Michelle was right. Jake’s future wasn’t a question anymore. It was already moving toward him.
All it required now was our signature.
“Okay,” she said, exhaling. “So. Who’s going in to talk to him? You or me?”
I quickly touched my nose to take myself out of the running. “Nose goes.”
“Oh geez.” Michelle glanced at an imaginary watch. “I just remembered I have to change the refrigerator filter.”
“You don’t even know what a filter looks like.”
“Too late. I already called it. Now go. I’ll be right here… with bandages.”
I headed for Jake’s room, calling over my shoulder, “Don’t touch the filter.”
Jake was on his bed when I let myself in, earphones turned up and his body coiled tight—one of the many habits captivity had carved into him. To anyone else, he looked fine, like he’d walked away from it unscathed. I knew better. Everything he didn’t say was still in there, compressed and volatile, and I didn’t know what it would take—or who would be nearby—when it finally blew.
Music was the only place he let any of it leak out. It had become his way back into the world. First it got him talking again—single answers, then full sentences, then stories we hadn’t known he was carrying. Then it pushed him to write: pages of lyrics we weren’t allowed to read and chords scratched into notebooks.
Learning at home, on his own schedule, gave him long, uninterrupted hours with his piano and guitar. And he kept getting better—far beyond anything he’d been as a child prodigy.
“Jake.”
He ignored me.
“Jake. Earphones.”
He pulled them off and looked up. “What?”
“What?” I echoed, scratching my chin. “Huh, let me think. Has anything interesting happened in the last—oh, I don’t know—twenty minutes? Maybe the men in suits sitting in our kitchen?”
He shrugged. “What do you want me to say? That I’m a stupid kid? Because you already covered that.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked.
Jake stared at the earphones in his hands. I waited. When nothing came, I tried a different way in.
“Okay,” I said. “Then tell me this. What do you want to do?”
Still nothing.
“If you don’t want the deal,” I went on, keeping my voice level, “we’ll find a way out. I’ll get a lawyer. A real one. But I need to know what I’m fighting for.” I met his eyes. “Is music what you want to do with your life?”
“Yes,” he said immediately. Then, quieter: “But not this way.”
“Then what way?” I asked. “Because if music is the dream, this contract might not be a bad thing. They’re practically handing you a golden ticket.”
He hesitated, just long enough for me to know there was more. “Not under my real name.”
I nodded. He’d never said it out loud, but it was obvious Jake didn’t like being Jake McKallister.
“Even with the other band,” I said cautiously, “your identity would have come out eventually.”
“You’re acting like we were going to be some decade-defining band. We’d be lucky to get one hit.”
“Then why do it?” I asked.
“Because it’s something,” he said. “Because it lets me play. That’s it.”
