“And stop screenshotting and sharing tweets on your Instagram. Tweets should stay on Twitter. Also, we need to start branding you, now— Oh! I almost forgot. I assume you’re driving with me to Garrett’s engagement party this weekend? Valeria is out of town,” Summer said, before abruptly hanging up.
Summer was never one for goodbyes. It was a PR habit—one crisis folded into another at lightning speed, so she would word-vomit everything she needed to say before she hung up. She happily left conversations without pleasantries, and now, she’d left this conversation with a reminder that I had masochistically inked my name atop the “accepts with pleasure” line.
I pointed my chin up to the towering skyscraper above me, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, closing my eyes and inhaling the balmy air, the timeless city stench of hot sewer and early morning street meat.
Somehow, I hadn’t thought about Garrett—not for one second since Asher walked into the Bowery Electric. I looked down at my phone, seeing a candid photo of Asher and me after the show—his body leaning toward mine, my eyes taking in every inch of his face—on E! News. I wondered if Garrett had woken up to these photos. I wondered if it bothered him the way it bothered me when I saw a picture of him on Cecily’s Instagram the night after Garrett kissed me. I felt sick admitting it, but I hoped the idea of me with another man twisted Garrett’s insides.
I didn’t know how I was going to exist in the same room as Garrett without crumpling. How was I going to pretend that I didn’t know he liked biting my lower lip? I shook off the cruel reminder, choosing to heroically point the shoulders of my flapping blue cape up to the sky, like a princess with boy trouble who had to save herself.
* * *
I SPENT THE FOLLOWING TWO hours inside the Rainbow Room belting out Elsa’s, Anna’s, and Olaf’s greatest hits while the Empire State Building glared at me through the windows. More money went into this party than Frozen’s actual premiere. There were chocolate milk ice luges for the toddlers, and beluga caviar served on blocks of ice for the adults. After my final encore—a wildly gorgeous indie-folk rendition of “Let It Go”—I cut through a pack of strollers on West Forty-Ninth Street in my Elsa costume, sans the wig, holding my breath as I dared to venture back online. I wasn’t sure how to fully prepare myself to come Elsa-to-Elsa with the paparazzi photos from this morning—mainly, the one in front of the subway where I had casually shrieked into the camera. Just as I was about to type “Enews” into Safari’s browser, a text from a 917 number came on-screen.
You’re about to get a call from an Unknown Number. It’s me—Asher
He attached the very photo I had been dreading: Elsa Gone Bad—my nostrils flaring into the camera, wig swaying backward over my seething face. It was…not super flattering. If your friend tagged you in this picture, you would not only untag yourself, you would ask your friend to take the photo down completely. It was “also delete this pic from your Recently Deleted folder” kind of horrible.
My hands trembled, and then my phone rang. UNKNOWN NUMBER flashed on the screen.
“Hello,” I said.
“Well, hello there.”
I let my cheeks blanket in heat as I took in the photo.
“So my PR intercepts all things Asher Reyes, and I have to say, I really enjoyed getting that photo this morning,” he said.
“I’ve looked better.”
“I think it’s…charming.” I heard him exhale a little laugh. “Would you like that photo to go away forever?”
“Very much so.”
“Good. ’Cause I agreed to have a window-facing drink with you tomorrow night at Marea, so that the piece-of-shit photographer can get one photo of us and destroy this one.”
I put my hand on my chest, exhaling the mortification from my bones. “Really?”
“PR photo-ops aren’t my thing, but…for you…”
“Seriously, thank you,” I said.
“It’s a date.”
A date. My hands were shaking again. But I wasn’t sure it was nerves. I think it was anticipation. Like, my fingers were itching to curl around the back of his neck.
“It’s a date,” I echoed.
A date. I had never seen a photo of Asher on a date. The closest I came to seeing him candidly in a relationship was a photo of Asher hand-in-hand with Penelope Lynn—his stunning co-star—leaving an SNL after-party two years ago. That was it. The rest of the photos were red carpet appearances with different starlets on his arm. He was willing to open himself up to a mountain of scrutiny, to go on a date with a nobody, just to save this nobody from a lifetime of embarrassment.
“I’ll see you Wednesday. Also—I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t go home if I were you,” Asher warned. “The paparazzi are going to camp out at your place for a day or two—it’s their style. Do you have a friend’s place you can stay at?”
“I’m actually on the way there now.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is. I didn’t think it through—just showing up at your gig like that. I got the final word from Amos and the studio, and I was so excited for you that I…Mags, I don’t do crowds like that. Ever. I’m sorry, honestly. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Yes, you do.”
I didn’t mean to say it aloud, but the words fell out of me fast. There was silence between us as I bent my legs and crouched to the ground in the middle of the sidewalk, silently mouthing “fuck me” with my eyes clenched closed. I heard him exhale.
“Yeah, I do,” he agreed.
I opened my eyes to the blue sky, my chest beating even faster.
“Bye, Asher,” I said quietly.
24
THIRTY-FIVE
I HAD A MANAGER. I, Maggie Vine, was officially being managed by a professional person. I, Maggie Vine, had a contract.
I grinned stupidly at the massive stacks of paper in front of me in the white-on-white room, with the city’s skyline shining in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The guaranteed money from this deal—the money I would get once I delivered all seven tracks—was enough to build a future. The money that would come once this movie was made was enough to keep that future a reality. I could create an embryo, I could become a geriatric singer-songwriter and then have a geriatric pregnancy. Life was officially full of options—the weird, young-geriatric, good kind. The joy inside me was so big that I wanted to scream, but I was pretending to be a professional, so instead I swallowed hard and stared ahead.
My brand-new manager, Shelly Pier, sat across from me at the huge oval conference table—just the two of us dwarfed by a room meant to house twenty people. Shelly looked like the spiritual granola type, with fringe bangs covering her purple glasses, chunky mixed-metal rings on her fingers, and a dizzying oversized patterned dress swallowing her figure. According to Asher’s Grammy-winning musician friend, Shelly was everyone’s fun-loving, mama bear manager, but if you tried to screw over one of her clients, she would become the scariest person in the room.
Shelly smiled brightly at me and reached across the table, pulling the paperwork toward her.
“All done,” she said, tucking the papers under her arm and shooting up like a rocket.
I followed, surprised that pleasantries were apparently not a thing. I anxiously threw my pen and copies into my backpack and stood to meet her face-to-face. Shelly smiled and gripped my fingers hard into a handshake.
“This is the start of the rest of your career, got it?”
I stood up straighter and mimicked her grip, trying to appear just as professional, even though I was throwing a party in my mind.
“Let’s have a long-running career that isn’t defined by a one-hit wonder from a kid who hadn’t reached puberty. Sound cool?” she said, as if she had just asked me if I wanted an iced coffee.
“A long-running career. That’s the dream,” I said, nodding with a shit-eating grin.
She dropped my hand and crossed her arms, her smile fading. I quickly willed the corners of my mouth to lay across my face.
“Vine, you’re not big enough for a PR rep, so I have to be your every-person. Which means, I have to be the person who asks you: Are you sleeping with Asher Reyes?”