Chapter 50 Florence
The rage takes over, same as it did when I threw my guitar at Joni’s face, eager to break her plump, dewy skin wide open.
I’m on the stage, the spotlight blinding me, so hot it makes me sweat.
I slide out of my coat, letting it fall to the ground, and wrench the microphone from Andrew’s hand.
It falls to the floor with a sickening thump.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I shout.
“I was doing this for you.” Somehow, Andrew’s voice is even and calm. “Introducing the world to your new song.”
My hands are balled into fists, shaking with rage. “You said it was your song. I heard you.” The whole goddamn place heard him.
“It’s our song.”
“Our song?” I echo hotly. I’ve heard those words before, excuses not to cut me in on royalties for the words I helped write, the choruses and bridges I gave away.
“We’ve been writing it together.” Andrew’s voice is gentle, like he’s sorry I misunderstood.
He lifts the mic from the floor and turns to the crowd. When he speaks, it’s still in that achingly calm voice. “Sorry, folks, my friend here is having a tough time. She needs to get back to Rush’s Recovery.”
Phones are being whipped out. For a moment, I think they’re calling for help, but then I see the way the bar’s patrons are holding their screens. They’re recording.
No one tells you how strange it is to be famous, how disorienting it is when strangers think they know you, when they believe the lies told by people who’ve never met you more readily than the words coming out of your own mouth.
This isn’t how tonight was supposed to go.
“Why don’t we head backstage?” Andrew says to me. Slowly, like he thinks I might pounce if he moves too quickly, he bends to place the mic on the floor, but his other hand snakes up to grab my wrist lightning fast. He smiles at the crowd, but his grip is a vise as he pulls me off the stage.
Backstage turns out to be a storeroom: boxes of napkins and empty glasses, a bare lightbulb overhead. It smells sour, like spilled beer. My Doc Martens stick to the floor.
“ ‘Imposter Syndrome’ is my song,” I hiss.
“That’s not how I see it.” Andrew’s eyes are every bit as unblinking as Evelyn’s. I wonder if he learned that from her, part of his training after she hired him.
Maybe someone else would try to reason with him, explain that he didn’t write a word, pull out her notebook with the lyrics in her handwriting, no one else’s. But my tether—short under the best of circumstances—has snapped.
“Just try to pass it off as yours, Andrew. Once I’m out of here, I’ll release a statement—”
“If you come out swinging, it’ll only make you look worse.” God, I hate how calm he sounds. “They all know you’re in rehab for anger issues, an addict who can’t control herself.”
Fucking Callie.
“Do you even know what you’re doing here?” Andrew’s voice shifts, an edge taking hold.
“I came to sing my song,” I begin, but Andrew’s laughter cuts me off.
“I don’t mean at the Shelter Shack.” He speaks slowly like he thinks I’m stupid. “I mean at Rush’s Recovery. Your manager cut a deal with Evelyn. Everyone on the staff knows all about it.”
My stomach twists.
“Evelyn needed a high-profile client to boost her reputation.”
“Aren’t places like this supposed to be anonymous?”
Even the regular rehabs I went to before—they never told anyone I was there. And AA meetings, where anyone could come—no one tipped off the paparazzi, no one leaked a story to the press. There’s honor among thieves, my sponsor said, but now I’m facing a real thief, and there’s no honor to be found.
“Callie promised Evelyn she’d leak a story to the press about how Rush’s Recovery turned rock’s ‘baddest bad girl’ nice.” He uses air quotes, like he’s never heard anything so ridiculous. “Callie issuing that apology on your behalf—that was just another step in their plan.”
Their plan? “What about doctor-patient confidentiality?” I know I’m grasping at straws.
Andrew laughs. “You have to understand the condition Evelyn’s in these days.
See, she and her husband dreamed up Rush’s Recovery together, sold it to their investors—individualized, privileged rehab.
But then the old man cheated, and their joint venture turned into a weapon in their divorce.
Evelyn needs the investors to pick her to run it, not him. ”
“How do you know all that?”
“You were so eager for my intel a few days ago. Practically begged me to dig up dirt on Evelyn. What’s the matter? You don’t like the dirt now that it’s getting you messy, too?”
I shake my head, trying to make sense of everything Andrew is saying.
“Evelyn reached out to Callie after you attacked Joni Jewell,” Andrew explains, his voice smooth as silk. “She didn’t have to promise much to get Callie to turn on you. It’s not as though you’ve been making her a ton of money lately.”
Callie said this place was the best care money could buy. She had me saying it, too. She convinced my mom and my kid it was different, the answer to their prayers. They were fucking smiling when they sent me away, like they thought I’d come back a new person.
“You’re just some poor little rich girl.” Andrew’s voice shifts again, mocking me as he whines: “Boo-hoo my daughter hates me, my mom is mean to me.”
“Don’t talk about my family,” I say through gritted teeth. I’ve barely mentioned them since I arrived. Andrew doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
“Boo-hoo,” Andrew continues. “The music industry turned on me, my band hates me, my husband left me.”
Boo-hoo?
I didn’t cry when my daughter stopped speaking to me last year, just kept on talking because I figured eventually she’d at least tell me to shut the hell up.
I didn’t cry a decade ago when it became obvious how much she preferred my mother to me, or a few years before that when it was clear she liked her dad better, too.
Andrew’s liquid-brown eyes turn steely. Less than twenty-four hours ago, I thought this man cared for me. “How come you never say your husband is dead?”
Because he left me. He left us. Despite the heat radiating across my body, I shiver.
“People like you don’t need another break. It’s people like me who need a leg up, people without industry connections, no inheritance from dead husbands to fall back on.”
I came from nothing. My husband didn’t leave me a fortune, whatever the tabloids said about it. His bandmates refused to cut me in on the songs I helped write. I had to clear out my savings to keep the house.
God, he loved that house. He talked about growing old there. Losing it would’ve felt like losing him all over again.
“Everyone knows about you,” Andrew spits. “Fucked your way to a music deal. Married yourself famous. Let your husband write your songs.”
“No,” I manage. I can feel sweat dripping down the back of my neck, pooling between my shoulder blades.
“No one would believe you wrote ‘Imposter Syndrome’ anyway. Easier to believe it was me.”
I hate to admit it, but he isn’t wrong. A bad reputation is worse than no reputation at all.
Onstage tonight, he made my song sound good.
He looked nice onstage, too, at ease with the crowd.
Record execs will like him more than they ever liked me.
He’ll be an easy sell: handsome, young, from a small town. He told me he grew up outside Atlanta.
“You left your daughter to become her own kind of disaster. Evelyn says she’s sick.”
They’ve been telling me she’s sick for years. Doctors, therapists, my own mother—they all promised they could save her, but I see the truth. My girl wants to disappear.
“What’s her name again?”
“Don’t say it,” I rasp. I hardly let myself say it anymore. I barely even think it.
There’s so much power in a name. That’s why I changed mine all those years ago, the minute I left home, my mother’s sock-drawer money burning a hole in my pocket.
I squeeze my eyes shut. I don’t want to be here, in this dingy room that smells like stale beer and Andrew’s sour, angry breath. I want to be onstage, under the lights, introducing myself with the name I chose, the name Andrew’s never called me, singing the words I wrote.
“Evelyn told the staff not to use your stage name. Who do you think you are, giving yourself a name while the rest of us mere mortals make do with our parents’ choices?”
I didn’t want to be the girl from Yonkers with the mousy brown hair anymore, the girl whose father left, whose mother never approved.
I loved the name I chose. The first name: strong like a man’s, but undeniably feminine. After an artist who could paint skulls as beautifully as she painted flowers, filling her canvases with life and death.
And my last name, my family’s real name, before they anglicized and bastardized it to Bloom, taking away its true meaning. Not that Naomi ever appreciated what I did, bringing our real name back to life. Not even when I gave our name to my daughter.
“You know your phone hasn’t rung once since Evelyn had it confiscated? Your family doesn’t care about you. They’re not even thinking about you.”
His breath smells rotten, like something crawled up and died inside him.
“Everyone knows the truth.” Andrew’s face is so close to mine he could kiss me. I can’t believe that just a day ago, I wanted him to kiss me. His fingers are still wrapped around my arm. “You’re a wannabe hack who only got famous because she married a celebrity.”
I shake my head. People forget I released two albums before we got married.
“And then when you’d gotten everything you could from your husband, you threw him away. Bled him dry, then spat him out.”
No, I didn’t. I loved him. I wanted to keep him forever.
“Is that why you can’t stay sober? Can’t live with knowing that it was all your fault.”
I ball my hands into fists.
“It’s all your fault, Georgia Blue.”