under each one.
I can’t look.
“Look!” Abel pokes me.
Cassidy sits cross-legged in a wood-paneled basement, wearing a billowy silk shirt with a peacock-feather print and bejeweled sunglasses pushed high in her long black hair. She leans close to the camera, so close I can see the sparkles in her lip gloss, and stage-whispers:
Hey, Cass-holes! I’m here with a very important addendum to my recrap. In case you haven’t heard, it seems our sweet tragic Miss Wiggy has a well-hidden talent for PUTTING HER ENEMIES ON BLAST. Like have you seen this stunning thing? I shit you not, it’s like four months of therapy in three minutes. If I’d done something this badass right after Pop U instead of dragging my carcass back to Rhode Island, I’d probably be releasing Album 4 instead of stewing in my parents’ basement, but then you fuckos wouldn’t love me as much, right?
Anyway, here it is. Watch and tell me: is this not an oddly cathartic experience?
I scroll past my video to the comments underneath. Some are rude—I spot a “whatever she’s still fug” that stings despite my official belief in Tera’s “Beautiful Is All You Are” lyrics. But most of the commenters are like:
MoveableBeast: dude I fucking loved this
hateship99: It’s refreshing, yeah. So sick of girls with their fakey p
ageant smiles when they get the boot.
EatMySkorts: ugh @ Twitter dipshits who are all “ew, jealous much”? LIKE OF COURSE SHE IS. THIS IS REAL TALK. THAT IS THE POINT OF THE SONG.
ladythoughts12: idk I feel like if more people talked about jealousy it wouldn’t feel so goddamn shameful like “you’re the world’s worst person if you aren’t instantly jumping out of your skin with joy when someone else gets what you want”
MoveableBeast: exactly. I feel baptized in the beauty of her bitterness y’all
virginia_creeper: True story: When I heard this, I was in a funk because my asshole college roommate got a two-book deal the day I got my twenty-sixth rejection letter. I pulled down the shades and blasted this song three times in a row and I feel strangely better now. Like the song helped me bring my ugly feelings to the surface and purge them and laugh at them, and now I don’t have to waste my energy on them anymore.
ladythoughts12: seriously this should be the thing she does now. i’d go to her show if it was all songs like this.
anarchymuffin: ME TOOOOOO.
“This is gold, Barrie,” Abel says. “You found your brand. Your market. You found a hole, and you know exactly how to fill it.”
“That’s what he said,” Brandon blurts.
We both look at him.
“I can’t pull that off. Sorry.” He reddens.
I reread the comments twice until they’re a blender-blur in my brain. I did not see this coming. And I’m not sure how to feel about it.
Somehow I get back outside. I think my boots take me there. I sit in the grass next to Franny’s empty tuna plate and free-write in my notebook, which is what I always do when my feelings are all snarled up and I want to untangle some truth. The words get looser and spikier until they morph into a sketch. Narrowed eyes. Villainous brows. A grim snarky slash of a mouth.
I blink at the face of Evil Barrie.
And right then I get one of those lightning-bolt epiphanies Tera described in her autobiography, when she realized the strong deep voice that got her teased as a kid was the thing that set her apart in the pop world.
Since I fell for Tera I’ve been bonsai-training my brain for positivity. Repeating her mantras. Trying to write like her. Locking Evil Barrie away.
What if I was wrong?
What if my tragic flaw was actually my secret superpower?
You have a gift, I hear Viv say. Maybe not the one you think. I dig her bracelet—my bracelet—out of the duffel bag and snap it back on.
Maybe it’s my imagination. It could be, you know? But as soon as it clicks around my wrist again, everything’s clear. I stand up on the concrete porch and scan the dark silent yard, a shadowy audience shaping itself before me.
And I get a wild idea.
I know what I want to do. It’s going to save my butt, and help hurting people, and get Brandon to stay and fall back in love with Abel, and maybe even save St. Castaways, too.
In a flash I finish my sketch of Evil Barrie. I give her a long green supervillain jacket, perilous boots etched with poisonous vines. She’s ruling her stage, ministering to her audience in that Church of Abandon room upstairs at St. C’s. And above her, a name on a banner, inspired by Franny’s glowing green-grape eyes and the critique I got from Tera, with the word I dreaded most.
“Sweetie?” A hand cups my shoulder. “You okay?”
Abel’s beside me, all concerned-big-brother. I turn the notebook around and watch him read:
THE SOUR GRAPES CABARET.
***
You know when you tell someone an idea and they’re all quiet for the longest time, and you can’t tell if it’s because they love it so much they’re gobsmacked or hate it so much they can’t bear to tell you?
For seven whole seconds after I spill my idea to Abel, it’s like that.
Seven seconds is a LONG TIME.
At eight, he cracks a smile.
“So a one-woman show,” he says.
“About bitterness. Envy.”
“In the Church of Abandon.”
“Exactly.”
“Yes. We could fix it up. It’s so sad, Barrie.”
“What was up there?”
“Our Have a Nice Day LGBTQ Teen Mixer that zero teens came to.”
“We could repaint. Redecorate.”
“Don could make a new menu.”
“I could sew my own costume.”
“I could be your—”
“—Emcee!” We say it together.
“Willkommen…and bienvenue…” He takes my hand and stalks around me slowly. “…to the greatest cabaret in LA…The show that saved one woman’s career—and made St. Castaways a destination location!” He pulls me close and dips me, which is thrilling because I have never been dipped, though I did have to dip Kelsey Crogan in the spring recital one year when they ran out of boys.
“Can I stay in your shed or something?” I ask, still bent backwards. “Until I get a day job.”
“Pff, are you kidding? This is our Hail Mary move.” He pulls me upright, his face all serious. “The couch is yours for now. All you have to do is save St. C’s.”
“Mission accepted.”
“Also, I need a day waitress, Tuesday-Thursday.”
“I’m your girl.”
I stick out my hand. He shakes it. As our palms connect I spot something on his collarbone—a small tattoo that says A+B in electric blue.
He catches me looking and adjusts his t-shirt. “I never got it covered up,” he says. “Always thought it might be relevant again.”
I smile at the tattoo. “It will be.”
“What’s going on?” Brandon’s slipping out the porch door. We spill the plan as he ambles toward us, our sentences tripping over each other.
“A cabaret,” he says. “At St. C’s.”
“Yes!” Here’s the risky part: “And I want to do the first show on Friday.”
Abel gives me a wait-WHAT-now look. “Seven days from now Friday?”
“I know,” I say pointedly. “I’m gonna need a lot of help.”
Abel’s not getting it. “But a week…that’s….” He sees me pointing to Brandon behind his head. “YES. We need to move fast! Statistics show the effects of viral videos wear off completely in less than—”
“Hold up. You guys. You can’t put a decent show together that fast.” Brandon rakes a hand through his hair. “You’d have to fix up that whole room, hang some lights…and Barrie, you’d need to have at least ten songs ready, and build in time for a full tech rehearsal, and—”
“Do you have experience?” I pretend to be surprised.
“I—” He dips his head. “I used to do a little show at the center where I volunteered, but it was no big deal. Really it was—”
The tinny chugging of acoustic guitar breaks in. Abel turns his phone to me.
“No. NO.” Brandon dives for him. Abel ducks and darts away. “DO NOT SHOW HER THAT—”
“Barrie!” Abel leaps over Franny’s tuna plate. “Think fast!”
He tosses the phone to me. I grab it, giggling. On the small screen, clean-shaven Brandon strums his guitar beneath a hand-painted rainbow banner that says PRIDE CENTER CABARET NIGHT. He wears a fitted white t-shirt with a chartreuse knit scarf and a silver belt, which I’m guessing was the wildest ensemble he ever wore before or since. He’s singing an acoustic version of that old song “Replay” with two other guys on bongos and maracas, their harmonies tight as their stovepipe jeans. I’ve always liked this song. It’s clever, with a sharp snaky melody and a strong central concept: your lover as a song you can’t get out of your head.
Brandon’s brow uncrinkles and his head starts bobbing.
“Don’t worry,” Abel says. “I told him he should never, ever sing the word shawty like, ever again.”
“I never did.”
“Look at your sparkly belt!”
“I borrowed it from my mom.”
<
br /> “He directed this whole show,” says Abel. “He’s multitalented.”
“Eh.” Brandon waves him away. “I’m retired.”
“Un-retire, Tin Man. We need you.”
Brandon gets visibly melty, just for a second, when Abel calls him that.
“Tin Man?” I lift an eyebrow. “Like ‘if I only had a heart’?”
“No, like his teenage android obsession.” Abel ignores Brandon’s groan. “We had this Castaway Planet vlog in high school, and we’d do these awesome funny recaps, and Bran was totally in love with—”
“Can we not?” Brandon shoves Abel but not like he means it, like he’s making an excuse to touch him. It’s cute. Kind of sexy. I wonder if I’ll ever have that: someone who makes up a loving private-joke nickname for me, and looks at me like I’m the McCartney to their Lennon.
I can’t think about that now. I’m on a new mission.
“Listen.” I hand the phone back to Abel and blast Brandon with let’s-put-on-a-show energy. “What if you stayed like, just for the week?”
“I…”
“St. C’s is dead on Fridays. And, you know, every other day,” says Abel. “We could start this morning.”
“Please please please?” I’m a head taller than Brandon so I go down on one knee for a proper proposal. “We could make this happen, I know it.”
I glance behind Brandon. Abel’s beaming so hard I’m afraid he’ll pull a muscle. He mouths I OWE YOU.
Brandon sighs and takes a few steps around the dark backyard. I can tell he’s picturing the whole thing, the set and the spotlights and the expertly sequenced flow of songs. It’s beautiful, what happens on his face. You can see him reliving a time he loved. Seeing what the Church of Abandon could be if we got our hands on it.
