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Chapter Five
Thirty thousand people screaming didn’t sound like people at all. They sounded like a lion, or a thunderstorm, or an earthquake: something alive and infinitely powerful and beautiful and dangerous.
Seattle, opening night of an arena tour, and a thirty-thousand-person-strong hurricane was roaring. Remy was seated at his drum set, which was below the stage—hydraulics would lift him up moments before the first song began. Up onstage, videos played of Vivi Swan writing music, of her talking to the camera about her process.
The ground beneath him shifted and he ascended, feeling a little too much like that tethered goat inJurassic Parkgoing up into the T. rex pen. The single thing that was thirty thousand individual things came into view. A clear plastic panel in front of Remy’s drum set made it feel even more like he was watching the crowd through a two-way mirror—he saw them, but in the black, they didn’t realize he was there. He forced himself to breathe evenly, to move slowly and deliberately so as not to startle them and cause an attack—
The lights surged; Remy jumped, his eyes went wide, a moment of utter panic flashed through him, fight and flight and nausea, and thengo.He kicked into action, spurred—thank god—by muscle memory from the rehearsals. He tapped off a beat, and David joined him on guitar. The crowd screamed a deafening pitch—Quiet Coyote’s audience hadn’t been so largely female, and he somehow hadn’t realized the sound of a crowd of women screaming would be so wildly different from the sound of a crowd of mixed genders screaming.
The dancers slid onto the stage, the song began, time till the first verse growing smaller and smaller and smaller, and then, with a ripple from the keyboards, Vivi herself was launched from underneath the stage, dress bubbling around her like Marilyn’s.
The screaming peaked, and Vivi began to sing, her voice the final brick in a wall holding the thirty-thousand-person creature back from swallowing the rest of them whole. This wasn’t at all like playing music live with Val; with him, there was always an element of the unexpected, a crazy, potentially disastrous feeling that something could go wrong—and Val liked it that way. Here, however, there was all the danger but none of the unexpected; the crowd was a lion with teeth and claws, but Vivi was a sleek and confident lion tamer who had a whip but rarely used it.
Three songs in, the music quieted so Vivi could address the crowd with a canned speech. She walked to the front of the catwalk and put a hand to her eyes, trying to see beyond the blinding lights.
“Hello, Seattle!” she said. They screamed—Remy was pretty certain they’d have screamed even if she’d gotten the city wrong. She grinned, an expression he caught via the giant screens that were zoomed in so close on her face that if she’d had a fleck of mascara on her eyelids, they’d have caught it. Of course, Vivi Swan didn’t have out-of-place makeup. She didn’t have out-of-place anything, curated as she was.
“You guys are amazing. Thanks so much for coming to our first show!” she said, and they screamed again. “When I saythank you, though, I want you to understand how much I mean it. I want you to understand how much I appreciate you all coming to see the show. I see you guys, way in the back, with the STRONGER sign—you made it light up and everything! It must have taken ages.”
They screamed again. Whenever she paused, they screamed. Remy looked toward the back of the arena and, sure enough, he could faintly make out a sign that had the wordstrongerlit up in something like Christmas lights—it was the name of one of Vivi’s singles. She kept talking; he knew her words had to be rehearsed, yet they felt undeniably personal.
“So many of you have amazing shirts that you made. I was looking at the audience earlier, and I thought, wow, you guys understand me because we’re all…we’re all just alike. We all know what it’s like to be excited. Or in love. Or to be heartbroken. Don’t we?”
They screamed again, again, again. Remy couldn’t help but remember the thing Val had said about Vivi back when all this began—that she wasn’t a musician, she was a product. Remy had agreed with Val then, but now he understood the product wasn’t beauty or lip gloss or perfection. Vivi’s product was empathy, and she peddled it so flawlessly that not one of the thirty thousand people knew it was a product at all.
During intermission, the band huddled in the dressing room, mopping their brows and blinking hard against the still-there glare of the stage lights. Halfway through, one of the backup singers—her name was Laurel, if Remy’s memory was accurate—poked her head into the dressing room, all smiles and makeup that went shiny instead of melting under the stage lights.
“How’s the first show going, Remy?” she asked, stepping inside. Laurel was wearing a wedding dress; the second half of the show opened with a song about interrupting a wedding. Laurel played the moody bride.
“Going great,” Remy said, smiling at her then nodding a hello as the other singers, Ro and Destiny, walked inside (wearing bridesmaids dresses, because sure).
“We’re trying to get everyone together after the show—all the musicians, I mean, singers and band. We’ll be on Bus Three. Want to come?” Laurel asked the room.
“Absolutely,” David said, nodding; Parish and Michael did the same.
“Yeah,” Remy added. “That’d be great.”
The bell chimed, the signal for everyone to get into their places. They left the room in a rustle of crinolines and hype-yourself-up-now deep breaths. One of the stagehands gave Laurel a bright-pink bouquet that matched the bridesmaids’ dresses as she moved to her position; the dancers hustled around all the musicians, far more eager to slide into their spot at the absolute last second than the rest of the cast.
The first number was heavily choreographed—the bridesmaids danced around Vivi as she pretended to interrupt Laurel’s wedding and steal away with the groom, who’d always loved Vivi and had somehow found himself engaged to the terrible, shrill, horrible Laurel character. During rehearsals, Remy had thought on how he’d flip the song and turn it into one from Laurel’s point of view—realizing the man you’re marrying is running away with his first love, a tall, blond, leggy thing that looks as unlike you as possible.
Reimagined, it still sounded like a Vivi Swan song. That was the thing about her music: no matter how you turned it, flipped it, mirrored it, flattened it, each song was all about her own heartbreak.
When the show ended—eighteen songs in all, including the acoustic numbers Vivi played solo—there wasn’t a wild amount of celebrating backstage. Everyone was too exhausted, too busy analyzing their performances, trying to avoid the light or stagehands who would tell them they’d missed a mark or a cue or an entrance. Vivi Swan herself had a meet and greet with fans in a back room; her team hurriedly reapplied her makeup and tidied her costume then yanked her away while everyone else slumped toward the arena showers. (“This venue’s got better ones than the bus, but that’s not always the way,” Michael said.) They had to be at the next show—Portland—the following evening; the crew would pack overnight, and buses would pull out as soon as everyone was loaded up.
Freshly showered, Remy went looking for Bus Three. The buses weren’t parked in order and were all painted identically—it took a few tries before he found the right one.
“Hey, Remy’s here!” a woman’s voice called loud enough that he heard it before opening the door. When he did open it, there was a light round of cheering, and Laurel welcomed him. She was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, as was most everyone else.
“Have a seat, have a seat. Do you want anything to drink?” she asked warmly.
“I’m set, thanks,” Remy said, nodding a greeting at Parish before he sat down beside him on one of the galley couches. The bus was almost identical to the band’s bus, but it smelled like hairspray and tea. Ro and Laurel were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, while David was talking on his phone quietly, light beer in hand.
“Alright, Remy. First show. What’d you think?” Parish asked. It was a weighted question, and from the way Laurel and Parish watched him, Remy knew the answer was going to tell them something important about him.
So he hedged his bets and simply shrugged, saying, “It was a good show.”
“Boo!” Laurel said, laughing.
