Page 4 of Finding Tane
“Before you have some fun?” Ivy sighed. “You’re pathetic, Dill. You can’t just keep on putting off your own wants and needs forever.”
“Well, there’s the other stuff as well.” I turned to look at Ivy, significantly.
Ivy shook her head. “Autism is far more well understood and accepted these days, Dill. You know that. So you like some things done a certain way, that’s not a deal breaker you know. You’re a good guy with a steady job and a great heart. The right guy will love you for all of you.”
I sat back in the chair and rubbed my hand over my face. “When did you get so wise, Ivy?”
“At college,” she said. “I’m a genius, I’ll have you know. My tutor reckons my poetry is going to change the world.”
Chapter Three
Tane
The day before
“You could change the spelling of your stage name to make it easier to say, easier to remember,” Andrew Lane said. It wasn’t the first time he’d brought this up, and I had told him absolutely not each and every time. “Make it like F — e — t — o — o?”
I shook my head, even though I knew he couldn’t see me. “No, Andrew. It’s staying with the correct spelling. W — h — e — t — u.”
There was a pause on the other end of the call. “Okay I know you care about this, but how about something us Americans can easily say?”
“It’s my culture, my heritage, my name was chosen to reflect that. I’m not going to change it up because you want something easier to say.”
“Come on, Tane, you know I don’t mean it like that, it’s just from a marketing perspective...”
“Next you’ll be suggesting I let people call me ‘Tayne’.”
I rolled my eyes and resisted the urge to hang up on him. He was my manager, I shouldn’t do that, but I really, really wanted to.
I looked around the room, searching for something to anchor me, something that would calm me down and stop me biting off this man’s head. My guitar? Nah, that had too much emotion associated.
The view out the window of my apartment showed Los Angeles sprawling into the valley. The sky was vast and blue, cloudless like normal.
Part of me really missed winter.
Most of me wanted to escape.
“How about what it means? What does whetu mean again?” Andrew blathered on, oblivious.
“It means star, but I’m not going to go around calling myself star, I’ll tell you that for free. I’ll sound like an asshole.”
“Okay, I’ll workshop it with the marketing team and we’ll get back to you.”
“Don’t bother, I’m not going to change my name.”
“All right, and I’m working on spin about how long your new album is taking to come out, let me know if you have any statements you’d like included.”
I hung up on him.
I dropped my head into my hands and tried to order my thoughts. I had a gig tonight. I had to get myself into the space for it. I had to focus on the music.
It had once been everything I wanted, it had been my escape from the little country at the bottom of the world that I came from. It had been my money maker, my everything.
I thought back with jealousy to how I’d felt when I first came to the States.
Back then, I’d been in love with the act of creation, staying up all night in a creative whirl, writing new scraps of melody, new beats. Show them to people — like my manager — and get hype in return.
Now? It felt hollow.
