The audience clapped. Polite. Tired. Somewhere out there, thousands of faces she couldn't see.
The stage manager's hand came down on her shoulder. In her ear, through Pete's mic, the countdown started — three, two —
The lights went up.
Chapter 5: The Question
The stairs up to the stage were carpeted — thick, sound-eating carpet — and that was the first thing that surprised her.
It shouldn't have been. The night had already been one long procession of rooms too big and people too smooth: the wardrobe girl who kept touching Harmony's sleeve like she might stain it, the little dish of wax fruit on the greenroom table that Harmony had very nearly tried to eat. Her brain had run out of room for surprise an hour ago. But the carpet got her. Backstage at BrightStar Voices, everything was quiet under your feet.
"Find your mark and don't move off it till I say," the stage manager said. His headset blinked red. "Chase comes to you. Smile."
Harmony wasn't sure she had a smile left in her tonight. She was sixteen years old, homeless since pneumonia took her mother when she was fourteen, and everything she owned in the world was the faded navy hoodie she was wearing, the rubber band holding her low bun together, the sneakers with the hole near the big toe of her left shoe, and the guitar on her back — her mother's old acoustic, chipped wood, in a case held together with silver duct tape. She nodded at the stage manager. Nodding was free.
The stage door opened and the light hit her like weather.
It was hot — that was the second surprise. Stage light had a temperature and a weight; it pressed down on the top of her head and the bridge of her nose, and it bleached everything past the first three rows into a dark ocean. Dana had told her that in the hallway: the audience is water. You don't look at water. You sing over it.
Her mark was a little X of white tape at center stage. She walked to it, planted her feet on the X, and tried not to think about how many millions of people might be watching that little X through the cameras.
Chase Delacroix was already gliding toward her, teeth very white, one arm out like they were old friends. "Harmony Cole, everybody!" The applause came up out of the dark like surf breaking. "Sixteen years old — and we found this one the old-fashioned way. She was busking on the Fulton Street platform with her mama's guitar. That right, Harmony? Fulton Street?"
The microphone he held out was cold. "Yes, sir," she said, and the speakers threw her voice back at her, enormous. She flinched before she could stop herself.
"How long you been singing down there?"
"Two years. Since my mama died."
A soft sound moved through the dark — not quite a gasp, more like the whole theater deciding to be gentle with her. Chase's smile dimmed a fraction into something that might have been real. "I'm sorry, baby. And that guitar on your back — that's your mama's?"
"Yes, sir." Her hand found the neck of it without her telling it to, the way you'd touch a sleeping person's shoulder. "She was a singer. Church choir. She taught me everything I know."
"Well, we're sure glad you're here." Chase turned half toward the judges' desk, sitting in its own little moat of light. Harmony let her eyes flick there once: Denise Holloway warm as a church, Rafael Ortiz unreadable behind his desk, Marcus Vane leaned back with his sunglasses on indoors. "Now, Harmony — be honest with me. What would you do if you actually won this whole thing? Quarter of a million dollars, a record deal — what does a sixteen-year-old girl from the Fulton Street platform do with all that?"
The question hung in the hot light. A quarter of a million dollars wasn't a number; it was a weather system. Her mouth moved before she could dress the thought up in anything prettier.
"I'd eat," she said. "And I'd make sure Tee eats."
A ripple went through the dark — laughter, nervous and scattered. Somebody laughed too loud and then stopped.
Chase's professional smile wobbled. "Tee — that's your—"
"My little brother," Harmony said. "Not by blood. By hunger."
This time the laugh that came back was warmer. A few people aww'd, which was worse than the laughter. She felt her face going hot under the lights and was glad for the dark ocean, glad nobody could see it properly.
"What are you singing for us tonight, Harmony?"
"A song my mama wrote." Her hand tightened on the guitar neck. "'A Place at the Table.'"
"Beautiful." Chase glanced toward the judges' desk. "Marcus — you want to jump in here?"
Marcus Vane leaned forward into his microphone. His sunglasses caught the stage light and threw it back in two white coins. He was smiling the way a cat smiles at something small with wings.
"So," he said, "subway girl — what makes you think you belong on this stage?"
The words landed like a slap. Harmony's stomach dropped clean through the floorboards. Behind the judges' desk, Denise Holloway's warm, churchy smile was already fading at the edges; Rafael Ortiz shifted in his leather chair and it creaked in the sudden quiet.
Harmony looked straight at Marcus Vane — at the two white coins where his eyes should have been — and her voice came out of her clear as a bell, outrunning her fear by half a second.
"If I sing well," she said, "will you give me food?"
A gasp went up, sharp and whole, like the entire theater had inhaled at once. And then Marcus Vane laughed — a short, barking laugh fired straight into his microphone, cruel and delighted — and the audience, released, laughed with him, nervous and uneven.
Denise Holloway's smile died completely. Rafael Ortiz shifted in his seat again, the leather creaking louder, and folded his hands on the desk. Harmony's cheeks were burning so hot she could feel it in her ears, but she did not look down. The subway had taught her that much: when the whole car is staring, you hold still inside the sound. You do not give them your eyes.