CHAPTER 69 – Smile

Kellie left in the morning, despite Eppie’s begging efforts.

Rationally, however, Eppie wasn’t too worried, because their new bestie was going straight to hair and make-up, then costumes, then the red carpet. Unless Kel had the balls for a beatdown while chauffeured by Sony’s staff, Kellie was golden.

Last night, the girls had talked—or rather, the girls had listened while Eppie talked.

She had relayed a vision of something in the distant future. A vision of hope, in the form of a musical involving an inner-city Catholic school and orphanage. The protagonist was a music director who was certainly not Curon, who had been ousted from power and had lost his job. In his banishment, an old mate with a heart of gold sets him something to do—and he lands in the teaching role of Chorist Instructor in an inner-city Catholic school.

The school, as Eppie had illustrated through her [Larceny] and [Persuasion], paired with the [Charisma] of her storytelling, would be under threat from a Corpo whose only defining characteristics are her income and her baddie body. She wants to buy the land from the city, demolish the school, and build apartments.

The school is hapless; the Sisters of the convent, who run it, are helpless, not only because of their lack of funds but also because they’re unable to control the immensely talented yet “troubled” inner-city children of multicultural, multilingual persuasion.

Naturally, she told them, Act I begins in medias res: Not-Curon enters the fray, using his musicology, corporate know-how, old connections, and the human touch to solve each student’s religious, familial, and institutional issues while becoming a “Father” to the orphaned kids.

“He ditches his Armani’s for the priest’s collar,” Eppie said. “He’s on a mission from the [Sys—I mean God.”

He enrols the kids in an NYC choir competition with national accreditation, rallies his own cynical, profit-driven old music friends, including his rival executive from Universal Music, and they are all moved to tears by the kids’ genuine performances, choosing the path of hope, charity, and compassion. In the end, even the baddie Corpo comes around.

Final scene. Church. All the kids in attendance. Choral closing. The converted baddie holds Not-Curon’s hand. Amazing Grace is performed in the style of Hip-hop spirituals by not-Kellie.

Eppie knew she was on to something when the girls gushed that they absolutely had to have a place in her production and that it would make an amazing feel-good Christmas movie. Her [Gospel] trembled like no tomorrow, and Kellie was on the verge of hitting the writing desk and starting to write a song.

What was curious was that the idea wasn’t triggering her [Karmic Muse].
If indeed she could manage the musical through the talented people she had met in her present world, then it very well may be the very first [Causality] positive profit without a net loss on initial investments.

Come morning, the girls had formed a sisterhood, and Eppie promised she would call upon their expertise to make her musical a reality.

What followed was a lazy breakfast.
A light luncheon at Culver.
Hair and makeup.
Final fittings.

And then the limo arrived, and both Eppie and Zara knew that there was no more turning back.

Their limo joined the motorcade after peeling from the 110, funnelled into a long line of similar town cars housing people far more famous and established. Guided by security, the line moved at a dead pace toward the lit-up block where the Staples Centre began.

From the back seat, Eppie saw the glow of the building, the cranes holding up the massive Klieg lights, each the size of a small sedan, then the building itself, with its squat shape and silver lining hidden behind row upon row of barricades.

“Eppie… I am so nervous…” Zara’s legs crossed and crossed again so often that Eppie had to place a hand on Zara’s knee. With her bare shoulder, thigh-high slit, Zara looked a treat, even if she looked like someone was torturing her with a branding iron pressed against her cream-caramel flesh.

“Stop fidgeting, you’ll wrinkle it,” Eppie said with good humour. “Just follow my lead.”

Their windows flashed.

The press corps started long before their car landed at the spot where they got out. They could already see the red carpet, and around it, and everywhere else, was a wall of blinking lenses tethered to full-body cameras. Familiar logos like E!, Access Hollywood, MTV, and CBS dotted the place like wild mushrooms after a monsoonal rain. A rope line of talent wranglers with clipboards and earpieces stood at intervals, calling names off manifests, becoming a human filtration barrier.

The carpet itself ran maybe two hundred feet, blood-red under the lights, flanked by sponsor logos repeating themselves into the middle distance.

It was here that Eppie realised something she had not paid attention to as Lana.

There were three lanes! One lane was for arrivals who were friends and family, and no bodies who just wanted to get on with it. One lane for the somebodies. And the final lane was for the people who were worth the digital data.

How did I never notice?! Eppie felt truly shaken by the undisguised inequality of it all.

The atmosphere was also simultaneously sickening and awe-inducing. As someone who had quite literally sold almost everything here at some point in her former career, she knew exactly how manufactured the red carpet encounters are. Yet, underneath the facade, there was a genuine sense of electricity and elation, the kind that comes from the Press, the fans, and the celebrities, all gathered in one place, their joy somehow creating a psychic current of invisible energy that made every participant a little tipsy.

The staff was split between ushers and security, two species, two uniforms. Security wore two piece black. The ushers wore the event’s branded polos and sponsor logos, carrying headsets, walkie-talkies, and seating charts on laminated lanyards.

It took thirty minutes, but their limo finally arrived.

A white-gloved staffer opened the door, nodded at them, and stepped aside with a hand rigidly paused in the air.

Eppie stepped out first and was met by a wave of light that near-blinded her. Her [Act Natural], [Hitting the Mark], [Love the Light], and [Comeliness] fired every possible cylinder, making her [Persona] throb. She took the PA’s white-gloved hand, moved through the shimmering sea of strobes, then was struck by a wall of noise.

Eppie!
Euphemia!
Miss Fontaine!

They KNOW my name?!
They knew her name! Eppie felt as though she had been transposed into another world for about three seconds before her [Intelligence] told her that someone had given out marching orders. Curon? Mirabelle? Or Vaughan?

All three were possible, but with this many people calling the name of a no-body, it had to be Dame Vaughan passing down the word of God through the influence ladder.

She smiled at the photographers.
Her burnt-orange silk caught the first bank of strobes instantly, the way Vittoria Conti had envisioned and then some, because Eppie seemed to suck in the light of the flashes and project it back toward the sensors with supernatural colour correction, lighting, and hue. Their photographers would not know yet, but every shot was in focus, every shot had caught her in the best light.

Zara came out after her, though only a few called out her partner’s name.
Eppie held her friend’s hand, and they half-turned to let out Zara’s scene-stealing dress.

The guitarist managed a half-turn, chin tipped just enough, the structured bodice doing exactly what Marta had promised it would do under duress. The girl looked natural, but her hand was trembling so violently that she might as well have been a lawn mower.

They walked up the red carpet, smothered by light, light and more light, feeling the heat of the strobes lick every inch of their skin.

Halfway down the carpet, a wrangler with a clipboard peeled them off into the slow lane. As Eppie suspected, someone had given marching orders to the staff.

On the logo panel, the official photographers were ravenous wolves for their virgin flesh.

A chorus of voices overlapped until they blurred into one demand.

“Eppie! Eppie, over here!”
“Zara, turn this way, lead with the leg!”
“Ladies—together, together, can we get you together?!”

Eppie was quick to learn the trick of it. Pick one voice, give it your eyes for exactly two seconds, pick the next. Zara hadn’t, and kept flinching toward whichever shout was loudest, which only made the rest of them shout louder.

For two whole minutes, they posed this way and that, Eppie relying on [Act Natural] while Zara floundered attractively.

They moved on.
Then—a moment born of a fevered dream came to life.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

A woman with silver hair, a microphone, and an unforgettable rasping voice accosted them.

Here, she was Joan Sterling, red carpet circus master, the kind of interviewer who’d outlasted three decades of careers by being meaner and funnier than everyone she interviewed.

“Euphemia Fontaine and Zara Arriaga! Girls, you look STUNNING. My god, you are young, my love. Tell me—what’s it like? Your first Grammy?”

“Mesmerising, and of course, a great reference for next year, and the year after that,” Eppie replied with a face full of smiles, her baby blues matching Joan’s.

“OH…” Joan moved her shoulders theatrically. “Such confidence!”

“Call it prophecy,” Eppie held out a hand. “Shall we be friends? I mean, after all, we’ll be speaking on the regular from now on…”

Joan barked out a real laugh, then took her hand. The crew behind her cackled along, and within seconds, it was a whole exchange. Joan’s replies were quick and easy, Eppie volleying back every follow-up with an unbothered charm that genuinely surprised Joan.

Zara stood half a step behind, smiling gamely and saying almost nothing at all.

After Joan, the girls moved on.

Eppie caught a flash of Lucia Lancet two stations down, fielding her own bank of flashbulbs with the practised ease of someone who’d done this since childhood, and further along, Kellie, glittering and orange-streaked, stood with Kel a pace behind her, acting like the best boyfriend in the world.

NO BRUISES! WE MADE IT, BABY!

Eppie punched the air.
Someone took a picture.
She made a face.
Someone took a picture.
Zara laughed.
Someone took a picture.

The girls fled.

Past the photo wall, she met her Sony family. Katrisha, regal in head-to-toe gold, calling her “songbird” the way she had at the Annual. Nathaniel Ellake, mid-interview, broke off from the interviewer just long enough to hug her. Candice Leah, trailed by a publicist running visible damage control, blew her a kiss from a safe distance while looking tipsy. At the door, she met Eric Gowler, unmistakable in all black, giving her a small salute from across the carpet. There was no time to talk; he was here with his bandmates, and they had music to promote.