Cherry
Alaska, 2024
Imagine you’re Cassie Griffin, told herself, as soon as the plane’s wheels had touched down, screeching, on the runway in Anchorage.
She’d gotten a seat in the very last row, and it took her forever to make her way to the front of the plane, using her phone to film herself as she went.
Think like Cassie, she repeated as she hustled through the airport and, finally, collected the keys to the rental car the show had arranged for her (she wasn’t yet old enough to rent one on her own, and she suspected money had changed hands to allow it).
Your bandmate, your sister’s husband, your writing partner, is dead.
Your band’s broken up.
You’re running.
remembered how she’d pestered her mother about the CD she’d seen in the used bookstore.
Who were the Griffin Sisters? What were the names of the other people in the band? Where did they live? Were they her friends? Did any of them have kids, and could meet them? Could she invite them to her birthday party, which was going to have a unicorn theme?
Zoe hadn’t wanted to answer.
“The Griffin Sisters was a made-up name,”
she’d told .
And, “It was all a long time ago.
I don’t want to talk about it.”
It had been Aunt Bess—Zoe’s great-aunt, ’s great-great-aunt—who’d finally told her that the Griffin Sisters were ’s mom and ’s mom’s sister.
“My mom has a sister?”
had asked.
“Where does she live? And who are the Griffins?”
“Griffin was a made-up name,”
Aunt Bess said, smiling a little.
“And yes, your mom has a sister.
She moved away.
She lives a long way from here.”
“What happened?”
Aunt Bess had looked troubled as she smoothed ’s hair.
“The band broke up, and your aunt went away.
It was . . .”
Aunt Bess paused.
“Very hard.
And sad.
A hard time for everyone.”
wanted to ask a million more things, but Aunt Bess’s expression was so grave, her face and body both stiff, the same way ’s mother’s face and body got right before Zoe told her to stop pestering her already and go find a coloring book or a game.
And so had waited.
Eventually, the Internet had filled in more of the blanks.
had learned more of the band’s history, and more about her aunt, although, as she got older, she was both bemused and insulted to learn that nobody seemed aware that Zoe Griffin—now Zoe Grossberg again—had even had a baby.
Nor did anyone seem to know where Cassie Grossberg had gone.
It hadn’t taken long for ’s imagination to turn her absent aunt into a kind of magical, musical fairy godmother: a woman who’d understand and support her, the way her own mother did not.
Instead of a gown and a horse-drawn carriage, imagined Cassie waving her magic wand and bestowing fame and fortune; connections and phone numbers; a clear path to musical stardom.
If could ever find her aunt and ask her for her help.
As she waited in line to leave the airport parking lot, thought, again, that she still couldn’t believe how lucky she’d gotten.
Years ago, she’d set up Google Alerts for Cassie’s name and for any mention of the Griffin Sisters.
Every time there was a new mention—whether it was in a magazine or a newspaper, a Pinterest page or some crackpot’s blog—’s inbox would ping.
The morning after she’d made it to the finals, she’d been in her hotel room and had checked the day’s links, thinking they would be the usual mix of stuff that she’d already seen: old articles that had been reposted, videos of singers who were not Cassie covering her songs.
But the third link had led to a Subreddit and a grainy snippet of a video of a woman in a supermarket singing “Silent Night.”
had plugged in her earbuds, thinking it would be the typical non-Cassie nonsense.
But seconds after she hit play, felt the whole world stop.
She froze, holding perfectly still, like the song, and the singer, were a soap bubble, and the tiniest move would cause it to pop.
“...all is calm, all is bright.”
“That’s her,”
whispered to the empty room.
“Holy shit, oh my God, that’s. . . .”
She’d turned up the volume and listened to the snippet again, just to be sure, and then she’d gone running to find Braden, to show him what she’d found and get an objective confirmation.
“Is that really Cassie Griffin?”
she’d asked, staring at her cracked phone screen, taking in the details—the big black parka with its fur-trimmed hood, the snow boots.
“Tell me I’m not making this up.”
“Yes.”
Braden’s voice was hushed and reverent.
“That’s really her.”
That was the good news.
The bad news: the comments that had been posted in the ninety minutes between viewing the video and its disappearance had quickly ID’d the performance venue, which turned out to be the Safeway supermarket on Sterling Highway in Homer, Alaska.
had printed out a map of the region and, with a highlighter, had drawn a circle with a fifty-mile circumference around the supermarket.
If Cassie was hiding, as surmised, she wouldn’t live in Homer, or anything close to an actual city or town.
She’d be off the grid, in the woods, in one of the camps or cabins that dotted the forests and the foothills of the Kenai Mountains.
A needle in a haystack, told herself ...
but Cassie was an extremely shiny needle.
And was extremely determined.
The Next Stage producers had, as promised, paired each finalist with a mentor.
’s had been a woman named April Lange, who was twenty-two and whose one hit song had gotten popular mostly because a big city’s Major League Baseball team had started playing a remixed version at games whenever anyone hit a home run.
April was reasonably accomplished and friendly enough, but her songs didn’t speak to the way the Griffin Sisters’ music did.
If she performed one of their songs—the music that was her inheritance, the songs that were literally part of her bloodline—she’d win, for certain.
So she’d petitioned for an appointment, explaining everything to Sebastian’s assistant, who had eventually brought to make her case to Sebastian himself.
“Zoe Griffin,”
Sebastian had repeated, looking over the way a man in a grocery store might have inspected a melon.
She braced herself, waiting for him to ask about her aunt, or her father, but, instead, he just said, “I saw the Griffin Sisters in Las Vegas.
It was twenty years ago, but I still remember—they were incredible.”
His expression, which had been, briefly, fond and nostalgic, shifted back to calculating.
“It’d be huge for ratings,”
he mused.
“Would your mother sing with you? Even if we can’t get Cassie, that would be something.”
tried not to grimace at the idea of her mother being her performing partner, when Cassie was the one she wanted. “No,”
had said.
“She wouldn’t be interested.
But I don’t want her.
I want my aunt.”
Never mind that she’d never met Aunt Cassie, and hadn’t known where to find her.
Sebastian had been intrigued enough (and, figured, ratings-hungry enough) to give her seven days, ten thousand dollars, and instructions to film her quest, so the producers would have plenty of background video to use when the show aired.
Those same producers had given instructions on how to give them what they’d need (“Shoot horizontally, vertically, in HD, 4K, at sixty minutes of footage, from as many angles and POVs as possible!”).
When Sebastian dismissed her, had racewalked back to her hotel room, where Braden had been waiting to hear what the producers had said to her.
“So what are you going to do?”
he’d asked.
Braden himself was planning on returning to his sensitive singer-songwriter roots for the final round, now that his closest competition had been sent home (the day after it had happened, had joined him on the hotel’s roof, for a ceremonial burning of his cowboy hat).
pulled her suitcase out of the closet and began gathering her clothes.
“I’m going to Alaska to find her.”
Braden looked thoughtful.
He belly flopped onto her bed and looked at her with his chin cupped in his hands.
“What was it like?” he asked.
“What was what like?”
she asked, even though she knew what he was asking.
It was what everyone asked when they learned her mom had been in the Griffin Sisters.
They wanted stories.
Details.
Up-close-and-personal tales of being raised by a rock-and-roll goddess.
Had been taken on tour, given a kid-sized pair of noise-canceling headphones, perched on a bodyguard’s shoulders so she could watch concerts from the wings? Had she attended the Rock her famous mom had actively worked to thwart her.
“You don’t know what it’s like,”
Zoe would say.
“The music industry chews up girls and spits them out.
You’ll get hurt.
I won’t let it happen.”
had spent years trying to tell her mom that things were different now.
Fame, she’d tell Zoe, had been a rare commodity twenty years ago.
These days, anyone with an Internet connection and talent—or a scandal, or just a good story—had a shot at becoming a bold-faced name.
“Famous for nothing,”
Zoe would scoff, about the reality stars and Instagram influencers, the Kardashians and the Teen Moms would tell her about. “No,”
would say.
“You’re wrong.
They’re not famous for nothing.
They’re famous because they’ve made themselves interesting enough for people to care.
That is a talent.”
Zoe would just roll her eyes.
As the line of cars inched forward, creeping closer toward the person in the booth to whom they’d have to present their paperwork.
found herself thinking about the day they’d moved in with Jordan.
She remembered sitting on her new bed, marveling at how big it was, and how clean.
A dresser, and a closet, and a desk with a lamp, all for her! A bookcase, with just her books! She and her mom had shared a dresser, back in the apartment.
There’d been one desk, and it had been strictly off-limits.
She’d been running her fingers along the pink-and-cream rug when Bix had come in without knocking.
He’d stared at her, with his big, dark eyes and too-red lips, in a way that made her feel like he’d dropped an ice cube into her shirt and left it there to leak chilly drips down her spine.
“This was my room,”
he’d said.
didn’t know how to respond.
Was he angry at her? Did he want the room back?
“I’m sorry,”
she said.
He’d licked his lips in a way that made her stomach feel strange and her skin go cold, and he’d looked at her, a long, slow, insolent kind of look.
Then he’d walked out the door.
Bix was creepy.
But what could she have told her mother? That he didn’t knock? That he was too quiet? That he looked at her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable? That, sometimes, she’d notice things missing from her room, little things like pens or books or earrings, a single shoe, and she was pretty sure he was sneaking in and taking them?
knew what Zoe would say: His mother died, .
He’s having a hard time at his new school.
Zoe would tell that she was imagining things and that if there were things missing from her room, it was probably due to ’s carelessness.
So, after a while, stopped trying.
She kept quiet, and did her best to stay away from her stepbrother, which got easier when he went away to boarding school, but she couldn’t avoid him completely.
And whenever they were together, she’d feel him looking, his gaze like a sweat-damp hand at the small of her back.
One more reason for her to leave; one more thing pushing her out the door.
“License and rental agreement?”
asked the woman in the tollbooth.
handed them over and double-checked her directions to the Safeway in Homer.
“One way ...or another ...I’m gonna find ya ...I’ll getcha, I’ll getcha, getcha,”
she sang softly to herself, following the highway for what would be, according to her phone, a five-hour drive.
She had a suitcase, the winter coat she’d purchased secondhand at a used clothing store in West Hollywood, a checking account with nine thousand dollars left of the money the producers had given her, and a stack of fifty copies of a flyer she’d made up on the seat beside her.
There were two photographs, side by side, one of Cassie in the Griffin Sisters’ heyday, the other an enlarged still from the supermarket video.
’s own name and cell phone number were printed at the bottom.
She had a week.
Seven days, to track down and convince Cassie to come to Los Angeles and sing again.
Sebastian had made it clear the show wouldn’t be paying April to hang around as a backup plan.
Failure was not an option.
By charm or by force, by begging or guilt-tripping, by promising Cassie an actual kidney or her theoretical firstborn child—whichever Cassie would prefer— was ready to do whatever it took.
She was going to convince the most fabulous of the two Griffin Sisters to step back into the limelight, where she should have been all along.