Chapter 3
“We need to take action. A cease-and-desist. Sue him into oblivion,” I say, pacing the length of the room, hands tearing through my greasy brown hair.
“You need to calm down,” Sigrún warns from her chair in the corner.
“Calm down? Calm down? My ex-boyfriend deserted our band, became an overnight star on a song about how bad I am in bed, then stole my lyrics and sang them on an internationally beloved talk show viewed by millions every night. Where in that absolute disaster is calm supposed to fit in?”
I’m not sure if it’s my hysterics or the truth of what I say, but Sigrún backs down.
Even Kale has sense enough to not be an absolute tit at the moment.
He never played with Connor, so this isn’t as appallingly personal, but he has worked on old songs we’ve been trying to repurpose for our EP.
Who knows how many others Connor has planned to snatch from us?
He’s probably ready to drop a surprise album of my life’s work on Tuesday.
What twists the knife even deeper is that of all the songs Connor could have stolen from me, that was the one he picked.
I wrote it when I was eighteen and heartsick, reeling from my first of many breakups with him.
We’d played our first London show a week before, and I caught him snogging a girl in the bathroom after our set.
I stayed in bed for days, devastated and inconsolable.
The only moments I felt remotely human were when I was writing about the pain eating away at me.
When I completed the song, I foolishly played it for Connor before band practice, expecting some sort of vindication and empowerment like when Stevie Nicks sang “Silver Springs” at Lindsey Buckingham on live TV.
But instead of staring at me with remorse and heartbreak and need, he stared at me like I was a proper idiot and he was embarrassed for me and of me.
“It’s a bit much, don’t you think?” he’d said, a few seconds after my voice broke on the final lyric. “All the theatrics … Comes across rather desperate. I don’t think it would play well for a crowd.”
Connor had needled at my songwriting since we started working together, but I’d always seen it as him pushing me to new levels of creativity.
But that was the first time he was breezily brutal, showing me how excessive my feelings are, how stupid they make me look when I share them.
It was then that I learned to tailor away the gross enormity of my emotions.
We got back together a week later.
With shaky hands, I click into a social media app, needing to stare directly into the pit of hell. I only have to type C-O-N before Connor McCabe pops up as the first suggestion, an obscene number of hits about him from the last hour noted in the search bar.
I wish him the worst, I really do.
Can Cubby Clark fight? Cuz i’ll go at anyone that hurt my bb Connor McCabe
no but did you guys *listen* to those lyrics? The man is fucking brilliant
Connor McCabe is the only man that could ask me to smile and I wouldn’t punch him in the face
I know we’ve all moved on from his first single and are making his new song our entire personalities but the offer will forever stand for Connor McCabe to fill my empty vase any day.
Okay but fr are we not going to talk about how Cubby Clark was wearing blue in that first pic Connor posted of them on IG and then deleted? “A bolt from the blue”??? Like PLEEEEEEASE
I’m sorry but Connor McCabe could spit in my face and I’d be like thank you daddy i’ll have another. it is truly insane to me that Cubby Clark would ever fuck that up like girl what?????
My phone drops from my numb fingers and I press my forehead against the wall, praying for a black hole to open up and swallow me.
“How could he do this to us?” I whisper.
The question loops around my mind, rage chiseling through the hurt.
“Seriously, how could he do this to us?” I whip around, eyes frantically searching for Harry and Darcy, the ones who have been there from the start.
“We wrote that together. Those are my words. Our music. How could he violate something as sacred as that?”
Harry’s face is stricken as he looks back at me, slowly shaking his head. His lips part but no words come out, and he drops to his piano bench, elbows propped on his thighs as he buries his head in his hands.
Darcy is similarly collapsing in on herself from her spot on the floor, legs tucked to her chest and forehead pressed against her knees.
I have the impulse to go to her, to wrap my arms around her shoulders, to sit next to her and let her lay her head in my lap, holding her tight until the world stops spinning out of control.
But my anger churns up a restlessness, something sharp and desperate with snapping jaws in my chest, moving my feet.
I pace the room, vision blurred. I feel Sigrún’s eyes tracking me, Kale’s and Skull’s too, but I can’t look at them.
I refuse to acknowledge the pity on their faces, the reality that we’re even more behind now with this album than we originally thought.
Sigrún grabs my hand on my next pass. “Take a beat. Sit down and we’ll talk this through.”
I shake my head, slipping out of her grip.
I can’t stop. Stillness is the scariest thing to face.
If I give in to the stillness, it’ll leave the door wide open for sadness, which will take me to my knees, lay me on the ground, and never let me back up.
It’s the law of inertia. It’s better to move—vainly try and satiate that manic restlessness—than be trapped under the weight of numbness.
“Let’s look at this rationally,” Kale pipes up. “Cubby, I get it. I get why you’re upset and it’s a really shitty thing he’s done, but it doesn’t actually change that much for us.”
This stops me in my tracks. If looks could kill, Kale would be dust in the wind right now.
He holds up his hands, gaze steady but not challenging. “I swear I’m not trying to fight you. I’m not. But we have to take emotions out of this for just a second as we figure out the next move.”
Take out emotions? Take out emotions? Music is nothing but emotions. It’s the language of feelings we don’t have names for. It has the power to lift you up or drag you down. It’s memories set to melodies. Without emotions, there is no music.
I’m about to say all this to Kale, but he clasps his hands in front of his chest in a mock beg. “I’ll let you yell at me in a second but please let me get this out.”
I scowl but wave him on.
“Here’s what we know: Connor stole your song. There’s no getting that back. And it also means he’s not above stealing other songs.”
I nod, teeth grinding together.
“Sorry, but couldn’t we make a statement? Go to the press with the truth?” Skull surprises me by asking from the corner.
We all look to Sigrún. She shakes her head, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“It wouldn’t do much. You never recorded or released the song, so there’s no real legal action.
Making a claim that the moment’s hottest pop star stole a song from a no-name band—quite literally up until yesterday—he was previously a member of would only be setting Cubby up to be called the crazy, vindictive ex. The optics aren’t good.”
“Fuck the optics, it’s about telling the truth,” Darcy says from her spot on the floor, indignation flaring crimson across her cheeks. “Those are Cubby’s words. She deserves the credit for them.”
My gaze locks with hers, something fierce and frightening in its intensity burning in her eyes. She doesn’t smile, or soften, or give me an encouraging nod, but that look lets me know she’ll always have my back. She’ll do whatever it takes to make things okay.
Sigrún shoots her a pleading frown. “I agree, Darcy. Believe me, I do. But I’m telling you the reality of the outcome.
It wouldn’t hurt Connor or get the music back to Cubby.
It would only increase public support and infatuation for him.
People love to be on the side of the ‘nice guy’ being publicly slandered by the ‘crazy ex-girlfriend.’ It’s awful but it’s the truth. ”
Bile burns up my throat, head swimming. Even before this new song, I would regularly get hate for being associated with Connor.
DMs and tags calling me a whore, a prude, a bitch.
YouTube comments on our old performance videos saying how glad they are that we’re broken up.
That I never deserved him. That he was way out of my league.
That I’ll end up miserable and alone. Strangers on the internet somehow hacked into the meanest, darkest things I whisper to myself in the bad times and confirmed they’re all true.
“We won’t make a statement,” I say, knees giving out as I fall into a chair. “But it’s too risky to include anything we wrote when he was around on our album.”
“Unless we drop the songs first, yeah?” Harry says. “We could put them out right now? Lay down four or five tracks we like well enough and put it out there?”
I shake my head. “Still too risky. We could put weeks into producing it for him to beat us to it. And I refuse to put out anything in an unpolished rush because Connor’s gone and strapped a ticking time bomb to our chests.”
Harry opens his mouth to argue, but Kale cuts him off. “Cubby’s right. We’ve been disconnected as a band as is, even before this was hanging over our heads. There’s no way we could even get an EP produced in a way we all agree on.”
“So, what, then? Where does that leave us?” Harry asks, an edge of desperation in his voice.
I take a deep breath, then another. It takes work to swallow down the anxiety knotting in my throat, pressing at my ribs, but I square my shoulders, meeting the eyes of each person in the room with a rueful look. “It leaves us at the beginning. So we better get started.”