I posted the EP to everything. SoundCloud, Apple Music, Spotify, all of it. Tweeted the link, posted the cover on IG with no caption, and drove to Savannah's before I could sit there and watch the numbers.
* * *
She opened the door and pulled me in before I even said anything. Kissed me and then stepped back.
"I missed you."
I laughed. "It's been like three days."
"I know."
She looked at me for a second, then at my face like she was checking for something. Then she said, "You made an album?"
"EP."
"What's the difference?"
I explained it. Three tracks, no filler, not a full project. More like a statement than a story. You put out an album when you want to build something over time. An EP is for when you have something specific to say right now.
She nodded like she was filing that away. Then she grabbed her headphones off the coffee table.
"Well I want to listen to it."
"Okay."
She put the headphones on and pulled up the SoundCloud, and I just sat next to her on the couch and let her go. I could hear the faint bleed of the music through the cushions. She didn't say anything. After a while, she stopped scrolling through her phone and put it down. Her face changed a little, went somewhere private. She left it there until the track ended.
When the whole thing finished, she pulled the headphones down around her neck.
"Hard to Choose One," she said. "That one."
"Yeah?"
"That's the one. That's the one people are going to remember."
She leaned back and looked at the ceiling. Then she said, "Isn't your label meeting in a few days? Are you excited?"
"I don't know yet. They're going to try to fuck me over, so I've been talking to a few entertainment lawyers. Making the final call on who I'm going with tomorrow."
She turned her head to look at me. "Smart."
"Speaking of which." I paused. "When I get signed, I want to hire you for something. So it doesn't have to be weird, you just being around."
She smiled. The real one, not the polished one. "Hire me to do what?"
"I don't know yet. What can you do?"
She threw a pillow at me. I caught it.
* * *
Cassie heard it the next day.
She was on her couch, half paying attention, texting Nate with the EP playing through her speaker on the coffee table. She wasn't really listening at first. Then Dead Man Walking came on and she put the phone down.
She went through the whole thing twice. Her favorite was Dead Man Walking, which was the one she wasn't expecting to hit. She texted her friend about it. She didn't text Jordan.
She was still texting Nate by the time she listened to it a third time.
* * *
Maddy listened to it alone in her room with the lights off.
She didn't tell anyone she was doing it. Just put her headphones in and lay back on her bed and let it go. She didn't skip anything. She listened to all three the whole way through without moving.
By the end of it she was looking at the ceiling with her phone on her chest.
She kept thinking about Nate. Not because the music was about him. Because it wasn't. Because Jordan had been through everything he'd been through in the last few months and came out the other side making something like this. No bitterness in it. No performance. Just ability.
Nate couldn't make anything. Nate couldn't build anything. Nate's whole thing was taking up space and making sure you knew he was in the room.
She stared at the ceiling and thought: why are you wasting your time.
She didn't have a good answer. She decided right there, quietly, without telling anyone, that if Jordan wanted her, actually wanted her, she was done making it complicated. She wasn't going to announce it. She was just going to stop blocking it.
She put her headphones in her drawer and went to sleep.
* * *
I heard my family listening to it from my room.
Mom had it playing in the kitchen. Gia was in the living room with it on her phone. I could hear them talking about it through the wall, their voices low, and I just sat at my desk and waited. It felt weird being in the same house while people I lived with processed something I made.
Later Mom knocked on my door and said she was glad people were hearing it but she wished it was better subject matter. I didn't argue. I knew what she meant. I just nodded.
Rue didn't say much. She gave me a look in the hallway that I couldn't fully read. I was still pretty sure she was using again. I'd been watching her for two weeks and the signs were quiet but they were there. I was going to have to address it soon. Just not tonight.
Gia cornered me in the kitchen.
"Okay so Boosted's Back," she said. "The second verse. I need you to know that verse goes crazy."
I smiled. "I know."
"Like actually crazy."
"Gia."
"I'm just saying."
I looked at her for a second. She was fourteen and had her whole life ahead of her and this neighborhood had a way of getting into people slowly without them noticing. I needed to figure out how to get her somewhere better before it started working on her.
I messed up her hair. She shoved me away and went back to her room.
* * *
Franklin Mann's office was on the fourth floor of a building downtown with a waiting room that smelled like leather and paper. He was older than I expected, maybe mid-fifties, with the kind of calm that comes from having seen everything twice.
He told me about himself first. His background, who he'd worked with, what he believed about how artists should be protected going into deals. He didn't try to impress me. He just laid it out like he was reading from a fact sheet.
Then he asked if I had a manager.
"No."
"You need one. Not a friend, not a family member. An employee. Someone whose job it is to look out for your interests and nothing else. Make sure they're trustworthy. It can wait until after the first meetings but not long after."
I told him about the offers. Atlantic and Interscope were the first two, but now I had Universal, Sony, and Def Jam reaching out as well.
He wrote that down. "Def Jam?"
"They reached out. I'm not taking it that seriously."
He nodded once, didn't push it. "I have decent knowledge on the numbers artists have signed at your level and above. I'll put together an outline. Come back tomorrow and we'll go through it before your first meeting."
I stood up and shook his hand. He had a firm grip, which I'd learned meant nothing, but his eyes were steady when he looked at you and that meant more.
* * *
The Atlantic meeting was in a conference room on the seventh floor with four people sitting across from us and water bottles on the table that nobody touched. They talked about vision. They talked about the moment I was in and how they wanted to be a part of it. Franklin sat next to me and took notes and didn't say much until the numbers came out.
Then he asked a few questions I wouldn't have known to ask, and by the end of it they were at a different number than where they started.
When we left I said, "That was it?"
"That was the opening. They'll sharpen the offer before you come back."
Interscope was similar. Different room, different people, same energy. We sat, they talked, Franklin worked, we left with a counter and a timeline.
In the elevator on the way down he said, "You need a manager before the next round. Two weeks. That's your window."
"I know."
"Do you have anyone in mind?"
I thought about it. "Not yet."
He nodded. The elevator opened. We walked out into the afternoon and I stood on the sidewalk for a second with my hands in my pockets while the city moved around me.
Two weeks.
* * *
It took about a week for the EP to actually take off. Not overnight, not the way I thought it would, but slow and steady and then all at once.
Each track on YouTube was sitting at 80k views and there was no video, no visual, nothing. Just audio and the cover. Spotify had crossed 100k streams across the project and it was still climbing. The SoundCloud numbers had long stopped meaning anything because they kept moving every time I checked.
I sat at my desk and looked at the screen and thought: it's going to keep going.
I didn't say it out loud. I just knew it without needing proof.
I closed the laptop and went to work on the next thing.