Harmony stood at the edge of the stage shaking so hard she thought her knees might fold. She bent down, picked up the dead microphone, and lifted it to her lips.
"Thank you," she whispered into it.
Chapter 7: Overnight
She woke to Tee shaking her shoulder and somebody else's phone shoved six inches from her face.
"Forty million," Tee hissed. "Harm. Forty million."
The St. Brigid's dorm smelled like bleach and somebody else's coffee. Morning light came through the high barred windows in dusty slabs and laid itself across the rows of narrow cots. Harmony sat up, her bun half-collapsed, the rubber band hanging on for dear life, and squinted at the phone. There she was — tiny, at the edge of a stage, bending to set down a dead mic — and under the video a number that didn't look real, and a hashtag: #SingForBread.
"It says sing for bread," Tee said, deeply indignant. "You didn't sing for bread. You sang for food. There's a difference."
"Give me that." She took the phone. The comments were scrolling faster than she could read. Crying emojis. Prayer hands. Somebody had set the clip to a gospel organ. Somebody else had written, in all caps, SHE ASKED FOR FOOD AND THEY CUT HER MIC, I WILL NEVER RECOVER.
Her hands started shaking again, the way they had onstage.
By nine o'clock there were news vans double-parked outside St. Brigid's, their satellite dishes tilted at the Bronx sky like sunflowers. Somebody from the shelter staff had to stand in the doorway to keep the cameras from coming up the steps. Harmony watched from the stairwell window with Tee pressed against her side, and the whole thing felt like a weather system that had decided, personally, to rain on her.
In the kitchen, Odette Baptiste had the shelter's old TV turned to the morning news, and when the clip came on — Harmony's small figure at the edge of all that light, the confetti like gold snow — Odette cried and laughed at the same time, both hands pressed to her cheeks.
"Ti zwazo," she kept saying, shaking her head. "My little bird sang for the whole world."
And then, in honor, she fed everyone extra portions. Extra scoop of oatmeal. Extra bread. An extra ladle of the good soup, the one with the chicken in it. The line shuffled past beaming, and the old men lifted their spoons to Harmony like she was a toast.
Tee appointed himself her bodyguard before noon. He walked her to the bathroom and waited outside the door. He told anyone who would stand still that she was his sister and he had taught her everything she knew, which was a lie — he was thirteen and had taught her nothing except how to make an overturned bucket sound like a thunderstorm and where the transit cops never checked. But he said it with such chest-puffed pride that Harmony didn't have the heart to correct him in front of people.
The cruelty came on a borrowed phone, in the afternoon, when the dorm was quiet.
Plant. Crisis actor. Nobody that polished is homeless, look at her teeth. The poverty is staged. The mic cut was staged too — you really think a show cuts audio by accident? All of it fake, all of it for votes.
Someone posted a photo from the soundcheck — her smiling, caught mid-laugh at something Pete had said — with the caption: See? She doesn't look homeless. As if hunger had a look. As if two years of Fulton Street platforms and shelter cots were supposed to print themselves on your face in a way strangers could verify.
Each comment was a small cold stone dropped into her stomach. She read until her eyes burned, and then Tee snatched the phone away and said, "Stop drinking poison, Harm," which was something Odette said, and he said it in Odette's exact voice, and she laughed until she cried a little.
Then Lorraine Pike arrived.
She was in her fifties, with graying braids and a soft voice and a clipboard that meant business — a child-welfare social worker, kindly but firm, the kind of firm that has forms. She sat Harmony down in the little office by the laundry room and explained, gently, that a sixteen-year-old in the shelter system appearing on national television triggered certain obligations. Paperwork. A guardianship review. Questions about supervision, about exploitation, about whether the show had obtained the proper consents.
She said "we're not taking you anywhere" three times. Harmony heard only the word review, and felt the floor tilt sideways under her chair.
Afterward, overwhelmed past the point of tears, Harmony hid in the kitchen with Odette and peeled carrots. The kitchen smelled of onions and bleach and the good soup. Her hands knew the work — the scrape and turn, scrape and turn — and the rhythm of it held her together the way singing did.
"Odette," she said quietly, not looking up. "Did I do wrong?"
Odette's hands never stopped moving, steady as a metronome. "Child, you sang. The world did the rest."
"But the vans, and the lady with the clipboard, and the people saying I'm a liar—"
"Ti zwazo." Odette took Harmony's chin and turned her face up, her palm warm and smelling of carrots. "You opened your mouth and told the truth. What the world does with the truth is the world's business. Not yours. Yours is the singing."
Tee burst through the swinging door then, waving the borrowed phone like a flag. "Harm! Somebody leaked the control-room audio — you can hear a lady say 'let's see the trainwreck' right before your mic cut!" He was breathless with triumph. "The whole internet is mad at the show now. There's another hashtag. #JusticeForHarmony."
Harmony felt sick and vindicated at the same time, like two weathers meeting.
That evening Dana Whitfield called. Her voice was breathless too, but in the professional way, like she'd been running between meetings all day.
"Harmony — baby, are you sitting down? They want you back. Semifinals. Live." A pause, and then, softer: "A car comes Monday. Nine a.m. Don't be late."
Harmony looked at the phone in her hand. At the half-peeled carrot on the cutting board. At Odette, who had stopped chopping and was watching her with flour on her sleeve and everything she needed to know already in her face.