Chapter Nine Lacey

Chapter Nine

Lacey

S HE WAKES UP IN M ONTREAL WITH A SNIFFLE, AND RIGHT AWAY she knows she's getting sick.

"Shit," Lacey whispers, rolling over in her hotel bed and taking careful inventory of her symptoms. She's achy. Her throat hurts. Her head feels like it's been stuffed with gauze. She texts Claire, who sets her up with a vitamin infusion, a gallon of electrolyte water, and a venti black tea with honey and lemon, which she drinks before pulling the shades down and going back to sleep for three hours.

"You good?" Claire asks when she wakes up again.

"I'm good!" Lacey promises, which is a lie, but there's nothing to be done about it. It's opening weekend for fifty thousand Quebecers, hundreds more already camped outside the venue hoping to scalp a last-minute ticket. She's not about to let them down because she has a sniffle.

She picks up her phone and texts Jimmy as she shuffles off into the shower: Sorry I missed your text last night , she tells him; she meant to message him back as soon as her encore was over, but she wound up passing out in the car back to the hotel instead, waking up in the parking garage with a slick of drool all down her chin. I think I'm coming down with something.

No worries , he replies a moment later. Kind of a weird night anyway.

Weird how? she types—or starts to, at least. Before she can hit the button to send, another message comes through: We're chill, right? We're low-key?

Lacey frowns. What the fuck does that mean? Is that weird? It sounds weird, but sometimes it's hard to tell over text. Toby always used to say she was imagining that he was mad at her, reading stuff into his tone that wasn't there: You take the stereotype of oversensitive girl musician to the extreme , he told her once, and while mostly Lacey thinks that Toby can go fuck himself, she wonders sometimes. She knows she can be too emotional, too navel-gazey, too everything at once all the time , and as much as what she liked about Jimmy to begin with was how unfazed he seemed by the very colossus of her, she doesn't want to scare him off. After all, they haven't even put a name to whatever it is they're doing. They haven't even talked about seeing each other again.

Yeah, dork, she texts him back, hoping she sounds careless and breezy. We're low-key.

***

S HE DOESN'T FEEL PARTICULARLY CHILL, THOUGH, IF SHE'S BEING honest. She's tired and worn out and a little bit grouchy; her whole face feels puffy and clogged. Her fans deserve better, Lacey thinks, dragging herself to sound check later that afternoon. She doesn't want to let anyone down.

Claire's waiting for her when she steps off the stage, handing her a water bottle and two Tylenol gelcaps. "So, hey," she says carefully, once Lacey has swallowed the pills and scooped her fever-sweaty hair off her neck, pressing the chilly plastic against her skin, "I've got something you should take a look at."

Claire holds her phone out so that Lacey can see the screen, which is open to Audriana LaSalle's Instagram profile. Lacey doesn't follow Audriana LaSalle on social media, obviously—Lacey didn't follow Audriana LaSalle on social media even before she found out Audriana LaSalle was secretly pregnant by Lacey's live-in boyfriend—and it actually takes Lacey half a second to recognize her. She looks terrible, frankly: exhausted and gaunt, her face scrubbed clean of makeup and dark rings blooming under her eyes. The baby, less goblin-like now but still very much pale and bald, sucks a pacifier on her hip. I was never expecting to be a single mother at twenty-six , the caption begins.

Just for a second, Lacey forgets she's not supposed to be talking about anything that isn't strictly performance related. "Oh," she says, not quietly. "Fuck me."

She reads the rest of the post twice, taking the phone from Claire's outstretched hand and sitting down on a black equipment box at stage left. The split... does not seem to have been mutual. They're taking time apart to focus on their careers, Audriana reports—or Toby is taking that time, anyway. Audriana will, presumably, be home alone changing diapers for the foreseeable future, unless she's already found a nanny to do that for her.

"Okay," Lacey says at last, standing so abruptly she gets a little dizzy and handing the phone back to Claire. She's not going to be smug about this. She feels a little bit smug, sure, but it's not like she wants that poor child to grow up without a father. Then again, his father is Toby, so conceivably he might be better off only seeing him on weekends and holidays. Lacey can't say for sure. "Well. I mean. Good to know."

"Yeah," Claire agrees, in a way Lacey knows is meant to be reassuring but is not committal enough for Lacey's personal taste. "Maddie wants to do a call."

"Okay," Lacey says slowly. They've got time tomorrow morning, conceivably. She feels restless and jangly all of a sudden, like there's someone she ought to call or otherwise notify. She kind of wants to tell—well, she kind of wants to tell Jimmy, actually, because he's the person she's been telling all her news to lately, the person to whom she reports things in order to make them feel real. But it would be weird to talk to him about this, to bring him dumb gossip about her old relationship like he's Cora or Matilda. For a person who has been with his fair share of famous women, the Perez Hilton of it all doesn't really seem like his speed. "When was she thinking?"

"I think, like." Claire isn't quite making eye contact. "Now?"

They FaceTime while Lacey sits in hair and makeup, Claire holding the iPad while the girls busy themselves with brush selection, mixing various concealers on the backs of their hands. "Hi, honey," Maddie says. "I know you're not supposed to be talking, so I won't waste your time, but I did just want to get a read from you in person about how you want to handle the rumors."

Lacey frowns. "What rumors?" she asks—thinking immediately of the blind item on the Sinclair a couple of weeks ago, of Jimmy's mouth on her body in New York. She knew, she knew it was stupid to think she'd gotten away with it, and now they're going to have to handle a shitstorm of press before they ever even get a chance to—

"The—the Toby rumors," Maddie says, sounding surprised. "That you guys are getting back together."

"Me and Toby ?" She whirls to look at Claire, whose gaze is studiously elsewhere. "And that's why he broke up with Audriana? Is that what people are saying?"

"I—yeah," Maddie says, her expression quizzical. "Wait, you really didn't know about this?"

Lacey winces. She's been so distracted with Jimmy lately that she hasn't been reading as much of her own press as she usually does—well, no, that's not true, she's been reading just as much of her own press as usual. It's the other stuff, the actually important stuff, she's been slacking on: the Reddit threads, the stuff on TikTok, the old stalwarts still lurking on Tumblr. That's where the real information is, those are the venues in which she has always done her most meaningful diagnostic and strategic work, but it takes time to dig through it all, and the truth is she's been spending that time with her legs spread in various beds across the US and Canada, muffling her sounds with a pillow while Jimmy tells her to wait until he says it's okay to come.

Lacey clears her throat. "Well," she says, blushing a little bit at the thought of it, like Maddie's going to be able to tell from the sound of her voice. "That's insane. Has Toby said we're back together?"

"Not in so many words," Claire puts in, "but." She holds her phone out to display another Instagram account—Toby's this time, the most recent post on which is a picture of him in line at Katz's wearing a T-shirt from her first tour.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Lacey says, louder than she means to. One of the makeup girls glances up in alarm.

"He's got an angle, probably," Maddie warns her. "I don't know what it is yet, but I'm working on it. In the meantime, do you want to shut it down?"

Lacey considers that for a moment—trying to wrestle her feverish brain into submission, to game out all the possibilities. She could call him out at the show tonight, she guesses. She could post something cheeky on Instagram, some assurance to her fans that they didn't spend all those weeks boycotting SNL for nothing. But her head hurts, truthfully, and her nose is still running; just for a second she feels too tired for PR gymnastics, to chase and scoop up all the various flyaway pages and arrange them in the order in which she wants them to be read. She doesn't want to manage spin on Toby's bullshit, she thinks crankily. She has to go be Michael Jordan and win the NBA Finals with the flu.

On top of which, Lacey reasons foggily, it might keep the heat off her and Jimmy a little longer if her fans think she's back with her ex.

It might— huh.

Lacey sits up a little straighter, shaking off a hairstylist as gently and politely as possible and looking from Claire to Maddie and back again. "You know what?" she says slowly, a plan starting to come together in her tired, fuzzy mind. Toby wants to use the idea of them getting back together for whatever the fuck kind of personal gain he wants to use it for? Fine. Lacey will see him and raise him. Lacey will call his fucking bluff. "No. I don't think we need to do anything about it yet."

"Really?" On the screen Maddie's lips are just slightly pursed, which is how Lacey knows she thinks it's a bad decision. "Are you sure you don't want to—"

"I'm sure."

Maddie hesitates, just for a moment. "Okay," she says at last. "You know your fans best, obviously."

Lacey nods, motioning for the stylist to come back over and finish turning her into the person everyone expects to see when she steps on the stage later this evening. "I do," she promises, and smiles.

***

F OUR HOURS LATER L ACEY STANDS BENEATH THE STAGE AS THE crowd screams for an encore, a quick and uncharacteristic flicker of uncertainty zipping through her. She hasn't told anybody but her band what she's about to do here, not even Maddie. Not even Claire. It occurred to her to text Jimmy and give him a heads-up, but what would she even have said, exactly? Just so you know, I'm conducting a quick and dirty psyop on my fans in an attempt to throw them off the scent of our sexy phone relationship ? It's not exactly a cool, un-creepy update to provide.

Maddie will get over it, Lacey tells herself. Claire will understand. And as for Jimmy: tomorrow's the last show of the weekend, with a four-day break in front of her. They'll talk; she'll ask him exactly what they're doing. She'll tell him she wants to see him again in real life.

And until then—they're chill, right? He literally just said it. They're low-key. It's not like he's going to be looking for secret messages in her set list. He follows the New York Times , other baseball players, and Alex Guarnaschelli on social media. This isn't something that's even going to remotely penetrate his world.

Lacey takes a deep breath as the lift whooshes her upward, thrusting her into the spotlight in the center of the stage. She wanted it simple, she told the lighting guys when she asked them to make the last-minute changes. Just her and her oldest guitar.

Lacey waits for the crowd to quiet and steps up to the mic, her nerves falling away like scales as she gazes out at the thousands of rapt faces in front of her. This is her favorite part of performing, knowing she has them. Knowing they're right in the palm of her hand. "I'm going to present this one without comment," she tells them coyly, then strums the opening chords of a song she hasn't played in ages and waits for the screams to begin.