Kate sat on the stool and leaned into the microphone. “Thanks for coming,” she whispered.
Carmen could see her long fingers trembling as they found their places on the neck of her guitar. She watched Kate take a deep breath and steel herself. The girl strummed a few chords, cursed softly, and stopped. She looked up at the audience through a lock of hair. “Sorry,” she whispered. “Starting over.”
This time, Kate’s fingers seemed to go where they were supposed to. She began to play, and after a few moments Carmen recognized the opening to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Of course PopTV had asked Kate to perform her “hit.”
I come home in the morning light, Kate sang.
Her voice was low and breathy and haunting. It sounded like she was confessing something unbearably private. Beside her, Carmen could feel Drew tense.
“What?” she whispered.
“She’s amazing,” he whispered back.
Carmen felt the tiniest twinge of jealousy, like the sudden prick of a needle. When had Drew ever thought she was amazing? But she quickly brushed this thought aside and focused on the music. The room was utterly silent, as if everyone in it was holding their breath. Kate’s voice washed over them all.
When Kate strummed the final chords, Carmen clapped as loud as she could. The girl was really, really good, but she obviously needed a lot of encouragement. She still looked ill.
Kate leaned forward again and spoke, this time a little louder than a whisper. “And now for something I wrote.” The PopTV camera zoomed in for a close-up.
The song was in a minor key, so it sounded eerie and sad, even though the lyrics were about sunshine and summertime. Carmen found herself nodding her head in time to the beat. Yes, she thought, this is really good.
She knew music because she’d grown up surrounded by song. (Sometimes literally: Once, when she was seven and sick with the chicken pox, the members of No Doubt had gathered around her bedside to sing her a get-well tune.) People called her dad “the hitmaker” because of his legendary ability to produce platinum albums, but as Philip Curtis always said, he didn’t make the hits so much as recognize them. Carmen couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but she had inherited his ear for talent. Carmen was the one who’d insisted her dad go check out Aja all those years ago. And then he’d signed her and made her a star. It was too bad Carmen didn’t want to work at Rock It! Records; she would have made a brilliant A&R exec.
“Encore,” Drew shouted when Kate’s song was over. “Encore!”
But the open mic had rules: two songs, seven minutes, and you were done. So they had to sit through the rest of the show (five more musicians, and not one of them with half of Kate’s talent) until they could make their way to the corner of the room where Kate was perched on a folding chair, biting her fingernails.
Carmen felt the eyes of the camera on her and Drew as she approached. Now was the moment that she would meet her castmate; she’d better hit her lines, whatever they would be.
“Hey,” she said, smiling. Wow, super-original, she thought.
Kate looked up, the tip of her index finger still in her mouth. “Hi.”
Carmen thought about sticking out her hand for Kate to shake but then decided against it. “I’m Carmen,” she said, “and this is Drew.” She pointed to her best friend, who grinned and said, “Dude, you were amazing.”
Kate immediately flushed and looked down at her feet. “Thanks. I wish I wouldn’t have screwed up so badly when I started, though.”
There was something so innocent about her that Carmen felt immediately protective. Her own nervousness disappeared. “You know what?” she said. “Something like that only makes the audience root harder for you. I know one guy who pretends to mess up at least one song every show. He says his fans like it because he seems more human that way.”
This appeared to cheer Kate up a little. “Really?” she said. “So there’s hope for me?”
“Of course,” Carmen said.
Kate smiled and nudged her guitar case with her foot. “You hear that, Lucinda? Carmen Curtis—the Carmen Curtis!—said I’m not completely hopeless.”
Carmen was a little surprised. She didn’t think Kate was supposed to know who she was. Weren’t they supposed to find out all about each other as the cameras rolled? As they became “friends”? It was already so confusing trying to distinguish between real truth and TV truth.
“I saw you in The Long and Winding Road,” Kate went on. “You were fantastic. When you and your sister didn’t have enough money at that gas station and you had to, like, basically beg for a fill-up? I actually cried!” She giggled. “I know, I’m lame.”
Now it was Carmen’s turn to blush. “Thanks,” she said. “But this is your time to bask in the glow of success. Let’s talk some more about how great you were.”
“Yeah,” Drew piped up. “Your bridge on that second song was totally inspired.”
But Kate, laughing, waved away their compliments. “Stop, you’re embarrassing me. Let’s talk about where you can get a burger around here. I was so nervous I couldn’t eat all day, and now I’m starving.”
Carmen slung her bag over her shoulder and nodded toward the door. “I know just the place,” she said. “Let’s all go for a drink and something to eat.”
A second location had already been cleared for them down the street, so Kate suggesting a burger was expected. Carmen was impressed by how naturally she had done it. Maybe she had underestimated this girl at first glance.
Carmen watched Kate gather up her guitar and her things, feeling optimistic about her new castmate. As they headed out into the warm Santa Monica night, it occurred to her that she might not need the quotation marks around “friend.”
Madison stretched out one long, toned leg and then the other, enjoying the feel of the warm sun on her skin. Beside her was a giant bottle of Voss water and a stack of gossip magazines. (She liked to fold down the corners of pages that mentioned her and keep them neatly stacked in her closet to flip through on lonelier nights.) But Gaby, who lounged beside her wearing a plum-colored bikini the size of a cocktail napkin, simply would not shut up.
“So the set is, like, totally amazing with all these lights and cameras and rotating stages and stuff,” she was saying. “And I met Chase Davis already. He is soooo cute, and really nice, too. And oh my God! Did you know that all the guys wear makeup?”
Gaby was on cloud nine because she’d been hired to be a correspondent for Buzz! News, covering minor events around Hollywood. Trevor had obviously gotten her the gig, Madison thought, because no sane person would hire Gaby to do anything more challenging than remember her own name.
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, the way the teacher in the one and only yoga class Madison had ever attended had instructed. (Yoga burned the same amount of calories as shopping—so why not just shop?) She and Gaby were killing time by the pool until their new neighbor, Kate Whatever-her-name-was, showed up. (Though, in truth, Kate lived two floors down from Madison and Gaby. Trevor had hoped the girls would all live next door to each other—like in Melrose Place—but it turned out his powers of persuasion didn’t extend to people who weren’t on his show; the couple in the apartment next to Madison had refused to budge.) Madison brought the bottle of water to her lips. Why, oh why, couldn’t they kill time in silence?
“—so I get to go to this ribbon-cutting ceremony, and I’m supposed to talk about the history of the site, and how, like, before they built this new club there, it was a vacant lot with this huge population