Spin: List 4

“You,” one of the goons began, his voice airy and reverent, “have access to more music?”

Cartoon Shoes’s mask canted to the side. “Excuse me? Demands? What makes you think you have any leverage here?”

That snatched a portion of jubilance from the masks; knees softened and shoulders slumped.

She unclipped the drive from the nylon lanyard and plugged it into the USB port in my center console.

Instead a voice on the track answered, falsetto at first, stretching a note, before settling into full-voice, throaty lyrics:
All of me doesn’t fill this space.
All of me is all out of place.
A part of me is all, do I stay?
And all you do is take away…

He grabbed his backpack off the couch, skulked to the exit, and hovered at the threshold.

“Of course, that’s the reality,” he said, understanding. “But that’s not how the world sees it. You drop a song—pieced together in your grandma’s house on rudimentary equipment. It blows up on the strength of the sound and this wild social media blitz by a fandom that rivals artists who have been around over a decade. You’re ascending fast, and it’s rare that the people you left on the ground can ever catch up.”

The mic hovered in my face, inches from lips. Waiting to immortalize my truth.

And I took in the opulence of the room, preferring to catalog my environment than think any more about my voice, or how I’d almost gotten some minor surgery without anesthesia.

Mama stayed stuck on power ballads of the ’80s, but she conceded on modern tunes because the freedom of choice kept me a willing participant in my own torture, if only for a hot second.

But Mama was a singer who never made it, and my voice was better than hers ever was, so for me to not do the thing I hated—get up in front of all those strangers, dancing and crooning even if it meant I needed to vomit in a bucket backstage right before my cue—I was somehow betraying her and every little girl in the world who wished for a special talent.

When you feel like I felt up there, cheers and boos were the same. I could take the shame of flubbing performances just to make a point.

Whether or not we’d drag those skeletons out of the closet became a moot point when the robotic voice of the Fallons’ alarm system announced: “FRONT DOOR OPEN.”

We perpetrated the coding-for-class fraud for another half hour just to cover our bases, before I ushered Kya to my car to drive her home and finish our real discussion.

We didn’t start talking until we cleared the neighborhood gate, as if we secretly suspected anything spoken inside my community's walls was susceptible to my dad’s eavesdropping.

“I mean, above all else, I liked ParSec and the music was hot. But, yeah, I saw an opportunity. I knew a lot about marketing because of Dad’s company. I wanted to show him you could do what he does and still be true to self. It was like a philosophical exercise or something.”

“It’s not altruism. I’ll tell you that. I once saw her haggle with a Girl Scout over a box of Thin Mints. She’s still maintaining an online presence for ParSec. The VenueShowZ deal never went public. So she’s trying to stake a claim, probably scheming on a way to keep getting paid off ParSec’s work.”

“It’s not altruism. I’ll tell you that. I once saw her haggle with a Girl Scout over a box of Thin Mints. She’s still maintaining an online presence for ParSec. The VenueShowZ deal never went public. So she’s trying to stake a claim, probably scheming on a way to keep getting paid off ParSec’s work.”

In my periphery, I watched her tapping and scrolling.

The next couple of days were mundane, more so than any week in recent memory.

Instead of working out an answer, our texts mostly devolved into exchanges like this:
FUSE
Did you know Cap’n Crunch has a for real whole name?
ME
Huh?

FUSE
It was the answer in this trivia app I play sometime. Here’s another good one: How much you think Judge Judy makes in a year?
ME
The mean lady with the doily collar on TV? IDK. I guess it’s a lot.

Shameik nodded with the vigor of a puppy wagging its tail. “Yes, ma’am.”

Her droning tested the potency of my Red Bull.

Fuse gripped her desktop with force. That it did not shatter was a testament to its solid construction.

Paula continued with a few more logistical things.

Paula’s feet scrabbled. She squeezed in a narrow space next to the paper towel dispenser.

Who knows what would happen given the weapon’s age and Paula’s penchant for cheap fabrics.

My followers and SoundCloud plays had been stagnant.

Fuse must’ve realized it was in her best interest to heed my direction here.

“Why do you even care, Paris?” Shameik stuffed his hands in his pockets and bounced his shoulders. He did that when performing some of his angrier poetry. “You got the studio. And Lil’ Redu. And your famous clients. Since when do you concern yourself with us peons?”

An oscillating fan on my dresser fwump-fwump-fwumped back and forth, creating a cone of cool air I wanted to live in.

She seemed dazed almost. Rambling. “Phillip wanted to be a millionaire. He had all these plans. The app was making money, and I started thinking, yeah, yeah we could—”

Posted outside the bathroom, only catching vague murmurs of whatever information Fuse pried out of Paula Klein, I played sentry.

“We wait.” Kya brooded. “She’s got to come home eventually.”

I kept skirting back to the Air Force 1s I’d come to know intimately in the moments where Florian made me believe I might die.

“I dabbled a bit in my youth."

Of the thirty or so sporadically seated diners in the room, only two were black.

Pops’s dining buddy said, “What fine piece of cinema will you all be indulging in?”

“Some assistant put me on the phone with a guy and another guy. We emailed back and forth, I let one of the paralegals at Grandpa’s firms look over the paperwork. It wasn’t messy like dealing with sketch-queen Paula. I had money in the bank and show dates booked for the summer”—he snapped his fingers—“like that.”