He slicks his long hair back. "You gotta pay attention to those cords backstage, man. They’ll get you every time."
Manny comes over with a couple of EMTs, who put a wailing Nash onto the stretcher.
"You can’t do thith—thith," he repeats, his eyes getting wider.
Then he opens his bloody mouth, and I see his tongue jut through a hole where his front tooth used to be.
Lou snorts into me, shaking with laughter against my side.
"We had a deal!"Nash screams at me.
"Yeah, butwedidn’t, sucker!" Lou yells. "Also, you kiss like a dead fish!"
And the entire backstage erupts into laughter.
The label exec glares at Lou, but she doesn’t say anything.
She can’t.
It’s game over.
And Lou won.
Wewon.
The audience is screaming, booing, yelling obscenities about Nash.
And then they turn their fury on Lou.
"You gotta do something," I say.
She gets onto her tiptoes and kisses me softly. "Okay. But I need you to be ready."
I look at her warily. She doesn’t want me on stage, does she? “Lou?—"
“Do your job, Sugar.”
She grabs her in-ear monitors from my booth and fits them snugly before slipping on her wireless headset mic. Then she blows me a kiss and runs back out to the stage.
When the crowd sees her, the booing slows, but it doesn’t stop.
She raises her hands, commanding their attention. "Well, Memphis? Can you see now why I’ve been saying Nash and I just won’t work?"
I don’t know how the A/V guys pull it off so fast, but within seconds, footage from only forty minutes ago fills the giant screens—a close-up of Lou slipping the flash drive from Nash’s pocket.
For a second, there’s nothing but stunned silence. Then, the audience erupts. Their cheers are so loud it feels like the roof might shake loose.
I watch as Lou turns to glance at the screens behind her, her posture relaxed but ready.
Then she cocks an eyebrow, and her crew—always ahead of the game—zooms in on her expression, magnifying her quiet triumph for the entire arena to see.
Her band rushes onto the stage, techs scrambling to plug in instruments as fast as humanly possible.
Lou turns her head slightly, looking toward me from the stage’s edge. Her teeth press into her bottom lip, just for a second.
"Y’all know I was raised in this industry, even if I tried to hide from it for a while. But as I’ve grown, I’ve realized people hide from this industry for a lot of different reasons."
She takes a deep breath, blinking, but she doesn’t square her shoulders, because she’s not putting on armor.
