Look at Me

The first time I had my heart broken, it was a lie.

The second time I had my heart broken, it was photographed in high definition.

And the third time, there is nobody around to see me cry.

Over facetime, my mom tells me that this is all my fault, that the song wasn’t good enough. I sit on Candice’s couch, my cheeks streaked with the echoes of tears, and listen to her tell me that I expect too much, I trust too easily, I feel too strongly. I don’t even tell her that I’ve developed feelings for Niall—I already know it wouldn’t do anything to make her sympathize with me.

“You know what this industry is like,” my mom says. I imagine her at home in Virginia, in the 5,000 square foot suburban house she bought when I was 14 even though we only spent a few months a year in it. Now, it’s just her there, her and all of her expensive things. “You know how cutthroat it is. Maybe your voice just isn’t top 40 material. You knew that was a possibility going in. You knew you could fail.”

Did I, though? Of course I knew that it would be tough making a record, even tougher getting it out there and making it successful. What I didn’t know was that I would meet Niall, write maybe the best song I’ll ever write with him, and then be passed over for recording it because I’m not established enough.

Then my mind starts going over all the things I could’ve done differently. Maybe if I’d returned Niall’s notebook, or if I’d never looked inside, then I wouldn’t be nursing my crushed dreams with a tub of cookie dough ice cream. Maybe if I’d brought the song to Candice before Niall brought it to his producer, then I’d be the one kicking him out of the recording booth in favor of someone with a larger audience or more cred on the indie scene or less fear about his marketability.

But if I’d made any of those choices, I never would’ve connected with Niall the way I did. Even if it was all one-sided, even if I was the only one feeling something between us, it still meant something.

He saw me. And I can’t regret that.

I don’t tell my mom that. Instead I say, “I know” and “I’ll come home soon” even though it’s maybe a lie and “please don’t worry about me” even though I know she doesn’t bother.

I’m close to tears again by the time I tell her I have to go and manage to hang up. How can she treat me like this so easily? How can I let her?

“Your mom is a raging bitch,” Candice says, coming into the room just as I drop my phone facedown on the table in front of me. “I don’t know why you even bother taking her calls.”

“She’s not a bitch,” I say, but I have to admit that my voice lacks conviction. “She’s lonely.”

“Then she should get a cat.” To punctuate her statement, Candice slams a bottle of beer on the table in front of me. “Drink this. You need it.”

“I’m fine—”

“You’re not fine, Minna. You’re staining my couch with your tears on a Thursday afternoon. Have you even eaten today?”

I shrug. “I can’t remember.”

“See! You’re not fine.” Instead of sitting down, Candice begins to pace the room, not even looking at me. “Let’s backtrack. So you move to LA to be near your amazing best friend and to make the record you’ve been dreaming of since your little brain could dream. Correct?”

Not exactly—there were definitely some years while I was working on “Minna” that I wanted to get as far away from LA as I could and never come back—but it’s not worth correcting. Silently, I nod.

“Right, so you’re in LA, and you’re having this creative block. Every song you’re writing sounds like the theme song to a different tv show.” Candice pauses, expecting me to challenge her. I’m so exhausted I don’t bother to object to her insult. “But then fate blesses you. You find Niall Horan’s songwriting notebook in a couch cushion. You follow your beautiful best friend’s advice and read it.”

“Worst advice ever,” I say.

She ignores me. “And then you go to Niall Horan and you’re like, I wrote these great songs and since I was inspired by you we should probably share them. And he’s like, okay, hot tv star from Virginia, let’s do it.”

“That’s not what happened.”

Candice rolls her eyes at me. “Yes, it is. So then you start writing with Niall Horan, making beautiful music together"—she gives me a pointed look—"and completely forgetting about your fabulous best friend, who is totally willing to produce an album full of tv theme songs if it’s the way you want to go. But then something wonderful happens.” She stops and stares at me, as if waiting for me to tell her what the something wonderful is.

“Beats me,” I tell her. “What happened next?”

“Well, a bunch of things. The first one being that, in addition to writing a kick ass duet with Niall, you also wrote your entire solo album.”

I start to shake my head. “I didn't—”

“You bet your skinny ass you did.” From behind her back she pulls my purple journal, the one I bought when I first moved to LA. “It’s all in here, Minna. If you want real, if you want stuff that matters, this is it. This is your first record.”

“What?” I jump off the couch and reach for the journal, but she holds it up in the air, out of my reach. “That stuff isn’t songs. It’s just…” I search for the word for what I’ve been writing lately. Half-poems and lists of feelings and descriptions of floors in rooms at the Getty Villa and sketches of graffiti I spotted around the city. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

“Wrong.” Now Candice lets the journal fall into my outstretched hand. “This is not nothing, Minna. This is an emotional journey, from lost and writer’s-blocked to warm, soulful, creative, in love, real Minna. This is who you are. This is your album.”

I stare at her and then down at my notebook. There’s no way it contains all of that, I’m sure of it. Candice must’ve made all of that up for effect; she’s always loved a good dramatic scene.

“I’ll leave you alone to ponder this revelation,” Candice says before exiting the room. Down the hall I hear the bathroom door shut and the shower turn on before Candice begins singing something that sounds suspiciously like “Despacito.” Suspicious because Candice met Justin Bieber a few years ago and swears he’s a terrible singer with the personality of a “weak-ass cheesecake.” Her words, not mine.

My words are the contents of the journal in my hand. I sink into the couch and let the book fall open in my lap. My handwriting is messy and the lines overlap each other, a hint that I wrote it in darkness, probably just before falling asleep.

I stayed at the studio after Niall left tonight so I could work through the second chorus. It sounded strange to me in a way that Niall couldn’t hear, like the pieces fit together almost too perfectly. Something that I like about Niall is that even though he thinks the song is fine as it is, he doesn’t mind that I want to keep chipping at it. He hasn’t told me that I’m crazy or wasting my time or fixing something that isn’t broken. He just lets me be me.

I don’t remember writing any of it. Flipping to the beginning of the book, I find an entry where I describe a memory of my mother, opening the front door for me after my disastrous prom night with a look of disappointment on her face. “There’s no such thing as bad press,” she’d said to me, “but this is pretty shitty.”

In later mentions of my mother, there’s hurt, but there’s also resignation. There’s less anger:

Today Niall told me about his mom (he calls her “mum”) and how proud she is of him. How nothing in her life has changed since he got famous. The nicest thing she owns is a bag he bought her last Christmas; his mate Hailee told him what to get. His mum doesn’t use it because she doesn’t want to get it dirty. “It’s too expensive to carry things,” she says. When he told me this, I thought about my mom and her closet full of expensive bags, so many of them bought with money that I earned. Niall’s mum shows that she loves him by remaining indifferent to his success; my mom loves me because of my success. Why do I love her? Why do I keep loving somebody who can’t seem to see me?

As I flip through the pages of the journal, I see myself progressing from someone who fears her mother to someone who realizes she doesn’t need her mother. That’s like a shock of cold water to the face: the understanding that I’m here without my mom, without her criticizing me and making my decisions for me, and I’m doing okay on my own. I’m succeeding and failing and breaking down on Candice’s couch, and I’m doing it all on my own. My mom can’t claim ownership over any of this.

When Candice returns, a towel wrapped around her head, I’ve located ice cream in her freezer and am spoon-deep in the carton.

“You’re disgusting,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “Do you see it? There’s an album in there, right?”

“Fine.” I gesture at the journal, which I’ve abandoned on the table so I can have my hands free to hold my ice cream spoon. “Maybe I have enough here for an album. But none of that changes what Niall did.”

“Good lord!” Candice stops scrunching her hair with the towel to plop down on the table in front of me and take the ice cream carton from my hands. “First of all, stop eating this. And second, this isn’t Niall’s fault.”

“Of course it’s Niall’s fault. He let the song go.”  

Candice shakes her head. “No, Min. The song was taken from him. Just like it was taken from you. Just like a million decisions have been made for you, by other people, your entire life. That’s the way this industry is a lot of the time. It’s all about marketability and money and…”

Candice keeps talking, making a case for Niall as a passive innocent rather than a heart-crushing aggressor, but I stop listening. I’ve been famous longer than Niall has, but he’s been in the music industry longer. He made his name on a show where adults decided for him what songs he should sing and who he should sing them with. And now the same thing is happening to him again.

I thought I knew what it was like to have my life controlled by my image, by the judgements of other people. But clearly Niall knows about that more than I ever could.