The address on the card was a glass tower on Sixth Avenue with the BrightStar logo — a golden music note — spinning slow above the revolving doors. Harmony stood across the street for a full minute, guitar case in hand, cornrows tight, the lucky red pick in her pocket. The building threw the morning sun back at her in sheets. People flowed around her like she was a stone in a river.
She crossed the street.
Chapter 3: The Contrast
Inside, the building smelled nothing like any building Harmony had ever been in. Fresh paint and expensive coffee — the kind that came in paper cups with sleeves. The lobby was all glass and brushed steel, and the air had a chill that went straight through the washed hoodie into her bones.
A security guard checked her name against a tablet and pointed her toward a freight elevator. The elevator let her out on the seventh floor into a hallway bathed in LED light, where young people with headsets moved at a speed that made her dizzy. One of them — a girl maybe twenty — took Harmony's card, looked at it, looked at Harmony, and said, "You're the subway girl."
"I'm Harmony," Harmony said.
"Sure." The PA smiled without warmth and pointed at the wall. "Wait there. Someone'll come get you."
The wall was exposed brick, cold through the hoodie. Harmony stood against it with her guitar case upright between her sneakers, and waited. Twenty minutes, counted by the digital clock on the far wall, because counting was what she did when the waiting felt like a test. Girls her age went past in both directions — mothers carrying garment bags, men with the smooth look of managers — and every one of them wore something that had been chosen. Harmony looked down at her faded navy hoodie, her fraying jeans, her sneakers with the hole near the big toe of the left shoe, and felt the choosing like a spotlight.
A woman came down the hallway like she owned the floor. Late fifties, tailored charcoal suit, silver hair cut in a blade. She stopped in front of Harmony and looked her up and down the way Odette looked at a cut of meat — assessing, unmoved.
"You're the subway girl," the woman said. Not a question.
"Harmony Cole."
"Evelyn Marsh. I run this show." Evelyn's eyes flicked to the guitar case, to the duct tape, and something like satisfaction crossed her face. "Dana's find. Our audience loves a good contrast, Harmony."
Harmony understood exactly what she meant. She'd been the contrast before — at the shelter's holiday dinner, when the volunteers from the church had taken pictures with the kids for the newsletter, smiling their charity smiles. The before-picture. The one that made everybody else look generous.
"Sing good, stay humble, cry if you feel it," Evelyn said. "Authenticity is gold. Don't manufacture it." She was already turning. "Wardrobe will see you next."
Wardrobe was a woman named Lisa with tired eyes and a rolling rack of clothes that looked bought new and beaten with a stick.
"Let's see," Lisa said, holding a flannel against Harmony's shoulders. "We're going for authenticity. Street, you know? Real."
It was a costume of her life, made for someone who'd never lived it.
"No," Harmony said.
Lisa blinked. "Excuse me?"
"I dress myself." Harmony held Lisa's gaze. Her voice didn't shake, which surprised them both. "This is what I wear. If it's not real enough, that's your problem."
For a second Lisa just stared. Then something shifted in her tired eyes — not quite respect, but the tired cousin of it. "Okay, honey. Your call."
They put her in the green room after that — a wide space with a long mirror and a craft services table at one end. Harmony saw the pyramid of wrapped sandwiches, the fruit bowl, the hissing coffee urn, and her body did the dog thing again. She took a sandwich and ate it standing by the wall, and took a second one, and folded a third into a napkin for her hoodie pocket, because the shelter had taught her never to trust a full table. The bread was soft. She almost cried at the bread.
"Oh," said a voice behind her. "You're the subway girl."
The girl was seventeen, maybe, with hair that fell in expensive waves and a white dress that probably cost more than everything Harmony owned. She had a vocal coach with the posture of a metronome, and a man holding a garment bag like a baby.
"Vivienne Carr," the girl said, extending a hand with pageant manners. Her eyes dropped to the duct-taped case, and her smile went pitying at the edges. "That's... brave. Bringing that."
"It plays," Harmony said.
"I'm sure it does." The smile didn't move. "Break a leg. Really."
She swept away before Harmony could answer — fine, since Harmony hadn't decided whether the answer was a word or a fist.
"Don't mind her." The voice came from the couch by the mirror — a boy, eighteen, with a guitar of his own against his knee. He had kind eyes and the rumpled look of someone who'd slept in a green room before. "I'm Jonah Reyes. That's a nice case."
Harmony stared at him. "It's held together with tape."
"Yeah." He grinned. "Tape means it's been places. My first guitar had a crack in the neck I fixed with wood glue and prayer." He nodded at her guitar. "What are you singing?"
The question landed like a hand on her shoulder. "My mother's song," she said. "She wrote it."
"Then it's already the best song in the building," he said, like a fact, and went back to tuning.
A man with a tool belt and kind eyes came for her guitar next — Pete Kaminski, sound tech. He turned the guitar over, checked the pickup with a tenderness that made her throat tight.
"Chipped wood," he murmured. "She's got stories." He looked up. "Nervous?"
"Terrified," Harmony said, because lying took energy she didn't have.
Pete smiled, and it reached his eyes. "Stage is bigger than it looks on TV. Lights are hotter. But the mic doesn't care who you are — it just carries what you give it." He handed the guitar back. "Give it everything."