Chapter 39
R enee booked a glitzy Sweet Sixteen for mid-February on a word-of-mouth recommendation after her first bat mitzvah.
It felt good to be filming again, now that she wasn’t racked with guilt and stress.
Sure, the videography of this party wasn’t making it to the Criterion Collection, but it mattered to these people.
The birthday girl cried with happiness, her friends showered her with hugs, and her dad gave a speech about how proud he was of the young woman she was becoming, which brought a tear to Renee’s eye too.
Once the dancing started, the DJ played a lot of Lola’s songs. Renee just clenched her jaw.
When “Star Sign” came on, the girls went bananas.
Renee willed herself not to avoid the pain of hearing it. She trained her camera on the birthday girl, capturing how she and her friends sang every word.
Then “Starcrossed” played. Of course it did.
For a moment, Renee was lost in memories. This song was precious, and like most precious things, Renee’s love for it threatened to overwhelm her.
But when she forced her attention back to the action on the dance floor, Renee found herself grinning.
The girls were really losing it now, the boys forgotten.
They were grabbing each other’s hands and spinning in circles and clutching their chests as they belted out their own hopes of finding love like Lola had.
The song brought them so much joy . They didn’t care who it was about, or that its love story had ultimately fallen apart, or even that it was pretty queer, if you knew what to listen for.
Renee could tell that the girls would love this song forever.
They’d listen to it when they ached over a crush or fell in love or got their hearts broken.
They’d remember the ecstatic belonging they felt right now, dancing in their party dresses with their best friends.
They might even play it for their own little girls one day.
The song would always be Renee’s—after all, she could play back memories of almost every scene Lola referenced in her lyrics—but it was theirs now too.
As “Starcrossed” wound down, Renee realized she really did have those recordings. She’d filmed almost all the moments that Lola had included in the lyrics.
Once Renee had imagined it, she couldn’t get it out of her mind.
She knew exactly how the fragments of footage would piece together.
She’d surrendered the hard drives with the film’s official footage back in L.A.
, but she’d backed up a lot of it on her own drive as a precaution, plus she had everything she’d shot on her phone or her own camera.
In her car after the party, Renee checked if there was a music video for “Starcrossed” with a knot of dread in her stomach.
Thankfully, there wasn’t. Renee couldn’t handle seeing their love story played out by anyone else.
But her search turned up a few results she didn’t expect, from Lo-Lites up in arms about the song.
Queer Lo-Lites.
Renee felt hot all over as she read the posts.
The song’s lyrics were too queer-coded to have registered with mainstream homophobes, but the sapphics had caught every reference.
One person said it sounded like a Mad Libs of lesbian stereotypes.
But instead of embracing the song, these same fans despised it as gay pandering from a straight artist. If Lola wanted to make queer music, she had to come out, otherwise it was cultural appropriation.
Renee didn’t think that was how cultural appropriation worked, but the public’s lack of media literacy was the least of her concerns.
Renee drove home intoxicated by an emotional cocktail of genuine rage mixed with the burning desire to take Lola in her arms and hold her.
After all the speculation and conspiracy theories, Lola’s queer fans were rejecting her?
Everyone had their own challenges to face when they came out.
Queer people knew that, yet they dared to act like they were experts on her situation.
They’d never had to deal with millions of people publicly debating their sexual orientation!
Although, Renee realized as she parked her car, hadn’t she herself been guilty of the same thing?
She’d dismissed what coming out meant for Lola’s business.
Seeing the reaction of Lola’s queer fans made Renee sick, but she felt sure that Lola had considered this.
Lola considered everything. If she hadn’t felt comfortable enough to share it with Renee, that was Renee’s fault too.
She made it to her room and dropped her gear, morose again. How could she have not understood? She was about to throw herself on her bed and cry, again, but wallowing in self-pity wouldn’t make things right with Lola.
At least she could let Lola know she still cared.
Renee dried her eyes and opened her computer.
A T 5 A.M. , she attached the finished video to an email and wrote out a brief message, but didn’t send it. Lola probably didn’t want to hear from her, let alone watch her music video, and if she did, she’d probably think Renee was still trying to pressure her into making the film.
She closed the computer and went to sleep.
When she woke up, it was early afternoon. She watched last night’s work. In daylight, it was a little ridiculous. So sweet and sincere and romantic, it was the kind of thing that might play at a wedding while Renee rolled her eyes through the whole thing.
It was the kind of thing Lola loved.
Still, she hesitated. Then her eyes caught on the top right of her screen, on the date.
It was Valentine’s Day.
Renee hit send.