Page 27 of Caught in a Storm
“When he was little,” she says, “when I’d drop him off at your place, he’d be like, ‘Why can’t you just stay here, Mommy?’ ”
“He told me once if I just moved the piano there’d be plenty of room for you,” says Billy. “Like us not living together was about square footage.”
They look at the ground, and Billy thinks of the Twizzlers Robyn used to cut into cigarette-size pieces after she quit smoking, just before they broke up. He’d snap his fingers sometimes, pretending to light them for her.
“You don’t think we fucked up our kid, do you?” she asks.
“I wonder sometimes,” he says. “I think that’s just part of being a parent, though. In our defense, the money we’ve spent on his sneakers alone should be worth something.”
Robyn doesn’t laugh this time; she just shakes her head.
“Oh, shit, I almost forgot,” says Billy. “I brought you something.” He opens the van door and grabs a paper bag from the passenger seat that contains one jumbo Hot Twist pretzel.
“Oh my God, you didn’t,” says Robyn.
“I did. Sorry, it’s not warm anymore, but—”
“Who cares,” says Robyn. “I haven’t eaten since lunch.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
Robyn digs in, rolls her eyes with pleasure. She tears off a piece for him, and for a moment they eat in silence as the security guard frowns from a distance.
“He’s gonna drive over here and shoot us, isn’t he?” she asks.
“Nah,” says Billy. “We’ll be fine. The worst he’d probably do is tase us.”
* * *
—
When Robyn is gone, the security guard sighs loudly enough to be heard from across the parking lot and drives off. Billy hops into the van and enjoys the smell of vinyl mixed with pretzel. He takes his iPhone out of his pocket and turns it back on before dropping it into one of the cupholders. As he twists the key in the ignition, his phone lights up and chirps. Then it chirps again…and again and again.
“Shut up,” Billy says.
His phone doesn’t shut up, though, not for at least ten seconds, because Billy has nineteen missed calls and thirty new text messages. He sees one from Caleb that includes a link. It reads: Dad? Have you seen this? Holy Sh*t!
Chapter 14
It wasn’t exactly lightning in a bottle. Margot’s performance at the Horse You Came In On went viral slowly, over about a week and a half, fueled by YouTube, TikTokers, and social media algorithms.
Who knows how many original videos exist? Margot would guess she saw fifty phones go up the moment before she counted off. Four videos broke through the clutter. One is eighteen minutes long and includes all five songs. The sound is surprisingly clear. The three others are shorter, taken from different angles, their quality fine enough, because even the cheapest smartphones are like tiny movie studios these days.
Likes, red hearts, retweets by the thousands. The link was copied from YouTube and dropped into text chains and emails over and over. Instagram, Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Facebook. The videos were sent by twenty-somethings to older brothers, sisters, cousins, and parents with questions like didnt u like this chicks band??? and do you kno who burnt flowers is? and remember her?
For a few days, like a communicable disease, the videos quietly spread, mutated. The long-form YouTube video was cut down to one broadcast-worthy clip of “Power Pink” that people thought was awesome. Like Caleb, they knew the song but had never really listened—or hadn’t listened in years. Kids who weren’t even alive when the song came out played it loudly through Bluetooth mobile speakers and thought, Do I like this? And then a TikToker named MusicBae99 posted herself dancing in a pink sports bra to “Power Pink.” Her mind-boggling number of followers watched, influenced.
The algorithms took over, relentless in their mathematics. Anyone who’d ever watched and/or liked any music video or any video of an attractive dancing girl was fed the clip. The other platforms followed, serving videos up to people who had liked MusicBae99 or followed female musicians, alternative-rock bands, Burnt Flowers, Lawson Daniels, any of Lawson Daniels’s movies, and so on.
Automated robots at Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and the other streaming music services logged the uptick in “Power Pink” streams and moved the song higher on their lists. Apple featured it on a playlist called “Girl Power Summer.”
The online news site HypeReport jumped on it before BuzzFeed and posted a story with the caption “Remember Margot Hammer? Well, she’s back and we’re here for it.”
Likes, loves, thousands of comments, forwards, retweets, quote tweets, and Margot Hammer knows absolutely nothing about any of it, because she’s stayed as far away from social media as humanly possible. To Margot, social media is just Us Weekly for computers, and she wants no part of it.
Rebecca Yang keeps calling, but Margot has let those calls go straight to voicemail. Rebecca is a direct link—guilty by association—to Axl, and Axl can fuck all the way off.
As Billy circles his neighborhood looking for a place to park Grady and Patty’s Charm City Rocks van in Baltimore, Margot sits on her couch in New York with her acoustic guitar. She’s messing with some lyrics she started thinking about in the hotel room back in Baltimore. It’s the first time she’s tried putting actual music to one of her would-be songs in years, but performing ten nights ago in front of actual people has made her more acutely aware of how much she’s missed being a musician. Her notebook is held open beside her by a plastic clip designed to keep potato chip bags closed.
