Chapter 11: The Journalist
The morning after the video spread, June woke to her phone buzzing on the small table beside her bed, again and again, until the whole room seemed to hum with it. She picked it up and stared at the screen: numbers she did not understand, names she did not know, and a mark saying she had been mentioned more times than she could count. She put the phone face down and pulled the blanket over her head.
Pearl was already in the kitchen, reading her phone with a deepening frown. When June came in, Pearl turned the screen away quickly.
"People are talking," Pearl said. "Talking is free, and most of it is not worth the air."
June nodded, her hands shaking as she poured a glass of water. She had expected a quiet meal and a walk home, not strangers who knew her face and wanted more than the song she had already given.
By noon, the woman herself was standing on Pearl's porch: a woman in her early thirties, neat and quick-moving, with a notebook in one hand and a phone in the other. She knocked twice, politely, and when Pearl opened the door a crack, she smiled the kind of smile June recognised from people who wanted something.
"My name is Nadia Frost," she said. "I write about music in this city. I would love to talk to June about last night."
Pearl did not open the door wider. "June is not giving interviews," she said.
Nadia did not leave. She asked for just five minutes, saying the story was already out there, and it would be better if June told it herself, before other people told it wrong. There was a kind of truth in that, and June felt it sting, because she had already seen how quickly a story could run away from the person it belonged to.
June stepped forward before Pearl could stop her and stood in the doorway, barefoot. Nadia's eyes were bright and kind enough, but also hungry, the way a person looks when they have found something rare.
"I played a song," June said. "That is the story."
Nadia smiled, softer this time. "It was a beautiful song," she said. "People want to know where you learned it. Who taught you? Was it your mother, your father? Did you study somewhere?"
June felt the questions land one after another, each pressing closer to the place she herself did not understand. She knew the cassette and the upright in the back room, but not the name of the man on the cassette, and she had never asked, because asking had always felt like pulling a thread that might unravel something she needed to stay whole.
"I learned it by ear," she said. "At home."
"And your family?" Nadia asked. "Are they musical?"
June looked at Pearl, and Pearl looked back, and in that look there was a conversation June could not quite read. Pearl's face was calm, but her hands were clasped tight, the way they were when she was holding something back.
"My aunt raised me," June said. "That is my family."
Nadia wrote something down, and June wished she had not said even that much. The notebook seemed to swallow her words and turn them into something she could no longer control. Nadia asked about June's father then, gently, as if gentleness made the question smaller: was he still alive, had he been a musician, did June remember him at all?
June's throat closed. She remembered almost nothing of her father, only a feeling, warm and far away, like sunlight through a window she could no longer find, and a laugh, and then nothing. The nothing hurt more than the memory did.
"I do not want to talk about my father," she said, her voice steady even though her hands were not. "I do not know anything to tell you."
Nadia nodded, and for a moment June thought she understood. Then Nadia said, "That is all right. If you change your mind, the offer stands. A story like yours deserves to be told properly."
When she left, the porch felt too quiet. June sat on the step, trying to feel like herself again. She was still June. She had still played the song. But now a woman with a notebook was walking away with pieces of her, and strangers waited for more.
Pearl sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. "You did right," she said. "You do not owe anyone your life story because you played them a song."