Spin

by Lamar Giles

  That scathing critique of ParSec Nation—as a whole, not just the Dark varietal—pricked my insides. I’d been a fan first. Been drawn to ParSec off the strength of her music too. Where it could take … us. Me and her. So I was negotiating terms I would’ve accepted if in their shoes. “Well?” I said, real boss-like.

  Cartoon Shoes said, “New music? By the end of today?”

  “I’m not going to say it again.” Kya, you better be able to deliver.

  Cartoon Shoes dragged it out another few moments, then, “Deal.”

  She pocketed her shears, and with a nod, the goons released Kya and me. I stood slowly, while Kya kind of crab-walked to me on hands and heels, putting comforting distance between her and her would-be surgeon.

  “Let’s go,” Cartoon Shoes said. “All of us.”

  We exited the apartment and building, the Dark Nation operatives escorting us all the way back to my car. If anyone was paying attention—and no one seemed to, people were very good at turning away from what might be strange and/or dangerous—we’d have looked like a twisted coven of friends wishing each other farewell after an awesome BFF gathering.

  Cartoon Shoes’s hood cinched tight around the moonshine oval mask as she tapped contact info into her tablet. The swoosh sound of her sent message was barely audible over the cross-street traffic. “Send whatever you have to the address I just provided you. One hour. We’ll be waiting.”

  The Dark Nation dispersed. Each in a different direction. Until we were alone. Managed to get my door open, slid into the driver’s seat with the adrenaline shakes. Kya was a moist-cheek mess in the passenger’s seat, her chest heaving as she tore the glove box open. The Bluetooth speaker was still going, though the sound was wrong. The office noises she’d mixed together weren’t randomized. There was a single sound from the compilation, a sneeze, repeating like machine-gun fire. Achoo-Achoo-Achoo-Achoo.

  Kya killed the speaker, shook her head at her malfunctioning app before swiping it away, then powering down both of our phones. She thudded her skull against her headrest a few times, went still. “Thank you for stopping that back there.”

  “Dude, it was for my benefit as much as yours.”

  Her eyes were squeezed shut, her lip quivering.

  “Hey, you’re welcome.” I gently rubbed the hand that would’ve been a digit short. I sat there awhile, letting her come back to some form of normal, before I asked the critical question. “Is there really a cloud drive with unfinished ParSec music?”

  She sniffled. “No.”

  Craaaaappppp. “Why did you say there was? You think it’s going to go well when they learn we lied? I’m really partial to my fingers.” She didn’t respond. I found her lack of concern disturbing. “Kya.”

  She snaked a hand into her collar, tugged out a plastic, pastel pink nub hung from a string. “I took it all off the cloud. Put it on this drive. There are about twelve gigs of music here.”

  My pulsed quickened all over again. How did I not know about this? “ParSec knew you had it?”

  A tight nod. “You wanted to know why me and her weren’t cool at the end. Turn on the car.”

  I did. She unclipped the drive from the nylon lanyard and plugged it into the USB port in my center console. On the audio display, file folders appeared in alphabetical order. Kya twisted the search knob until she highlighted a folder called “Everything, I’m Not.” Her hand fell away from the knob, as if her arm gave out. She was incapable of going the final step. “Play that one if you want.”

  Of course I wanted to play it. I jabbed the control on my steering wheel, and a guitar melody spilled from my speakers. No thumping bass line, definitely not the party songs ParSec Nation—or I—was used to. A classical piano riff joined the guitar. “A ballad?”

  Kya didn’t respond. Instead a voice on the track answered, falsetto at first, stretching a note, before settling into full-voice, throaty lyrics:

  All of me doesn’t fill this space.

  All of me is all out of place.

  A part of me is all, do I stay?

  And all you do is take away …

  It was simple, and beautiful, and I stopped it because I had an ear, recognized the incredible singer by her tone alone.

  “Kya,” I said, “that’s you.”

  It wasn’t a good day. The landlord left this stupid note on my door about keeping my music “to a respectable volume” or there’d be some kind of fine on next month’s rent. Which was a problem because when I checked my bank account for last month’s rent, I only barely made it. The numbers hadn’t improved much since, meaning Paula, who was supposed to be managing my money as well as my gigs, and me were going to have another talk. I didn’t want any more tech toys—my landlord made if very clear he wouldn’t accept a GoPro as partial payment. I didn’t want to hear about unexpected expenses and slow paperwork. Funny how there was never any delay in Paula getting paid.

  I still had shoebox money, but that wasn’t going to last forever.

  Living on my own was way harder than I thought it would be. Someone always want something. Some payment always due. It’s like everybody’s taking little bites off you all day, every day. My big fat advance check had dwindled. It maybe wasn’t as big as I’d thought, all things considered.

  “Is there anything else I should take out with these pizza boxes?” Shameik asked, folding old grease-stained cardboard into a heavy-duty garbage bag.

  Gawd. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  I was hunched over my notebook, trying to write a song. He could, literally, see me working on the hook. So of course he needed me to supervise his Mr. Clean activities at this exact moment. Like I didn’t have enough to do already.

  The seal broke on the refrigerator, followed by, “Bae. Seriously. It’s nasty in here.”

  I let my pencil fall on my notebook and took three deep breaths before answering. Still wasn’t sure I kept my tone in check. “Did you come over here just to nitpick everything?”

  Then he was beside me, agitated, not doing a good job of keeping his tone in check either. Our normal lately. “I came here to roll with you to the studio. Since you were working, I figured I’d give you a hand because your crib is crazy right now. You’re welcome.”

  “I was going to clean this weekend.”

  “You said that last weekend.”

  Forget this. I grabbed my earbuds, prepared to drown him out with my latest beat.

  This dude—who really must’ve lost his mind—snatched them out of my hand. “You’re trippin’ now, Shameik.”

  “Me? I’m—” He stalked from my tiny hand-me-down desk, rounded my beat-up couch, and began plucking up various debris littering my coffee table, TV stand, windowsills, and any other available flat surface. He tossed it all into his bag that was starting to bulge like Santa’s sack. “Soda cans. Dirty Tupperware. Burger wrappers. Beer bottles!” He lingered on the dark green long-necked bottle in his grip. “Who was over here drinking beer, Paris?”

  “November Mobb.” Not that it was any of his business who comes to my place.

  “Those rappers from Maryland? You brought them here?” The way his mouth tightened, and his eyebrows drew together, he had many more questions now, and I already knew I wasn’t in the mood to entertain his stupid jealous streak.

  “Yeah. After the studio session, we felt like celebrating some dope successful work. One of the guys brought the beer.”

  “Those cats are, like, grown men. What you bring them here for?”

  “I feel like you’re trying to imply something. You should stop.”

  He threw the bottle into the bag hard enough to break it. “My girlfriend’s alone with some drunk old guys and I’m not supposed to be concerned?”

  “I wasn’t alone. Paula was here—still talking business. So were the girls the Mobb brought down to sing on the track.”

  His posture shifted, he glanced away, lips moving as if doing math in his head. “So, basically, a party? That you didn’t invite me to?” />
  I sneered and took some minor joy in delivering this particular answer to his interrogation. “You had school the next day.”

  He grinned, bobbed his head. It wasn’t good-natured. “About that. I guess it’s taking Paula longer than expected to find that tutor that’s supposed to help you graduate.”

  “Now you’re my maid and my guidance counselor.”

  “Man, what’s wrong with you?”

  He had the exhausted look I’d gotten used to seeing on people who just can’t seem to grasp what this music thing takes. Kya for not going to the movies on her birthday, and not texting her back instantly, and not hitting Five Guys anymore. Grandma when I told her I actually had a say in what my life should be. Shameik because … I don’t even know, my place wasn’t all OCD neat like his meticulous bedroom? Or I had guests I didn’t inform him about?

  Shameik set his bag down, seemed to be thinking about his next words carefully. I waited, wondering if I needed to throw this guy out. It wasn’t lost on me that I rarely thought of him as my boyfriend anymore.

  He said, “Paris, I’m worried about you.”

  For what? I was about to ask when he added, “So is Fuse.”

  I blinked rapidly, like he’d shined a bright light in my face. “You and Fuse been discussing me?”

  He cursed under his breath. “It ain’t like that.”

  I pushed from my chair and went to him, chest to chest. “You just said.”

  “This is what I’m talking about. Your mood’s all over the place these days.”

  “What do you expect, Shameik? I got mad work to do. And bills to pay. And Paula talking about trying to get me out-of-state gigs, so I need new material. This isn’t easy!”

  “We know.”

  “We. You and Fuse. Who haven’t been talking about me.”

  He backed away. Defensive. “You know what, forget I said anything. Let’s just go to the studio. I’ll keep Redu’s crew occupied so you can actually finish up at a decent hour, and we’ll talk about it later.”

  “No.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said no.”

  He threw his hands up, defeated. “Fine. Point taken. I will not bother you anymore. The artiste must focus. I’ll do my homework while we’re there.”

  “You’re not hearing me, Shameik.” Was I really going to do this? I’d thought about it. Dismissed it as just being frustrated about my money. But even skirting close to it gave me a feeling of weightlessness, like something heavy falling off my shoulders. “We gotta take a break.”

  He shook his head, scowled. “We have arguments like this all the time.”

  “I know. What’s okay about that?”

  “I’m sorry, Paris. I could be more chill. I know.”

  That may be true. Probably, we both could, but I liked that weightless feeling. It was nice dealing with something unpleasant head-on, one of the few unpleasant things in my life I could deal with head-on. “Me and you, we’re in real different places right now. I’m not saying I don’t like you, but I just need to focus on my music. I can’t do that if I’m thinking about whether you’re mad.”

  “I’m not mad, though. Couples have fights.”

  “I don’t want to have fights. Or be a couple. You gotta understand that.”

  He didn’t understand. Didn’t take my sincere effort to do this quick and painless well at all. “Yo, you’re acting like a real—”

  He caught himself, stopped just short of something nasty. Too late.

  “What? Like a real what?” This was part of why we couldn’t work. His little outbursts when he didn’t get his way. Fine, I could be nasty too. “Don’t come to the studio. I’ll be fine with Lil’ Redu on my own. And we both know you keep wanting to hang around because you hope I’ll break down and do a song with you. It’s not going to happen. Your sound ain’t my sound. So stop pouting and get out of my crib. We’re done.”

  “Wow.” He seemed stunned. Confused. “Tell me how you really feel, Paris.”

  I said, “Did you forget where the door was?”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Shameik, we already arguing. Don’t make me start yelling. Just go.”

  He grabbed his backpack off the couch, skulked to the exit, and hovered at the threshold. “I know you going through some stuff right now. But be careful you don’t let the music be the only thing you have left when—”

  I slammed the door on him and got back to work.

  “Mic check, mic check!” Winston spoke into his phone, the display spiking with the sound of his voice, ensuring the recorder captured everything. Like always, he flipped the mic toward me, and I said, “One, two. One, two.”

  “This is how …”

  “… the ParSec crew do!”

  He laughed, but I didn’t. My mood was still bad no matter how hard I tried for a different vibe. The recorder levels jumped with his high cackle. It was so corny, and the first time he ran it down for me, I hit him with some vicious side-eye. He explained it was a ritual. Every time he started a piece on an artist he was getting to know, they’d put together a few bars of something special. He didn’t write about it, no one else ever heard it. Just for him.

  “It’s good luck,” he’d claimed. “Every time I’ve done it, the artist became a future MIXX cover story. I’m talking J. Cole before The Come Up. SZA before the S EP.”

  Well then. Who was I to break the tradition?

  We were on our fourth session, in the studio I rented by the beach for Lil’ Redu to work on his—sigh—mixtape. Written by him—double sigh—and produced by me. It wasn’t going well. Mostly because Redu’s a lazy artist. Repetitive rhyme schemes, played-out subjects. But his money spent well enough, and more important, he paid in cash, something sorely needed since the pay for all of my other work took forever and a day to actually get to me. Every time I asked Paula why that was, her answer was the same: “Proper accounting isn’t quick work, dear.”

  There was time before Redu and his messy entourage showed up, so I leaned in my rolling chair, back to the soundboard, while Winston sat wide-legged on the couch. His thick canvas bag filled with legal pads, his laptop, copies of old MIXX issues. He wasn’t all stiff and about business the way he was in our first Q&As. We’d gotten to know each other better, and he knew something was wrong.

  “You okay? You seem distant tonight,” he said.

  Fuse was always on about how I shouldn’t ever relax around journalists. Some advice she picked up from one of her books, or blogs, or wherever else she got those tips she always threw at me. Fuse, who was, apparently, chatting up my boyfriend (ex now, gotta get used to that) about me. Maybe it was her I shouldn’t relax around. “Just don’t know who’s real and who’s fake anymore.”

  “Something happened.”

  “I mean”—I was mindful of his phone, the recorder app—“off the record, all right?”

  “Sure.” He snatched the phone up, tapped the screen, set it facedown.

  I told him about some of the things going on. The money, Shameik and Fuse, Grandma and me not seeing eye to eye. Our previous conversations kept my personal life vague, but I was happy to be talking to Winston again and not thinking about publicity—even though it was kind of the same thing. I don’t know. MIXX magazine was about the art and the artist. Winston was good at focusing on that. On me. I liked him.

  When I stopped talking, he said, “Wow, that’s a lot. Good that you vented … you gotta do that sometime. I’m glad you felt comfortable doing it around me.”

  “You cool for listening.”

  “You’re dealing with something very few people ever experience. Overnight success.”

  I willed my jaw to unlock. “It didn’t happen fast for me.”

  “Of course, that’s the reality,” he said, understanding. “But that’s not how the world sees it. You drop a song—pieced together in your grandma’s house on rudimentary equipment. It blows up on the strength of the sound and this wild social media blitz by a fandom t
hat rivals artists who have been around over a decade. You’re ascending fast, and it’s rare that the people you left on the ground can ever catch up.”

  My cheeks warmed, and I spun my chair toward the soundboard, messed with the levers for no reason. “I’m not that big.”

  “You will be by the time my article drops. I’ve seen this kind of thing before.”

  He joined me at the board, recorder in hand. “You mind if we go on record again? We’ll only discuss what you want.”

  I nodded.

  “Seriously, how do you pull off a thing like that? Tell me what made you rewire old laptops and keyboards. How’d you even know to make that stuff work? How’d you pull together ParSec Nation from your grandma’s living room? Who was your support system? The friends who believed in you? The family that nurtured you? Time to fess up.”

  The mic hovered in my face, inches from lips. Waiting to immortalize my truth. What was that? Grandma holding me back. Kya wanting no part of the success. Shameik nagging. Fuse running her mouth when she shouldn’t. I said, “It’s all me. I’m determined. Sort of knew how to put the pieces in place to make it happen. Guess it’s in my blood.”

  “Your blood?” Winston pressed. “What part would you say your parents played in all of this?”

  I shrugged that one off same way I had my whole life. “Moms passed when I was young. Pops won’t ever around.” Leading to his most uncomfortable question yet.

  “How’d you do with that?”

  “Fine. I mean, look.” I swept an arm around the state-of-the-art studio we currently occupied. Having one parent, or no parents, wasn’t totally strange. Fuse was one of like three people I knew whose mom and dad stayed together.

  Winston leaned in, intense. “What I mean is, is there any feeling behind those missing components in your life. Does it drive the music?”

  A couplet played in my mind, almost a whisper. All of me doesn’t fill this space. / All of me is all out of place.