Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Her numbers didn’t look good.
Twenty thousand copies of her EP were sold in the first week. She’d been staring at that figure long enough that it stopped feeling like a number and started feeling like the truth.
Zena had been scrolling through her phone with one leg folded under her on the studio couch, moving through comment sections on various social media sites.
She knew she shouldn’t look, but she did anyway.
The two singles she’d dropped were getting the most attention, and not all of it was bad, but the EP was getting picked apart in ways that made her stomach sit low.
She put the phone face down on the cushion beside her. And went back into the booth and sat on the stool in front of the mic.
The thing nobody told her about putting her art into the world was that people would consume and criticize it as they saw fit. She had fans, but not the ones she wanted to connect with.
Her mother used to tell her that a woman who didn’t know what she stood for would spend her whole life being shaped by whatever room she walked into. Zena hadn’t understood the message when she was younger. She was starting to know, but she was afraid it might be too late.
She hadn’t been eating. Hadn’t been sleeping.
Just refreshing streaming numbers and reading comments from people who weren’t even her target audience.
She couldn’t identify her target audience anymore.
She had been wasting her time chasing what the label told her was trending, and the EP was the result.
She knew it. The comment sections knew it.
“Hey, you ready?” Freddy’s voice came through the booth mic, pulling her back into the room.
“Yeah.” She lifted the headphones back over her ears, then stopped. “Actually, give me a minute.”
She set them back down.
Freddy nodded through the glass and leaned back into his chair without a word.
She was still staring at nothing in particular when the studio door opened.
J-Rock walked into the studio, hands already sliding into his pocket the way they did when he was about to ask her for something. She’d learned to read that gesture in the first month of being signed. It meant whatever came next wasn’t really a question.
A girl had followed him in.
Zena looked up.
She was light-skinned, maybe an inch or two taller than Zena, with a head full of short wild curls dyed blonde that somehow worked well on her.
She was pretty, she could admit that. She was wearing a red crop top that left very little to the imagination and shorts that fit like they’d been sewn onto her.
She looked like she couldn’t decide if she was a tomboy or an Instagram model and had landed somewhere in between.
What Zena noticed most was her eyes. They moved over the studio the way someone’s eyes move over a room they plan to own.
Out of the booth, she stood in front of them, waiting for the ball to drop.
“Hey, Princess.” J Rock said in a mellow tone. “I want you to meet someone, our newest artist, who has just joined the family.”
Zena gave the girl a quick smile. “I’m Princess.”
The girl just looked at her. Not unfriendly exactly, but not warm either. She gave a small wave and kept looking around the room, as if making a mental catalog of things.
“This is Velvet and the reason I brought her by,” J-Rock continued, shifting his weight, “I was thinking you could maybe…be like a mentor. Let her sit in on a few sessions, get her feet wet, ya know?”
Zena looked at him. “A mentor?”
It was moments like these that she wished she could just cut her losses with the label and disappear. But she couldn’t.
“Bad choice of words.” He held up a hand. “More like a cosign. Someone to help her get acclimated.”
“Right.”
“I think what he means,” Velvet said, cutting in smoothly, “is I just need someone to help me get comfortable with everything.” Her hands moved in a slow circle, gesturing at the room and the booth.
J-Rock pointed at her. “Exactly. That.”
Zena held his gaze for a moment. She’d been signed for less than a year, her EP was underperforming, and they were asking her to cosign someone new.
“Sure,” she said, her tone flat.
J-Rock’s shoulders dropped. He said he would check in later, gave Velvet a nod, and was gone.
The door clicked shut behind him.
The studio felt different with Velvet in it now. Velvet hadn’t moved toward the couch or the chairs. She just stood near the door, still doing that thing with her eyes.
Zena picked up her phone again and looked at the screen.
“You can sit down,” she said.
Velvet smiled for the first time as she sat on the couch. “Thanks.”
Zena slid back into the booth, took a seat, and put the headphones over her ears. “Freddy. I’m ready now.”
Velvet didn’t have much of a digital footprint.
That was the first thing Zena noticed when she started looking. No Wikipedia pages, no press features, barely anything on her social media beyond a handful of carefully curated posts that told you nothing about who she was or where she came from. Everything was an aesthetic.
She dug deeper and found a SoundCloud project from a few months back. Six songs, a project called Reality Check that had collected maybe a few hundred plays total. She put her earbuds in and listened to it all.
Velvet could perform. She had a presence. A confident one, but the vocals weren’t there. She could hear the autotune in all the tracks. If she were honest, her sound was almost a copy of what Zena had been doing.
She put her phone down and stared at the ceiling.
Six songs and a few hundred plays on SoundCloud.
That was Velvet’s resume four months ago.
Now she was opening for a show, and her name was attached to a music festival slot that Zena had been lobbying her management for since she signed.
To top it all off, she was sitting in every one of Zena’s studio sessions like she was already being groomed to take her spot.
It didn’t make sense. Zena had been making music for years before anyone at the label looked at her twice.
She had the catalog, the live experience, and the audience she had built from nothing.
She had done everything right, or at least tried to, and her EP was at 20,000 copies while Velvet was about to perform in front of 100,000 people on a stage that was supposed to be hers.
What did Velvet have that she didn’t?
She was still stuck in her head, scrolling through social media, when she heard the front door open.
Tate came in carrying a handful of shopping bags. He crossed the living room, dropped the bags beside the couch, and kissed her on the forehead in one continuous motion.
“What were you doing?” He was already moving toward the TV remote.
“Nothing.” She locked her phone and leaned over to look inside the nearest bag. Clothes, mostly. “You didn’t get me anything?”
“Come on now.” He reached into one of the bags without looking away from the screen and pulled out a hoodie, tossing it to her.
She caught it.
It was neon pink. Oversized, and not in the way she liked it. She held it up and checked the tag. Two sizes up from the size she wore.
She looked at it for a moment. Then folded it in her lap.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Mm.” His eyes were already on the game.
She sat with the hoodie on her lap while the TV filled the room with commentary.
She thought about how to explain to someone why this bothered her without sounding ungrateful.
She couldn’t. He’d gotten her something, hadn’t he?
That was the point. That was what he’d say if she brought it up.
I thought about you. I got you something, didn’t I?
But he hadn’t thought of her. He’d thought about the idea of her.
A version of her who wore neon pink and didn’t notice the size, something he’d picked up on his way out of a store after spending all her money all day.
The distinction felt small from the outside. But from the inside, it was everything.
She got up quietly and took the hoodie to the bedroom. Tossing it on the bed, she stepped out of her clothes and into the bathroom to shower.
The hot water cascaded down her body as she thought about the state of her relationship.
She and Tate had been together long enough now that she knew the shape of him.
All his habits, the way he moved in the world, the things he was good at, and the things he would never be.
She loved him, but the reality of who he was still crashed against the version of him she actually needed.
The ring was on the dresser when she came out of the bathroom. She stood in front of the mirror, a towel wrapped around her, and looked at it without picking it up.
She wore it only in public because not wearing it required a conversation she didn’t have the energy for. It had become part of her image now, the pink diamond to match the pink aesthetic the label told her was her, all of which had slowly replaced the version of herself she’d started with
But nevertheless, she wasn’t ready to call it what it was. She would continue to do whatever she could to prevent going back to square one.
She got dressed and went back into the living room, where Tate was still watching the game, and the shopping bags were still on the floor where he’d dropped them. She sat beside him, and he put his arm around her without looking away from the screen.
She was right where she wanted to be, and for a moment she almost believed it.