The voices were coming closer to the door.
Alex went up on the balls of his feet and backed away down the corridor the way he’d come, quietly, without turning around until he had to.
Since he’d woken up in this body he had made a point of walking through a few record stores.
Unless you were a superstar, or the thing came in a deluxe package, a single cassette ran no more than five dollars.
Seven thousand copies, every one of them sold, came to thirty-five thousand — gross, before a nickel of cost came out of it.
No wonder the men in that office were saying we’re done to each other like a chant.
So.
He tucked himself into the shadow behind the DJ station and looked out at the dance floor, which was as loud as ever.
The fill lights washed the bodies out to white silhouettes.
The director told them to dance and they danced, sweating, so locked in they wiped their faces without seeming to notice they were doing it.
Emily’s smile had nothing in it but happiness.
Nothing else at all.
Then the director called a stop and she doubled over fast, hands on her knees, chest heaving.
She was ten.
Her legs simply weren’t going to hold out.
Connie had shed her coat a long time ago.
That morning she’d rented an evening dress from a second-hand store — a dress made out of maybe two scraps of fabric, with nothing between them — and when the cameraman deliberately pushed the lens down toward her hips she read his mind instantly and set her rear shaking like a motor running off its mount, proud of it.
A.l.
was puffing his cheeks, face flushed dark.
Beatboxing at that volume was a lung-capacity test with an audience.
Rap was only half his life; to keep himself fed he gave almost all the rest of his hours to waiting tables at a restaurant.
And the star himself, Lil Lori, tugged at the mic and swung it around and struck every pose he believed to be the coolest and the handsomest.
Two years ago a record company had taken a liking to him and offered him a contract, and he’d dropped out of school on the spot.
Since then he’d spent most of his time on the boring part — writing lyrics, drilling his vocals over and over.
Basketball was his only amusement.
The dozen-odd songs on the album, every lyric, he’d written himself.
Beside Alex, Tony was watching the floor with his eyes full of longing and pure pleasure.
Make it big.
Ride somebody’s coattails.
Get out of this fucking slum.
That was Tony’s whole vocabulary these days, and every time Alex heard it he’d mutter inwardly about a man whose big dream was to be another man’s hanger-on.
But.
But then Alex thought about the week he’d just had.
The week he’d lost.
Monday, ET went down at the edge of the road two blocks from the house with five bullets in him.
Alex went with Tony to lay flowers on the spot where it happened.
Word was that ET’s crew had sworn revenge.
And what would that accomplish?
Aside from making everybody on the block a little more afraid, nothing — a few more pairs of shoes knotted over the wires at the intersection, some months from now.
At band practice, his triangle came in wrong again, and he only saved the credit by standing there looking pitiful in front of a furious music teacher.
Then math turned on him too.
The advanced class had gotten as far as calculus, and the students in it had teeth; he couldn’t coast through the way he had in the standard course.
Since A Plus name had stuck to him he’d taken it calmly enough, and it was true that the teasing and the shoving had eased off a little.
But the real problem with that public school was that there was nowhere quiet in it.
Try to find a corner to read in for half an hour and you’d be run off by some hustler in a hurry to get high, or you’d blunder in on a couple who badly wanted the corner for other purposes. Read this novel at novelping(.)com for the best experience.
And yesterday.
Yesterday the whole family had set out at first light under Aunt Susie’s generalship to stand in line at the doors of one charity after another for whatever was being handed out free.
Alex had held the food stamps and stood five hours in a line outside a store with its metal security grates freshly bolted back on and exactly one register window open, to trade them for flour and enough other food to carry the household a week.
Then the family assembled at the church and lined up again, for a free lunch of bread and soup.
In the afternoon there was another line, at another giveaway.
Last of all they waited at Walmart for the close-of-day markdowns on eggs and meat about to turn.
When the dark came down, a family with no car stood at the stop with big bags hanging off every arm for another half hour, waiting on the bus home.
His settling-in period was over, and what Alex could feel in himself now wasn’t ambition.
It was absorption.
This life had no daylight in it anywhere, and it was quietly taking him in.
Give it another year, another year and a half, and if some little local star crooked a finger at him he knew with total certainty that he wouldn’t be able to say no.
And that was the good outcome.
Better to carry somebody’s bag than to stay here and, on some bad impulse, pick up a gun and start moving product.
“All right — that’s a wrap!”
Just past four the director announced the video officially shot, and the dance floor let out a cheer.
“Thank you, Tony. You’re so good to me.”
Tony’s ex-girlfriend bounded over and hung off his neck, kissing the side of his face again and again.
“It’s nothing.” Tony was three feet off the ground.
“It’s still early, let’s find us a spot—” He got the idea and then got interested, pulled off the monitor headphones, and took her straight off to find one.
Connie watched the two of them go with a flat stare, then handed the wrung-out Emily over into Alex’s arms.
“Forget them. Come with me, I gotta take the dress back.” She was shrugging into her coat as she said it.
It emptied out the way a theater empties, everyone doing a little quick socializing on the way to the door.
Alex turned his head and saw Lori and Al talking with two older Black men, one fat and one thin.
And there it was — he knew both voices.
The pair from the office.
The heavy one was the bass.
From what he’d overheard, this was the man who owned the record company, and he had the bearing to go with it.
The pink suit didn’t come off the least bit soft on him.
A thick gold chain, a gold ring, a gold watch: the whole set, worn all at once.
The thin one had to be Lori’s agent.
A dark suit that fit him beautifully, a courteous way of talking, not one hair out of place in a slicked-back cut, the whole effect of a man who’d learned his manners in an older business.
Lori and Al clearly had no attention to spare, and there was obviously no point waiting on Tony.
Alex hoisted Emily up and left with Connie.
“Hey! A Plus!”
Outside, Muffler was helping the cameraman carry equipment out, and a few people called goodbye.
Then AK came out after them at a jog and cut them off.
“Connie too? Come here. Come here.”
He brought Alex and Connie in close and turned his body to block the sightlines of everybody behind him, then peeled three bills off the stack of twenties in his hand: one for Connie, one for Alex.
“Little Emily gets one too.” He grinned and pushed the last one into Emily’s fist.
“Everybody getting these?” Connie asked, tucking hers into her top.
“Family only. Those other guys should be glad to get their faces in a video,” AK said.
“Uh…” Alex felt like a freeloader. The source of this chapter is g.com.
“I didn’t even dance, though. This money—” He held it back out.
“Ha! Tony’s right, you got a problem up in there.” AK laughed and rapped a knuckle against Alex’s forehead.
“Don’t be stupid. It’s not my money. You’re Tony’s brother, so we’re family, and family looks out for each other. All right?”
“Just leave him alone.”
Connie shot Alex a look.
“Thank you,” she said.
Emily added her own polite little thank-you.
“Come on, let’s go — I’m going shopping today!” Connie announced, delighted.
“I want a tutu!” Emily hollered after her.
So Alex had no choice but to say goodbye to AK with the money in his hand, and went with the girls to the platform to wait for the bus.
Twenty dollars.
The largest sum of cash he had personally possessed since the switch.
The enormous numbers from the other life didn’t count, obviously.
As things stood in 1990, a dollar on the black market back in China went for something like ten yuan, which made twenty dollars more than an ordinary person there earned in a month.
Second-hand stores that rent out evening wear tend not to be small operations.
“Tutu!” Emily slithered down out of Alex’s arms and made straight for her objective.
“Watch her. I’m changing,” Connie said, heading for the fitting room in back.
Alex followed Emily along the rows of hangers, and somewhere in there the feeling arrived that he had stood in this exact scene before.
But this store wasn’t here before.
He was still turning that over when something at the edge of his vision caught: a pink suit on the wall, not so far off the one on Lori’s boss a few minutes ago.
Huh?
He went digging after it, hard, and his hand went to his pocket and touched the twenty dollars.
~I’m gonna pop some tags~
Twenty dollars.
Shopping.
Pink suit.
That bass voice.
Rap.
Put them all together and—
~Only got twenty dollars in my pocket~
It hit him where he stood, and it hit like something handed down out of the sky.
Image after image of a music video arrived complete, with the rap and the track running underneath it in time, all of it at once and all of it finished: the hook built around having nothing but twenty dollars in your pocket.
The bit about popping the tags off whatever he walked out with.
A big man riding along in an enormous fur coat like he owned the block, somebody else’s castoffs worn with more swagger than anyone who ever paid full price.
Verses, chorus, camera moves, the grin at the end of a line.
All of it.
~I’m, I’m, I’m huntin, lookin’ for a come up~
Thrift Shop.
That’s where he is.
Thrift shop.
~This is fucking awesome~
Wonder if the lyrics are neccesary for you guys.
I understand due to a lot of reasons it should be blotted out but I think its easier on readers to actually see the lyrics on screen.