RE: IMMEDIATE RESPONSE NEEDED
By the time the sun’s properly up I’ve read the same three emails four times, and none of them get less unhinged with rereading. The label wants a statement by noon and a reminder they want the whole band at the industry event tonight, in an attempt to repair our image. He also wants me to know, that one more incident like this and the contract renewal is back on the table.
I text Lena:
What are you doing right now?
She answers fast. Procrastinating on email. You?
Damage control. Sandy went viral and it’s very bad.
How bad?
There was a slap and a seventeen-part story. Please send help. Or snacks.
Sending my prayers
The band meets at Jo and Rebecca’s.
I get there early. Jo’s already up, hair wet, moving around the kitchen like she’s been awake for hours, and when I come in she doesn’t say a word about the video or the label or the six months of frost between us. She just pours a second cup and holds it out.
“You look like you haven’t slept,” she says.
“I haven’t.”
“Figured.” I take the cup. I take the terrible sweet coffee.
“Hiya Rhonda.”
I wave back.
Rebecca comes in leggings with her hair in a claw clip, kissing the top of Jo’s head on her way to the couch. Jeremy in a beanie, wearing the face of a man who wants no part of any of this. Ana second to last, already holding her phone and showing us the damage on the socials.
Sandy arrives last, twenty minutes after the time I gave her, carrying a cardboard tray of coffees nobody asked for.
“She’s up to seventeen parts,” Ana says, before Sandy’s even got her coat off. She turns the phone around. Olivia Fox, devastated in matching loungewear, mascara placed rather than smudged, over a caption calling Sandy a narcissistic commitment-phobe who broke her heart. There’s a clip too: Sandy scrambling up out of the hallway clutter the night of the awards, Olivia ranting, then the slap.
“We weren’t together,” Sandy says, to the room, to no one. “We were never?—”
“The internet doesn’t buy arrangements,” I say. “It buys stories. And right now the story is that our guitarist is a heartless narcissist who got what she deserved, and four million people have decided they were standing in that hallway too.”
“The label’s made the call. They want a holiday album.” Jo says.
“But we’re a rock band.” Sandy says.
“Our roots are whatever keeps us signed. They want something wholesome enough to bury your scandal under a foot of tinsel, they want it before Christmas, and our real record gets pushed to next year.”
Ana frowns. “I turned down a session gig for this,” she says, quiet. “A real one. I’m three payments from clear on my loans. If the label walks, I go back to bar sets, and I’m too old to load my own amp at two a.m. for forty bucks.” She doesn’t look at Sandy when she says it. She doesn’t have to.
Sandy frowns and looks down. “I’ll fix it.”
“You’ll come record a Christmas album and be kind to every person in the room while you do it,” I say. “That’s how you fix it.”
“There’s one more thing.” Jo says. “Conor’s out.”
The room goes still. Conor’s been our manager for five years and produced the last two records off the side of the same desk, which made him cheap and made him ours and makes this hurt in two places at once.
“He can’t just leave,” Rebecca says. “You’ve got contracts.”