Look at Me

That night, I sit in my rented studio apartment in Studio City, the one that I can’t afford, and stare at the cover of Niall’s journal.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that Niall is recording at the same studio as me. I use the studio in the mornings, so he must use it in the late afternoons and into the evening. I didn’t check with reception to confirm because I didn’t want to seem creepy, but that has to be how his journal ended up in the couch. He must’ve left it behind last night. And now it’s in my hands.

When I first found the thing, I thought I’d leave it right where I found it. Niall would come back, find it in the couch cushion, and never think that anyone else had touched it. But then, just before leaving the studio, in a moment of impulse, a moment I’ll never be able to take back, I snuck it into my bag.

Now I don’t know what to do with it. I trace my finger over the cracked leather and consider my options: I could take it back to the studio tomorrow and pretend I never had it. I could drop it at the reception desk and tell them I found it in an elevator. I could mail it back anonymously.

Or I could open it.

That’s what Candice thinks I should do. She voices her thoughts to me in no uncertain terms when I finally break down and call to catch her up.

“You need to open it,” she says for the twelfth time since our conversation began.

By now I’m sitting on my bed, as far away from the journal as I can get. It sits on the small kitchen table across the room, taunting me. Candice went through a full spectrum of emotions as I told her about finding Niall’s journal in the couch but now she’s stuck on one line, like a scratched record: I have to open the journal.

“You could blackmail him with this,” she continues. When I met Candice, we were both 15. She was a burgeoning popstar, and I was starring on a television show playing a character named after myself. Back then, we loved to imagine all the scheming we could do if we weren’t so closely watched. “Maybe there’s something embarrassing inside it. Or you could be like, I’m not giving your book back unless you agree to co-write with me on my album.”

“I can’t do that.” I lean back on the bed and close my eyes. Like everything else in this flat, the bed smells like cats, but I can’t be bothered to care about that right now. “I shouldn’t have even taken it. I should take it back to the studio and drop it through the mail slot or something. I should throw it away and pretend I never had it.”

“Yeah, shred the evidence,” Candice says. Even over the phone, I can tell she’s rolling her eyes. “That’s really the best choice here. He’ll never be able to trace it back to you. When he goes public with the story, the publicity will be great. I can see it now: Minna Locke steals Niall Horan’s songwriting notebook and destroys the evidence. Minna Locke, thief. You’ll be the next Winona Ryder. Child star gone wild.”

I groan. “I get it, thanks.” I open my eyes and stare at the notebook. It’s so small and unassuming, so unaware of the trouble it’s caused.

“On second thought,” Candice says, “you should definitely not read it. You might get sued, and if you get sued, we’ll never finish this record.”

“At the rate I’m going, we’re never going to finish the record anyway.” I roll over, burying my head in my pillow. When I emerge, Candice is giving me a pep talk, which I cut off. “I’ll figure it out. See you tomorrow.”

“Sure,” she says with a skepticism that I choose to ignore. “See you tomorrow.”

I toss my phone aside and get to my feet. Outside, a horn honks, brakes squeal. Los Angeles is so much louder now than I ever remember it being. When I was a kid, LA never felt unsafe, never felt anything but homely, but now I see darkness lurking around every corner. Is that because I’m now an outsider here?

Maybe it’s that fear, that desperate sense of hopelessness, that has me reaching for Niall’s journal and turning back the cover, flipping back the page that says, Don’t steal, ya wanker, and beginning to read the scrawled handwriting inside. It’s that part of me that wants so badly to make it here, to prove my mother wrong, to prove to the world that I’m just as talented that I once was.

But it’s something in my heart that keeps me turning the pages.

Some of the things Niall has written are diary entries: Today I recorded the first song. I worked with Jamie on it and he says it’s going to be big. That’s what I want, right?

Other pages have lists, names of books and songs by other musicians, observations: Sitting in a restaurant in NYC. The place is lit with candles and my date’s gone to the toilet. Julian set us up. Not sure I ought to see her again if she can’t make it through dinner with me without constantly looking at her mobile and dashing off to the loo twice before dessert.

That makes me smile, but it’s the bits of poetry, unfinished songs, that stand out to me. The words in the journal are nothing like the songs Niall has released. They’re just as smart, with phrases I can already imagine as earworms, but they’re so much more.

They’re honest. Organic. Real.

They’re a side of Niall that I’ve never seen on stage or in interviews. They’re so raw that I wonder if he’s holding them back for that reason: because they don’t fit with how everyone sees him. I can relate to that, to that fear that people won’t accept who you really are because they’ve always understood you to be someone else.

Reading his words, I almost feel as if I know him. As if I could go to a bookstore and select something for him to read and not be wrong about it. I feel like I could choose a meaningful birthday present for him. I feel like I could look at him and sense what he’s feeling.

That’s why I shouldn’t be reading it. But I can’t put it down.

On one page, Niall describes a coffee mug shattering in the sink, spilling its contents across the basin—easily cleaned up, unlike a breakup, when you have to disentangle your life from someone else’s without leaving—or taking—too many scars. The metaphor is so vivid, the imagery so tangible, that I can picture it all in my mind like a memory. Like I’m the one who dropped the mug in the sink and bloodied my fingers on its shards during the cleaning process.

It seems only natural, then, that when I find a stanza unfinished, I pick up my own journal and complete it. My brain finishes Niall’s lines as easily as if it had begun them.

Objectively, I know that it’s wrong. It’s a complete invasion of privacy to read someone’s work without their permission, much less add onto it, and I’d never want someone to do it to me. But I can’t stop. It feels like a missing piece of something—maybe even a missing piece of me—has fallen into place.

And once I’ve started, I can’t stop. I keep at it until my words fit seamlessly with the ones that Niall’s written, almost like we composed them together.