Page 85 of Always Been His

Something happens to me.

Something that was there before Nicki and the contract and the machine, before the wig and the brand and the schedule, before any of it. The thing that made me climb the oak in Grandma Mary’s backyard at nine years old and sing to the neighborhood because I had something in my chest that had to come out, and music was the only exit.

I’m standing in a classroom in Hamilton County with six girls who have never signed anything with anyone, and I am the most alive I’ve felt on a stage in six years.

I hit the high note at the bridge and hold it.

Then I let it go.

Miss Flack lifts her hands from the keys.

Nobody says anything for a full second.

And then the thought arrives, clean and specific and devastating in its simplicity. I cannot give this up.

I don’t mean the arenas, the sold-out nights, and the charts. This. A voice and a room and other voices finding yours, and the way it lives in your chest for hours after. If signing another contract means I get to keep walking into rooms like this one, if it means I get to keep doing the thing that made me climb trees as a kid and sing to no one in particular, if it means Deja gets to hear what her voice sounds like next to something real…

Is it worth it?

I genuinely don’t know.

But standing here, I understand for the first time that the question is not whether I want to sing. I’ve always wanted to sing. The question is what I’m willing to do to protect the right version of this. The version that feels like what just happened in this room rather than the version that eats the person doing it.

Zo tips her head at me from the second row. “Okay,” she concedes, her voice stripped of attitude. “You can actually sing.”

“I thought you’d heard her music,” Deja calls out, amused.

“That’s different,” Zo returns, completely unapologetic. “This is live, and it’s so much better. All stripped down like that. It’s so good.”

I point at her. “That is the most valid thing anyone has said to me in months.”

“Can I ask you something?” Ruby ventures, her copper braids swinging forward.

“Go,” I tell her.

“Why did you disappear all summer after the Garden?”

“Ruby!” Miss Flack snaps, swiping her glasses off her face. “That is completely inappropriate.”

I swallow dryly and shake my head. “No, it’s fine.”

I wipe my hands on my thighs and think about it. I’ve been saying I’m exhausted, and I was exhausted, but it’s deeper than that. Like I lost and found a part of myself again.

“Because I forgot why I love music,” I say, and the meaning of it hits me as it leaves my mouth. “I forgot that I sing for me, and for girls like you. Being a popstar stops being fun when you’re just doing it to be famous. You have to want it for more, and this, singing with you is more.”

Ruby nods with her whole upper body. “Woah, super-deep, girl.”

“Yeah, sorry,” I cough out a laugh. I really shouldn’t be pouring out my heart to a pre-teen. “But I think I’m back, so don’t worry about me.” I clear my throat. “Another song?”

The class squeals out a yes.

After the session, Miss Flack makes me drive her home for dinner.

She has her window cracked. Her gray locks are still pinned up from the class, her reading glasses are folded in the collar of her shirt, and she watches the road ahead with the expression she has always had, the one that sees more than it comments on.

“Those girls will remember today,” she says. “Not because Echo came to their choir room. But because Sienna did. There is a difference and they felt it, even the ones who wouldn’t admit it.”

The road curves south, and the harbor comes into view between the tree line, the water flat and silver, and I feel Deja’s voice sitting in my chest the way good sounds sit after they’ve passed through you. Not gone, just settled.