It’s three in the morning, but this city is never quiet. The muggy New York night presses down on me as the rush of traffic and blare of horns wafts up the eleven stories to where I lean against the glass door, staring over the city. And then something else wafts up from below. The quiet chords of an acoustic guitar.
It’s so faint I have to strain against the noise of the city to hear it. I move to the edge of the balcony in the direction it seems to be coming from. A floor below and to my right, a girl sits on a balcony, her white T-shirt glowing against the smooth brown skin of a pair of endless legs, propped on the rail in front of her. I lean a little more to get a better look, and when she opens her mouth and starts to sing, my suspicion is confirmed.
Lucky.
I know her by voice because, after I left the taping at Rockefeller Center, I looked her up online. She grew up in foster care in San Francisco, dropped out of high school last year to be on The Voice, but plans to finish when her schedule slows down. She gives her best friend, Lilah Morgan, all the credit for her success, and has her seventeenth birthday coming up in a month. I also pulled her up on YouTube. I spent hours listening to every track that was posted: everything from the covers she sang when she was competing on The Voice to newer vids from her original CD.
She’s pretty damn incredible.
But what she’s singing now is nothing I heard in any of those tracks. I listen closer.
The guitar line is simple but not dull and the lyrics are synced to the backbeat. I can’t make out all the words because she’s murmuring, trying to be quiet, no doubt, but the melody seeps through my ears, into my bones, and settles there, causing me to shudder despite the muggy heat.
It’s been a long time since music did that for me. This girl has something real.
I slide to my ass, my back propped against the glass door, and take a long drag off my smoke, feeling that silky voice of hers saturate every cell in my body along with the nicotine. She’s still playing two hours later when the horizon starts to pink with the new day, and I’m still listening. Finally, the music stops. I drag my ass up and find out it’s numb. When I look over the rail I find Lucky’s balcony is empty, and I can’t deny the disappointment that sinks like a stone in my gut.
I duck back into the room and find the girls are thankfully gone. The living room is quiet, so the party’s apparently over. I drop into bed with the echo of Lucky in my mind, but while I drift off, the tune changes as the bones of a new song takes shape in my mind.
#
I never come to hear the opener. After the sound check, I usually don’t show up on stage again until Jamie starts pounding out the intro to our first song on the bass drum. But tonight, I left Grim and Jamie drinking in the on-site dressing room and I’m standing in the shadows near the soundboard. I brought a few beers to keep my stage buzz on, and I drain the first as I watch Lucky wrap her second song.
She’s got lead guitar and there are three guys backing her up: a bassist, drummer, and one who switches between keyboard and rhythm guitar. Her coppery kinks are up in a bushy ponytail near the top of her head and her getup is simple: a black tank top with an open men’s white button-down shirt knotted at her waist, a short camo skirt, and a pair of black boots with spiky silver heels that look more like a weapon than footwear. Classy, but smokin’ hot.
But, honestly, the music is nothing special—nothing I haven’t heard a thousand times before from a thousand different artists. Even the lyrics are pretty pedestrian. What’s crushing it is her performance. I move to the edge of the stage-side scaffolding that holds up the rigging and glance out at the crowd. The seats are only about half full, which is not unusual for the opener. But the people who are here are engaged. Many of them are on their feet, dancing in the rows and in the pit. They see what I see—for someone so tiny, Lucky’s stage presence is immense. She’s impossible to ignore. She plays like the guitar is an extension of herself, like she is the music.
I watch her move as I stand in the wings, reminding myself that she hasn’t even turned seventeen yet. She’s just a baby. But, fuck, she doesn’t look like one—or act like one. I know firsthand that some kids grow up faster than others. I was only a few months older than Lucky when everything went down with my old man and I found myself on the run. I grew up in a matter of days. From what I read in her bio, there’s no doubt this kid was looking out for herself from a very young age. From all outward appearances, not only did she grow up faster than me, but she’s surpassed my twenty-three years by a few.