Chapter One
I could find a Walking Disaster song lyric appropriate for any occasion.
Humming, “The world is mine/I’m breaking through,” I spun the revolving door into the marble lobby of the high rise in Times Square. Today, this song was my anthem.
I’d finally broken through, and the world would be mine.
Well, at least a job in the music industry would be.
Standing in honest-to-God New York City, I felt like a tourist gawking at the big city, but if the shoe fit. It wasn’t like I’d never set foot outside of central Indiana, but before I took this job at the Rock Paper, most of my traveling had been concert related, and my career had been dullsville. As an extreme music fan, my true passion had been a very expensive hobby.
That all changed today.
Today, I became a legitimate New Yorker. I still couldn’t believe I’d landed this job at this magazine. I closed my eyes to breathe in the air actual rock stars may have exhaled. Cigarettes, coffee, and crowd musk formed a uniquely Manhattan cologne.
Halfway across the lobby, my phone rang out a popular Walking Disaster song. The call could only be from Ashley, aka DeadFan on the fan board. Online, we all had our aliases. People knew me as Pumpkin39. Pumpkin because of my flaming orange hair. The rest because of my March 9th birthday.
Oh, yeah. In my spare time, I ran the biggest Walking Disaster fan site on the Internet. My obsession with music was about to become my real-life career.
I swiped the phone to answer, as I strode purposely toward security. “Ash? Is there a problem?”
It wouldn’t matter if the site had gone offline. She knew I wouldn’t have time to put out trash fires on my first day at work.
“Just called to wish you good luck! I’m so excited for you.”
I patted my hip for the lanyard then slid my shiny new ID badge over the electronic sensor and took my place among the many other career-oriented people waiting for the elevator. I adopted a professional, non-fan-girl tone. “Thanks for calling. Is everything okay?”
That was a mistake. Ash could talk a mile a minute. “Yeah, though there was some drama this morning over a bad review. You know how they call people bad fans for agreeing with criticism? A fight broke out, but I handled it. I think.”
I zoned out a bit as she chattered on, but my attention perked up when she said, “I wanted to tell them how you’re about to start work at the very magazine where that review was posted.”
The elevator dinged its imminent arrival, and I switched the phone to my other ear so I could better enunciate my response. “Do not under any circumstances tell anyone where I’m working.” I’d already explained all of this to her.
“Oh, I know. They’d all go nuts, expecting you to share state secrets or whatever.”
That was only half of it.
The elevator doors opened, and the crowd jostled me as people got off. I whispered as loud as I dared. “And if my boss, or anyone here, happened upon your posts, they’d figure out pretty fast you were talking about me.”
Maybe it wasn’t lethally uncool be a fan forum admin, but I wasn’t ready to find out.
She sighed. “Got it. It’s still exciting.”
I stepped onto the elevator. “Ash, I need to go. Please only text if there’s a real emergency, okay?”
“Sure thing. And good luck, Layla.” Before I could hit End on the call, her tinny voice came through the speaker. “If you meet anyone famous, let me know!”
Muffled chuckles on the elevator made it clear they’d all heard.
There were days I started thinking I was too old to run a fan site for a band who didn’t know or care that I spent my time promoting them, all for free and out of the goodness of my heart. Not that they needed the publicity. Walking Disaster was one of the most successful bands of the past several years with no sign of slowing down.
Once upon a time I felt proud of what I’d accomplished, but nowadays, I never mentioned to anyone in real life that I ran a fan forum. It sounded interesting when I was nineteen. At twenty-eight, announcing that I was anonymously famous in a very remote corner of the Internet would be met with understandable pity.
Still, I shot a glance around the elevator on the off chance a celebrity hid in our midst. It would be entertaining to bask in Ash’s jealousy if I could report back a Dave Grohl or Ed Sheeran sighting. Despite how unlikely.
Even the remote possibility humbled me.
I rode to the ninth floor with trepidation and giddy expectation, but an anticlimactic silence greeted me when I entered the floor for the Rock Paper. There were a few people scattered about, but the overhead lights hadn’t even been completely turned on.
Somewhat relieved I wouldn’t have to interact with anyone right out the gate, I found my assigned cube sandwiched between a pair of identical desks on either side. Another matching set ran parallel across the narrow aisle. I tried to ignore the implication of so much conformity, accepting the necessity of efficiency. Still, I had a romantic notion of the music industry. Mainly, I liked to ignore the industry part of that phrase. I’d been around long enough to understand the compromises and little deaths that everyone, even the most artistic people—the ones who made the rest of our jobs possible—had to endure.
I dropped into my chair and slid paperwork out of the manila envelope they’d given me, searching for my login credentials. When I noticed nobody had delivered the company-issued laptop, I bent forward to check under the desk and peeked around the cube walls in case they’d left it with my neighbors.
Nothing.
In the cube cattycorner to mine, a head of brown curly hair bobbed in a jerky rhythm. As self-assured as I came across on my website, I had a hard time talking to people in real life, but I’d need to get over my anxiety working in the real world, so I mustered up my courage and knocked on the strip of metal along the top of the wall. The cube’s inhabitant didn’t look up. I tapped again before I noticed she wore headphones, something I’d be doing as soon as I had a laptop and assigned projects.
I walked around to her side of the dividing wall and touched her shoulder. The girl jumped out of her seat with an embarrassed laugh. “Oh, my Lord. You scared the dickens out of me.”
Her chair spun, and when she looked up, I found myself face to face with Josie Wilder. My eyes grew wide, and I took a giant step back because I knew her well—although she didn’t know me from Adam. And I shouldn’t have known her. Josie was a relatively obscure photographer, not a celebrity in her own right. However, through a spiderweb of connections, she’d earned a bit of notoriety in my small corner of the universe. She was the girlfriend of Micah Sinclair, whose sister was Eden Sinclair, whose husband was none other than Adam Copeland, lead singer of Walking Disaster, the band my fan site idolized. True story.