Chapter 14
R enee hoisted the bag of gear up her shoulder, where it was fighting with the strap of her backpack, and rang Lola’s doorbell.
As soon as they’d gotten back from Denver, Renee had called Micah for a meeting.
“I’m cutting what’s on the schedule for Tuesday,” she’d said.
“Why? The dog rescue will be a great humanizing moment.”
“Because as much as Lola loves dogs, she doesn’t volunteer at dog rescues, Micah,” Renee said. “And I think you know that. I’m going to be working with her one-on-one.”
“Doing what exactly?”
“Humanizing her another way.”
“I suppose the dog rescue isn’t critical,” he granted. “Send me the details so I can tell hair and makeup. You’ll need some lights and we’ll get Alejandro on audio.”
“No hair and makeup, no crew. Trust me, I’m great at shooting solo. And hey—we’re keeping costs down, right?”
“Gloriana won’t love this,” he said.
“Then don’t tell her.” She’d added some Lola Gray–worthy positivity into her tone. “Come on, Micah, be a team player on this one.”
Now, the door swung open to reveal Lola, not an assistant or housekeeper or any of the staff she’d promised would be out of the house. Lola wore an oversize cardigan, leggings, and glasses.
“You wear glasses?” Renee said.
“Hello to you too,” Lola said as she led Renee into the kitchen. “I’m supposed to take a break from my contacts when I can. I was up late last night. Album stuff. You want a coffee?”
“’Course.”
Lola grabbed a mug. Renee watched her, not even bothering to set her stuff down.
She couldn’t get over how Lola’s doe eyes looked even larger than usual behind the lenses.
Her hair loose and long, the unconscious way she swept it out of her face, and how the sleeves of her sweater bunched up at her wrists.
She looked like Saturday morning. Renee was overwhelmed with a vision of Lola tucked into the corner of a couch, her glasses slipping down her nose as she filled in the crossword puzzle, the two of them playing footsie.
Lola pressed a few buttons and the smell of coffee filled the kitchen. “I don’t think it’s fair to hold someone to promises they made after you pressured them into using drugs.”
“For the record, you were fully sober when we set this up. If you want to back out, that’s cool. But I do think this is what the film needs. If it doesn’t work, I’ll cut it. Worst-case scenario, you spend the day with me.”
Lola handed her a mug and leaned against the counter beside Renee. She scrunched up her nose. “Gross.”
“Come on, you know you love me,” Renee said.
Lola let out a laugh and her eyes darted away. Suddenly Renee was acutely aware of how close they were standing and how empty the house was.
Lola cleared her throat. “I need to put my contacts in.”
“Keep the glasses,” Renee said. “The fans will think they’re adorable.”
N OW , AS R ENEE followed Lola into her studio, anticipation fluttered in her belly.
She and Lola had planned on focusing on Lola’s mu sic: her process, the stories behind her songs—the artistic, personal things she might not want the whole crew around for.
Renee felt as if she were being admitted to an inner sanctum.
The studio was so much cozier than Renee had imagined.
Sun streamed through huge windows onto a pillow-packed couch and a fluffy sheepskin rug.
The room was full of the stuff of Lola’s music: a white piano, the rack of guitars, a shelf of shiny gold and cut-crystal awards, a computer hooked up to a mic, a keyboard, and some additional gear.
Lola flopped down on the couch while Renee set up the camera, then triple-checked the SD card, batteries, and backup batteries.
She attached a mic to the camera, then set another recorder on the coffee table as fail-safe.
She cracked her knuckles, then her neck.
If this worked how she was hoping, she’d finally have something of quality to show Dragan.
She might even be able to drop the staged shoots entirely.
Lola yawned, then rubbed her temple under the arm of her glasses.
Yes, this was what Renee needed: Lo, playing with her phone and her cheek smushed against the couch cushion, a little tired and undone. If Renee could keep Lo in that place, away from the show-pony version of herself, this could work.
Renee hit record. “Lo, can you explain where we are?”
Lola lifted her eyes, the wrist holding her phone going slack. Renee braced herself for Lola Gray to return and present the room like an overeager Realtor.
But instead, Lola arched an eyebrow and said, “This is where the magic happens.”
Renee blushed .
“Just kidding,” Lola said, pushing herself off the couch. “Most of the time I use it for songwriting.”
“I—um—you know I’m recording, right?”
Lola burst into giggles. “You should see your face.”
“I don’t need to, because I know it looks entirely professional.”
“I’ll go again.” Lola straightened up, but to Renee’s relief she didn’t bring out that high-gloss sheen. “This is my home studio, where I write most of my songs.”
Lola gave a tour. As she did, she sounded—normal.
Like she was talking to Renee, not a reporter or her management.
She explained that the awards displayed in here were only the ones she’d won for songwriting, with the one exception of the prize she’d taken at the Fellows High School talent show their freshman year.
After the pageants her mom had put her in, it felt like the first thing she’d won for herself.
She showed off a letter she’d received from Elton John after her second album, dried roses preserved from a bouquet from Stevie Nicks.
Lola stopped at a glass-fronted cabinet full of notebooks. She had one hand clasped behind her neck, the other hidden in the sleeve of her sweater. “These are my journals.”
“Like where you do the actual writing?”
Lola grinned. “Yes, the actual writing. I use the notes app on my phone too, but there’s nothing like working the song out on paper.”
“There must be a hundred notebooks in there,” Renee said, staring at the cabinet.
“I haven’t counted, but they go back before Seventeen Candles .”
“You always had a journal with you back then.”
Lola’s dark eyes darted to Renee. “I got made fun of enough for it.”
Renee shifted uncomfortably. She hadn’t made fun of Lola herself—at least not to Lola’s face—but she’d never stopped anyone else from doing it either. “I’m sorry. I kind of hoped you’d forgotten about that.”
Lola’s hand slipped from her neck and she looked directly into the camera. “It might shock you, dear viewer, but I was not terribly cool in high school. Right, Renee?”
“I wouldn’t say terribly cool,” Renee said carefully. “You had other priorities.”
“Come on, you can admit it. I was different. Even you didn’t like me in high school.”
Renee flushed. “You probably don’t remember, but back then I didn’t like anyone .”
“I remember,” Lola said quietly.
Renee wished she wasn’t holding the camera. “I really am sorry. If I’d known better, we could have been real friends. I was too busy being an idiot.”
“It’s fine. I was halfway out of Fellows anyway, and you had a lot going on.”
“So did you. That’s not an excuse.” Renee’s ribs were suddenly too tight. “Anyway, I like you now, enough to make up for it.”
Lola was looking at her with her lips parted, her eyes round. Renee hastily angled the camera at the journals. “Can we look at them?”
“At my journals?”
“No, no—I mean, let’s film you looking at them.”
“They’re sort of private.” Lola hesitated, her fingertips light on the latch of the cabinet door. “But … all right. Why not?”
H ALF AN HOUR later, Lola sat on the floor, her old journals fanned around her.
Renee couldn’t believe Lola had allowed her this.
She understood exactly how personal an artist’s notebooks were, that they carried the unrefined contents of your heart and mind.
The other artists Renee knew were devoted to a singular style of notebook, imported from places like Japan or Germany, and could not create without them.
Renee herself preferred a specific Finnish brand with dotted pages that she imagined would fit in at a film archive.
But Lola, whose notebooks probably would end up in an archive, had begun writing songs before she knew how artists were supposed to behave.
Her notebooks were in all shapes, colors, and sizes: floppy college-ruled things with stickers on the cover, fancy leather-bound sketchbooks, staticky black-and-white composition books, girlish diaries with tiny locks.
The spines were cracked and bindings bent, corners battered and covers peeling.
Renee thought of her own notebooks, stored under her bed in Fellows; even the used ones looked nearly as pristine as the day she’d unwrapped them.
Lola got to her knees and pulled out a thick accordion file folder. “This is where I keep most of the scraps.”
“The scraps?”
Lola fluttered her hand as if everyone knew this term. “When you have an idea, so you just grab an old envelope or whatever? It’s excessive, but I like to save everything I can.”
“You’re saying you can write a whole song on an old envelope.”
“Sometimes you have to.” She rummaged through the file and pulled out a subscription card from a magazine. It was covered in cramped writing, some of it crossed out, other parts circled. “That’s ‘On a Dime.’”
Renee was gawking at Lo, but she couldn’t help it. “On a Dime” was from the last album. It hadn’t been a single but charted anyway after a sped-up bit of the chorus, where Lola almost growled— you wanna see me turn on a dime? —went viral. It became her first dance number one.
And Lola had written it on a literal piece of trash.
She held the card up for the camera and explained, “I was on a plane somewhere and we were held on the tarmac, and it came to me.”
“The whole song ?”
Lola smiled sheepishly. “In that case, yes. I recorded the demo on my phone before we even landed. But that’s not how it usually works.”