“Don’t talk about my family,” I say through gritted teeth. I’ve barely mentioned them since I arrived. Andrew doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
“Boo-hoo,”Andrew continues.“The music industry turned on me, my band hates me, my husband left me.”
Boo-hoo?
I didn’t cry when my daughter stopped speaking to me last year, just kept on talking because I figured eventually she’d at least tell me to shut thehell up. I didn’t cry a decade ago when it became obvious how much she preferred my mother to me, or a few years before that when it was clear she liked her dad better, too.
Andrew’s liquid-brown eyes turn steely. Less than twenty-four hours ago, I thought this man cared for me. “How come you never say your husband isdead?”
Because he left me. He leftus. Despite the heat radiating across my body, I shiver.
“People like you don’t need another break. It’s people like me who need a leg up, people without industry connections, no inheritance from dead husbands to fall back on.”
I came from nothing. My husband didn’t leave me a fortune, whatever the tabloids said about it. His bandmates refused to cut me in on the songs I helped write. I had to clear out my savings to keep the house.
God, he loved that house. He talked about growing old there. Losing it would’ve felt like losing him all over again.
“Everyone knows about you,” Andrew spits. “Fucked your way to a music deal. Married yourself famous. Let your husband write your songs.”
“No,” I manage. I can feel sweat dripping down the back of my neck, pooling between my shoulder blades.
“No one would believe you wrote ‘Imposter Syndrome’ anyway. Easier to believe it was me.”
I hate to admit it, but he isn’t wrong. A bad reputation is worse than no reputation at all. Onstage tonight, he made my song sound good. He looked nice onstage, too, at ease with the crowd. Record execs will like him more than they ever liked me. He’ll be an easy sell: handsome, young, from a small town. He told me he grew up outside Atlanta.
“You left your daughter to become her own kind of disaster. Evelyn says she’s sick.”
They’ve been telling me she’s sick for years. Doctors, therapists, my own mother—they all promised they could save her, but I see the truth. My girl wants to disappear.
“What’s her name again?”
“Don’t say it,” I rasp. I hardly let myself say it anymore. I barely even think it.
There’s so much power in a name. That’s why I changed mine all those years ago, the minute I left home, my mother’s sock-drawer money burning a hole in my pocket.
I squeeze my eyes shut. I don’t want to be here, in this dingy room that smells like stale beer and Andrew’s sour, angry breath. I want to be onstage, under the lights, introducing myself with the name I chose, the name Andrew’s never called me, singing the words I wrote.
“Evelyn told the staff not to use your stage name. Who do you think you are, giving yourself a name while the rest of us mere mortals make do with our parents’ choices?”
I didn’t want to be the girl from Yonkers with the mousy brown hair anymore, the girl whose father left, whose mother never approved.
I loved the name I chose. The first name: strong like a man’s, but undeniably feminine. After an artist who could paint skulls as beautifully as she painted flowers, filling her canvases with life and death.
And my last name, my family’srealname, before they anglicized and bastardized it toBloom, taking away its true meaning. Not that Naomi ever appreciated what I did, bringing our real name back to life. Not even when I gave our name to my daughter.
“You know your phone hasn’t rung once since Evelyn had it confiscated? Your family doesn’t care about you. They’re not even thinking about you.”
His breath smells rotten, like something crawled up and died inside him.
“Everyone knows the truth.” Andrew’s face is so close to mine he could kiss me. I can’t believe that just a day ago, Iwantedhim to kiss me. His fingers are still wrapped around my arm. “You’re a wannabe hack who only got famous because she married a celebrity.”
I shake my head. People forget I released two albums before we got married.
“And then when you’d gotten everything you could from your husband, you threw him away. Bled him dry, then spat him out.”
No, I didn’t. I loved him. I wanted to keep him forever.
“Is that why you can’t stay sober? Can’t live with knowing that it was all your fault.”
