I laughed. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” she replied. “I do.”
I glanced at the studio door again. “I gotta finish this session,” I told her. “But I’m calling you tonight. We’ll talk more.”
“Okay.”
“And if somebody at school brings it up again?—”
“I’ll ignore it.” She cut me off. “I don’t feel weird about it now.”
“Good.”
After we hung up, I stood in that hallway for another minute. The bass thumped faintly through the door. My phone felt warm in my hand. The plaques on the wall didn’t look as shiny as they used to.
When I finally walked back into the studio, Malik looked up. “You good?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Let’s work.”
I sat in the chair and pressed a button on the soundboard to play the music back. The beat dropped and thudded to the rhythm of my heart as it beat in my chest. For the first time in a long time, I understood that metaphor. That was how every musician balanced family and their career. It was a part of me.
I finally understood that I didn’t have to choose one or the other.
19
The one thing in life that never lied was numbers. My name had been trending for eight weeks straight. First, it was for the baby rumors. Then, for the DNA results. After that, it was for the statement Kam drafted, which I rewrote three times before I let my PR release it.
The streams went crazy. Even my old songs resurfaced.
The track I wrote for Kennedy years ago, the one she surprised me with at her wedding, had gone viral. Somebody posted us walking down the aisle with the caption:“Real talent don’t age.”
It would’ve been a lie to say that that didn’t make me feel good when I read those comments.
“Westside Zay been a legend.”
“Remember when he was in that Detroit group back in the day?”
“Real hip-hop ain’t dead.”
Fans began to dig up footage from when I was seventeen, rapping in oversized tees with my group “The Ether Division” in my boy’s basement studio. The videos were grainy, with bad lighting, but even in them, you could see the hunger in our eyes.
It was nostalgic. It felt powerful.
And that meant it was also profitable.
Kam sat across from me inside the office at the label with his laptop open. There were charts pulled up on the projector in front of us.
“You see this?” He pointed at the screen.
I did. There were engagement numbers on separate charts that climbed. One titled “Merch Sales” was up, and another that read “Streaming Revenue” appeared to show that it doubled in a month.
“This is organic,” he continued. “You don’t even need to drop nothing new. The streets doing all this for you.”
I slowly leaned back in my chair.
“You know what that means?” he continued.
“Yeah,” I replied.
