15
Sasha
At the Channel, people worshipped Heather Erin. Not adoringly, but fearfully and hopefully, the way some people pray. There was a tiny opportunity to ascend, though you were much more likely to be damned.
Meet the person who raised me.
Heather Erin, who’s currently embroiled in defending her client, the international pop star Augustus Ash, on the world stage in a celebrity trial. Presumably, she’s also perturbed by my absence, maybe infuriated, but Augustus tends to require a little more maintenance. Usually, I’m the good child. The ignorable one. And my note said I was fine. Though I doubt her concern is for my well-being so much as my image.
As Admirer, Augustus and I have made Heather Erin wealthy and powerful, and she’s made us famous (and wealthy and powerful). She wasn’t the one who scouted me and my brother and signed us to the Channel, but she was the one who switched us over to the music side of things. She got us the contract that goes until I’m twenty-one. I owe her, because I was dying on the soundstages in the Channel’s warehouses. I’m not good with my face on camera. I can’t lip-sync. The helmet absolutely saved me in music videos.
Now I sit in the back seat of Cyprus’s station wagon with no helmet on, windows down, going to someplace called Falafel ’Til Dawn.
“It’s an absolute staple,”
says Lillian.
“Oi, and you’re an expert on that, eh?”
says Quinn in an incredibly iffy approximation of a British accent.
“Bloody fuckin’ ’ell, your wanker ancestors can’t cook a wee bit.”
Lillian pretends to look offended.
“You can’t just say British expressions and call it an accent.”
“Bullocks,”
says Quinn.
It takes me a second to get the courage to join in.
“Loosely Australian at best.”
Quinn laughs.
“My point exactly. But this place is open late. It has falafel. That’s all you can dream of. My dad orders it for every occasion.”
“That’s because it suits every occasion,”
says Cyprus. She changes lanes without glancing at a mirror.
“Can you bug him to send me those grant forms?”
“My dad’s an arts council grant person,”
says Quinn for my benefit, which I appreciate. He talk-sings.
“I got all the
connections / connections / really just the one con-nec-tion,”
not really answering Cyprus.
That’s the sort of talk my own dad would have liked. He cared most about art when it intersected with business. He was sick and fading out during Admirer’s ascension, but he got to witness some of it. He died just after Augustus turned eighteen. I’m glad he didn’t live to see the charges and trial. My mom too, though she died when I was baby — before I remembered her well enough for it to be tragic to me. The fans still like to frame my life that way. My alleged sorrow is very alluring, apparently.
My dad would have made an uproar about the career implications of my absence. Now I wonder if Heather Erin has even told Augustus that I’m gone. Since he’s my guardian, she might be obligated by the law, though I’ve seen her step right over that red tape a lot of times. After all, the more people know, the higher the chance of the world finding out. Which would endanger me. So she’d claim she simply couldn’t tell Augustus, for my safety.
Heather Erin is fabulous at seeming like the good guy. Here’s her trick: she tells you what to do and makes it seem like it was your own choice. If things go badly, she blames you. If they go well, it was her, and now you’re in her debt. When she cues you to laugh, you laugh. More importantly, when she cues people to buy, they buy. When you say something seems wrong, she says.
“It’s just business.”
And if you want something different, she says.
“Why aren’t you grateful?”
She was always trying to shape how I saw the world.
To her, Quinn, Cyprus, Lillian and me would be a collection of amorphous promotional problems to be solved. These are the same thoughts that go through my head, like trash you can’t ignore floating in a stream.
Lillian’s going to have to have a tidier, prettier, more feminine look if she’s going to continue that punk thing. Got to make sure she’s appealing to some statistical concept of average straight men. Male gaze and such. Sexy punk girls should wear dark eye makeup and the remnants of tights. As the conversation goes on, it sounds like Lillian’s dad is British. Heather Erin would like that, but she’d be less happy with someone who won’t follow orders. Who might call out problems. Heather Erin only gives voices to people she thinks she can control.
Cyprus is White and skinny, which to Heather Erin looks like possibility. Except for Cyprus is too tall. Tall enough to make a male co-star look short. The way she moves isn’t right, not seductive enough, and Heather Erin would want to unteach Cyprus’s fashion. Incorrect proportions and facial asymmetry. Heather Erin thinks Cyprus could maybe die early in a B movie, but she’s not the final girl.
Quinn’s got so many marketing problems that he’d have trouble getting hired as an extra. He’s not a person the Channel elevates. At best, Heather Erin gives Quinn sitcom potential, side character, only if he passes within the Channel’s frameworks of masculinity. She’d use words like complexion and commercial potential to mean her actual thoughts of not white enough and looks Middle Eastern.
Then she’d say.
“That’s just the numbers talking, not me. If he was Latinx the way Isabelle is, we could use him as an ethnic wild card.”
As in relatively fair skinned, as in colorism. So she’d be sure to add.
“Christ, this industry’s a cesspool, but what can you do?”
These things are usually said by the people who have the power to do something.
Instead, she’s the one who made Isabelle change her name to a “classier”
spelling, aka more French.
Oh yes, and we’d all meet the latest in absurd body standards. In a TV show, we’d still be eating at Falafel ’Til Dawn, but after each shot, we’d spit out our food instead of ingesting it.
Last, Sasha.
See here, I catch myself. Better late than never. Even when you know the way someone views the world is wrong, it takes a while to unlearn what you’re surrounded by. A lifetime, maybe. There are tendrils of intruding thoughts, irrational prejudices, disgust toward yourself and everyone who doesn’t check an improbable list of boxes that shouldn’t need to be checked.
I’ve been working on recognizing the trash and cleaning it up. On not trusting the thoughts or using them to define value. Even if what happens in my head was put there by someone else, it’s still my responsibility. It’s selfish, but I didn’t seriously start throwing away what Heather Erin had handed me until I sorted out the nonbinary thing and started directing some of the hate I’d learned at myself.
I felt repelled by me.
I guess it was the first time in my life I’d experienced any of the internalized prejudice I had against other people. Now, I’m not pretending I couldn’t have been nonbinary at the Channel at this point in my career. I’m an extremely wealthy, powerful White superstar. Layers of unearned advantages. But every fragment of yourself you give to someone like Heather Erin is a fragment she tries to turn into money. She’s Queen Midas. Sometimes the gold touch kills, but at least you’re rich.
I will not have my gender and sexuality picked apart by a marketing team.
I had to leave. To ditch the lies and learn who I am, and most importantly to grab a few precious moments like this.
We’re piling out of the car in front of the busy glow of Falafel ’Til Dawn. I’m trying to absorb everything about these people and this night. To start out open, start out listening. That’s how they’re treating me.
Pop music is about being able to be understood very quickly. Hear the song for the first time, and by the second chorus you know the words. Stardom is the same. You see a celebrity in one movie, and you’ll recognize them in everything else they’re in. There has to be continuity, rigidity.
Well fuck that.
Okay, actually I love pop music, but it’s a metaphor.
The restaurant’s built in the style of a diner. There’s a long counter with tall stools and a huge menu above it written in Arabic and English. There’s music playing tinnily from a speaker somewhere toward the back of the room. Cyprus is bobbing her head to it.
We head toward one of the cracked red booths. Quinn and Cyprus take one side and leave the other for me and Lillian. She gets there first but doesn’t seem to want the inside seat. Instead, she makes a sweeping, exaggerated bow and says.
“Why please, after you.”
“Such chivalry,” I say.
“I would never be chivalrous. It’s a patriarchal long con.”
She sits next to me and immediately starts fiddling with the saltshaker, screwing the lid on and off.
“But since you’re our esteemed guest, let us do the ordering.”
“You do look esteemed,”
says Quinn to me.
“Does anyone ever look at you and say, them-there’s a sharp dresser?”
asks Quinn.
“They/them, them-there? Anyone?”
We all groan, but I like how comfortable they are with my queerness. Lillian asks whether I’.
“punk enough to be vegan.”
I shake my head and she orders what sounds like a ridiculous amount of food.
Quinn puts his head on the table.
“My puns are utterly wasted on you three.”
Cyprus pats Quinn on the head.
“There, there.”
Lillian turns to me with a serious mouth but smiling eyes.
“If you make a dad joke too, I will end you.”
She slams the saltshaker down for emphasis and the lid flies off, sending salt everywhere. A couple people at the counter glance over. Lillian’s laughing too loudly and apologizing and brushing salt off the table and the booth and me but then apologizing for that too.
“It’s not the first time,”
I say without thinking. Suddenly, I find myself halfway through a revamped story about how Augustus, who I just call my older sister, dumped an entire one of those big things of diner sugar on my head as a kid.
“Where are you from?”
asks Cyprus, and as soon as I say, she goes.
“Oh, you’re the music one. Quinn said he met an excellent music person. Okay, weigh in on something here. Do you listen to Admirer?”