CHAPTER 70 — Crazy

The ceremony had entered its winding golden coda by the time Eppie stumbled back to join Zara, whose makeup was melting in an aesthetic manner. Kellie and Kel did not return with her; they had peeled off twenty minutes earlier, escorted by a production assistant with a headset and a clipboard, to do whatever needed to be done to conclude the night with a headliner finisher.

Eppie immediately missed the space Kellie and Kel occupied; the empty seat felt strange, like a bad omen she couldn’t shake. Her father caught her before the feeling grew excessive. He slid a seat over and pulled her to his side with the kind of grip that suggested he’d forgotten, momentarily, that she was not actually his child. He plonked Sony’s Grammy in her lap. After all, Curon had produced the song, and he could lay claim to three of them. He held her possessively with one hand, a second Grammy cupped his other hand, looking like a greedy dragon with an arrested princess.

Eppie knew how they looked, an industry executive, with his arms wrapped that tightly around a teenage girl half his size, her face mashed sideways into his lapel, listening to Curon mumbling about how proud he felt.

In their private world, he was a dad, and she was his little girl who had just won the championship in the cinematic classic A Little League of Their Own.

“My girl, my girl,” Curon hummed, his voice thick in a way that had nothing to do with the open bar. “Best Pop Solo Performance, Best Pop Vocal Album, and Record of the Year—do you understand what you’ve done? Do you have any idea what that means? You’re fifteen. What’s in store for me when you’re sixteen?”

“That’s… a choice of words…” Eppie answered, grinning wickedly despite herself. Curon was tipsy on something, and it showed. Her father had an arm hooked around her, radiating happiness like Mr Chin after a warm meal.

“Hey, I’m allowed to be proud,” Curon slurred, grinning from ear to ear. “Proud of you.”

When she leaned in to smell if her adopted father was really drunk, he pressed his lips violently against the top of her bangs, then came away awed by the taste of hairspray. Eppie didn’t have the heart to push Curon away, because the moment was warm and the world felt right.

Trent Davis, watching from one seat over, said nothing, but his stone-cold sober expression suggested he was filing it away as material for later teasing.

Zara, on Eppie’s other side, arrested her other arm, sharing in the delight for entirely different reasons.

Across the aisle, the Universal section was also joyous. Vanessa Vines went up twice in the space of fifteen minutes. Song of the Year first, then a second category. Vines was thankful but reserved. There was no tearful speech, no shaking hands clutched to her chest. Vines had thanked her mother, said maybe four sentences more, then walked off.

Valorie sat next to Woodhouse, demure and patient.
Their eyes met again.
She said something to Woodhouse, then Sir Woodhouse took out his phone and took a picture of Zara, Eppie and Curon.

I hope that’s for teasing… she nudged her father.
Curon raised an award with one hand and made Eppie raise the other.

The lights dimmed again, properly this time. A low ripple of anticipation moved through the crowd.

“And now, to close out the fiftieth annual Grammy Awards… please welcome to the stage, Kellie Noah, performing Umbrella.”

The stage swallowed itself in black, and for one suspended second, they were lost in the depthless space of a fingerless dark.

Then the light found her—Kellie Noah, Grammy winner, superstar.

Moisture filled the arena at the same time as the Garage Band beats, then a sheet of rain fell from the ceiling.

It came down as a wall of falling silver that Kellie walked straight into without flinching, hair plastered dark against her skull by the time PayZee delivered his rhymes. Eppie felt it in her chest before she heard the words, that low-to-high cello soaring that only Kellie could manage. That was her “biblical voice”, a vocal talent greater than Lucia Lancet’s, rivalling a younger Katrisha, amplified through forty thousand-watt speakers.

Whoever designed the stage was going to receive a hefty bonus, for the stage turned golden from the magic of laser streams blasted into the falling water. Whole sections were threaded into frozen beads of gold, crossing from ice-blue to warm-wash, a whole season compressed into forty feet of stagecraft. Dancers, bodacious and barely clothed, slapped into the flood on the downbeat, sending blasts of water into the audience closest to the stage. Celebrities screamed with thrilling joy, stood up and danced. Cameras swung to and fro in every direction, telling the people watching at home that this was the epitome of cool, the materialised American Dream.

This was art. The art of the masses.

Kellie’s voice cut through all of it, raw and uncompressed—wetter, wilder, winding upward exactly where the bridge demanded. By the second chorus, she was on her knees in ankle-deep water, drenched hair whipping in a slow arc with every head-snap, mascara running in black streaks she didn’t bother to wipe.

You were my Umbrella
You were my Umbrella.

The final chorus brought the whole dance company surging back through the deluge, the falling water roared in timed sheets with every bass thump, lit gold-blue-gold like some pantheistic myth of Pangean floods playing out in real time.

Kellie stood alone at the centre of it, soaked to the bone, chest heaving, arms thrown wide, bigger than the stage, bigger than her small world.

She pointed at the crowd, at the Sony section.

Applause erupted like a microburst.

Davis stood and clapped like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane.
Everyone else did it with far less performativity.

As her tiny palms released [Strength] [20] thunderclaps, Eppie realised that her face was wet too.

Damn. She thought to herself. That’s some good stage magic to fling the water straight to my face.

As soon as the song ended, Eppie was on her kitten heels, traversing the aisle with Curon’s pass to see Kellie. Zara had wanted to join her, but was far too emotionally intelligent to be their third wheel.

“I’ll take care of this one,” Curon told her. “Go congratulate your singer.”

Eppie ran. A production assistant waved her past the rope before she even flashed the lanyard. She had no idea where she was going, so she used her not-crying face on every usher she came across, waving the pass while shouting, “Kellie! Sony! Where?!” to extract directions from the charmed staff.

The corridors backstage were a lot less glamorous than Eppie expected. They were pragmatic, unadorned, and not meant to be seen by the public. Thanks to the deluge on stage, the place also smelled like mould and antiseptic, with a stink of fresh chlorine. She tripped twice over old cinder blocks and exposed cabling that had come loose thanks to the humidity. The stronger the stink, though, the closer she came to her goal.

Eppie was fairly sure she was still a block away from the main stage when her [Perfect Pitch] picked up Kellie and Kel’s distinct voices.

They were arguing.

FUCK. Eppie swore. Her [Perfect Pitch] fired up its [Causality] engine.
The angry voices had the synesthesia of warm maroon, growing hotter as the volume increased.

Frantically, she sprinted in heels here and there, checking every room and cranny, bursting into service wardrobes and knocking on security doors.

The voices grew louder, angrier. The synaesthesia of sound was bordering on scarlet.

FUCK FUCK FUCK. She had let her guard down.

She found the alcove almost entirely by accident. It had a door opening into a larger corridor leading to the main stage. Opposite the stage entrance was another corridor; inside it was yet another door, ajar, showing a narrow seam of light.

It was one of the storage rooms for props used in the half-dozen performances.

The technical crew was gone. Security was elsewhere. But the voices were still there.

“—four red carpets, Kellie. Four. ‘Carrying the clutch.’ On national TV, what? Am I a bitch?” Kel’s voice was climbing, carrying the cadence of a man who had been building his grief for months. “I look like a foo. And you ain’t said nothin’. Just stood there laughin’. Like it’s cute—”

“They’re playing, is all, Kel, don’t take it to heart.” Kellie, soft, smaller than her stage voice by a factor of ten, sounded like a meek librarian being berated by a basketball coach.

“Playing? Playing?” Kel laughed, but it wasn’t a laugh—more like a jackal’s yapping. “Nah, see, that’s the thing, Kellie. Everybody keep telling me it’s playing. I lost the New Artist award to some country singer—just playing. PayZEE collaboration, I wasn’t invited to that—they jus playing. Some nigga commenting under your shit in Christmas, talking ’bout how I’m ‘just decoration’—playing. You laugh it off every damn time, like I’m supposed to just take it. I’m done playing.”

Eppie froze an inch from the door.
Do I go in?
Do I let this play out?
She was certain that if she walked through that door right now, Kel’s violence would erupt like a supervolcano.

From the gap, she could see that Kellie was folding in upon herself, that she actually believed Kel’s anguish was justified. The euphoria from the Grammy wins was gone. Despite her hair and her push-up bra, this demure child was the real Kellie Noah. Her real name was Kelly Price. The voice of an angel who had the luck, or misfortune, of running into Trent Davis.

“And that little blonde nepo bitch—” Kel’s voice cracked into something uglier, lower, a C-word Eppie wouldn’t repeat even in her own head, “—following you around as she made you. She didn’t make shit.”

Something shifted in Kellie’s stillness.

“Shut up,” Kellie’s retort was a physical slap. Shut up. She heard the words snap Kel’s ego like a drop kick. “Don’t talk about Eppie like that. You’re just jealous—”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

OH NO.
Behind the door, [Strength], [Agility], [Acrobatics], [Athletics] fired off at the same time, near-tearing her muscles as Eppie shouldered through the gap.

Her hand went to her feet, and her Chanels went flying like a pair of tomahawks.

The sound that followed was too quick even for Eppie.
The crack of it reached her brain before she cursed herself for hesitating—a flat, wet sound, shoe against skin, followed by the snap of knuckles hitting air.

Then the proverbial bass dropped.
Eppie burst in like a one-girl riot squad, sending the hollow-core pane flying off its hinges to crash against the wall. Her body crossed the threshold in a second, before the rest of her thoughts caught up.

Kellie was falling backwards in slow motion because a $520 US women’s 5.5 Chanel kitten-heel slingback in ivory just struck her calf.

Overhead, Kel’s fist grazed her bangs by a few millimetres.

The other $520 shoe flew past Kel’s nose, missing his face by an inch.

Eppie caught the singer before she could barrel into the waist-high cupboard.

Kel stood over them. He appeared confused as to where the shoe, and now this barefoot gremlin-in-orange, had come from; his hand was still half-raised, unbalanced from the missed swing. He did not look ashamed, merely surprised and enraged; his eyes were misted over, blank with vitriol and joyful catharsis.

“I got you.” Eppie swung her singer behind her, placing herself between Kel and Kellie.

Kel took a step forward, the simmering violence bursting through the paper-thin crust of his ego.