Most of the changes take place in the middle of the story. Any feedback?
The Day Beverly Lost Jessica
As Beverly's daughter, dissatisfied with the pace her mother was walking, a speed that, to Beverly, was perfectly fine, dragged her closer by the hand to the building, which seemed only to be a few months old (the only thing making it remotely aged was the bird's nest in the arch of the “O” in “WORLD WIDE MUSIC” in the sign above the double doors) and, even so, was being cleaned and repainted by two men, Beverly knew that this place was not where she wanted her little Jessica to be, and her discomfort grew when the gentle hand of her daughter forcibly left her own, Jessica’s fake fingernails leaving a sharp scratch on Beverly’s palm, and opened one of the doors to the smell of seven thirteen year old girls’ perfume so strong that Beverly instinctively held her breath.
Inside was a waiting room designed, not for conversation or comfort, but for constant observation of things that seemed to be screeching at her from all angles at all volumes as if they were trying to distract her from observing too much of anything at all, like spending too much time on one thing would harm her in some way and to be safe was to only view something for a miniscule amount of time and thought. Pink and purple televisions in every corner of the room looped the same four music videos (produced by this company, she assumed), each with its own teen pop singer, whose likeness was being used in multiple life-size cutouts which were scattered, like they had just been thrown down from 20 feet high, around the room and some of the girls, with their hair glistening with product, their faces pancaked with blush, and, she couldn’t help but notice, their skirts hemmed up to the upper thigh, were posing beside the cutouts as their parents, invested with smiles behind their cameras, snapped photos and the resulting flash caused Beverly to involuntary slam shut her eyes and turn her head. Large banners constantly blowing due to their position in front of air conditioning vents and congratulating someone named Harmony Graham were hung from the ceiling. Chairs were set up in a circle so that everyone could see everybody else (but not directly for no one wanted to be caught eyeing the person across from them). The girls who weren’t getting their pictures taken were practicing songs that Beverly couldn’t process over the clutter of noise, and even if she could, she wouldn’t have known them. Brightly colored pamphlets were thrown on a round table—which itself was slapped with shiny, but uneven, stickers of microphones, headsets, stars, expensive sports cars, and sayings like YEAH and LOL—in the center of the chairs. Bored but restless parents were speaking loudly over the phone yelling questions like, “What?” or “I can’t hear you, say that again?” As Beverly stood in the entrance, she couldn’t help but feel lost in it all.
She looked at her hand that Jessica had scratched remembering earlier the previous night when she helped put the fake nails on her daughter’s fingers as they faced each other sitting on the living room carpet.
“I just don’t know about all this.”
“Look, Mom. I know how the system works. They want pizzazz. They want presence. And they provide everything else. They don’t want talent, really. They already have it to give.”
“And so do you. I’ve heard you sing. You already have talent.”
“Sure, but that doesn’t mean I’ll get anywhere with it, you know. These guys are supposed to get me out there. I’ll be known. Talent doesn’t come first. Notoriety does.”
“Okay, Jess. I trust you.”
“That’s why I love you, Mom.”
“Excuse me, Ms…” said a young, handsome boy behind a counter near the entrance who kept swishing his head to the side and back, the way young boys with longer hair do this to keep the hair out of their eyes, but this young man’s was short and cleanly cut and didn’t move.
“Oh, right,” said Beverly. “What?”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Oh! Oh, my daughter, Jessica, has an audition…”
The boy looked at a purple sheet of paper.
“Jessica…Jessica… Twelve, right?”
“That’s it.”
The boy gave another swish and said, “Please sit down. Someone will come get her shortly for her appointment.”
Jessica was in a chair already, messing with her phone, not a bit of self-consciousness in her poise, when Beverly sat down and leaned close to her so they could hear each other.
“You okay?”
“What?”
“Are you nervous or anything?”
“You shouldn’t ask stuff like that before stuff like this, Mom.”
“Sorry.”
A small girl, small even considering the rest of the room’s teenagers, started to dance in place.
“I mean we can leave right now if you want to.”
“We can’t leave. Are you crazy?”
“You’re right. You’re right. I’m just scared.”
“I’m right here, Mom. I’ll be okay. This is good for me.”
“Okay, I trust you.”
“That’s why I love you.”
With her unscathed hand she reached for her daughter’s, but the wall in front of her, painted with bright shades of purple, pink, and blue, distracted her as it revealed part of itself to be an actual door as it opened, and inside the doorway was a man, possibly around his mid-50s, with sunglasses on, his thick hair gelled in place, his figure perfect for the long sleeve white buttoned down shirt he was wearing, and with a black tie as skinny as her daughter’s wrists it seemed. He looked around the room as he said, “Jessica? Is Jessica here?” and Jessica got up, walked toward him with a stage presence of a more mature—or at least more experienced—teenager. As Jessica walked away, Beverly noticed that she had let her hair down and realized, as the man put his shoulder around Jessica and closed the door, that she would never again see her daughter’s hair bounce from side to side in a pony tail as she walked.
Beverly picked up, with her wounded, stinging hand, a pamphlet filled with sharp images of cameras flashing, teenagers leaving limos onto red carpets, screaming crowds, sound studios, small text bites such as “120,000,000 views!!!” and “Become a Pop Legend!!!”, and it took five minutes before she found an article of any kind that might have told her more about the place she was in that wasn’t from Jessica’s own mouth, and found bits like “…have chosen Harmony Graham, an extremely beautiful, multi-talented 14-year-old from Long Beach, California to be America's next Pop Star phenomenon!!” and “Harmony is chosen to participate in a challenge that will try and make her into the next Big Thing in only one short week,” and “…songs made specifically for her,” and she suddenly got the urge to know more about this girl.
The wall-door opened after a few minutes it seemed and a light that wasn’t there before poured forth, but did not reach anyone in the waiting room, and the man, silhouetted, stood and raised his arm and, even though his voiced seemed fogged through the loud music, asked without raising his voice, “Is Jessica’s mom here?” which was answered by Beverly’s hand, the scratch a clear red line across the palm, raised like a child not quite shy enough to keep from answering a teacher’s question. He waved her over and she walked inside. The first thing she saw was a large window to another room, which she was unable to see inside, and Jessica smiling, sitting on top of a long table with her legs crossed leaning on her hands behind her. She seemed like a Jessica that Beverly had never seen before—when she looked at her she didn’t see herself crying the first time she was able to cradle Jessica comfortably in her arms after a month of holding her premature daughter in the palms of her hands, or always being amused when Jessica would blend her mashed potatoes with ketchup because she liked the color pink so much, or Jessica graciously offering to share her twin-size bed when Beverly told her about her recurring nightmares. Instead she saw Jessica, sitting on a worn couch in a therapist’s office, being diagnosed with clinical depression, being cradled in an older boy’s arms as they watched a movie Beverly had introduced her to years before, stoically refilling a customer’s drink after getting her ass slapped.
“Hey, Mom,” she said.
“Hello, Ms. Faulter,” said the man.
Beverly kept looking at Jessica.
“What are you doing on the table?”
“Auditioning. That’s Jackson, Mom.”
After a few more seconds, she looked at him.
“Hello.”
“We think your daughter is an exceptionally talented artist and we would like to take her on as our client, Ms. Faulter.”
“What did I tell you, Mom?”
Beverly nodded her head, perhaps for too long, and said, “Yeah, super duper.”
“Please don’t say super duper. It makes you sound four years old.”
“Yeah,” Beverly said.
“If you want, we can sit here at the table and discuss what to do from here.”
“Can I go check out in the sound studio?” Jessica asked, looking at Jackson with wide eyes.
“So that’s what’s in the other room?”
“It is, and yes, you can.”
Jessica jumped up and, holding Jackson’s guiding hand and using a chair as a step, walked off the table.
“So, Ms. Faulter, if you have any questions, just interrupt me and I will answer them as best I can.”
A few more superfluous nods. “Okay.”
“As I said, I believe Jessica to be a wonderful girl, excellent singer, and a natural for the stage.”
“You hear that?”
“Just with that one, short audition?”
“Sure, do you disagree?”
“She’s my daughter.”
“Hey, Jackson. Do any of these buttons work?”
“We can provide her with songs made just for her. If she wants to use her own lyrics, we have someone to help her with that—tighten them up. Make them a little more her age.”
“Her age?”
“Have you not seen them?”
“She won’t let me.”
“She let me, and let me tell you, it’s amazing stuff. Wonderful wordplay. Rhythms are powerful. About family, divorce. Even one about post-racial racism. They aren’t just songs, their stories. But we might need to tone them down.”
“Oh.”
“There’s just so many buttons and knobs in here!”
“It will cost you some dollars, but…”
“Who is Harmony Graham?”
“Excuse me?”
“Harmony…the girl that was picked to be a star?”
“Oh yes. We at World Wide Music are extremely excited to join her on her journey.”
“I wonder what they all do.”
“But who is she?”
“I don’t know exactly what you’re asking me.”
“I don’t think I do either.”
“I’m going to touch one, okay?”
“She’s very talented.”
“And you think you can make this girl famous in a week?”
“It’s possible.”
“It is?”
“Nowadays.”
“Here I go.”
“Go ahead.”
“But how?”
“The internet. The World Wide Web.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Anyone can become famous now, thanks to the internet.”
“Step out on the floor”
“Oh, not this song. How do I turn it off?”
“Anyone can post videos of themselves singing a song, dancing, playing guitar, and everyone can see them. The world is their audience at the very beginning of their career so no longer do they have to hide in obscurity. There’s so much you can do now, it’s amazing.”
“Okay.”
“Cause I’m ready for more”
“You’ve heard of the Hide-Yo-Kids Hide-Yo-Wife Guy, right? The Charlie-Bit-Me Kid?”
“The DJ keeps playing my song”
“The Numa-Numa Guy? The Star-Wars Kid, for sure. The I-Like-Turtles Boy?”
“I…no.”
“Gonna push ‘send’ text all my friends”
“How do I turn this off, Jackson?”
“And tell them what I’m thinking of”
“The Terrible Sports News Caster? The Crazy Woman on the MARTA? The Winnebago Man? You know the Winnebago Man.”
“Is this the volume?”
“The Serious Face Baby? That one guy who yelled ‘Don’t tase me, bro’?” Come on.”
“I don’t. It’s all hard to keep up.”
“The Woman Who Fell Squishing Grapes with her Feet? The Big Kid on the Amusement Park Ride? The Sneezing Baby Panda!
“EVERYONE IS HERE AND I AM HAVING SO MUCH FUN”
“I’m sorry! I don’t!”
“Wrong way. Meant to turn this down.”
“Well, the point is those people were nobodies! Now at least 200 million people—each and every one of them—know who these people are! And it’s all thanks to the internet! Are you okay? You look a little tired.”
“What? Have you had success with clients before?”
“I HEAR THE SOUND AND THEN YOU KNOW I’M GONNA SING ALONG”
“Jessica, sweetheart, your mom and I are trying to have a meeting!”
“I’m trying to turn it off!”
“I mean. I—I don’t want to push my daughter into some—something like this without any sort of guarantee, you know? I don’t want—want her disappointed.”
“Course we’ve had success. We’re very good at what we do.”
“Lose yourself. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for”
“And what—what—what do you do? I want to hear it from you.”
“We help children like your daughter out.”
“Like m-my daughter?”
“Like me!”
“We discover and recruit young, talented singers. We make it possible for an emerging artist to be discovered, defined and delivered, to advance in their chosen career and be successful. Do you need a glass of water or something?”
“A—And you do this through…”
“The internet, yes.”
“I guess I’ll just let the song play.”
“Don’t speak. The music’s gonna say it for you”
“Look, Ms. Faulter. I fancied myself a good singer songwriter back in the day. Everyone I knew liked my stuff. But I stayed out of the lime light, and you know why? Because the world is big. Very big, Ms. Faulter. I couldn’t be everywhere at once. Now I’m too old for the lime light. So I help artists like your daughter to do what I couldn’t.
“And those p—people in the videos are famous.”
“Those videos have hundreds of millions of views. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Don’t be shy. Just take a chance”
“There are just so many.”
“I love this place already.”
“Come on come on”
“I—I’m getting lost in it all.”
“Fads come and go, Mrs Faulter. Those views are permanent. They’re going nowhere. What are you doing here, Mark? I’m in the middle of a meeting.”
“Sir, there’s fighting in the lobby.”
“Everybody’s feeling the beat”
“Who? How many?”
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“All of them.”
“Even the parents?”
“I don’t want to lose her.”
“Mom, answer me.”
“Even the parents, listen.”
“Dancing to the rhythm with me”
“Don’t you dare call my daughter a hussy. What does that even mean?”
“Get the camera. You know how to work it right?”
“I don’t want to lose her in it all.”
“She just ripped my shirt! My shirt!”
“Jessica, you better get in there with them. This is what we need.”
“Okay. Mom, are you okay?”
“Enough of the talk now we’re ready to rock”
“It’s on your desk, right?”
“What’s going on out there?”
“Yes! Yes! Get it. Quickly!”
“They’re ripping apart the cut-outs!”
“Let’s go, Jessica. Get in there. This is exactly what we need.”
“Everyone’s here and I’m having so much fun”
“Where’s my daughter? Where did she go?”
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