Logan glanced at Kavik. The dog didn’t open his eyes. Unhelpful.
“Selena Quintanilla-Pérez,” X said, “is the Queen of Tejano music. An icon. A legend. My first love. She is possibly the greatest performer this continent has ever produced, and the fact that you are sitting in this room right now, breathing air that Selena never got to breathe past thirty-one years old, and you don’t know who she is—” He sucked in a sharp breath and shook his head slowly. “That’s a failure of your education system. That’s a failure of society. That’s a failure of whoever raised you, and I say that with love and respect for your father.”
“Dad likes Johnny Cash.”
“Johnny Cash.” X sat back. “Johnny Cash is great. Johnny Cash is fine. But Johnny Cash never wore a bedazzled bustier and sold out the Houston Astrodome, so.”
Logan didn’t have a response to that.
“We’re gonna fix this,” X said, turning back to the laptop with the energy of a man who had found his purpose. “But first—” He pulled up the editing software and spun the screen toward Logan. “Watch this and tell me where it dies.”
The footage was from yesterday, according to the timestamp. Troubadour at a canter through the near pasture, the Bitterroots enormous and white behind him. X standing in the saddle with both arms out. The camera was drone footage, pulling wide in a long, slow arc.
It was good. It was obviously good. But X was right—somewhere around the twelve-second mark, something went flat. The energy just bled out of it, like a song that hit the wrong chord and couldn’t find its way back.
“Can I…” He motioned to the computer.
“Go ahead. That’s what you’re here for.”
Logan pulled the laptop toward him. He’d been doing this long enough — the editing, the cuts, the way a clip either had momentum or it didn’t — that he didn’t need X to walk him through the software. He’d taught himself on a cracked version of DaVinci Resolve on his mom’s laptop, making dumb videos of nothing. Skateboard tricks. Time-lapses of the city at night from the apartment roof. A whole project he’d started and never finished about the woman who sold flowers on their corner every Saturday morning, because he’d thought she had an interesting face, and he’d been right, but then they’d moved to Phoenix before he could do anything with the footage.
He scrubbed backward to the beginning and watched the whole thing through again without touching anything else.
“Mind if I answer emails while you do that?” X asked and opened a second laptop. “Gotta keep the fans happy, so the money keeps coming.”
“Wait,” Logan said and looked up. “This is your actual job here? Like, official?”
“Yes, sir.” He held out his arms to embrace the room. “You’re looking at Valor Ridge’s entire PR department. I do all the work, but Kavik always gets employee of the month.”
Over on the bed, the husky gave a dramatic yawn.
“Someone’s gotta bring donations in, and Walker can barely work his phone on a good day. The only other one here that’s good with computers is Ghost, but he sees a camera pointed at him, and wants to remove the lens and probably the eyes behind it.”
“He is kinda scary,” Logan admitted.
“Yeah, but he’s harmless. Okay,” he added after a second. “Not harmless. Not at all. But he wouldn’t hurt you.” He pulled up an inbox and turned the screen to show all the unanswered emails. “People donate. People spread the word. Good press is how we keep the lights on and change our image.”
Logan looked at the footage of X balanced on two horses, the mountains at dawn, Kavik running alongside, losing his mind with joy. “Did you know this was what you wanted to do when you got here?”
X laughed. “No. When I got here, I was pissed at the world. And I couldn’t ride.”
Logan stared at him in disbelief. “I thought you were from Texas. Isn’t that like a requirement to live there?”
“Yeah, I grew up in Brownsville until I was a few years younger than you, then my mama moved us to Atlanta.” X leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling like he was checking to see if he’d left anything up there. “Wasn’t a good neighborhood. Kids on the block had two options, mostly—corner or church. When my mama died, and I ended up in foster care, I picked the corner. Got into trouble. Got out, went into the military. Got out, and got into more trouble.”
Logan kept his eyes on the laptop screen. “What kind of trouble?”
“The kind that lands you in a program for ex-cons in Montana.” He sat up, picked up the protein chip bag, looked inside, put it back down. “After the Corps, I had too much time and not enough direction, and that’s a combination that will eat you alive if you let it.”
Logan thought about Denver and Phoenix and Tucson and the second boyfriend who used to call him‘the mistake.’He thought about the days of school he’d skipped. The failing grades. His mother’s declaration that he wouldnotend up like his father, even if it killed her.
And then Mom had died.
He and X were a lot alike. “I get that.”
“Yeah,hermanito. I know you do.” X squeezed his shoulder, then nodded to the laptop. “See what you can do with that. Impress me, and you can be my intern this summer.”
“Really?”
