I turned on my signature Sassy Cassy smirk and nodded. The girls dissolved into more screaming. Can we get a picture with you? Will you sign my shirt?
Alex grinned and brandished his camera. “Cass, it’s your first time being mobbed in a public place! You gotta take a photo.” I acquiesced, but while he took a photo with both his and one of the girls’ disposable cameras, I felt like I was outside of my body watching the entire interaction. My mouth stretched the way it should, my hands floated to the girls’ shoulders like a friendly pop star’s would. But I wasn’t really there.
Now, in the dressing room of the stadium, Merry sighed and leaned over Yumi. “That must’ve been nice,” she said. It was even nicer, I thought, that Alex had met up with one of the friends he’d made while at school and was missing the concert. I didn’t want him to feel obligated to be next to me all the time.
The others were still riding the buoyant wave that the crowd had given us, but my feet had reached the shore as soon as I’d seen that cowboy hat waiting for us after the performance. I felt as though I’d drunk six cups of coffee and my ribs were quivering, but when I stopped running the pin through my fingers, I found that my hands could stop completely still. It was only inside me.
There was a knock at the door and Ian—cell phone in hand, with the echoing sounds of Illuminated Eyes’ wild drumbeats and a hissing roar of the crowd—joined us inside. “Ladies,” he said, then saw Stephen. “Oh, hi there. You can be here if you want. It’s Peter with some news.” He jabbed a button on the receiver. “Putting you on speaker, Peter.”
The reception was, as usual, a little spotty, but we could understand him perfectly when he said, “Ladies, as you know, your debut album went live last week. We have numbers for you. You are . . .”—he paused for dramatic effect—“Number one on the Billboard chart!”
The room exploded in a cacophony of sound. We hopped around the room and shrieked.
Ian calmed us down and Peter continued, “And . . . you’ve been invited to the Music Video Channel MVAs.”
We screamed some more.
“. . . You’re not eligible for an award, but the producers want you to perform instead. Meredith, we have to make sure there are no more missteps, so keep a lid on it and a bra on until September. Ian?”
Ian took him off speakerphone and clapped the phone to his ear. He smiled a huge smile at us, so big that his eyes disappeared into the mass of his brown cheeks, and he spoke into the receiver as he backed into the corner of the room.
Rose turned to me and yelled, “Can you believe it?”
“I can’t believe it!”
We grasped each other’s elbows and jumped up and down. It was the most interaction we’d had in weeks. As if realizing it at the same time, we disengaged and then hugged the other girls. Even Stephen got in on the hugging, though he barely brushed me.
Two years ago I was the loser on a reality show competition. Now we had the top-selling album in the country and were invited to a huge industry event. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. That night, I floated back to the hotel without feeling my feet touch the ground. It wasn’t until I was kicking the covers back in the morning that I saw the other bed still tightly made with its hospital corners and realized Merry hadn’t come back to the room at all.
Soleil
Soleil waits until she can hear her mother’s footsteps recede down the hall before she thrusts open her closet doors and pulls out a large cardboard moving box, filled to the brim with envelopes. They’re all different sizes and colors, different levels of worn and torn, with handwriting of all types scratched on the outside. She had sauntered into the garage to take a phone video of Raul’s newest car to share on Instagram—she wasn’t sure if her mother would have approved but she knows that she can share car videos as long as the license plate is obscured. Besides, Merry was so busy, she couldn’t keep up with everything, especially something as ephemeral as her Instagram stories. Soleil figured she could share the videos there, so they’d be available for twenty-four hours before disappearing into the ether, and Merry wouldn’t know.
When Soleil entered the garage, she noticed that someone had carelessly stacked a set of big cardboard boxes in a corner, taken down from the adjoining storage area. Soleil had seen these boxes before—a few of the many items that had been transferred by movers from the Malibu house to this one—but had never actually looked inside them. She pried open a corner of a box and dipped her hand in: paper. Her fingers swam through a disorderly collection of envelopes, all crammed without care into the box. She pulled out a fistful of letters and read the mailing addresses: some to Rosalind McGill, some to Meredith Warner, Yumiko Otsuka, and Cassidy Holmes, and some to just “Gloss” or “GG,” care of Big Disc Records. The post dates on the envelopes were from over a decade ago.
Her heart had soared. Fan mail! Who knew that her mother was so sentimental that she’d keep her fan mail? Maybe these were destined for the trash. Soleil needed to save some for posterity.
A thought struck her immediately after: people loved this sort of thing. Nostalgia. Fan appreciation. Soleil was sure that this would be more interesting to her followers than a fancy car. She’d hauled one of the boxes to her room and stashed it in her closet. She was almost sure her mother wouldn’t mind if she looked through the fan mail, but Merry had also been so touchy about Soleil’s latest Instagram post that maybe it was worth keeping quiet, for now.
It wasn’t Soleil’s fault that she didn’t know who her father was. Didn’t it make the most sense to ask her thousands of followers who she looked like? Have the mob do the detective work for her? “Just another bastard who doesn’t know her dad.” It was the perfect way to gain sympathy—and virality.
Soleil opens her window blinds to let in pretty natural light and carefully does her makeup the way she’s seen the influencers do. By the time she is done, she looks sixteen and her cheekbones pop. She changes into a cute cropped shirt with glitter rainbows on it before she decides that she looks too young and switches to a black V-neck. Then she studies herself in her phone’s camera, making sure her look translates well to selfie.
Going live on Instagram, she starts with a big smile and a toss of her shiny blond locks. “Hi guys,” she says, in her best imitation-YouTuber voice. “I’m here with a special treat. FAN MAIL!!!” She indicates the box. “In here is NOT fan mail for me, but mail sent to my mom in her Gloss glory days. We’re going to roulette this bitch and open a few live on air. I might make this a weekly segment, what do you think?”
Her interaction count is rising, so she chats a for few more minutes, letting them join in, and sets her phone at an angle on her desk to have both hands free. Then she pulls open a corner of the box and fishes for an envelope somewhere in the middle. “We’ll keep this anonymous, to protect the innocent and maybe not-so-innocent.” She waggles her eyebrows while opening the envelope. It had already been sliced open, so she doesn’t feel bad about going through this one: it is already vetted. “Addressed to my mom,” she announces, “and sent from Georgia.” She unfolds it and begins to read: “Merry Gloss, as talented as you seem to be, you set a terrible example for our children. You should be ashamed of yourself, wearing those slutty clothes . . .” Soleil trails off, pressing her lips together. This woman who wrote to her mom really did not like the stage outfits and was pretty mean to her mother. “Wow, this lady is unhinged,” she says aloud. “She doesn’t like that my mom had a wardrobe malfunction, but it’s not like she could’ve helped it. Let’s see the next one. To Yummy.” She flips the envelope toward the camera, gesturing, but so quickly that it’s illegible to anyone watching. “It’s actually spelled out as Yummy. How gross.” She’d heard about Yumi being called Yummy or Tasty, but in this day and age, even she knows that is unpleasant for any woman. If it is this easy for a fourteen-year-old to grasp, Soleil wonders why this person with neat, adult handwriting was rude enough to address a person this way.
She is glad she reads a line or two before reading it aloud, because this is in no way PG-rated and she feels the color rise in her face. “Ohmigod,” she squeaks, setting it down. “Okay, there were some real weirdos writing to the group, people. Ew ew ew,” and she places the letter down with two fingers gingerly, like it is wet.
“Maybe roulette wasn’t the best choice. I should’ve checked a few beforehand,” she says into the lens. “What do you think?”