When Esme hit the chorus, the girl came in a few beats late. The harmonies were simple, but she didn’t seem to be able to hold the notes long enough and was ever so slightly off-key. Darby’s shoulders rose, an involuntary reaction to the atonal interval, while Sam let out a low “sheesh.”
Darby hummed the harmony under her breath, hoping to correct the girl by osmosis, but Esme stopped halfway through. “Tanya, you’re falling asleep up here. Stay with me, okay?”
The second attempt wasn’t much better. Tanya looked as if she were going to be sick.
“What’s wrong with her?” Darby asked Sam.
“She’s high.”
Tanya put her hands to her head and began listing to the left.
The bass player dropped his bow and reached out to break her fall, but she still landed with a loud thud. Sam raced up to the stage to help.
Esme stomped over to Darby while the girl was carried off by the bassist and drummer. “I knew she wouldn’t make it. This is my big night and she’s ruined it.”
“You can still do the song. You sound terrific.”
“The final number’s supposed to rev everyone up. I can’t rev without a backup singer.”
Sam, who was headed back to the kitchen, stopped in front of her. “Darby can back you up.”
Esme looked up at Sam, then at Darby, her eyes wide.
Darby laughed. “He’s joking.”
“I’m not, I heard you singing the right notes. Not loud, but the right ones.”
She shook her head. “No, I can’t. I don’t sing.”
“I just heard you.”
“Okay, I sang in the chorus at school, but I never did anything for real.”
“Backup isn’t for real; you just stand there and do it.” Esme sang a phrase, her hands stretched out to Darby.
No matter how badly she wanted to help her friend, Darby knew her place, and it wasn’t onstage at a nightclub. She pictured the audience laughing at her, the same way the Ford girls laughed at her.
“I’ll embarrass you, Esme. You’ll do fine alone.”
“Sing.” She started in again.
“I can’t.”
Sam punched her playfully in the arm. “Sing under your breath, then. Like before. Just to prove to Esme that I’m not crazy.”
His touch startled her. She put a hand over the spot where his knuckles had hit her upper arm and rubbed it gently. Darby sang along, quietly, her voice hesitant but on pitch.
“Yes. You’ve got to do it. You do that three times, whenever I do the chorus, and you sway your hips a little, and that’s it.”
“My hips don’t sway.”
“Come with me.”
Esme dragged her down the hall and opened a door.
“Welcome to the green room.” Esme swept her arms around as if they’d entered a parlor in Versailles. A couple of raggedy couches lined the walls, one of which was taken up by the prone Tanya, who snored softly. A small table tucked behind the door held some cups and a pot of coffee. “This is where the cats hang out before each show.”
“Why is it the green room? It’s not green.”
“No idea. That’s just what they call it. Wait here a moment.”
Darby sat on the couch opposite Tanya, her knees pressed tightly together and her hands on her lap. She didn’t want to look like a baby in front of Sam. And she only had to sing three choruses. She’d pretend she was back at school at the end-of-year concert, surrounded by other girls. If she did that, she might be able to do the song without falling over like Tanya.
Esme reappeared carrying her purse, the contents of which she poured out on the floor by Darby’s feet. An array of cosmetics, from lipsticks to powders, scattered about like Christmas tree ornaments.
“Where did you get all these?” asked Darby.
“Whenever a giraffe leaves something behind in the bathroom, I swipe it. It’s like when customers at the Flatted Fifth leave a tip for the waiters.”
“Won’t the girls notice?”
“Nah. They get all that stuff for free, anyway.”
Esme knelt in front of Darby and twisted a bright orange-red lipstick out of its casing.
Darby bit her lip.
“You’re right, it’s too orange. Try this.” Esme replaced it with one that was a softer shade of coral.
“Mother said I don’t have a face for cosmetics.”
“The only requirement for wearing cosmetics is to have a face, and you have one, as far as I can see.”
“It won’t help.” The same words Mr. Saunders had said when Darby and Mother had come back from shopping for Darby’s “city clothes.”
“I like a challenge. Your face is plain, but sometimes that’s the best kind.”
Esme smoothed a cream over Darby’s eyelids and filled in her eyebrows with some kind of stick. The wand of mascara was frightening, but Esme told her to look at the ceiling and then the floor while she covered her eyelashes in black goo.
She grabbed a wide comb next. “Not done yet.” Darby tried not to wince as her hair was combed backward from the way she normally did it, then flipped to one side and combed back again. “Now look.”
A mirror hung crookedly above the table holding the coffee. Darby stood up and stared. Her eyes, defined in black, appeared bigger than they actually were. Her hair puffed up a couple of inches above her scalp, a triumph over gravity. A plastic taste leached into her mouth from the lipstick.
“I look so different.”
“You look pretty.”
Darby wasn’t so sure. “Mother would be horrified. I look like one of those girls.”
Esme’s grip on her shoulders tightened. She put her face next to Darby’s and looked at her in the mirror with a quiet tenderness. “For ten minutes of your life, forget about your mother. You will be one of those girls, the ones who fool around and don’t care and get into trouble. But it’s all an act. I know you’re a good girl. I’m a good girl. We do it for the audience, ’cause they got hunger for girls like that.”
The pretense and bravado fell from Esme’s face, replaced by a look of desperation. “You have to do this for me. One song, three verses, that’s all I’m asking. No one will know. Please.”
Underneath the rough voice and confidence, Esme was scared as well. Not scared of change, like Darby was, but scared of staying put, staying unchanged.
The place where Esme touched her bare skin tingled, the beginning of an illicit thrill that shimmied down her spine. Could she be a bad girl? Esme refused to define herself as a hotel maid. And maybe Darby didn’t need to define herself as a boring secretary. At least not tonight.
“Okay. I’ll try.”
Esme squealed and hugged Darby close. “Go out there and get a seat at a table up front. I’ll call you up when it’s time. And act like you’re having fun.”
“I’m not swaying my hips.”
“Okay, don’t sway, just sing. Keep the mic a few inches away from your mouth, not too close, not too far, and look at me if you get scared.”
Tanya moaned again.
“Should we do something for her?” Darby asked.
“She’ll be fine. She got herself into this mess, and she’ll have to get herself out. Buckley will make the busboys dump her in the gutter if she’s still here at closing.” She turned back to the mirror. “Off you go. I’ll see you under the lights of stardom.”
When Darby emerged from the green room, the club was three-quarters full. As directed, she took a table near the front. The stage was steps away, but she’d have to be careful getting up there so as not to fall or hike up her dress too high.
The undercover policeman whom she’d seen the first time walked by her table and gave her a nod, staring at her two beats longer than what was considered polite. In fact, several of the men at the nearby tables held her gaze, or tried to hold her gaze, before she looked away. A hot rush of shame traveled through her, from her forehead to her feet. Did they think she was a prostitute, sitting alone?
But so what if they did? They’d see soon enough that she was part of the show. She hummed the notes under her breath, imprinting them on her memory.
Finally, Esme’s name was announced and she bounced up to the stage to stand in front of the center mic. Darby nodded along with the beat and clapped at the end of the first song, but her mind was racing, her heart pounding faster than it ever had. A dry stickiness spread over her tongue, a combination of the lipstick and fear.