A Chorus Rises Page 3

  “They’re flowers. I just thought—” She caresses the back of her black pixie cut the way she does when she’s playing fragile. It works wonders on my dad. She’s petite and she’s responsible for my perfect deep brown skin, big eyes, and thick eyelashes, so I get it. I’m just basically her taller twin, and as such, am immune.

  “You just thought I’d like to wake up in a crypt? No, thank you. I know you’ve got preggo brain, but seriously, Mommy.”

  But she’s no more used to rejection than I am, so instead of doing what I’ve asked, she goes and retrieves a card I hadn’t noticed among the mourning flora.

  “Look, Ny,” she says, thrusting it at me before her hand unnecessarily cradles her bump again. “Read it.”

  When I snatch the card, she smiles like a doe-eyed Disney cartoon.

  “Out loud,” she whispers.

  “No,” I whisper back.

  To Our Eloko Princess—Please Post More Content On LOVE, We Miss You!

  I accept a second card from her.

  You Are Still What Makes Portland Great!

  “I can feel you smiling, Mommy. Fine. I’ll keep the cards. Get rid of the flowers.”

  It isn’t quite the same as having a constant stream of comments and notifications. It can’t undo an entire year—my senior year, if I haven’t mentioned!—of being plagued by whispers, and disingenuous smiles, and snubs, and what felt like the whole world’s attempt to wrestle away my Eloko-ness. It won’t change the fact that the media I never knew to distrust has taken every opportunity to uplift my attacker and disparage me, all while pretending they’re protecting me because they don’t call me by name.

  I wonder how much more useless that flimsy performance will be after today, when Tavia’s movie drops.

  The level of affirmation and nonmedical attention I am accustomed to has been severely lacking. Despite the fact that I have plans to hang out with my crew—two of whom can always be trusted to deliver some amount of fawning—it isn’t like my friends can keep the city from tilting out from under my feet. I mean, they were there when the whole Network Excommunication happened last summer, and they couldn’t stop that. But I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about the possible limitations of even Eloko friendship on the same day a movie canonizing a siren/gorgon one goes live.

  “I’m headed out,” I tell Mommy, kissing the top of her head the way pretty much everyone who isn’t a small child does.

  “I thought that wasn’t until later,” she says with a pout.

  “And I thought this was a bedroom suite, not a sarcophagal chamber, byeee.”

  * * *

  My girl Jamie’s house is within walking distance, but I drive my beloved Fiat anyway, pulling into the drive behind Gavin Shinn’s car, because apparently I’m not the only one who decided to get a jump on hanging out. All we’re missing is my Priam, unless he came with Gavin, and I’m so excited to sink into our Eloko oasis that I don’t even spare the few seconds it takes to text and let Jamie know I’m here. So when I come around the back and enter her bedroom via the patio doors, I catch Jamie and Gavin completely by surprise.

  I know this because Jamie shoots off the bed with a start, and because both of them yelp my name.

  The final clue, of course, is what’s playing on her sixty-inch television screen. Which Gavin pauses—because in his panic, he must think freezing a huge image of the actress playing Tavia Philips will somehow make it better.

  “You guys couldn’t have been fooling around, like normal teenagers!” I yell behind me as I storm back the way I came, but not quickly enough not to hear Gavin’s calm:

  “We’re never gonna hook up, like…”

  “Nyyyy.” Jamie’s whine tries to catch up as I storm through the backyard, and around the outside of the house.

  “Cannot believe you! Jamie!”

  “I’m sorry!”

  Which is when I whirl around. It’s a pretty narrow walkway, between the house and the fence, and Gavin has to peek around Jamie to see me. It’d be hilarious if they weren’t betraying me, yet again.

  “You can’t be sorry the instant you’re caught, Jamie, that’s not remorse, it’s wishing I hadn’t found out!”

  “Please don’t be upset at me!”

  “Seriously?!”

  “You never said we couldn’t watch it!” She bats the unwieldy ivy leaves back toward their lattice, and the leaves defiantly keep hold of her maple tresses so her hair splays like it has a life of its own. Which—naturally—reminds me of Effie, at the pool, the first time we all saw her hair move.

  “Are you trying to piss me off?”

  “Well, you didn’t!”

  “And yet, somehow you knew it wasn’t cool, otherwise why’d you freak out that I caught you?” Behind Jamie, Gavin has his hands in his pockets. “You good?” I snap. “No pleading apologies from you?”

  “If it makes you feel any better, you’re not technically in it?”

  For a moment I can only blink at him. Why that’s supposed to … but also how is that even possible?

  “You’re not, it’s some random character named Nina—”

  “Gavin,” Jamie tries to shush him.

  “What, I get that you and Tavia aren’t cool, but the movie’s about Effie, too, and as far as I can remember she never did anything to you—”

  “She was the weapon, Gavin!” I yell.

  There’s a trill like a fragment of an Eloko’s already-brief melody, and sometimes we put it in our voices. When we’re upset sometimes it just happens, so while the three of us stand on the path beside Jamie’s house, our trills mingle in the space between us, reverberating off the walls and the fence, like the echo after cymbals crash. Non-Eloko are enamored with the sound; they also can’t tell the difference between trills complimenting each other and trills competing. Mine and Gavin’s are doing the latter, but only another Eloko would know.

  “I’m going home,” I say.

  “Ny,” Jamie begins, and then Gavin tells her to let me go. And I do.

  My city’s turned on me. My platform, too. I don’t know why I thought it’d be any different with my Eloko crew. After all, we’ve been splintering bit by bit for the past year.

  I’m beginning to realize they aren’t feeling what I’m feeling. Which, fine. They didn’t have to get used to the slight and usually unspoken chill that comes with a once-adoring audience’s disapproval. There were no blog or YouTube posts about a nameless Eloko whose other attributes were exhaustively listed just so no one missed the fact that it was me being discussed.

  They weren’t the ones slowly coming to terms with the fact that the longer I’m Awakened, the less my world makes sense. Priam, Jamie, and Gavin didn’t have to genuinely consider the possibility that the gray I was trapped in while Stoned was actually a portal, not a place, and that I got spit out in an alternate Portland. Because what other explanation is there, really? That everybody’s siren fear has really and eternally been forgotten because she released us from gorgon prison? That even Effie is adored, despite being the gorgon in question, because she didn’t know she had that power?

  It’s been clear for the past year that this is not my Portland, and that’s not something the three of them have had to face. That in my Portland, Tavia Philips is a secret siren I have to help protect from discovery. I’m the hometown heroine, or at least generally fawned over. I’ve got one of the largest followings on LOVE, which means that company is loyal to me, not the whims of cancel culture—which surprisingly no one has a problem with when it’s directed at me.

  This city loves me. They don’t criticize me for a livestream and still snatch footage to plaster all over local media. The post got me suspended on LOVE, and yet the footage they said was Too Troubling went everywhere. Apparently, it wasn’t too troubling to slap on TV.

  My friends—my Eloko hive—don’t watch the movie that supposedly leaves me out. The movie, I might add, they weren’t nearly salty enough about when the production company rolled
into town mere months after the Awakening.

  Except they did watch that movie. Judging by the way Gavin and Jamie reacted during its filming—not to mention neither of them were appalled that it was rumored to be funded by the all-new siren synthesizers—I guess I should’ve seen it coming last summer.

  Maybe if I’d really lit into them the first time Jamie and Gavin betrayed me, things would’ve been different today.

  * * *

  There had been open casting calls, and I’d found out via LOVE—which I wasn’t posting to, but sometimes scrolling through—that Jamie and Gavin had gone to one. Totally unsurprisingly, it had been Gavin’s idea, but Jamie had buckled and gone with him, so she wasn’t an innocent party.

  Shocked doesn’t even begin.

  Literally anybody else could’ve pretended that it was just another Portland production and it was harmless to want a cameo, but my friends? In a Tavia Philips movie? For what?

  I couldn’t even flash on them properly, because there was still a small detail they didn’t know—that Tavia had instructed Effie to Stone me intentionally. Everybody had dispersed or been consumed by the time that part happened, and based on the way Portland was Upside Down when I got back, part of me thought telling my friends what she’d done would look petty and attention-seeking. Which is really more Gavin’s deal.

  That and I didn’t think I should need to be wounded to deserve a bit more loyalty and consideration than they were showing.

  Anyway, after discovering their audition betrayal, I’d muted them in my phone, and Priam promised to take my mind off them with a date day that abruptly ended at Powell’s.

  That day had been like a ridiculously impressive cornucopia of awful, just a fragrant bouquet of trash events. The first bad omen was definitely the two siren synthesizers we saw between getting out of the car and getting to the door of the bookstore. I knew Priam had seen them, because he’d been tensing up almost as much as I had whenever anything Tavia-related came up.

  The first flashed past us on a kid running by, but the second was harder to ignore.

  A white girl with long curly hair was standing at the bus stop across the street from the bookstore with her legs wide, chin up, and the white mesh mask covering her mouth. It was all very You’ll Never Silence Me and defiant, except for the whole She Couldn’t Possibly Be A Siren thing. She had a photographer capturing her every extremely slight adjustment. Her hair was doing 90 percent of the modeling for her, if we’re being really real.

  In the middle of the white mesh, there’s a flat, white disc. I couldn’t see it from across the street, but it’s the voice distorter that mimics the powerful vibration in a siren call. If the Not-Quite-Cutting-It-As-A-Model wearing it said anything, she would’ve really sounded like a siren. By which I mean, it would sound like she was a siren according to the commercial reminding people not to miss the upcoming movie.

  Nothing sounds like the real thing. Nothing sounds like a siren call except the sound of Tavia’s voice, standing a few feet from me in the courtyard, telling her sister to turn me to stone.

  But yeah. Siren synthesizers.

  Let’s talk about why this was the unfunniest of all the jokes. Not only was Tavia getting a super premature biopic after what she’d done to me, she was getting her very own gadget! That way, there was no grace period before the movie came out! I got to be reminded that it was coming every single time some nimrod was super brave and edgy and wore a synthesizer-dealie!

  Amazing!

  “One day, Tavia has to hide,” I said, while Priam stood a little ways behind me, probably intentionally looking somewhere else. “And six hours after prom, the world is paying to pretend they’re just like her.”

  Priam hadn’t answered, and neither of us mentioned that the only accessory previously attributed to sirens was not a toy. It was a collar, a device designed to undo the power in their voice. In the same city where it was legal for cops to forcibly collar sirens, people were now gonna parade around in synthesizers meant to mimic them. I wonder what Camilla Fox would have to say about that, but she’s still in police custody, and despite the fact that Tavia’s started her own mini-Camilla channel, I’m pretty sure she hasn’t said anything, either.

  I don’t like the girl, but I’m not ridiculous. I can see a couple reasons why she wouldn’t want to, I guess.

  I don’t know how long I stood there staring at a girl who didn’t know what to do with her hands, though she’d recently discovered jutting out her pelvic bone was a look. Then a gaggle of preschool/day camp–aged kids came squealing up to Priam and me, grabbing our hands and hugging our legs because they’d heard our melodies.

  “I found a princess!” one of the kids told their amused chaperones.

  “You did,” the woman agreed, smiling, before turning to Priam and me for the inevitable ask.

  She wasn’t gonna ask if we’d take a picture with the kids; they never did. She was going to ask if she could take a short video—just in case they could catch our melodies on tape.

  I turned on my heel before she could get it out of her mouth.

  Priam could pose if he wanted to, but I wasn’t feeling it. Across the street, a girl in a siren synthesizer was still pretending she had a future in front of the camera and, sorry, but Portland doesn’t get to have it both ways.

  Inside Powell’s, I headed for the corner in the Romance/Coffee room where Jamie, Gavin, Priam, and I usually pop a squat with a stack of manga and comic books. And when I arrived, surprise surprise. The betrayers were already there, one of them toeing the floor like she was preparing to go en pointe, and the other running his hand through his thick hair before tossing his head a bit to get it to fall the way he wanted. Because Gavin Shinn is always ready when the Eloko-obsessed descend on him, and the answer is always yes.

  When they saw me, both their eyes got big, Jamie’s almost quivering, but they didn’t pounce. I knew why when I felt Priam’s arm snake around my waist and turn me toward him.

  “You told them to come?” I accused him.

  “Yes, beautiful. Is that okay?”

  “No, Priam, it’s not.” But I didn’t pull away. And not because I very easily get distracted by the way his hair swoops to a point on one side, like it’s about to stab the mole under his eye.

  Which reminds me. He cut his hair after the school year ended, and never said why. I’d been trying to figure out if it had anything to do with what happened at prom, or since Portland turned into a film set and people started selling interviews. And I really wanted to know if it had anything to do with his new fits of weirdly cagey behavior. Like, he was either pulling me into his arms and calling me beautiful like some blond Noah Centineo character, or he was standing still enough to be stone. The one thing he wasn’t doing was telling me why.

  “I’m angry,” I said, pushing against him now because I knew he wasn’t letting go.

  “That’s all right,” and he kissed me. “You get to be. That doesn’t mean we stop hanging out with our friends, does it?”

  That time I pushed free for real.

  “You do know they tried to be part of the movie.”

  He stopped. Not like he was confused; he knew exactly what I was talking about.

  “Priam.”

  Near us, Gavin took Jamie’s belt loop and pulled her toward the coffee because he’s such a considerate friend and wanted to give us some privacy. Or because he was guilty and didn’t wanna have to actually explain why they did it.

  “Did you ask them not to?” Priam was asking, his body free from whatever momentary curse kept afflicting him. He reached for my sides, but his touch was too light. Whatever was going on, I was getting very suspicious. And tired of it.

  “I didn’t know I needed to,” I said, following his eyes to see what exactly was so interesting in the middle distance, and trying to force him to make eye contact again. “Priam!”

  “Yes. Would you prefer they hadn’t told you?”

  “What? They didn’t. I saw G
avin’s video on LOVE, remember? What is going on with you?”

  “Don’t get upset, Ny,” he said, kissing me again like he’d been paying attention all along. The charming smile returned and he swept a hand through my hair. “Gavin craves the spotlight. You know that. Plus, it loves him.”

  “So why didn’t you, too, since it’s no big deal?”

  “They didn’t invite me.”

  “And if they had? Then you’d have gone? To be an extra in a movie about her? I thought you said you hated her.”

  He’d been playing with the charm at the end of my necklace, and paused to take a deep breath.

  “I never said I hated her.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You just wish you hadn’t met her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which sounds curiously like something you say when you actually care. But too much.”

  “I don’t wanna talk about— We’re here to hang out with our friends, and for you to let them grovel and apologize.” But Jamie and Gavin had wandered closer again, and I saw the tick in Gavin’s eyebrow, which Priam must’ve seen, too, because he pointed at him without looking.

  “I’m not interested in the apologies of a couple of backstabbers,” I said, and watched Jamie’s face crumple.

  “Ny.” Gavin’s brow dropped, as I knew it would. “Be nice.”

  “Ny, be nice?” I whirled to face him. “Is everybody high? Why the hell am I supposed to be nice? To anyone? Let alone my best friends who went behind my back to try to get cameos in a trash fire movie glamorizing a girl I effing hate—” I had to stop because my stupid melody was trilling in my voice, and nearby Powell’s customers were smiling like idiots. When I started up again, I whisper-growled, “whose story somehow made my city hate me.”

  “Naema,” Priam said, like his heart might be literally sore. “Don’t say that.”

  “This city loves you,” Jamie said with an earnestness she couldn’t have faked. Poor girl still believed it. “There’s a digital vigil for you under every one of your LOVE posts! The ones you haven’t selectively and strategically taken down. Which has been totally good for your numbers, by the way.”