21. INTERLUDE - So Happy For You （Really）
INTERLUDE - So Happy For You (Really)
Skye
The stream replay was going when I pulled it up. Too-big apartment, day two of the same sweats, Rosé I definitely wasn't supposed to be drinking alone on a Sunday open on the coffee table.
Here we were.
All these lights. Dancers in white. The screen cycling old Liora Fresh photos—back when she had the eight ball jacket and the mushroom bob and a perfection that only looks perfect in retrospect. Very respectful. Very emotional. I literally helped plan some of this.
I was supposed to be up there.
My phone was face-down next to the bottle. Still buzzing. People texting feel better! and so sad you couldn't perform! as if I'd caught a cold and not a bullet. I wanted to hurl it into the Pacific.
I posted the excuse yesterday. The virus lie. Like I was some regular person with bad timing and not someone whose manager had called to say, They're asking you to drop out, Skye. Do it yourself and save face, or they'll do it for you.
I didn't ask who they were. I knew.
Romi Dulce didn't ask. She made things happen quick, ninja-like, the way someone with real juice did.
The way she handled Niko at that label party.
One minute Niko was there, yapping too loud, the next minute security snatched her up by the elbow and nobody was allowed to say why.
Romi didn't show her hand. Didn't need to.
That was the move. Never showing your hand.
And now she'd done it to me.
Stacks Monroe was doing her intro verse when I tuned back in. She sounded incredible, obviously. The crowd was losing it. And I was on my couch watching the performance I was supposed to be in, feeling like the biggest idiot in California.
Cam came out in all black, hair laid. She looked good. She always did, but tonight there was an energy, like she wasn't performing for the crowd at all. Like she had a specific audience of one in her head.
Then the trade-off section hit.
The part that was mine.
The music landed on the cue. The dancers parted.
I held my breath—one stupid second where I let myself believe they'd gone with the safe version.
Some pre-recorded thing on the Jumbotron, dancers and lights and no third girl at all, because God forbid they admit they'd just cut me and kept it moving.
Please be a screen, I thought, like an idiot. Please be a screen.
Romi stepped out instead.
The crowd gasped. An actual gasp, audible through the speakers. I sat there with the wineglass halfway to my mouth and didn't move.
She wore a leather bustier, cutouts, iced-out bracelets, heels that put her at a different altitude. Her face was painted for a funeral she was throwing. Mine. She stepped up and took the room without asking.
The place went feral. Everybody on their feet.
And Cam—
Cam turned and looked at her. Even through the screen, I saw it. The way her face shifted. That smirk.
I'd been right about them the whole time.
I saw it at the afterparty. I saw it at rehearsal. I just didn't want to be right.
They started trading bars, circling each other, getting closer with every line. The safe choreography we'd blocked out was gone. They were chest-to-chest, in each other's faces, and it looked like they were about to throw hands.
Except I knew Cam. I'd known her since we were teenagers in a group that was always going to fail. And how she was looking at Romi Dulce right now, three stories tall on the Jumbotron—
That wasn't how you looked at an enemy.
I set down the wineglass before I dropped it.
The performance ended in confetti and lights, the crowd live, and Cam and Romi were standing close at the front of the stage and when Cam turned to her, Romi's face did a thing that she clearly didn't mean to let out.
I looked away.
My phone went off in a cascade. I didn't have to open it to know. The comment section had decided. The chemistry is insane. They're literally in love. The Romi and Cam era. I locked the screen. Tossed it on the couch.
Poured more wine.
The stream moved to backstage interviews. Stacks, then Cam, then Romi. Everyone asking about the collab, about the performance, about whether they'd work together again.
Nobody mentioned me. Not once.
Better nothing than a pity mention, right?
I picked the phone up and opened Cam's thread anyway. Stared at the empty message box. What I wanted to type was: you chose her over me. What I wanted to type was: I was down for you first. What I wanted to type was a lot of things, none of them sentences I could come back from.
My thumb hovered.
I closed the thread. Scrolled past the names that didn't matter, past the people already pretending they didn't know me.
I stopped on Bishop.
Two seconds. I typed:
u up?
Sent it. Then immediately felt pathetic when she told me she was working it out with Shi.
Shiloh. The same Shiloh that Cam used to get all weird about back when we were still good.
A fucking four-eyed nerd who probably had a spreadsheet for her vinyl collection and ironed shapeless hoodies to show nothing.
And somehow that's what Bishop wanted. That's what Cam wanted too, once.
Both of these lames out here losing their minds over a girl who probably still brought a Teen Titans lunchbox to the studio.
I sent a thumbs up emoji. Set the phone down.
Drained the rest of the wine straight from the bottle, because fuck it. The hell else did I have to lose at this point?
Cam had Romi. Romi had everything. Bishop had someone worth the text back.
And I had a failing single, a cease and desist I hadn't finished reading, and a special kind of patheticness that comes from losing your best eater.