Chapter 5
L ola was leaving LaGuardia in the back of a black SUV.
Her phone lit up with a text from Claudia: a photo of her and Josh sipping cocktails with little umbrellas under a cabana.
Lola grinned. Nothing made her happier than Claudia’s happiness, and her sister’s smile hadn’t dimmed in the week since the wedding.
The wedding—the night of the wedding.
Lola’s face heated.
She kicked herself again for giving in to her desire to take Renee to bed.
She didn’t feel ashamed, not at all. The NDA she’d picked up off the floor of the hotel that morning was ironclad—though it had been punctured by Lola’s heel in her rush to kiss Renee.
Lola just worried that for the rest of her life, whenever she thought of her sister’s wedding, she’d think of how intoxicating it was to finally get the taste of Renee on her tongue, the feeling of Renee’s fingers snaking into her hair, how Renee had called her Lo , which no one ever did.
How could Lola let her memories of her sister’s day be overwhelmed by a one-night stand?
Lola massaged her temple as the New York skyline came into view.
Perhaps how wasn’t entirely a mystery.
All the years since she’d last seen Renee had made no difference. Lola’s body hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to look at Renee and course with longing.
When she was a teenager, her feelings for Renee had come out of nowhere, like thunder from an unseen storm.
Their childhood friendship had faded with the start of high school, as Lola’s commitment to her dream began to consume all her time and attention.
Then sophomore year, she had come back from a disappointing trip to L.A.
and gone to pick up the missed assignments Renee had collected for her.
When Renee had opened the door, Lola saw that she’d hacked off her hair, in retaliation, Renee said, for her mom forcing her to remove the eyebrow piercing she’d done herself.
There on the Feldmans’ stoop, Lola had felt like she was seeing Renee for the first time—not as a childhood playmate, but as her own person, rebellious and tough and unbearably cool.
Renee was angry at everything, because of course she was—Lola knew what her dad had done.
Lola had wanted to pull Renee against her, soothe her pain, and taste a little of that wildness.
Back then, it was just a massive unrequited crush, the kind sixteen-year-olds wrote a million songs about and then got over. But in all the years since, Lola had never been able to move on.
She still had to sing about it every night.
Half the tracks on her debut album, Seventeen Candles , were about Renee, including her breakout hit, “Jean Jacket.” Or, not about Renee, but not not about her either.
Lola’s early songs were about the romance of teenage longing: lust, pining, heartbreak, and hoping that the cool girl next door in her jean jacket would finally, truly see you.
Renee hadn’t. Neither had anyone else. Lola had spent high school obsessing over her career, not going on summer-night drives with the top down and her hair streaming in the wind, like she sang about.
That first album was so rich with yearning because it was about how badly she wanted things that never happened: dances she’d had to skip, dates she was never asked on, kisses no one gave her.
Falling hard into the kind of love that changed everything, when she’d never fallen into any kind of love at all.
It was easy to hide the gender of whomever she was singing about, when she wanted to: use you and we and the listener filled in the rest. She’d known even then, before she was truly in the business, that being bisexual wouldn’t help her get where she wanted to go.
Lola was still so careful, discreet. It wasn’t like her to hit on a woman surrounded by wedding guests, when only a tiny handful of people—her parents and Claudia, select members of her team, a few of her closest friends—knew she liked women at all.
But when she saw Renee waiting in the parking lot, she knew it was her last chance to live out that teenage dream.
The SUV hit a pothole, jolting Lola back to reality.
She’d had her fun. That night was an ending, closure for the past—not the beginning of something new.
Lola forced her mind to the writing session she had calendared for the afternoon. Maybe she could channel all of this into a song. “Jean Jacket, Part 2”—the fulfillment of that unrequited crush from the original, coming full circle. She opened a note on her phone and typed,
it’s ten years later but we’re better older
the way you looked at me tonight
made me want to be bolder
Lola could feel it coming together—snapshots of moments, the beginning of a chord progression.
Something about your soft skin, legs tangled in the sheets —
No, that was obviously feminine: a man’s legs didn’t tangle in the sheets.
She edited it to we’re tangled in the sheets .
A chill washed over Lola.
It didn’t matter how she changed it: everyone would say it was about Ava.
Lola Gray lyrics were famously diaristic, the kind of songs that made listeners feel like confidants.
Lo-Lites spent hours picking apart her words, trying to connect them to Lola’s life.
Lola had enjoyed it once as a special bond with her fans.
But the breakup with Ava changed things.
She couldn’t bear the thought of her fans plundering her lyrics for evidence of her secret love, her secret heartbreak.
Already, in the two songs she’d released about Ava, they’d been alarmingly good at finding it.
Lola deleted the line. The vision of the song crumbled.
Lola rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t realized that writer’s block felt like a physical block: any way she turned, her mind hit another dead end.
She hadn’t realized because she’d never had writer’s block before.
Lola didn’t have jaw-dropping vocal range. She couldn’t dance her way out of a wet paper bag. She was pretty, but sex appeal wasn’t her major selling point. An exec had once told her that she had a likable sweetness, but wasn’t “100% charismatic,” like his other top artists were.
What Lola had was songwriting , a gift for finding the right words and pairing them with a melody that kept them dancing in your head for days.
At least, that was what she used to have.
She hadn’t finished a song in months.
In more than a year.
An incoming call from Gloriana saved her from staring at the empty space she knew she’d never fill with a song.
“Good news! We’ve got a director ready to go and we just need your sign-off. Once that’s done, things will start moving quickly, since we’re already behind.”
Lola suppressed a groan. She couldn’t even remember why finding a director had taken so long.
It was grossly unfair that ignoring the documentary couldn’t stop it from happening, especially given that Lola was not just the star, but had formed a production company, on her team’s recommendation, for this project.
She and Gloriana were executive producers, which meant they handled big-picture things like securing a director, while a producer named Micah ran the day-to-day.
Streamy was already signed on to distribute the finished product to its 75 million subscribers and had posted most of the film’s budget.
“Great,” Lola said. “Who is it?”
“Chess Waterston.”
The seat belt tightened against Lola’s chest as she lurched forward. “ Chess Waterston? No. Absolutely not.”
“Lola—”
“I’m not working with Chess Waterston.”
“He did the film about Tatiana Jones that got tons of eyeballs. Super viral.”
“Because it was all about rehab and her second marriage. It barely mentioned her music.” Lola squeezed her eyes shut.
“If this is about keeping private things private, do not worry. We’ll get tons of days with Nash on the calendar. Chess will never know. It will be a totally safe space.”
Now Lola’s eyes flew open in a burst of frustration.
Gloriana knew she was bisexual. After all, Gloriana kept track of the NDAs.
She had managed things with Ava, kept the label off her back, and—in the wake of the secret breakup—found Lola the perfect PR boyfriend.
Currently she and Nash Walker were a year into a love affair manufactured to grab headlines.
The issue wasn’t whether Lola’s sexuality was off-limits for the documentary; Gloriana knew it was off-limits everywhere.
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Lola said. “Haven’t you heard the rumors about him?”
“Those are rumors.”
“Rumors always come from somewhere.” Lola forced herself to pause.
She had to put this in a language Gloriana understood.
“The optics will be terrible. It’s only a matter of time before those rumors hit the press and lawyers—or the police —get involved.
Look up his blind items. I don’t want my name mentioned in them. ”
“I hear you,” Gloriana allowed. “But we need to start filming ASAP. We’ve committed to a timeline for Streamy—they want to see a full cut three months before the album comes out. That puts us at March.”
“But I’m still writing the album.” Technically, true. “It doesn’t have a release date yet.”
“We were planning for June. You know that, Lola.”
“We discussed June. I said it felt fast.” Lola fought to keep the anxious pitch from her voice.
“You did express that, but as I recall, you also said you could make it work. So let’s do that, okay? We’re obligated to Streamy now for March. We’re lucky Chess can hop on board. Directors aren’t usually available on such short notice.”
“We need to find someone else who is.”
Gloriana clicked her tongue. “I’m not saying that you’re being difficult, Lola, but others could see this as difficult.”
I’ve earned the right to be a little difficult , Lola wanted to say, but she clenched her teeth. She didn’t want to be that person, who got famous and lost perspective. She was the executive producer. This was her problem to solve.