Chapter Twenty-Nine. Mackenzie
chapter twenty-nine
MACKENZIE
It isn’t the contract that has me in a bind anymore. It’s the “compromise” the label made. The one that’s a whole lot more of a threat.
If I perform in the showcase alone, they’ll consider running with Mack & Sam. Which is to say, if I don’t do it, any future for Mack & Sam is off the table.
In theory, the plan is simple. Go onstage and fill up as much of the billed time as I can by singing Mack & Sam songs alone.
Even if I can’t do them justice without Sam, the songs will speak for themselves—all of the hope and the joy and the depth that a Seven song could never capture on its own.
The kind we had with “Play You by Heart.” The audience will latch on to the new music the same way they did with that song back then, and the demand will force the label’s hand.
In reality, I spend the whole day sweating like a geyser, trying not to upchuck my lunch.
It was daunting enough to debut my new voice in public with Sam by my side.
It’s another thing entirely to do it on my own.
It may be overdue, but there’s no escaping the truth everyone is bound to realize.
I am not the woman who sang in Thunder Hearts, and I never will be again.
There will be no reunion tours, no new recordings. The Mackenzie Waters they knew is gone.
It feels like I’m crashing my own funeral to bring something else back from the dead.
“You ready?”
Serena touches my arm gently, but I still startle.
I haven’t put the guitar down all day. My fingers are aching from rehearsing Sam’s parts.
My heart is aching even worse from missing him.
I’ve still been holed up in Serena’s apartment avoiding the cluster of people on my sidewalk, but that hasn’t stopped me from checking the door every other minute as if Sam will magically walk through it.
I loosen my vice grip on the guitar, forcing myself to take a breath. It doesn’t make a difference. My intestines are still playing hopscotch. My heart is still on the verge of cracking in two.
“As I’ll ever be,” I say.
When we get in the elevator, Serena reaches up and snaps the back of my bra. I let out a stunned laugh, turning to her to catch her familiar smirk. It’s something we used to do back when one of us was nervous or in a funk before a show. Like shocking someone out of the hiccups.
It doesn’t fix me, but it helps. Having Serena in my corner again helps. With all the work we’ve been doing trying to dig into Tick Tune’s deal and salvage the one Sam and I already had, we’ve leaned on each other more in the past few days than we have in years.
Grayson and Hannah are waiting for us in the car Serena summoned to the curb. One look at the grim look on Grayson’s face as I open the car door is enough to make me want to push it shut again.
“What is it?” I ask.
“The label owns all of Mack & Sam’s content,” he says.
Grayson has been acting as our lawyer, diligently poring over the contracts and contending label’s legal team, working with Hannah to figure out what we can get away with tonight and working with Serena to see what we can do about Tick Tune in the long term.
But we’ve been over this. I knew that the label would legally own all of the Mack & Sam content we shared with them. They wasted no time filing copyrights on all four of the songs we sent.
As I slide into the car and Serena lets herself into the front, Hannah reaches over Grayson to put a hand on my knee. “The label’s legal team is exercising their rights to them. If you sing any of them, it’ll be a breach of contract.”
The car pulls out into Park Avenue traffic.
“What about covers?” I ask.
Grayson shakes his head. “They had that baked into the showcase contract. No covers, either.”
Serena lets out an undainty curse from the front seat. They would only have thought to cover their bases on that because it’s the same loophole Serena’s been using to let her openers perform without using songs that are tied up in contracts.
“So they’re trying to force my hand,” I say. “I don’t have anything else I can fill the time with.”
“The most important thing to remember here is that you’ve never admitted to being Seven,” says Grayson. “They can stop you from singing Mack and Sam songs, but they can’t make you sing Seven songs.”
The thing is, I was willing to do just that. I have to be onstage for a full thirty minutes. Mack & Sam’s songs couldn’t hit that alone, so I would have sung some of Seven’s songs, if it meant keeping the label happy. If it meant they were going to stay true to their word and consider Mack & Sam.
But they were never planning to consider anything. The revelation slides in like ice under my veins, but nobody else in the car seems surprised. I wanted us to have a chance so badly that I let myself believe.
I take a deep breath. It’s too late for tears. I seam myself back up in a brutal instant, but when I turn back to Grayson, my eye catches on a stain by his lip.
“You’ve got a little—magenta,” I tell him.
Grayson’s cheeks nearly match it then. But not nearly as close as Hannah’s lips do. I raise my eyebrows at her and she clears her throat pointedly. I make it clear with a pointed blink right back that I am filing this conversation away in “delayed, but not forgotten.”
At least one thing isn’t going to shit this week.
“Do you know what you’re going to do?” Hannah asks.
For once, I’m drawing a blank. There’s no winning or losing anymore. They have all the cards, and with Mack & Sam, my alter ego, and all these Tick Tune artists performing with me on the line, I’m the one with everything to lose.
When we arrive at Terminal 5, we drop off Hannah and Grayson, but Serena slides into the back and tells her driver to find somewhere to park a few blocks away.
She doesn’t waste any time before handing me her phone. “I texted Sam to tell him what the label said about the Mack and Sam songs.”
My eyes snap to hers. “Why?”
“I know you don’t want to hear this. But Mack and Sam is over,” she says, gentle but resolute.
“Look at how much control the label has, and how they’re using it.
We can’t trust them anymore. I know it might be hard to hear it from me, but he knows it, too.
I thought it’d be easier to let it go if it came from him. ”
I swallow hard. It’s nothing I don’t already know deep down. But it’s still a tough pill to swallow, knowing that these people we’ve worked with our whole careers are so unfeeling that they’d rather use a contract to trap me than hear me out.
“It isn’t,” I say. “Sam already let it go. But I—I just can’t.”
Funny how working with Sam was my worst nightmare only a month ago. It’s nothing compared to the nightmare of losing our shot.
Serena nods firmly. “Then we won’t. After this is over, we’ll find a work-around. Wait out the contract. Write new songs with Sam under a different duo name. I’ve heard what you did in a month. Don’t try and tell me you two won’t knock it out of the park again.”
My throat is tight. Not at Serena’s promises, but at the word we .
“What did Sam say?” I ask, looking down at her phone.
Serena takes her phone back, opening the thread. “He hasn’t answered yet.”
Dammit. I want to leave. But that’s not fair to the artists who are opening, and doubly unfair to the ones coming after. This is their big shot, and I’m all too aware that it’s the intrigue with Seven getting people in the door.
“I can’t sing Seven’s songs,” I say.
“Then don’t,” says Serena.
I let out a breathy laugh. We both know that leaves me with nothing to sing, unless I sit in this car and come up with a whole album’s worth of songs in an hour.
“Whatever happens tonight, we’re doing a good thing for those Tick Tune artists.
I wish I could do more to help with this part.
” She settles a hand on my wrist, squeezing tight.
“But if I’ve learned one thing from watching you perform all these years, it’s that nobody can roll with the punches like you can. ”
If that’s true, it’s only because I was never on my own.
There was always the safety of being a part of Thunder Hearts, or of being Sam’s begrudging other half.
My whole life I had felt so lonely that the stage wasn’t just a place to perform.
It was a place I shared with people I loved and would come to love. It was a place that felt like home.
It’s easy to be wholly yourself when you’re home. It’s easy to take risks and push your limits when there’s a soft place to land. But now it’s just me.
“Can we just—sit here until we have to go in?” I ask.
“Of course,” says Serena.
I regret it the moment after I ask. The car rolls to a stop at the curb, but my thoughts start to tailspin, and my stomach starts to twist. Just when I am on the verge of genuine panic, I’m startled by a little knock, knock at the window, and a muffled voice saying, “Ben! You don’t even know if that’s their car! Sorry, I—”
I roll the window down and sure enough, there’s Ben, with a backstage pass slung over his tiny body. It’s such a relief to see his big broad grin after the scare the other day that I almost forget the show entirely.
“Hey, you,” I say. “How’s the arm?”
Ben opens his mouth to say something, but his eyes balloon when he sees Serena. His jaw drops like he can’t decide if he’s going to use his next breath to speak or to scream, but thankfully Lizzie interrupts.
“Oh, hi,” she says, breathless and surprised. “Sorry—Ben didn’t want to miss the show. We had the taxi let us out here to go in through the back and he just marched right up before I could stop him.”
“It doesn’t hurt so bad anymore, but I basically got to fly ,” Ben brags, both for my sake and Serena’s. “I was in the air for like, a whole minute before I crashed.”
Serena lets out a stunned laugh. “He really is a tiny Sam.”
“And you’re Serena ,” says Ben, with a little jump. “This is so cool .”
Lizzie sets her hands on Ben’s shoulders to guide him away, but he shakes his head up at her.
“You said I could show her,” he protests.
Lizzie shoots us apologetic glances. “I meant later, hon. Mackenzie’s got a show to get ready for.”
“It’s okay,” I laugh. “Show me what?”
Ben reaches his hand out for Lizzie’s phone. “I’ve been listening to my dad’s songs,” he says, leaning his little head into the open window like a puppy. “You’re right. They’re good. But I like the new one he wrote best.”
“Sam’s been letting him listen to it,” Lizzie explains. “He told Ben he wrote it based on one of your songs, but—I think he wrote it for you. I don’t think he’d mind if you heard it.”
Ben hits “play,” but the song isn’t new. The strumming pattern is too familiar. Almost identical to a song I’ve sung hundreds of times.
But another few beats and it is abruptly a song of its own. The chords aren’t yearning and hopeful, but steady and bright. It only takes a few lines for me to understand what Sam has done, and it takes everything in me not to press a hand to my chest and cry.
“Golden,” it’s called. A play on the song “When I Was Green.” Only this time instead of a song about someone trying to prove themselves, it’s a song about someone who never had anything to prove. Someone who had what it takes all along, and only had to recognize it themselves.
If that first song I wrote was a call, this was the response. An uncertain melody that finally found its way to solid ground.
I blink before my eyes get misty in front of Ben. “Thank you.”
Ben beams. I beam right back. Not just because of the song, but because of the reminder.
Whatever happens tonight doesn’t matter, really. I have everything I need right here. Thunder Hearts by my side. Sam’s love infused in every note of that song.
But most of all, I have myself. Whatever it takes to get through this night—whatever it takes to free myself of Seven, and rebuild Mack & Sam—I’ve had it in me from the beginning. I’ve come too far not to believe in myself now.
“You know what?” I say to Ben. “We’re going to head in now, too.”
Ben lights up, using one arm and his full body weight to yank the door open for us.
We all laugh at his enthusiasm, which doesn’t let up for the whole block it takes for us to get to the side entrance.
He’s still blasting “Golden” from Lizzie’s phone even when security comes to meet us, refusing to leave with Lizzie until it’s played all the way through.
We high-five Ben and hug Lizzie goodbye as the song starts up a third time, trailing off as they walk toward the front.
“It’s damn catchy,” says Serena. “It’s too bad you can’t sing that onstage.”
“Yeah,” I say, and then abruptly stop.
Maybe I can’t sing that song, but “Golden” isn’t the only gift Sam gave me. In fact, the other one may just be a secret weapon. I reach into my bag, a slow smile curling on my face.
It’s been an entire lifetime of trying to spin my wheels for other people’s sakes. Trying to make my parents care. Trying to make the wrong people stay. Trying to be the type of performer the label wanted, even if it meant letting them call the shots between me and Sam before we met.
Seven was my first chance to break away from expectations. But Seven only existed in the dark. Seven only existed because of the hurt other people caused. Now is my first chance to claim myself and do exactly what I want.
“You have a plan?” Serena asks.
“No,” I say, laughing. “Maybe. Shit!”
Serena raises her eyebrows, amused and relieved. “Well, this ought to be good.”