When I Picture You

Chapter 1

Renee scanned the afternoon crowd as she weighed grounds for cold brew.

Prince’s had been a major hangout when she was in high school and needed to get out of her house.

It was still strange to be behind the counter at twenty-seven, even after nine months there.

When she moved back to Fellows, Michigan, from New York City, she’d hoped to find work that made use of her nearly complete MFA in film.

She’d applied with every videographer in three counties.

The one company that gave her a chance hadn’t sent her anything after her edit of a Sweet Sixteen party.

It didn’t feel fun, they’d said, but Renee hadn’t been going for fun .

She’d been going for real , and the birthday girl’s parents had fought right in front of her camera.

She’d taken the job at Prince’s as a stopgap, but now it was her main gig.

Outside Prince’s big front window, a pair of teenage girls squealed.

Here we go , Renee thought. The girls were taking selfies, which meant Renee had maximum five minutes before they disturbed the peace inside.

The girls barreled into the coffee shop.

One was tall with sharp elbows and shoulders; the other, shorter, had curly hair and a smattering of acne.

They both wore the exalted look of pilgrims to a sacred site.

The shorter one clutched her phone to her heart, while the taller one filmed her clutching her phone to her heart.

Renee really hoped they wouldn’t cry. Girls like this sometimes did.

“Did you know that—there’s, like—” The taller girl stumbled over her words.

Her friend took over. “There’s this song, by Lola Gray—”

“We really, really love her!”

The shorter girl continued, “And she wrote a song, ‘My Ever-After,’ and she, like, mentions this place?”

The pair waited for Renee’s reaction with their jaws slack.

“This is the place from that song,” Renee admitted.

At Renee’s confirmation, the girls practically began levitating in their white Air Force 1s.

The taller one asked, “Does Lola ever, like … come in here?”

Renee shook her head. “Lola Gray probably lives nowhere near here.”

“She lives in L.A. Hollywood Hills,” the girl corrected, as if it were normal to know where a total stranger lived.

“But, like, has Lola come here recently ?” the shorter girl pressed.

“Why would she have come here recently ?”

The girls had a silent conversation using a rapid-fire series of micro-expressions.

“We heard that she’s here this weekend because her sister is getting married, and we thought …”

Renee gave in. “And you thought she’d get coffee where some boy once promised her a happily ever after?”

The taller girl gasped. “You do know the song!”

“We get fans like you all the time,” Renee said with an eye roll.

“The picture over there is as close as you’re getting to Lola Gray.

” Renee pointed to a sun-bleached photo near the door, of Prince’s owner with a fine-boned young woman with tan skin, big eyes, and a cascade of chocolate-brown hair.

She was clutching a copy of her first CD and smiling so widely that you could have conducted a full dental exam based on the photo alone.

“If you want to hang out here, you need to order something.”

Renee had just finished making the girls’ iced strawberry matcha lattes when Kadijah walked in. Their long black braids were tied back and the deep brown of their shoulders glistened with sweat under their halter top. In their hands: much-needed bags of ice.

“Kadijah to the rescue!” Kadijah said brightly as they heaved the ice onto the counter.

Renee slid open the freezer, ripped open a bag of ice, and dumped it inside. “Just in time.”

Kadijah cocked their head at the girls, who were taking selfies with the picture of Lola.

“More Lo-Lites?” Kadijah said, using the name Lola Gray fans had coined for themselves.

Renee rolled her eyes. “Coming out of the woodwork for the wedding.”

“Did you tell them?”

Renee’s face puckered, but she didn’t dignify the question with an answer.

“They would freak if they knew you were going,” Kadijah said. “ I’m freaking and I’m just a regular adult Lola Gray fan. I’m still mad you didn’t get me a plus-one.”

“Plus-ones are for dates, not coworkers, even your favorite co-worker.” Kadijah was the hottest polyamorous non-binary person in a twenty-five-mile radius, but Kadijah and Renee were strictly close friends.

“I’d rather be there with you than with my mom and her boyfriend.

Weddings are just a load of performative sexist traditions, like your father giving you away to another man, or—”

Kadijah cut her off with a dead-eyed stare. “Renee Feldman, you are not going to weaponize feminism to distract me from the fact that you are going to chill with Lola Gray. Tonight. Without me.”

Renee held her finger to her lips and shot a glance at the Lo-Lites. “I am not going to chill with her. It’s been like ten years since we last talked, and even before that, we haven’t been friends since eighth grade. She probably doesn’t even remember me.”

“You grew up next door to her ,” Kadijah said, as if Renee weren’t perfectly aware of that fact. “Of course she remembers you.”

“Even if she does, it’s her sister’s wedding. She’ll be busy.”

Kadijah sighed dramatically. “It’s just tragic that you’re getting a private concert from Lola Gray when I, an actual fan, have never seen her live. Her last tour sold out in minutes.”

“Lola’s not performing. I know I’m repeating myself, but it’s her sister’s wedding .”

“Exactly! She’s going to sing for their first dance. You have to Face-Time me.” Kadijah swatted at Renee with a rag. “Don’t give me that look, Miss I’ve Never Been a Fan of Anything . Lola’s the greatest pop star of our generation.”

“I don’t pay attention to that stuff,” Renee said.

“I need you to stop saying things like that if we’re going to stay friends. I’ve been following Lola since You’re Next! I begged my mom to let me vote for her.”

“I barely remember that,” said Renee, who remembered it vividly.

Lola’s run-up to second place on the talent competition show had been all anyone in Fellows could talk about their junior year.

Kadi jah, who’d still been a middle schooler in Dearborn, had missed the frenzy.

“I have better things to do than keep track of Lola’s career. ”

Sure, Lola was a chart-topping recording star who wrote all her own songs.

She’d won the Grammy for Best New Artist at eighteen, then been nominated for every album since.

Rolling Stone had first dubbed her “The Patron Saint of Teenage Girls” and, when her later albums proved she had staying power, elevated her title to “The New Princess of Pop.”

In the same twenty-seven years on planet Earth, Renee had only managed to earn a BA from Kalamazoo College and admission to a documentary film MFA program (after a rejection the year before).

She was hoping to add the MFA itself to that list, but she’d taken a leave of absence just shy of her thesis project, during which she’d moved back in with her mom.

If you stacked up the achievements of the former neighbors against each other, the scales tipped slightly in Lola’s favor.

Not that it mattered, because Lola had probably forgotten Renee existed.

Renee slipped her apron over her head and grabbed her tote bag.

“I’ll take opening shifts for a week if you promise to tell me everything about tonight!” Kadijah called after her, but Renee was already out the door.

T WO HOURS LATER , Renee sat in her car outside a brick building that had once operated as a bottle factory, and now operated as a wedding venue called the Bottle Factory.

Heat radiated off the asphalt of the parking lot.

Under the hot, wet blanket of humidity, everything felt too bright and fuzzed out.

Renee could visualize how she’d capture it on film: a touch of overexposure to convey the heat, the pair of men smoking at the edge of the frame, the focus on the older woman in a sequined dress fanning herself on the steps.

Maybe she could make her thesis documentary about how wedding venues served as liminal spaces, constructed to create the illusion that love stories were real.

What an insipid concept , the critical voice in her head muttered. Asinine. Plebeian. Anemic. The primary thing Renee had learned in film school was a new vocabulary of fancy insults. Not only did she now know what those words meant, she applied them to herself regularly.

Renee remembered the girls she’d seen at Prince’s earlier, the way they’d filmed themselves: smiling easily and crowding their faces into the frame. They’d turned their camera on everything and anything. If they were here now, they’d just be filming, not sitting in a hot car thinking about filming.

She slumped forward and set her forehead against the steering wheel. Had it come to this? Was she really jealous of teenage girls making content for social media?

Her phone buzzed.

MOM : Are you running late?

We have a seat saved.

Renee wanted a fast-forward button to smash and skip over the wedding altogether.

Since her parents divorced when Renee was fourteen, she’d understood that real life wasn’t like a Lola Gray song, all drippy romance and happy endings.

The tune might be catchy, but the words were ultimately meaningless.