Page 28 of Into Pitch

A man near the stage yells something and she points at him with the mic, amused.

“No, not that one.” She laughs.

More laughter follows chorused by cheers. The energy is wild, bright and chaotic in the way crowds become when they’re given permission. It’s Valentine’s Day, and this bar is full of people trying to feel something loud enough to drown out whatever they go home to, and Sadie acts as if she is all too willing to serve it up to them.

She watches them with the kind of ease that suggests she’s been doing this for a long time, and she’s not trapped by it. How had I not seen this version of her in her sessions or asked to see it?

She shifts her weight, glancing down at someone close to the stage who holds up a phone. The bright screen lights up her face and I can only assume it’s a song title by the way she nods once.

“Alright,” she starts into the mic, gesturing for people to settle. “This one’s not exactly… happy. But it’s beautiful so don’t ruin it by being a bunch of ungrateful assholes.”

Laughter ripples out and she turns to the man who is standing beside a computer, saying something past her mic that I can’t catch through the noise around me. He nods and the lights over the stage dim slightly. The bar quiets—not completely, but enough. The sound system crackles once, then steadies.

Sadie lifts the microphone closer to her mouth and she begins.

The first notes are familiar, but not in the way most people would expect. It isn’t the bright, fast pop version that plays in grocery stores and nostalgic playlists.

It’s slower, lower, and haunting.

It takes me a second to recognize it as “Take on Me”, but by the time I do, my attention is already caught and held. Her voice isn’t thin or shaky, it isn’t something she does casually. It’s controlled with smoke and texture, like she’s singing through something lived-in. The melody drags like silk over broken glass; soft, but sharp at the edges. She doesn’t oversell it nor does she perform something emotionally theatrical.

She just sings.

And the bar—this loud, messy place full of people spilling beer and shouting over pool games—goes still in a way I wouldn’t have believed if I wasn’t watching it happen. Heads turn to her and conversations taper off mid-sentence. A man near me stops laughing and stares at the stage like he’s trying to remember what it feels like to be sober.

Sadie’s eyes close on the chorus, lashes shadowing her cheekbones and the spotlight catches the curve of her mouth as she shapes the words. She’s devastating in this element. Not in the way she had cried out in the mirrored room, but in a way that burrows so deep inside of you there is no hope of clawing it out. She’s hooked inside each and every person in the room, captured in the same awe that has me drowning.

She on the other hand does not look like a woman drowning, she’s one that looks as if she’s learned how to float. Her voice rises flawlessly on the higher line and the room doesn’t interrupt it. No one shouts or whistles. No one tries to turn it into something dirty.

We all just exist in this strange place that is captured in this moment. Completely taken.

My eyes turn down to her hands as she sings; one steady on the mic, the other relaxed at her side until the chorus, when her fingers curl and flex like she’s holding something invisible. And I don’t think it’s nerves with that expression, but maybe ownership.

My mind tries to label it to understand what I’m looking at through the lens I’m accustomed to using. Performance as regulation. Music as coping strategy. Controlled exposure. Connection without vulnerability.

But the analysis feels too small for what this is.

She’s simply alive.

The song ends with a drowned-out note that fades into silence, and for a heartbeat the bar holds its breath.

Then it breaks.

Applause erupts like a wave crashing against the stage as people cheer and shout and whistle. Someone pounds a fist on a table hard enough to rattle glasses and another near the front throws his hands up like she’s won something. Sadie laughs, bowing in a playful gesture. When she straightens again, she’s still smiling.

Bright enough to soften the hard lines I’ve been mapping in my head. Bright enough to make her look younger than twenty-three. Bright enough to reveal something that doesn’t fit neatly into any of the trauma outlines in my notebook.

It’s joy.

Not constant or naïve joy, but present.

I mark it instinctively, the way a hunter marks fresh tracks. If she can feel joy here, in this place, in the midst of chaos, then she is not as closed off as she thinks she is. She’s not depressed, but repressed. And there is a difference.

Sadie lifts the mic again, laughing as the crowd continues to roar.

“Alright, alright,” She calls. “You’re going to make me blush, and then I’ll mess up on the next one.”

Not that they give a shit, they’re going bonkers at the prospect of another.