by Lamar Giles
One of his escorts snort-laughed, genuine that time. His head snapped to her, silently scalding. Knowing how he rolled—ejecting people from his oversized entourage anytime they displeased him in the slightest—she’d probably need a ride home after this.
He tipped his too-big bulbous head forward so he peered over the rims of his Gucci shades. The combo of dark lenses and bloodshot eyes felt like he was looking at me four different ways, like spider eyes. “See you still got that smart mouth. Thought you was fired, though. You here to stuff some hors d’oeuvres in your purse?”
Hors d’oeuvres was a big word for this miscreant, and him commenting on my employment situation rubbed me all kinds of raw. How’d he even know? “Why are you here? The last time you and ParSec spoke, you threatened to run her over with your truck.”
“See”—he leaned in—“that’s your problem. You always thought you knew more than you did. ParSec and I talked plenty. She still hadn’t come around to seeing things my way, which was too bad. Unfortunately, she met her little tragedy before we could conclude our business. So that’s what I’m here for. To discuss getting my masters back from someone more reasonable. And more alive.”
Paula. The woman trying to wring every dime out of ParSec’s corpse. That’s how he knew I’d been booted from the PK Music Group. She’d been holding court with Lil’ Redu for … I don’t even know. What the heck was going on here?
People stared. We weren’t loud. It wasn’t a scene. Our energy, though. It made the room skittish. Deer before an earthquake.
Paula slipped between guests, accompanied by a few dark-suited men. I spoke before she could. “I’m not here to cause trouble. Okay? I just want to see her one last time.”
She didn’t respond. She did greet Lil’ Redu. “LR, good to see you. Unfortunate it had to happen under such circumstances.”
He shook her hand. “Fo’ sho’,” he said.
Paula welcomed his girlfriends individually, taking her time getting around to me. Letting me squirm.
Finally she faced me. A simple “This is surprising. Let’s walk.”
She grabbed my tricep, pinching it in a way I wouldn’t have allowed if I wasn’t desperate to remain here. I endured, a test of will. One almost broken when Kya, not so subtle, raised her phone level with my face and took a photo. There was no flash, but I knew. And I wondered.
Thoughts of Kya flitted away as Paula steered me toward the exit. “I’ll give you the usernames and passwords you asked for if you let me stay.”
Her goon squad paced us. She gave them a tight nod, and we all stopped. Still inside. Still close to my friend.
I misinterpreted everything.
The lobby lights flickered dim-bright, dim-bright, five times, the way they did in playhouses shortly before a performance began.
ParSec’s final show.
The crowd of strangers poured toward the auditorium, murmuring, almost cheerful. Though Paula was speaking, I wasn’t hearing her. The screaming inside my own head was too loud. IT’S NOT A PIXAR MOVIE! IT’S PARSEC! SHE SHOULDN’T BE HERE, BUT SHE IS, AND YOU DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT TO SMILE ABOUT IT!
One of those people was Kya, our eyes locked. She wasn’t smiling. She was furious. Not at me. At them too.
Her stare was ice-cold.
For a hot second, we were like-minded. It passed. She linked arms with the elderly woman Paula had tended to before I became her most pressing problem. ParSec’s grandma? I’d never met the woman myself, and I was getting the impression that wouldn’t be changing today. The pair disappeared into the auditorium, and just over their shoulders, I caught the briefest glimpse of an ivory shell. The coffin.
Winston Bell got pulled along with the attendee current but took time to make a confused gesture, his palms toward the ceiling, mouthing, What’s happening?
I didn’t have a good answer.
“… so you understand, then.” Paula concluded a speech I hadn’t heard at all.
“What?”
She glanced away, gathering herself. Determined to control her annoyance. “I said, I don’t need those usernames and passwords anymore. We’ve made other arrangements. Fresh, official PK Music Group social media accounts meant to memorialize our girl properly. We’ve already got a contact at Twitter working on getting the prior fraudulent accounts taken down.”
“We who?” The last of the lobby stragglers slipped into the auditorium. Paula’s guards sealed them in. And me out.
“Not you, Fuse.”
The guards moved in unison, flanking me but not touching me.
Paula said, “You’re trespassing at a private function. I’m well within my rights to have you thrown out, and to notify one of the lovely police officers across the street of your unwanted presence. Is that the way this afternoon’s going to go? A dozen YouTube videos of you being tossed into the back of a squad car? As I’ve recently been informed, you don’t need more bad coverage.”
Everything she said, I couldn’t process. Her men hovered uncomfortably close, and I’d scream if they touched me. Maybe Paula knew that too. She said, “Back off a bit.”
Her goons took two steps.
“Paula”—do not crack, voice—“I … I just want to see her one last time. Something different than what I actually saw in that warehouse. Please don’t”—and I was begging, begging freaking Paula Klein—“make my last memory of her be a corpse flung across some turntables.”
She glanced toward the ceiling, her head bobbing, considering. Like everything else she did, being decent required calculation. “Fuse, I know you actively campaigned for ParSec to fire me and find a different manager. I know you told her she didn’t have as much money as she should have because of me. I know you, a schoolgirl strumpet who’s good at finding Instagram followers, thought you could mess with my business and get away with it. So, no, you don’t get to go in there. Though it shouldn’t be that big of a deal”—she leaned in, whispering—“corpse on turntables, or corpse in a box, what’s the real difference anyway? Bye, now.”
She snapped her fingers, and her goons grabbed me by the armpits. I screamed, no one cared. They carried me out and set me down gently. Though I called them every horrid thing that popped in my head, they spared not a glance. The theater doors slammed shut.
Alone, noticing cops noticing me, I stopped my tirade. Phones were out across the street, undoubtedly snapping photos and video of me getting thrown from a place I should’ve been more than welcome. How did I get here?
With my shoulders hunched against the cold on that relatively warm day, I marched up the sidewalk, away from the crowd, my head turned to the ground, away from anyone looking to get social media hits off my misery. My tears were private, today of all days.
Around the corner, I passed a Print & Ship office store, the strong notes of pulp and cardboard wafting from its cracked door. A quick glance over my shoulder, and I spotted some ParSec fans in loose pursuit. Still on the far side of the intersection but angling to watch where I went with their eyes and phones. I sped up and cut through a parking lot midway up the block, spotting a sketchy alley running between the buildings. I made a sharp detour, hoping to discourage any other rude jerks who couldn’t read body language (or who could, and thought a shamed Fuse Fallon was better clickbait).
In the dark recesses between buildings, my thoughts swirled. Deep, bottomless grief for missing her funeral. A vengeance-fueled blowtorch scorched the spiteful things Paula had said into my memory forever. She and I weren’t done, not even close. Though one thing she said puzzled me more than the rest.
As I’ve recently been informed, you don’t need more bad coverage.
Turning another corner, I saw the alley’s end about thirty yards away, blocked by a dark van. Its sliding side door an open, hungry mouth, and nope, definitely not going that way because I’ve seen all the horror movies. Turning to escape, I found that option had been taken from me. A large dude in a white mask blocked my path.
An opaque sack slipped over
my head.
Everyone had an if-it-were-me scenario. Thoughts about what you’d do in the face of a very specific danger. I had an if-it-were-me scenario for being kidnapped. It was all lies.
I hardly screamed at all.
“Explain it to me again?”
Fuse left her director’s chair, also known as my bed, and triggered her tripod’s quick release lever, snapping her iPad off the mount. She rotated the screen and played back what she’d recorded.
She said, “Video drives online engagement better than anything. And you smashed this video, friend.”
In the playback I wasn’t doing much, just scratching and mixing at my turntables. It wasn’t even a mix I’d thought up. Fuse had requested it, brought the records with her and everything. Real talk, her idea sounded corny when she’d first said it. But since we started connecting on my social media outreach a couple of months back, most of her ideas been on point. So I was like, whatever, if you say so. Now that I was hearing the final result, gotta admit, kinda fire.
It was a simple mix, really. Darth Vader’s music from the original Star Wars soundtrack and an old-school hip-hop track by Queen Latifah and Monie Love called “Ladies First.” I’d recognized the Star Wars music—who didn’t?—just by being alive. I was a little embarrassed I hadn’t heard “Ladies First” before. When I asked Fuse where she got it, and how she even knew to get it, she rolled her eyes and said, “My dad used to be cool.”
Fuse shot me from the side, with a lot of zooming on my hands as I moved between the vinyl and the fader, making the two records sound like they were happily married.
She said, “We should shoot a couple more things. You talking about how you sped up ‘The Imperial March’ to match the up-tempo record. Maybe talk about the equipment a little.”
My stomach clenched. “Naw. You should show something else. My setup looks crazy. All these mismatched pieces.”
There were two different turntables, an old Technics 1200 I got from the pawn shop, and a Vestax PDX with droopy half-melted housing that I found in a dumpster behind a lounge that burned down about a year ago. The mixer Kya found online for like ten bucks because it didn’t work … at least not until she got her hands on it.
“That’s even better,” Fuse said. “There will be a lot of people who can’t afford top-of-the-line stuff. When they see what you do, it’s going to be, I don’t know, inspirational.”
That word again. Inspirational. I made party music, but she’d been pushing hard on “growing my brand” into something “more robust” like that expensive spaghetti sauce Grandma buys.
On top of music videos—which we hadn’t actually shot yet—Fuse wanted a series of how-to DJ videos and production videos that show the way I make songs: from when the idea first hits, to building the beat, to adding the vocals, to mastering the mix. Still, I said, “Half of music is about your rep. You don’t think people will clown me over my gear looking homemade?”
“Maybe some. There are always trolls. Most will get it—that it paints you as, like, a genius who can make anything work.”
“I made that work, though.” Kya stood in my doorway on some ninja stealth stuff, pointing at the equipment she helped piece together. Her sudden appearance made me yelp.
There was a Nerf basketball on my desk. I threw it at her head—missed. “Announce yourself, fool. Rolling up in here like a ghost.”
She said, “I’m here.”
“I ain’t know you were coming over.”
“You never needed to know before.”
Fuse didn’t look up from her tablet, already editing the video file. “Hey, Kya.”
Kya grunted.
Fuse tapped away from the newest video and a grid of thumbnails filled her screen. She flipped it so Kya and I could see, the good little presenter she was. “I figure for every hour we spend shooting quality video, we can leverage it into ten to twenty different artifacts for cross-promotion. Full videos on YouTube, a bunch of fifteen- to thirty-second snippets for Twitter and Instagram stories. Of course, the audio we can push through the normal channels. It’s going to drive ParSec Nation wild.”
“ParSec what?” Kya stepped fully into the room. Usually, she sat on my bed. There was still room—Fuse’s frail tail don’t take up no space—but Kya leaned on my closet door instead, her arms crossed. Her face tight.
I said, “Fuse, tell her what you did. It’s sweet, K.”
Fuse swiped away the video app, opened her social media dashboard full of rapidly scrolling columns of new posts from different platforms. “You know the BeyHive and you know Rihanna’s Navy. There’s Swifties, and Team Drizzy, and Selenators. All of those fandoms love their artists, and the artists love them back.”
“Okay,” said Kya.
“ParSec Nation is our dedicated fandom. I started the hashtag a few weeks ago and have been working with ParSec to distribute regular, hot content. The hashtag’s usage has been on a steady incline. Every time someone shouts out the Nation, ParSec’s message gets amplified.”
Kya said, “Like a street team?”
“Eh. That concept’s kind of prehistoric.”
Kya’s head snapped back. Fuse probably could’ve said that a little better.
She kept going, though. “I’m of the opinion that most artists don’t use their fandoms to maximum effect. Let’s be honest, Beyoncé could start the Purge with a tweet if she wanted. That is untapped power.”
Kya immediately countered. “I’d bet Beyoncé doesn’t ‘start the Purge with a tweet’ because she doesn’t want murder and jail to mess up her brand. Is brand the right term? Not too prehistoric?”
Jeez, this was going south fast. I crossed the room, plucked the tablet from Fuse’s grasp, and handed it to Kya. “Look.”
Kya unfolded herself and took the tablet. Fuse was on her feet, floating at Kya’s hip. “You can swipe left to see more—”
“I know how tablets work,” Kya said.
Fuse threw up her hands and retreated to the turntables, where she took pics of the still records with her phone.
Kya and I stood together while she checked all the traffic #ParSecNation was getting. She nodded. Not super enthusiastic, but she was too smart not to get this.
“This from last week.” I swiped to the specific tweet Fuse showed me when she first arrived.
ParSec The Don @DJParSec
If you at a party this weekend, and they ain’t #Turnup with your fave #ParSecNation track, you need to have a chat with the DJ. #Makeanoffertheycantrefuse
Then I swiped to the column Fuse created that tracked all the combined uses of #ParSecNation and #Makeanoffertheycantrefuse. “The Nation really went in on this.”
There were tons of selfies of #ParSecNation supporters crowding a DJ booth like some invading force, with posts like:
Da Bounce @JYeezy1428
Oh, she turned up. Believe that! #ParSecNation #Makeanoffertheycantrefuse
And a Boomerang, looping the moment a bunch of partygoers tipped the DJ and all his equipment off the dais into a swimming pool glowing with purple lighting. The tweet saying:
Kung-Fu Kelly @KendrickFan4U
All you wack DJs out there be warned. He **didn’t** take the offer. #ParSecNation #Makeanoffertheycantrefuse
Kya’s head whipped on that one. “Paris, they just threw all of his equipment in a pool. That looks like a couple of CDJ-2000 multiplayers. A mixer. A MacBook. That’s like eight grand worth of stuff ruined. You’re okay with that?”
I wasn’t. At first. Fuse flicked some subtle side-eye our way. She’d explained that we didn’t make them do that. Didn’t even suggest it. I got the sense she was done explaining her tactics to Kya, so I repeated what she’d told me. “We don’t control people, K.”
A different, calmer video might be in order. “Mostly this is what we’re going for.”
In it a glassy-eyed #ParSecNation fan bounced while shooting a selfie video from behind the DJ’s table. He was with friends, having a good time, and m
ore importantly to me, so was the DJ. My music—a new dance track, “Splitsville”—played to a jamming crowd. The cameraman shouted, “HE TOOK THE OFFER!”
Kya squinted like the video was fuzzy when it wasn’t. She tapped the screen, jumping the video back ten seconds. “Who is that?”
I paused and she pointed, the figure I hadn’t noticed before was barely in the frame. It was some old Friday the 13th dude hovering over the DJ, mask and all. Not a hockey mask. It was plain white, maybe even a little creepier than a hockey mask.
“Fuse?” I said, walking the tablet back to her.
Fuse frowned at the screen, tilted her chin down a bit. “Hmmm. I’ve seen those masks popping up in some posts. Not a ton. I think it’s just coincidence, maybe some new fashion thing. Like fauxhawks.”
“Fauxhawks?” Kya said. “Paris, I need to talk to you downstairs.”
Here we go.
Fuse gave a mighty eye roll and turned her attention back to her device. Kya stomped past me and down the stairs, her footsteps like falling rocks. I was slow joining her, recognizing the signs of an oncoming Kya storm.
When I got to the living room, her hip was cocked. Her right foot tapped. She had the “are you serious?” look popping. Kya pointed up—through the ceiling, aiming at Fuse—and spoke in her whisper-yell voice. “Where did she even come from?”
I whisper-yelled too. “What you mean? She’s been in school with us for years.”
“No. Not with us. With her people. The rich kids who got dropped off in Audis and laughed at our clothes.”
“Naw, Fuse won’t ever like that.” I remembered all those laughing faces. They were fuel on late nights when the music wasn’t coming out right. I imagined those laughs drying up when they saw me and my crew stunting at the Grammys.
Kya said, “She doesn’t even use your name, Paris. It’s all ParSec this, ParSec that.”
“Yo, don’t Johnny Odom call Superman Superman?”
“Jimmy Olsen.”
“Whatever. I ain’t tell no lies, though. I like that she gets that my artist side and my at-home side ain’t really different. It don’t make me mad, why you salty?”
