“You’ve heard them on the radio already with their single ‘Wake Up Morning.’ And now, maybe we could persuade the beautiful ladies of Gloss to sing it for us live?” The cheers intensified. “Yes! Come up here, ladies! I’d like to introduce some very special friends of mine . . . Rose, Meredith, Yumiko, and Cassidy! The girls of Gloss!” The thunderous applause didn’t stop, even after we’d climbed the stage in designer clothes and stiletto heels.
These weren’t students in a gymnasium, fidgeting during a school talent show. This crowd wasn’t a room full of teenagers brought in by record stores at the mall. These were industry insiders, promoters, journalists, all interested in what was happening in the room. I didn’t care that the lyrics were a little too adolescent, that I didn’t write them, or that I hadn’t really felt any of those feelings keenly before. All I cared about was delivering them with emotion and conviction. I needed to sell the feeling and make others believe that I believed it. When Meredith, Rose, Yumiko, and I blended the chorus, I took a peek at the glittering eyes closest to the stage. People were smiling. They were clasping their hands together, clenching their fists. They had tension in their shoulders and were biting their lips. I felt my chest do a double-thump—though it could’ve been the percussion reverberating through my back. I thought, We got this.
I wasn’t going to let the doubts creep in this time.
BEING BACK ON the Sing It lot was not as unnerving as I expected, now that I was on the other side of the competition. The stage was just a stage; the little yellow room was just a box with a dingy couch.
I didn’t need Sing It; Sing It needed us. We were Gloss and our single had debuted with half a million copies sold—on its first day. Peter had hummed excitedly about its climbing rank on the Billboard Hot 100. We were walking on air by the time we rehearsed for the show’s season finale.
Emma Jake caught us after soundcheck and smiled benevolently, her thick eyelashes fluttering. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “We could have lunch.” She commandeered a van and had a driver take us to the Ivy, where a waiter led us straight to a table in the back. “Iced tea, Jerome,” she said, her grandiose lilt even more pronounced. “We’ll also be needing another chair. Thank you.”
She tucked her napkin on her lap daintily and smiled around at us. Her face was lit with two bright pink spots of rouge on her cheeks. If she were a normal civilian, I would say she looked clownish, but because she was Emma Jake, I thought she looked only a little ridiculous.
Emma Jake was an icon. According to legend, twenty years ago you couldn’t walk down the street and run into a kid who didn’t have at least one of her albums, or a poster of hers on their bedroom wall. Cyndi, Madonna, Emma. They were uttered in the same reverent breath.
I was born a few years after her peak, as her star was losing momentum. She fell in love with a backup dancer, planned for a short break to have a baby, and then it died at birth. She left the dancer—or maybe he left her—started recording a comeback album, and lost heart halfway through. The delay kept extending until she finally released it two years behind schedule. I’d grown up hearing her new, matured sound; it wasn’t the high-synth pop that her old fans wanted, and Emma Jake faded into the background. And though she’d made albums since, they were rarely in the top charts. Still, she was respected in the industry: she had come back. And she had come back with integrity; she’d penned autobiographical folk songs about the life she’d never have. I wondered if she’d chosen to join Sing It as a judge because it was a way for her to reenter the mainstream conversation.
“Ladies,” she said, raising her glass. “I want you to remember this day. This is the last day where you can walk around L.A. feeling anonymous. It’s the last precious day of your lives.”
It was strange to sip iced tea and leaf through menus while sitting across from a woman whose backstory I knew as well as my own. To think that she had had dreams of where her life would take her, and the world learned as soon as she did that they wouldn’t pan out. If it had happened to me, I would have dropped out of the public eye immediately, crawled into bed, and never wanted to take off the covers.
And yet, she was smiling at us like a benign bird, almost pitying how naive we were. “It’s going to be a doozy,” she told us. “Everything you say will be amplified. If you don’t misstep after this album, the news will report about you as much as they’ll discuss stocks, the weather, and presidential addresses. I’m serious. Ah, Lucille! Yes, you’re late. Sit.”
Her attention was usurped by a teenager with blond hair and a heart-shaped face who had approached our table. She was wearing metallic jeans and a casual black V-neck that was so dark it had to be new. Lucille gave a quick, breathless hello and slid into the chair in between Emma and Rose, directly across from me.
“Ladies, this is my niece, Lucille.”
The young woman wasn’t wearing much makeup, but her cupid’s bow was so pronounced that I stared at her mouth, certain that I’d seen that uncommon feature somewhere before.
“Oh my god!” Yumi exclaimed. “You’re Lucy Bowen!”
I tried to rein in my surprise, but a noise escaped my lips. Necks were already craning at other white-topped tables nearby. Emma Jake was the kind of presence that people understood, and they quietly let her be, but Lucy Bowen of the hit TV show The Jet-Setters was small-screen royalty.
Lucy smiled politely, used to this sort of reaction. Even though I knew she was younger than us, her mature response made an impression. I would have had my eyes hidden in the menu if this were me. “Yeah! Nice to meet you. Are you a fan of the show?”
“We haven’t been able to watch recently—I mean, we’ve been working so hard—” Yumi chattered excitedly.
“My sisters would scream if they saw me sitting here with you,” I blurted out.
Emma took control of the conversation again. “Yes, well. I invited her here because she’s young like you, but has a lot of experience in the industry. I thought she could be a good influence for you. Luce, these ladies are from the pop group Gloss. They’re about to break out with a hit album and I have a feeling the transition is going to be swift. They are going to need help.” The waiter arrived with Lucy’s iced tea and stayed to take our orders.
“Aunt Emma, I grew up doing commercials. I’ve been on sets my entire life.” Lucy pursed her mouth a little and addressed the table. “Television is different from the music industry, but apparently she thinks that I’m the best person to help you?”
“Oh, hush. Sets, sets. We were just on a set, weren’t we, girls? I asked because you’re the same age and you owe me a favor. Listen, ladies, the money isn’t in the music. I tell all new working chanteuses this because I don’t want them to fail. The money: It’s in you. You are the brand. Become spokespeople. Shoes, perfume, whatever.” She waved her hand as if she were fanning away ephemeral fog.
“Isn’t the album enough work?” Rose said. “We busted our asses getting here. Now isn’t it time for us to be on TRL? Well, we busted our asses. Cassidy here just hopped on at the last minute.”
I took my time spreading my cloth napkin across my lap. I could simultaneously believe and not believe that Rose would say something like this in front of Emma Jake, and our new mentor, Lucy Bowen, who busied herself by tearing Sweet’N Low packets.
“Oh?” Emma Jake said archly. “She hopped in, did she?”
“Well, yeah. We worked so hard to get the attention of the label and finally did. Then they just added her on after she lost Sing It.”
If Emma Jake had a stern face, she didn’t show it. But her voice lost some of its lilt and there was some flint to it. “The label did what was best for the group,” she explained slowly. “Heaven knows I don’t always agree with them on things, but they knew what they were doing. I listened to your record: it would not have worked without Cassidy. Whether you like it or not, and whether you agree with the way that she was brought on or not, the four of you are a team now. You can’t have in-fighting. You can’t act like you resent one another in front of the press. You must get along and you must support one another.” She paused. “You may not be friends after all of this, but you will be like family. And you will have to learn to trust one another, because the rest of the world will love you and hate you and support you and then turn on you. You can rely only on one another. Do you understand?”
Meredith, Yumi, and I nodded. Rose was still, her eyes flickering on the water glasses. She probably wasn’t used to being spoken to like this.
“Rose,” Emma said, and the flowery tone was back. She touched one of Rose’s hands.
Rose jerked her arm a little but not away. “Yeah.”
“I don’t mean to lecture you, especially here. This was supposed to be a celebratory meal.”