2000

Los Angeles

“I want Axel Holm.”

Across from me, my A&R rep at Lolli, Pat Mackey, is frowning. He twists his wedding ring around his finger, which is what he does when he’s frustrated. Pat is around forty, newly divorced but in denial about it, obsessive about his own musical taste. He prefers rock and punk to pop music, but now that all the labels have signed pop acts, Pat feels as if the earth has crumbled beneath him. He clings to Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe in private, Rolling Stone covers framed behind his desk. He has taught me more about music than anyone else, but his taste is firm: this is a good song, this is a very bad one. There is no nuance in his thinking.

Now he glances outside his window, to the sprawl of concrete, the green hills. “I think it’s a long shot. It’s not like I haven’t considered it. But Axel is booked. Everyone wants to work with him. So, why you? That’s what he’ll be asking.”

Sonny turns to me. “Honey, we might have to let this one go.”

Pat nods, knitting his hands together. He says the album did pretty well, but Gwen’s and Savannah’s first-week sales were higher. He’s printed out reviews. “It’s as if she has studied her contemporaries and mashed them together into a cacophonous mess that unfortunately values provocation and lewdness over quality,” says one that he’s handed to me. The rest I don’t read. The reviewer isn’t wrong: I do feel as if I’ve grasped Savannah’s and Gwen’s limbs, sewed them onto my body, hoped the stitching wouldn’t be visible.

As he waits for my response, Pat unscrews the cap of his water and drinks it all in one gulp, the plastic crunching beneath his hands. His assistant scurries over with a new bottle for him. I’m uncomfortable when I realize she’s my age, or close to it.

“A headlining tour for this next album, maybe?” Sonny asks, licking his lips.

“Maybe,” says Pat. “Depending. It’s all Lyle’s decision.” He glances down at my hands, which are visibly shaking. Gwen’s absent voice rings through the room: What do you want?

If Axel produces for me, the next album has a better chance of success: a headlining tour, a career with longevity instead of just one hit in “Sweat.” This industry is ceaselessly churning out fresh talent, flipping them over, slapping on barcodes. I want to feel safe. I want to feel like I’ve solidified. Maybe this is an impossible goal—Gwen certainly doesn’t feel comfortable, and her career is stratospheric.

I take a deep breath. “What will it take to get a meeting?”

Pat sighs. “Look, Axel is in town soon, which is a rarity. We can try to put you two together in a room, and see what happens?” His hands, fiddling with the pen before him, suddenly still. “You’ll have to win him over.”

Sonny and I exchange a look. I am on the cusp again.

Wes and I meet up at his new house in West Hollywood. Each time we are together, we make the most of it, because at any moment the tablecloth could be yanked away, revealing us crouched beneath.

There is hardly any furniture in Wes’s house, and his pool is dry and full of leaves, the tiling laced with grime. When he’s home, he doesn’t bother unpacking his suitcase, just throws the contents on the floor in a pile. His refrigerator has only packs of Coors. His bed, which we’re in now, has no comforter, just a top sheet.

I rest my chin on his chest and ask how Alex ended up proposing to Savannah.

“You’ve never heard this story? It’s wild.”

“Who would I have heard it from?”

He licks my cheek. “Don’t be bad.”

I rub his spit off with the back of my hand, then lean forward to lick his nose, but he holds me back. This is a game we play. When we’ve settled down again, he says, “Well, I think Savannah wanted to tell everyone she wasn’t a virgin anymore. She was tired of the media’s emphasis on it, and they’ve been having sex for a while now. Alex wasn’t into the idea. He has this incredibly pure image of her, I think. He felt like he was protecting her from herself, and that annoyed her. Reasonably. I mean, I’m never on Alex’s side. Anyway, they had this huge fight. We were in London at this point.” He pauses there for a moment to kiss me. “Sorry, you looked so cute. Anyway, Alex wasn’t focused at all during our show. He stops the entire thing and goes, ‘I just can’t stop thinking about my girlfriend. Do you think I should marry her?’ And the entire crowd says yes. So he has a phone brought out, he calls her, and he proposes right there onstage, with her on speaker.”

“She can’t say no with the whole world listening.”

“Well, yeah. Exactly. I think he knew that.”

I run my hand down his cheek. “Hmm, what do you think of Savannah?”

“Oh, she’s great. People think she’s kind of passive because she’s so nice, but she’s not at all. She’s super talented. She writes most of her own music, actually, which most people don’t realize. I think her parents are in some band together. She’s from a super musical family in Nashville.”

“Why do you think she’s with Alex, then?”

He’s drawing patterns on my stomach now, and I close my eyes. “What do you mean?”

“They seem very different.”

“I think she’s the one in control, though. Their dynamic might surprise you.”

Then his finger stills near my upper thigh, and he says he needs to tell me something.

“What?”

SMG is stalling, he says. They don’t want him and Gwen to break up yet. Her album just dropped; ETA’s is scheduled for next month. We’ll have to be patient. Soon, he says. Eventually. More barren words. I turn over in bed and close my eyes. He kisses my shoulder until I turn back around. His thumb is nudging my lips apart. Our eyes are a key in a lock.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s okay. It’s not your choice.”

“I want you so badly.”

He knows I love hearing this.

“More than anyone else?”

“Yes.”

In response, I pull him toward me. “Have you been thinking about me when we’re not together?”

“I always am. Seriously, I always, always am.” He’s kissing my neck, my breasts, my belly-button ring, slowly stirring my body, and it feels like each of my nerves is straining toward his mouth, waiting for its turn to be woken up.

“Fuck, that feels good.”

He looks up at me from between my legs and laughs. His breath steams my thigh. “Yeah? What else?”

“I don’t know. How do I know what to say? Like, where did it all come from? All this stuff we say during sex? Maybe you should call me a few names, just so I can see what I like.”

“Which ones?”

“Whatever comes to mind.”

He laughs again. “Okay. But I want you quiet for now. See if you can be quiet.”

I smile, my head falling back.

When we start having sex, the rhythm sounds like a song I’ve heard, or maybe sex is just what a drum sounds like, what the underlying beat of so many songs sounds like, and this is why it’s so familiar.

Axel Holm doesn’t want to work with me. This is obvious from the start. Pat’s assistant deposits us in a conference room, where he is already swiveling around in an office chair. He is younger than I expected—still in his twenties—which surprises me, since he’s already so accomplished. He has full lips, a square jaw, and a cleft chin. An angular, sharp face that encourages shadow. Dark-blond hair curls behind his ears.

For a while, no one speaks. Then Axel coughs, and slowly the vertebrae of his back extend until he is standing at full height, looking down at us all.

“Hello, Pat.” His accent is slight, barely noticeable.

“Maestro,” says Pat. “Good to see you again. This is Amber.”

Axel studies me, frowning. “I heard your first album,” he says simply. No hello.

“And?”

He shrugs. “You have a nice voice.”

Axel checks the time on his watch, clearly disengaged. Pat glances at me, which feels like he’s pushing me forward.

I take a step. “Do you want to talk here or somewhere else?”

Axel frowns.

“I just thought, maybe we could take a walk and get to know each other, if you’d like. It’s beautiful out.”

At first, I think I’ve made a mistake. He spends all day in the studio, maybe he dislikes the outdoors, the sunshine. But he shrugs and says okay, so I find myself in a car on the way to the Venice Boardwalk, which he says he would like to see on this trip. We each look out our own window, our bodies pointed away from each other, until we arrive. Sand has blown into the parking lot. We slam the doors shut and walk in silence, passing sunbathers lying on beach chairs in the grass and tourists flocking to kitschy ephemera. We follow them into a stall selling T-shirts, flags fluttering above in the slight breeze, thumbing tags and running our hands along the different fabrics. He inspects a white shirt, then neatly folds it up again.

Outside again, Axel is quiet as he observes the mayhem. A skater skids around us on the path. A man is jamming on the bongos, surrounded by a circle of dancing women, who rotate around him and flail their arms.

He nods along to the beat, then turns to me. “So how old are you?”

“Almost twenty.”

“You look older.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“You actually look younger,” I say. “I heard your studio is in Oslo now, but wasn’t it in Stockholm before? Why did you move?”

“My mother lives in Stockholm, but my father is from Oslo. I wanted to spend more time with him. I can do my work from there well enough.” He uses his hand as a sun visor. “So why do you want to make music?”

“Oh. Well, I don’t know.” I stop to think for a moment, intending to continue my thought, but he breaks through the pause.

“You do not know,” he repeats stiffly.

I turn toward him in the grass, my toe kicking up a disk of dirt. “No, I do know. I just have never said it out loud. No one has ever asked me that before. I guess it’s just assumed.”

“What is assumed?”

“That I like making music. That I want to keep doing it.”

He crosses his arms. “If we are going to work together, potentially, we have to be honest with each other. There has to be a—” He pauses, searching for the right word. “Symbiosis. I want to get to know you.”

Our feet push and pull on the hot sand as we walk onto the beach. We find a spot to sit beneath the shadow of a lifeguard chair. I pick up a fistful of sand and filter it through my fist, taking my time before I respond.

“Singing is the only thing I’m good at.”

“So you came to it by default.”

I shake my head. “It was the only thing that made me feel like, you know, that feeling. That feeling when you’re in love with someone. Heat in your stomach. I can’t explain. Maybe that’s the point. You can’t put music into words. It’s, like, feeling in motion.”

He looks out toward the water. “Okay. When did you feel like that for the first time?”

I tell him about my Christmas talent show, and he nods. “What did you like to listen to?”

“Whatever was around. I wasn’t picky. Mostly pop, I guess. My dad left some of his records behind, so I sometimes listened to those. I felt like I got to know him through those albums a bit. Others I bought myself. I listened to so much alone in my room. Mariah. Janet. Madonna, of course. Um, Joni Mitchell. Whitney Houston.” I tell him how, when I was young, I used to stand in front of my mirror and lip-synch to women with big voices, a power they knew exactly how to wield. And I hoped I might find that power in myself, too.

“I like shoegazey stuff, too,” I add. He doesn’t respond. “You know? Dream pop. Mazzy Star.”

He grimaces slightly. “Too slow.”

I shake my head. “That’s not true. Have you ever heard ‘Fade into You’?”

“I’m sure I have.”

“That song feels like this big ball of sadness and longing just rolling around inside you. I love it. I’m not making that kind of music, obviously. But when I’m feeling moody, I like to listen to it.”

He scratches his chin. “Maybe I’ll try again.”

“What made you want to make music?”

He blinks, surprised. “Me? Oh, I think—I think for me, it was—” He trails off, deep in thought.

“See? It’s not such an easy question.”

“I have an answer. I just need a moment.” He pushes sand into a mound with his hands. “For me, it was probably to escape.” He doesn’t elaborate on what he was escaping from. Then he turns to study me again. “You’re not what I expected.”

I still under his gaze. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not how Gwen described you.”

“How did she describe me?”

He shrugs. “Natural talent you don’t cultivate. A lack of drive.”

This would be a blunt thing to say to someone’s face if I hadn’t already heard it before, from Gwen. It hurts less the second time. “I know succeeding in this industry isn’t just about natural talent. It’s brutal, and talented people fail all the time. You need more than ability. Are the most successful songs always the best-written ones? The most well-sung ones? Probably not.”

He takes a cigarette from his pocket and lights it, cupping his hands to nurture the flame. Smoke blows into my eyes. “So what do you need?”

“Really, really good people around you. Smart people. People who make you want to be better, who push you. And a good song doesn’t hurt.”

His mouth cracks slightly. “Well, I think a good song is about feeling. It transcends communication. If you can play it anywhere in the world and people get lost in it, if they say, ‘I can’t get this out of my head’ or ‘I just have to sing along to this,’ no matter what language they speak? That’s success to me.”

“So your goal is to irritate people.”

He laughs and takes another drag. “Maybe. But I think a good song is like an affair. It lingers long after it’s over. You can’t forget it, especially when you try to. It’s the lover who stays in your head. Who drives you mad. Didn’t ‘Bubblegum’ drive you a bit mad?”

I admit it did. “That’s what I want. I want to make music that’s played in twenty, fifty years. Music like that first love you can’t get over.”

I feel his eyes on me, a slow sweep of interest, then their abrupt absence, as if he’s a scholar turning the pages of a book. He seems like the kind of person who thinks deeply before he speaks, who will write it down beforehand if it’s important enough.

“That’s a beautiful thought,” he finally says. He stands and wipes away the sand from his jeans. “Let’s walk back to the car now, okay? We will be sick of each other soon enough.”

I must look confused because he laughs.

“After many hours in the studio. I have some songs I think will work very nicely for you. I’ll send some demos over to Pat, so you can get a feel before you come to Oslo. Okay?”

The cold sand, protected by the lifeguard chair, turns hot again once we’re hit by the sun. We collect the shoes we’ve abandoned by the grass, and I smile up at him. “Okay.”

Back to myself in the mirror: a girl, six years old, her fist a microphone, lip-synching to iconic voices. I was too young to perceive myself through the world yet, so I gave myself everything I lacked. I was not yet reframed, because I was the frame. I was not in their eyes, because I was the eye.

In Lolli’s downtown office, I excitedly pull my phone to my ear. Just as it starts to ring, I remember Gwen won’t pick up. She’s gone, but she’s also everywhere: What If? is her new dreamscape of an album, produced in part by Axel. It has three irresistible hits that are all getting plenty of radio play. One song in particular, “After-School Project,” is constantly being cycled through, and when she played it for me months ago, I said it should be the first single off the album. I loved the hook—You’re my after-school project / Spending all my time on you—and the detached tone of her voice. When it hit number one, I wasn’t surprised.

Her friendship was my skeleton—it held me up. It moved my limbs and gave me strength. I wonder if she’s sagging with loss, too.

The next time I see her, we’re both wearing mermaid tails and seashell bras, filming a commercial for Poppy’s Patties. The concept is this: a pirate drops his cheeseburger into the ocean, we find it, and it’s so delicious we swim to the surface to ask for another. The pirate has us compete over the burger, each of us singing a few bars, and he hands it over to the most beautiful voice. In the commercial, and in real life, Savannah Sinclair gets the meal.

In the makeup trailer, Gwen avoids my gaze, tilting her chin so someone can apply powder to her forehead. Her entourage—publicist, assistant, two bodyguards—settles on the steps of the trailer and leaves the door swinging open to the parking lot.

She asks for a cigarette. I bum one from the production assistant, too.

“Jesus Christ,” she says. “This tail is so constricting. Don’t you think?”

Her tone isn’t inviting. She just wants to say something, and I’m the only one there to say it to.

Savannah Sinclair is led to her chair, waving hello to us as a stylist fits the mermaid tail around her waist and legs. They’ll drive us to set on golf carts, since we can’t walk in them.

She closes her eyes, and her makeup artist bends over her, rubbing more swaths of eyeshadow across her lids. All her features are fighting for space, the result a harsh beauty of straight, symmetrical lines. Goodness wafts from her. She’s said, “Hi, hello, how are you?” ’ to every crew member, and I can tell it’s not false. She’s full to the brim with kindness and likes to pour it into other people, which in turn refills her.

Eyes still closed, she asks, “How are y’all?”

Gwen laughs, the cigarette between her teeth. She removes it. “Oh, fine. Congratulations, by the way.”

“Thank you.” Savannah opens her eyes and smiles up at her makeup artist. “Zane said we were insane.”

Zane pecks her on the forehead. “You are fucking insane.”

“I was telling Zane, like, if I could have a baby and not have to go on another world tour for a year, I would have one this second. No joke.” She smiles, twisting her blond hair into a knot. “What about you and Wes?”

Gwen coughs, fans away smoke.

“Like, will y’all get engaged, do you think?” Savannah presses. It is obvious she cares deeply about other people’s lives. Most people ask questions out of politeness, but she genuinely wants to know.

Gwen’s shock travels through her, through me, through Savannah. “Um,” she says. “No idea.”

Savannah’s eyes widen. “With Alex it was immediate. I was like, ‘That man. Him. I want to eat him.’ ” When she speaks, her Southern accent gains strength in the middle of her sentences, then dissolves.

“But are we talking about attraction, or love?”

“I think attraction.”

“Well, I don’t know if you need that immediately. Haven’t you ever wanted someone unexpected?” Gwen asks.

“Never,” I say, attempting to join their conversation.

Savannah nods at me. Zane tells her to look up, so he can apply mascara. “Blink, babe,” he says. She thrusts her eyelids down as he strokes upward.

I continue, “I think if you don’t want someone when you first see them, you never will.”

“Yeah, totally,” Savannah agrees. “You have to have that feeling. Like, boom. Hello, I want to carry your child.” She laughs girlishly.  This tear in the fabric reveals the layer of child beneath. Sometimes I forget she is two years younger than I am, barely old enough to get married.

The trailer door opens. Strangers filter in, then Chloe Woods, wearing a casual T-shirt and sweats, a designer purse swinging on her arm. Her lips are lacquered in gloss and her box braids are dyed a cool gray. Her presence shifts something subtly, like an ear suddenly weighed down by a diamond. The rest of us stop talking.

Chloe knows Gwen the best out of all of us, so they catch up as Chloe’s makeup is applied, passing Gwen’s cigarette back and forth.

On my way out the door, hopping in the tail and holding a production assistant’s arm, I tap Chloe on the shoulder. “I really wanted to say, I love your music so much. I’m really, and I know honored sounds weird, but I’m honored to be working with you.”

The only reason I’m here is because Maria Colmenares dropped out due to a scheduling conflict, and they needed a fourth mermaid. The paycheck was big, and I probably shouldn’t have it. Compared to them, I am no one. An afterthought of a pop star. She must know this. But Chloe realizes I’m intimidated by her and soothes me because of it.

“Stop, you’re too sweet.” She touches my arm.

I can feel myself redden. She politely asks how long I’m in town.

“Only for tonight. When do you think we’ll wrap?”

“At this rate? No idea. Four a.m., maybe later?”

Gwen coolly glances over at us. Her look says I’m a suck-up. And she knows my eyes are trying to thaw her, so she immediately turns away.