45
Sasha
The most common question I used to get asked was.
“Why did you put on the helmet?”
It got to the point where the origin story was practiced. If I told it when Augustus was around, I even knew where he tended to jump in. I’d downplay certain things because I knew he’d exaggerate them. I had to start them off small or else he’d grow them to impossible proportions.
As part of Heather Erin’s plan to transform us into popstars, we were on a glorified musical talent show. One of those ones that thrives off reaction shots and judges being cruel to children and then passing it off as doing them a favor. A show premised on throwing people into a multi-round grinder, and whoever comes out alive is held up as worthy.
I’m somewhat more charitable when I describe it in interviews. Those judges are famous, after all. Surely they’re not needlessly sadistic. Surely.
I was thirteen years old. I was hyperventilating backstage, certain I was going to be sick and absolutely terrified of one of the two men sitting on the left. I couldn’t make eye contact with him. He kept saying good things about us and looking at me like he hated me. In interviews, I leave that out. I talk about being nervous to perform because it was the final round.
The thing is, the final round of that show is prerecorded. The headset mics are for show. People don’t like to know that. Augustus saw that I’d be a lip-syncing disaster if I was panicking. He saw his career in trouble, though in interviews he puts his arm around my shoulder.
“Couldn’t stand to see my little brother suffering,”
he says. I’d like to think there’s some truth to that.
He grabbed the nearest thing that could save us, a motorcycle helmet that belonged to our security guard. Full visor, dark and reflective. He named some famous musicians who wore masks and helmets and put it on my head. It was massive. The Channel always uses the only photograph from that performance where I don’t look like a total orb.
But I could see the judges’ faces and they couldn’t see mine, and that was enough. We won while I was wearing that helmet, our biggest spike in fame prior to Augustus’s trial.
I felt safe, invulnerable. I refused to take it off for days. The Channel saw an opportunity and made it my brand before I had time to consider whether I wanted to live like that.
As my face changed behind the visor, the idea of getting away started to form.
On tour, I sang everything live. Always. For me, it’s integrity and spontaneity. And it’d break my heart to do otherwise. As much as the helmet the Channel made for me was an expensive technical marvel with amazing internal microphones and sound technology, singing full voice without it on is a completely different experience. I only used to do that when we recorded, and now I’m on a stage with nothing between my face and the faces looking back at me.
I try not to spend the whole song looking at Lillian. She’s got a smile at the corner of her mouth. I understand. I loved seeing her jump around stage like she owned the place. It made me pull out all the show I’ve got stored inside me.
After this, no one is going to tell me what to change. No one will make me switch my clothes or tell me how to use my voice. I’m singing whatever I want. Singing for myself and whoever I want.
I hit the last note, and there’s a round of applause and a few cheers. Mostly from my table, mostly from Quinn.
That’s it — on to the next person. I leave the stage.
I used to be able to get the crowd to start singing something as I left, and they’d keep going even after the houselights came on. I imagined their voices echoing mine on the buses and cars as they went home, onward and outward, extensions of me sitting alone on the floor of a hotel room shower trying to feel connected to something.
I thought this would seem like less, but as I squeeze between people to get back to my friends’ table, I feel like I’ve done the performance of my life.
Cyprus points at her phone face down on the table as proof that she didn’t video.
“Only pictures,”
she says, which wasn’t exactly what I asked for. For her, that’s pretty big though.
“Incredible. Fabulous, even.”
Quinn sways to imitate a way I moved that I didn’t realize. The effects of wearing a dress and my head feeling weightless and not performing the male popstar.
Lillian says.
“Well damn, Sasha,”
when I sit beside her. She’s smirking at me, has to lean close and talk loud to be heard over all the voices.
“You do realize we’re at a bar, not Live Aid?”
“Do you?”
I say back.
She shrugs. I can feel it because she’s so close she’s touching my shoulder, justified by the noise around us.
She says.
“The room’s as big as you make it. You broke the walls down.”
I’m soaking in the moments before. Seeing her face made me want to sing my best, more than a stadium full of Admirer fans did.
She’s the entire crowd, all the voices carrying out into the world. She’s the one I want with me afterwards, backstage, in the taxi, tangled in the white sheets of a hotel bed.
After introducing the next singer, Christensen handshakes and hugs his way over to our table.
“I knew you kids were prodigies,”
he says.
“Is there already a band named Punk Prodigies? There should be.”
“But subversively,”
says Cyprus.
Lillian says.
“Because punk destabilizes the concept of ‘good’ music, rendering the category of prodigy without meaning.”
“That’s got to be from a book,” I say.
Cyprus shakes her head.
“Nope, Lillian can just talk like that.”
“And you,”
says Christensen, looking right at me.
“you can sing like all hell. Wherever you blew in from must have been sorry to lose you.”
Then he’s back to milling about, and I realize where I recognized him from.
Christensen worked for the Channel.