“Aw, screw you, Rose!”

We were ushered outside to wait behind the patio stage. The crowd was a wavering blob of colors and noise and rectangular boards. The fluorescent poster boards were easier to read than the people holding them; they expressed birthday wishes, anniversary kisses, hellos to people at home, all wanting their tiny slices of broadcast fame. I could see Milena Vaclavik’s side profile as she spoke to a camera amid a spattering of enthusiastic viewers, and then we were tipped to ascend the shallow stage. I nervously looked at the faces, trying to single out anyone who shouldn’t be there. I wondered if those people would be fast-forwarding through our parts on the VCR while slowly parsing the crowd scenes. Perspective. We may have flown in on a private jet, but to thousands across the nation we were just the musical filler, the background to their loved one’s tiny moment of fame.

“This is Gloss with their debut single, ‘Wake Up Morning.’ What a perfect title for our viewers!”

It was barely ten and already the buildings were baking in the summer sun. The unforgiving latex made me feel like I was encased in tin foil. Merry and Rose, both so fair, began to turn pink.

We took our places—Rose and Merry in the front as main vocals, Yumi and me in the back, and waited for the backing music. While we grasped a hold of our microphones, I found myself reading the signs.

HI DAD

NANA PAPA WE LOVE YOU

LOUISIANA GIRLS LOVE NYC

GO SASSY CASSIDY GO GLOSS

A quick pang of fear quivered down in my stomach, ricocheted off every surrounding organ. I glanced up at the face to see who was holding this sign.

I squinted. Was that . . . ?

Teeth glinting in a large, smiling mouth; sunglasses wrapped around his eyes so it was hard to tell, but . . .

There went the opening bars to the music, and I snapped back to the task at hand. We were a well-oiled machine and our dancing was crisp.

Every morning when I wake up

I feel a pang when I remember you’re not here

But then I recall that you kissed me goodbye

And told me that you’d always be near . . .

We were in the middle of the second verse when the crowd began to buzz with agitation. Normally I lose myself when performing, but out in the daytime like this, on an outdoor stage without extra lighting, the audience was visible and took up more attention than usual. It wasn’t the typical grooving or hand-clapping that we’d grown accustomed to—they seemed distracted, pointing at the stage, murmuring. I wasn’t sure what was going on. They whooped and clapped when we finished our set.

As we exited the stage, the crowd shifted away from us, homed in on the camera crews like minnows. We were being led back toward the building, but I craned my head and looked for that guy again. Maybe he’d fight his way inside.

“God!” Merry said as soon as we were inside. “Fuck!”

She was clutching her chest.

Yumi was incredulous. “What happened?”

“This damn suit ripped open! What do you think happened?”

Her jumpsuit had torn along the left armhole seam and across her chest, and a gash had opened up along the nipple line.

“What did you do?” I exclaimed, staring at the rip.

“What could I do? I put one hand up to hide what I needed to and kept singing. The show must go on, right?”

“I’m going to kill whoever made these costumes,” Rose vowed.

“It’s like your boobs couldn’t be contained,” Yumi joked, “now or any other time.”

Merry set her jaw and glared at Yumi. “I can’t help what happened with that guy in Oklahoma. I could help not flashing all of New York if the costume person hadn’t made these suits so minuscule!”

Ian finally met us at the dressing room door. “What the hell?” he barked, looking straight at Merry.

She was indignant. “I can’t help it! The suit ripped! It was live! I couldn’t just leave!”

“But you—”

“This is humiliating! Can we just drop it?” She pushed into the room, her hands scrabbling at the zipper on the back of her neck, and I followed her in to help. Ian saw her starting to disrobe and turned to face the door.

As I helped to peel Merry out of the garment, Ian sighed and said, “They can’t air a topless pop star on morning television. Maybe they cut away in time.” But I knew from the murmurs and pointing in the audience that Merry’s wardrobe malfunction couldn’t be ignored, and I was sure that The Sunrise Show’s audience got more than they bargained for this morning. Merry knew it too. She wadded the suit up, threw it in the trash, and grabbed her original shirt from her dressing chair.

She angrily buttoned her top while glaring at Ian. “You tell Peter that I will not wear a stupid pleather, latex, whatever-the-fuck-that-was jumpsuit ever again!” Without waiting for an answer, she stormed off, bumping into a man in the hallway.

A man I recognized.

10.

Friday

Merry

I was on my third cup of coffee, even though my limit was supposed to be two. Dousing fires coming for my fourteen-year-old daughter required caffeine. Tons of it.

What possessed my sweet, lovable girl to post such a stupid, idiotic thing on her Instagram? Where were my parental controls? Why did I let her run amok? Even though it had been deleted for twelve hours already, the screenshots kept coming up with speculation and commentary. The internet always has receipts.

Then calls began coming in from gossip rags and TV shows. It was Friday and they needed fodder for the weekend, I supposed. The same questions that had come up over a decade ago that we had tamped down and buried—or so I thought.

I’d had to call my publicist for reinforcement. She worked steadily on her end, sending me texts every so often on the steps she had to take. When I’d called to tell her what Soleil had done, she huffed a long sigh into my ear. “Are you sure you don’t want her to just let her learn from her mistake?” she said wearily. “Sometimes teenagers just have to stick their foot in it.”

“I’m not asking you to scrub the entire internet. We just need to control this a little bit.” I chewed the inside of my cheek.

“The best thing you could do is tell her to apologize. A real apology, not something that shifts the blame on anyone else. I’m sorry you were offended, et cetera, doesn’t work here.”

“And what do I do? People are blaming me for this. I’ve said some shitty things in my lifetime, I’ll admit that, but I never could have seen this coming.”

A beat, like she was weighing what to say. “I’m aware.”

“I know you’re aware. You’ve cleaned up more than your fair share of my messes. But the chatter now is a smear campaign. I’ll be damned if this will hurt my bottom line.”

Justine sighed again. “Roger that. I’ll get to work.”

I slugged my coffee. Pawed through my calendar. Emily was fielding questions, adding meetings that were stacking up on Monday to calm the board, soothe investors. There was a setup at four on Tuesday that looked suspicious. I texted her. “What does FPZ want?”

“A meet. Looking for a new Sing It judge,” she typed back.

I paused. “FPZ? Sing It?”

“New network acquired rights. Rebooting show. Need celebrity judges.”

“Damn it, Emily,” I muttered under my breath. Didn’t she see what else I was dealing with? I didn’t want to be a part of some cheap reboot on a small network, which would take attention away from my businesses that actually made money. “Not interested,” I typed. “Cancel it.”

“I think they’re asking other Glossies too.”

Hmm. It would be interesting to see Yumi and Rose at each other’s throats for the job, but no. “Even more of a no,” I wrote.

“Okay.”

Raul popped into the kitchen, hair still wet from a postworkout shower. “Hello, my love,” he said.

Despite my attention being pulled in multiple directions like taffy, Raul could crystalize my focus like nothing else. I smiled up at him. “Hello.”

“Oh, you have that tired-but-caffeinated look.” He nodded at my mug. “What number is that?”

I slurped the last dregs from the cup. “I’m not telling.”

He leaned over the kitchen island and wiped foam from my lip with his thumb. “Try to behave yourself,” he whispered, the lines around his eyes crinkling.

Love in Hollywood is a strange beast. It feels two-faced and duplicitous when you’re trying to find someone; everyone has a star meter, where they judge how important you are in the industry, even if they don’t mean to. Some will say that they don’t care about your level of fame, but they really do. I’ve had boyfriends who couldn’t handle the demands of my schedule, asked me to slow my hustle. If I listened, it inevitably tanked the project I was working on: solo record, makeup collaboration with a well-known brand, a cookbook that I failed to promote hard enough. Or maybe my name just didn’t command enough attention anymore.

I had faced the inevitable: individually, we just weren’t that interesting to people. We needed to be the cohesive foursome.