Fangirl Masquerade

The smell of the place hit me first. Old wood, spilled beer, and something underneath it all, like copper and burnt sugar. The audition was in the back room of a bar that hadn't seen a legal customer since the Reagan administration. I stood in line with eleven other guys, all of us clutching sheet music and headshots, all of us pretending we weren't terrified.

I'd been pretending for three weeks straight. What was one more hour?

The boy in front of me turned around. He had a jaw like a shovel and breath that smelled like spearmint gum. "You here for the vampire gig?"

"That's what the flyer said."

He laughed. "You know it's a joke, right? Some rich asshole's idea of performance art. Four dudes in capes who don't eat garlic. It's gonna be a disaster."

I shrugged. "Pays five hundred for the callback."

That shut him up. Five hundred dollars was rent. Five hundred dollars was groceries for a month. Five hundred dollars was the difference between sleeping in my car and sleeping on a mattress that didn't smell like my own failure.

The line moved. I checked my reflection in the dark window of a pawn shop next door. Short hair, buzzed close to the scalp two days ago with clippers I borrowed from my neighbor. No makeup. Binder tight enough to make breathing a conscious effort. I looked like a skinny teenage boy with a bad attitude and worse posture.

Good.

The back room was smaller than I expected. A stage the size of a king bed, three amps stacked against the wall, and a single folding chair in the center where a man sat with his legs crossed like he was posing for a portrait. He had black hair that fell past his shoulders and skin so pale it looked blue under the fluorescent lights. He didn't look up when I walked in.

"Name," he said.

"Jamie."

"Last name?"

"Just Jamie."

He lifted his head. His eyes were the color of old pennies. "Just Jamie. How rustic."

I didn't flinch. I'd learned not to flinch when men looked at me like that, like they were deciding whether I was worth the trouble of being cruel to. "You wanted singers. I sing."

"Everyone sings." He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "What do you want?"

The question caught me off guard. I'd prepared for scales, for range tests, for the inevitable moment when someone asked me to take off my jacket and prove I was what I said I was. I hadn't prepared for philosophy.

"I want the job," I said.

"That's not what I asked."

The other three were somewhere in the room. I could feel them more than see them, shapes in the periphery that didn't move like people. One was tuning a guitar that didn't need tuning. Another was reading a book with a cover so worn I couldn't make out the title. The third sat on an amp with his eyes closed, head tilted back, throat exposed. He was beautiful in a way that made my stomach hurt.

"I want to stop sleeping in my car," I said. "I want to eat something that isn't gas station jerky. I want to stop owing people things I can't pay back."

The man in the chair smiled. His teeth were very white and very straight. "Honest. I like that." He stood up. He was taller than he'd looked sitting down, and thin in a way that suggested he forgot to eat for days at a time. "Sing something."

I sang the first thing that came to mind. A lullaby my mother used to hum when I was small, back when we still had a house and she still had a voice. It was in a minor key and it didn't have words, just sounds that rose and fell like breathing. I closed my eyes and let it come out of me, the way I'd been doing since I was six years old and realized that singing was the only thing I was good at that didn't require me to be someone else.

When I finished, the room was quiet.

The one on the amp had opened his eyes. They were green, a green so dark it looked black until the light caught them. He was looking at me like I was a puzzle he'd already solved.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Jamie."

"No." He slid off the amp and walked toward me. He moved like water, like he wasn't subject to the same laws of gravity as the rest of us. "What's your real name?"

My heart stopped. Just for a second. Just long enough for me to feel it.

"Jamie," I said again.

He stopped a foot away. Close enough that I could smell him, which was strange because I hadn't heard him approach. He smelled like rain on hot pavement. Like the air before a storm.

"Liar," he said. But he said it softly, almost gently, like it was a compliment.

The man in the chair clapped his hands once. "Enough, Cassius. You'll scare him off."

Cassius didn't move. His eyes traveled down my body, slow and deliberate, and I felt it like a hand. "He's not scared. Are you, Jamie?"

"No," I said. And it was true. I was a lot of things. Terrified, exhausted, running on fumes and stubbornness. But scared of him? No. That came later.

"Good." He turned and walked back to his amp. "He's in."

The man in the chair raised an eyebrow. "I make the decisions."

"You do." Cassius sat down and closed his eyes again. "And you were going to pick him anyway. I'm just saving time."

The man in the chair looked at me for a long moment. Then he sighed. "Fine. Rehearsal is Tuesday at midnight. Don't be late. Don't bring anyone. Don't ask questions."

I nodded. I didn't trust myself to speak.

"One more thing." He walked toward me, and I noticed for the first time that he didn't blink. "The flyer said we're vampires. That wasn't a joke."

I laughed. It came out before I could stop it, sharp and nervous. "Right."

"I'm Lucien." He held out his hand. His fingers were cold when I shook them. Not cool. Cold. Like he'd been holding a glass of ice water for an hour. "That's Cassius on the amp. The one with the guitar is Dmitri. The one pretending to read is Theo."

Theo looked up from his book. He had a face like a poet who'd died young, all cheekbones and shadows. "I'm not pretending."

"You've read that same page for twenty minutes."

"It's a good page."

Lucien ignored him. "We'll see you Tuesday, Jamie. Or whoever you are."

I left before he could say anything else. The hallway was dark and smelled like mildew. I made it to the street before my hands started shaking.

The night air was cold and I stood on the sidewalk for a long time, breathing it in, trying to remember why I'd thought this was a good idea. Five hundred dollars. A band full of men who claimed to be vampires. A lead singer who looked at me like he could see through my skin.

I should have walked away. I should have gone back to my car and driven to my sister's house in Ohio and begged her to let me sleep on her couch until I figured something else out. I should have done a lot of things.

Instead, I pulled out my phone and typed a reminder into my calendar. Rehearsal. Tuesday. Midnight.

Then I walked six blocks to where I'd parked my car, climbed into the back seat, and fell asleep with my jacket over my face, dreaming of green eyes and cold hands and a voice that sounded like rain.