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“Yes, but your fans want more, baby, and you have to give it to them.” She steps back and taps the wall twice. “You’ll thank me when the reviews drop tomorrow.”

“Nicki!” I yelp, unsteady on my toes as the lift rises out of reach.

“Smile, baby!” she sings off-key and gestures an exaggerated smile across her face.

My heart races at a thousand miles an hour as Nicki’s face fades away. I love my fans, believe me, I do, but they will always want me. They will always demand things of me, my time, my voice, my energy, hell even my smile. And I know I shouldn’t complain. I’m a public figure. I have the life a lot of people dream of.

But sometimes, at night, when I’m alone, I feel an ache in my chest, an endless cavern of nothing echoing back at me. An echo that I’m finding increasingly difficult to stop.

The platform clears the floor, and the lights hit me. The crowd screams. I shove the in-ear back in, put a hand on my hip, and tilt my head, letting the corner of my mouth pull into the Echo smile. The opening synth of ‘Superstar’ kicks in behind me, and I step off the lift like my ankle isn’t throbbing, like I didn’t just almost escape, like Echo is the only thing I have ever wanted to be.

“Did someone say encore?” I sass into the mic.

The Garden goes wild, and I give myself over to the crowd.

2

SIENNA

Three songs later, I don’t take the lift off stage; I walk to the back. Nicki’s assistant, an overly confident girl named Bow, with a chocolate-brown pixie cut and glossy pink lips, runs up to me with a water bottle and a towel.

“Echo, that was awesome,” she coos.

I snatch the water bottle out of her hand, squeezing the liquid into my mouth, which surprisingly is cool blue Powerade. I down half the bottle before I even look at her. My throat is raw. My ankle is still throbbing under the boot, a slow, hot pulse that gets worse every time I shift my weight. And under it all, I’m still wired, that post-show buzz crawling up the back of my neck, the kind of high that has nowhere to land because the rug got pulled out from under me twenty minutes ago.

I rip the clip out of my wig and yank the whole thing off in one go. My scalp burns. My braided hair underneath is damp and matted. I shove the wig into Bow’s arms without looking at her.

“Where’s Nicki?” I ask, my voice flat.

Bow blinks at me, hugging the wig to her chest like a baby. “She, um, she stepped out to take a call. But she said she’ll be back as soon as she’s done. Like, any minute.”

Of course she did. She shoved me back onstage and then disappeared the second I came off. Convenient. Because she knows what I’m about to say, and she has been ducking this conversation for weeks now, sliding past it with a smile and a pat on the shoulder and a new contract page to sign. Not tonight. Tonight, I am done being managed.

I push past Bow and head down the hallway toward my dressing room, my heels clicking unevenly against the concrete because I’m favoring my left foot. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. A stagehand presses himself against the wall to let me pass. I don’t make eye contact.

The door bounces off the wall behind me and slowly swings shut on its own. The dressing room is too bright. The vanity lights still cranked all the way up from earlier when the glam team was layering on my third coat of eyeliner and gluing down baby hairs that I didn’t have the energy to fight about. The space smells like hairspray, sweat, and the cold pizza somebody left on the side table about four hours ago.

I limp over to the vanity and brace both hands on the edge of it, dropping my head between my shoulders for a second. I count to five. I lift my eyes to the mirror.

Echo stares back at me as I take off my accessories, the red belt, and the signature gold choker around my neck.

Even without the wig, she is still there. The heavily smoked-out eye, the false lashes starting to peel at the inner corner, the glossy pink lip that has been touched up so many times tonight, that it sticks my lips together. The body she lives in. My body. I drag my eyes down the length of it. The black sparkle booty shorts, so tight they leave nothing to the imagination, hugging my thighs and hips. The heeled knee-high boots add four inches I don’t need. The cropped tank top with the red broken heart printed across the chest, riding up over my stomach, the bright red bra peeking out the bottom hem where the shirt has bunched from all the dancing. Gold glitter illuminating the warm undertones of my chestnut skin.

I look like an adrenaline-drunk superstar. I look like a smudged billboard. I look like every single poster a teenage girl has tacked up on her bedroom wall this year muted with sweat and exhaustion, and mascara that’s starting to run. I look like Echo, a girl curated in an executive’s office and marketed as real.

I do not look like Sienna.

I don’t even remember the last time I looked like Sienna. Not really. Not in any way that counts. Sienna wears shaggy jeans, sneakers, and crop tops, and her curls are royal blue with black roots. Sienna doesn’t sparkle the way Echo does. Sienna has freckles she lets you see. Somewhere underneath the foundation, the contour, the highlighter dust, and the body glitter, she is still in there, I think. I hope. Although, right now, I’m not sure.

I push off the vanity, and my ankle screams at me. Hissing through my teeth, I stumble back, dropping into the makeup chair sideways, one leg stretched out and the other tucked under me. I reach for the zipper on the inside of my left boot as the door opens.

“If your name isn’t Nicki Campbell, I don’t want to talk to you right now,” I warn, jerking my left boot off and turning my attention to my right boot.

“Echo,” Bow mutters anyway.

I look at her through the vanity mirror. She has the same hand-on-hips stance as Nicki, commanding space and attention she doesn’t own. It is honestly impressive how quickly she has picked it up. Three months on the job and already she has the same head tilt, the same little inhale before she delivers bad news, the same pinched smile that says I know you’re not going to like this but… Nicki is raising a clone.

“What?” I snap.