Backstage Romance with the Popstar novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Gold Room

Laurel finds her own song under Lexi Rotherhithe's name and freezes the tour money. Devon writes to Echo.

Halo Row Records took up the third floor of a brick building in Silver Lake.

At midnight on Saturday the lights were off except in one glass office.

Maxine Salterforth was waiting inside, still in her gala dress, with her reading glasses pushed into her gray hair.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Thank you," I said. "I haven't slept."

"Sit. You need to hear this before you hear anything else."

She turned her laptop around.

On the screen was a streaming page for a song called "Gold Room," by Lexi Rotherhithe.

It had gone up at eight that morning.

It already had four hundred thousand plays.

Maxine pressed the button, and I heard the first piano chord.

I knew that chord.

I had played it on a bad keyboard in my bedroom in March, when Devon was in Tokyo and had not called for six days.

Then the voice came in.

It was Lexi, bright and thin, singing the words I had written alone with the lights off.

Every word was mine.

The line about the gold room with no door was mine.

The bridge about how you can't leave a house that was never yours was mine.

"Where did she get it?" I said.

"Devon's shared drive," Maxine said. "Hank has a login. Your demo folder was in there under 'Laurel misc.'"

I put my hand over my mouth.

I had kept that folder there for two years because Devon liked to hear my demos in the car.

He used to say I should do something with them.

"Credits," I said.

Maxine scrolled down.

"Written by Lexi Rotherhithe and Devon Ransom," she read. "Produced by Hank Dorsey."

"Hank can't produce a sandwich."

"That is what I told the lawyer," Maxine said. "Twice."

I laughed, and the laugh came out wrong.

Maxine waited, the way she had waited the first night I ever walked into this building.

I had been twenty-two then, holding a check from my grandmother's house and a recording of a boy singing on a pier.

She had read my contract three times and said, "Honey, are you sure you want to be the owner of a record label?"

I had said no, I only wanted him heard.

Now I stood in her office and said it again, out loud, to a screen.

"I want her song down."

"I can have it down by morning," Maxine said.

"But Hank filed her tour contract with us."

"If we pull it, they say we sabotaged a new artist, and every blog in town runs it."

"Then we don't pull it. We freeze the advance."

"The advance is two million dollars."

"Then it stays frozen."

She looked at me over her glasses.

"Hank is going to scream," she said.

"Let him scream to the person who signs the checks."

"He doesn't know that's you."

"Good," I said. "Neither does Devon."

Maxine closed the laptop.

"You haven't asked about him," she said.

"I don't want to know about him."

"He's called the label a dozen times today."

"He can call Echo."

My voice was flat, and I was proud of that.

Maxine did not smile, but her eyes did.

"He's been doing that too," she said. "Four emails."

She slid one across the desk.

"I printed the last one, because I thought you'd want to see how he sounds."

It said, in Devon's plain, careful style:

"Echo, I know you never come to the studio. I know you never take meetings. I am asking anyway."

"I have three weeks to finish the tour record and I can't hear it anymore."

"Please be in the room Monday."

I read it standing up.

I had read his emails for three years, and always in the same place, on the passenger seat of his car.

He used to say "Echo" the way other people said "God."

"What do you want me to tell him?" Maxine asked.

I thought about Lexi's bright voice, and Hank's whiskey, and the envelope sinking in a stranger's drink.

I thought about all the nights I had sat in that dark control room alone, so he could believe the sound came from nowhere.

"Tell him yes," I said.

Maxine put down her pen.

"Laurel."

"Tell him Echo will be in the room."

"He'll see you."

"No," I said. "He'll see a pane of dark glass. He has never once looked at the person in the room."

I folded the paper and put it in my bag.

At the bottom, in smaller type, Maxine had added what the lawyer found when she checked the registration.

Gold Room was listed with a co-writer.

His name was Devon Ransom.

He had signed the form himself, on Friday afternoon, six hours before he fired me.

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