Fake crowne, p.2
Fake Crowne, page 2
part #1 of The Crowne Brothers Series
This shit with Logan is getting old anyway. Having coffee with him and Ella in the morning. Chilling with her stepmom, who’s a cool lady, and her buddy Amilcar.
The thought comes… and it’s like getting T-boned by a car running a red light. I sit up as if someone just put a trombone to my ear and blew hard.
I like it here.
Shit.
I don’t want to leave.
Cursing facts that can’t be unknown, I get up and change the record to Max Richter. No words. No one telling me anything. Just da-da-DA da-da-DA over and over.
When I took my inheritance and split, I was hopeful I could make something of myself without my family connections. I went to Memphis, Detroit, Austin. As soon as I settled in, or even when there was a threat of feeling at home, I’d get a call from a friend in another city, or I took off to hear a new act and never came back. I left behind half-done deals and artists who trusted me when I didn’t trust myself.
Then I landed in Nashville, where I met Tamika, and settled in one place, built her the studio, and produced her music. Her leaving was bitter medicine. It tasted like my own.
I should leave again. Take to the road. See what I find.
But the pull to do that is gone.
I’m not attached to Los Angeles, but I like having my family close by. I like this back house. I like this corner of the garage and my old album collection. I like my fucking Pez-collecting brother and his knocked-up wife. Ella being pregnant reminds me that I also like babies.
I wrangle my phone out of my pocket and call Liam.
Here goes nothing.
Chapter 2
SKYE
I sing like no one’s watching.
Up ahead, the light goes red at the song’s chorus. I’m lit by the purple flashing neon of a smoke shop to my left with fill from the streetlights through the windshield. Perfect. I stop at the crosswalk and turn down the song so I can hear myself, instead of Tamika’s gut-punch voice.
I got this. All major scales. Auto-tuned to death. Slow tempo. Repeat, repeat, big uplift, and repeat louder.
The windows are rolled up, but it’s not as if I’m behind soundproof walls or anything. My old Toyota leaks sound like a colander leaks water, and as I hit the bridge with everything I’ve got, I worry that someone will hear me.
No. The city’s loud and I’m just a voice. I’m as good as alone. The guy in the crosswalk with the backward baseball cap and his hands in his jean pockets can’t hear me. I sing to him. To the wave of hair trapped behind the cap buckle, swaying with his stride.
“Don’t be scared,” I belt from the bottom of my lungs. “You know you’re safe with me. Don’t be sorry…” I close my eyes and put my hands over my heart for the big notes. Don’t be my friend, don’t be my… Don’t be don’t be don’t be…” The last e morphs into an oo sound so Tamika can stretch it into seventeen syllables, and every one of them is for the guy crossing the street with his hands in his pockets. I take my hands off my heart and stretch them forward, opening my eyes toward the end of the chorus.
He should be on the sidewalk by now, but no. He’s still standing there. In the whitewashed glare of my headlights, his eyes are a sharp, clear blue.
“Shit.” I gulp a bunch of air.
He’s my age or a tad older—mid-slash-late twenties—with a face that’s approachably handsome in the whitewash of my headlights. He puts up his hand to cut the glare and turns all the way around to face me. I don’t know whether to apologize, or shrug, or panic that a stranger heard me grabbing for the outer reaches of my range. Usually, the third option would choose itself by making me incapable of breathing.
Even though I wait a split second for the anxiety take over, it doesn’t. I count down. I’m fine. No panic at a stranger hearing my voice. No shit-sure belief that a rando can see through all my pretentions to the lack of talent beneath, thinking things about me that I won’t ever know, tying himself to me by his opinions. None of that.
Great. Fine. I’m not having an anxiety attack. But Crosswalk Guy isn’t moving. We’re looking at each other through the windshield, me in wide-eyed “what the fuck do you want?” and him with some kind of curiosity.
If he thinks he knows me, he doesn’t. I’m not interested in meeting a random guy in the street and I don’t want to play a game of chicken with him. Why doesn’t he finish crossing?
From behind, a loud blare jolts my attention.
The light is green. Crosswalk Guy takes a step in my direction.
Jesus Christ. The SUV behind me swings hard to get into the left lane, which is already moving, to the tune of screeching and honking.
I roll down my window and lean out. “Can you move?”
He just stares at me. It occurs to me that he could be having some kind of mental break.
“Please?” I add.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
What the… is this guy hitting on me in the middle of Wilshire and Western? What kind of psychopath behavior is this? It’s terrifying, but I’m not scared. I’m just angry. I don’t even tell him to fuck off. My actions will speak for themselves.
Once my head’s back in, I close the window. The light’s gone yellow, and I have a split-second opportunity to go, so I take it, swerving around him and through the empty intersection at the last second.
In my rearview, I watch him avoid getting hit by a car and run the rest of the way across. When his foot hits the sidewalk, I breathe a sigh of relief.
My mother acts as if Los Angeles is some kind of lawless dystopia.
Maybe she’s right.
Turning off Wilshire, I pull into the underground lot on Serrano Ave. I’d park on the street, but the lot is free if you bring a receipt from the karaoke place on the third floor, which is where I’m going. I park in the back so I don’t have to pay for the valet, which isn’t free no matter where you get a receipt from.
I reach for the phone in the passenger seat. As I disconnect it from the charging cable, my mother’s ringtone comes from it. I’ve owed her a call for days, and the call can’t go on too long if I’m driving, so I answer.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Oh, Skye!” My mother sounds pleasantly surprised I picked up. “How are you doing?”
“Fine.” Still a lie, but close enough.
“Did you get the package I sent?”
The box had all the forms, brochures, booklets, and directories I’d need to enroll in med school in the fall, when my one-year deferment ends. I checked for the earliest deadline for all of it, closed up the box, and shoved it under my bed before the anxiety exploded in my chest.
I’m not finished with Los Angeles. I haven’t done anything but make friends and keep a job making coffee. I’m not ready to go yet. And I like it here. I like it a lot.
“I got it. Thank you.”
“Do you need help filling any of it out?”
“Most of it is online. I can do it.”
“Your father’s excited for you. He says he’ll introduce you to the dean if you like. Make a smooth transition in.”
“Okay. That sounds good.”
There’s a pause. I should say something. Offer a bite of my day-to-day here or tell her I’m making headway with music, but I’ve been saying that for two years and every half step forward has seemed more meaningless as the clock ticks.
What made me think I could become a singer in twenty-four measly months? People with twice my talent take ten times as long.
“So,” she says. “Have you met anyone special?”
My entire brain snaps to attention. She hasn’t asked that in a long time. She used to bring it up when she wanted to know if that special someone was a man or a woman so she could either worry I wasn’t in a phase or hope it was permanent, depending on the special person’s gender. When her friends found out I was bisexual, she dared them to have a problem with it. If the ladies of the Grosse Pointe Women’s League wanted to judge, she could judge them harder.
She’s a complicated person.
“Define special,” I ask.
“You know what I mean. I was just wondering.”
She’s right. I know exactly what she means. Her worries about my sexuality have switched over to discomfort with the geography and precarity of my career choices. They’ve morphed into a need to make sure I had a solid career to salve the loneliness every “confused bisexual” must suffer from.
She wouldn’t accept anyone judging me, but that didn’t mean she understood me.
Like I said, she’s complicated.
“Wondering if I’m going to stay here for them?” I ask.
“Skye. Why do you always think I have some ulterior motive for asking about your life?”
Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m the problem. As mothers go, I could have done a lot worse.
“I’m not focused on that right now, Ma.”
“I know, I know. And yes. I’m sorry. I admit it. I worry you’re going to get attached and stay there.”
It’s hard to be mad at someone who cops to their shortcomings.
“It’s all right. I get it.”
“So, how is the singing going?”
“Honestly?” I sigh. If she can be honest, I can too. “It’s hard. Really hard.”
“What about that agent who signed you?” Despite her wanting me to come home and have the life she’s dreamed of, she’s annoyed on my behalf. She wants me to succeed as much as she needs me to fail my way into med school.
“Still hard.”
“Isn’t it his job to make it less hard?” I half expect her to offer to call Liam Crowne herself and give him a piece of her mind. How dare he not hand her beautiful, perfect, talented daughter the entire world on a silver platter?
She isn’t just complicated. She is—without a doubt—the most complicated person I’ve ever known.
“He’s trying, Ma. We’re all trying.”
Jeannie is already singing “Brokeback Blues” and Becca is otherwise taking charge of the entire operation, assigning songs so that we build slowly to a crescendo fifteen minutes before we have to vacate, and wind down by the time they kick us out.
Starsong Karaoke’s private rooms hold twelve people max. We have ten people so far. A bottle of vodka. A tray of wings. They set up three mic stands in front of the huge screen, give us access to thousands of songs in four languages, serve food and drinks, and let us sing our hearts out behind a closed door where no one can see or hear. When I got to Los Angeles, I assumed this cost a fortune. It doesn’t.
“You saved two spaces, right?” I ask Fátima, my roommate and manager at the Starbucks on LaCienega. She has long straight hair parted in the middle and a pretty little mole over her lip that I used to kiss when we were sex buddies.
“Yeah, who’s coming?” She squeezes a lime into her vodka and soda.
“Liam Crowne.”
When Liam signed me, it was such a boost to my confidence that I worked in the studio for three whole days. Then, knowing there were people who would eventually hear me… People I didn’t know… Strangers who would judge me based on their own feelings and thoughts and the kind of day they’d had instead of judging me based on my voice and what I was trying to do… It made me crazy. All I could see was their big eyes, their big ears, their invisible scowls. I’d never know what they said.
Tripping over that fear has been the story of my time in Los Angeles. Then Liam found me at a karaoke bar like this one, drunk enough to sing without the private room.
Liam has zero-anxiety status, which took his time and patience. He had enough of the second thing to make the first seem irrelevant. He believes in me, and after all the work he’s put in, I believe in him.
I’m fine with the guest list until Fátima reminds me of the math.
“And?” She wants to hear who number twelve is, and I’d made such an effort to forget.
“He’s bringing his brother.”
Fátima’s eyebrows go up a little. “He’s got four brothers. The builder, the CEO, the mysterious one, and—”
“Colton,” I say. “Which one is he?”
Jeannie finishes and it’s Evan’s turn to sing her jazz-style version of “I Will Survive.”
“Why do you look like that?” she asks instead of telling me which one is showing up.
“Like what?”
“Like all your blood stopped at your neck and made a U-turn back to your heart?”
“I forgot to be nervous until now. I don’t know him and he’s some kind of producer.”
I’ve crashed and burned with every producer Liam’s put me with. It’s not that I’m hard to work with or that my songs are bad. It’s the anxiety that attacks as soon as they bring in the musicians because I’m sure they can hear the flat notes, the utter lack of dynamics. They compliment me because they want to get paid. Or they want to get in my pants. Or they just want to get it over with.
Thinking about it makes me miss a word. Or a note. Or I cough. And sure, they say it’s normal, but all I can think about while I’m in the middle of the song is every place I could fuck it up.
Something in my brain decides the only way to avoid these horror scenarios is to stand there and do nothing.
“Okay, mija.” Fátima sits on the low table in the U of couches so she can face me. “Let me remind you of something about LA that I’ve told you a million times. There are all these rich fuckers living on the top of that hill, and I know as much about them as our neighbors. So yes, that family is rolling in it, and yes, they had, like, six babies in a tub of money, but Colton… he’s the worthless one. That boy’s a Bible story.”
“I’m sorry, Fátima, but that can mean a lot of things.”
She rolls her eyes. “He took his inheritance early and ran off looking for the ‘next big thing.’ Blew half of it throwing open-bar raves and most of the other half on lawyers.”
“Nothing criminal, right?”
“Stupid baby shit. Anyway. He spent another chunk building a studio because he did, eventually, find the next big thing.” She smirks at me. “Tamika.”
“God, I love her.”
“Well, so yeah. She came to Gavin McCormick with a demo, and he listened because a Crowne boy produced it, and—supposedly—it was all wrong. Like, everything wrong. But he heard something special and ‘bought out’ her contract. Or ripped it up. Or started fucking that Crowne boy’s girl, stole the song, all his ideas, made the exact same composition with exactly twenty-two percent changes, and anyway… that’s where the rest of the lawyer money went to.”
“Did he get anything?”
“Nada. Not a dime. Sad face.” She traces a frown. “I guess if you have that many kids, one of them’s going to be a fuckup, no matter how rich you are. You feel better?”
“I see what Liam’s doing, you know. He’s trying to save his brother and serve his client at the same time. Clever.”
“Stick with Liam.” She winks at me. “He’s got bad luck, but he’s not a fuckup.”
“Noted.”
Chapter 3
COLTON
Once I finished cleaning up, I took a nap, and now I’m really fucking late. Liam buzzed me seventeen times, and I slept through until the eighteenth. I brushed my teeth and ran here without stopping for a second except in the middle of the street because someone was singing in her car, and she was really something.
But I was in the middle of the street, and late, and anyone that good already has producers lined up out the door.
Liam’s waiting right outside the elevator. “You’re fucking late.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
We’re in the hallway of an office building in Koreatown, and even my mumbled apology echoes. The lighting makes my brother look green.
I’d do anything for Liam. I owe him. When Malin died, I was thousands of miles away and checked out. Totally incommunicado. I avoided any news about the Crownes, which wasn’t easy. When Tamika told me, months later, that my sister in-law had died suddenly, I la-la-la’d her at first, then realized the funeral was long over. Too late to send a card. So I did nothing. The next time the family heard from me, I was going to be so different my apology would mean something.
Different never came home, but the apologies did.
“Come on.” Liam starts down the hall. At the end of it is a whiteboard sandwich sign that with an arrow drawn onto it.
“How’s Matt?” I ask.
“Better. Only sucks his thumb at bedtime. I can’t get him to quit.”
“He lost his mother.” We turn at the sandwich sign.
“Thanks. I forgot.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.” He stops at a set of glass double doors and puts his hand on the bar but doesn’t push it. The lobby beyond them is painted white but lit with colored lights. “Listen. This girl. She’s a little…” He looks for the word. “High-strung. No. More like… under certain circumstances, she gets nervous.”
“Okay.” You can say that about anyone, pretty much, so I don’t know what he’s trying to say.
“So don’t be a dick.”
“Don’t be a… when am I a dick?”
“Just… don’t be…” He sweeps his hand up and down, from my head to my feet. “Come on, man. Stand up straight. Be a serious person.”
I’m about to argue that I am a serious person, but I have no proof, so I reach past him and push the door open.
The lady behind the counter smiles as we approach. “Welcome to Starsong.”
“Crowne,” my brother says, taking out his wallet. “Liam Crowne.” He snaps his credit card on the counter. “This is the card I phoned in. My party’s already in room six, yeah?”
Her face lights up like Dodger Stadium. This is why I hate telling anyone my last name, because I can’t follow it up with “I walked here because I don’t want to spend money putting gas in the car.” But Liam doesn’t seem to mind how his name changes everything, so here we are, walking down a hall with soundproof doors on either side, behind a woman with dollar signs in her eyes.
