“Alexis Mayer. Lived around the corner. Babysat for Maggie.”
“。 . . but what I really love are Broadway plays, especially musicals . . .” Alexis said onscreen, tucking her hair behind her ear. “And choreography! I love excellent choreography . . . !”
“Why do we care about this?” Zig asked, noticing the sign just above Alexis’s head. It was in an eighties Miami Vice font, aquamarine and pink. SuperStars, Zig read, old synapses firing as he remembered . . . “SuperStars Modeling?” he blurted.
“That’s the one. It was two towns over. The owner’s daughter got booked on a commercial for Sunny Delight or something stupid like that. Back when the girls were little, half of Maggie’s friends did tryouts at SuperStars with one of these videos.”
“Please tell me you didn’t let Maggie—”
“C’mon,” Charmaine said, pointing him back to the screen, where young Alexis was adamant that Newsies changed her life.
Zig was trying to watch, but what he couldn’t unsee was his old TV, its familiar plastic paneling playing tricks with his brain, like he was watching his past, spending a lazy Sunday in bed, back when he and Charmaine were first married, binge-watching VH1’s Behind the Music long before they called it binge-watching, the two of them betting whether it was the guitarist or drummer who would have the drug problem.
“God, I remember buying that TV . . .”
“Circuit City,” Charmaine said, still focused on the screen. “What matters is, SuperStars shut down years ago, once they realized that charging kids $49.99 for headshots that don’t work . . . well, that’s just not a long-term business model. Apparently, the owner of the place died six months back, leaving everything to her daughter, someone named Dianne Cash. Two weeks back, Dianne finally started going through her mom’s stuff, at which point, she found boxes and boxes of . . .”
“。 . . old videotapes,” Zig said.
“Exactly. At first, she uploaded a few to Facebook, everyone getting a laugh at how they used to look in their Star Search days. And then, as she was going through one of the tapes, Dianne saw this and reached out to me.”
Zig studied the screen. As the girl in the video stood up to say goodbye, the video blurred, the screen filling with horizontal lines that got wider, then smaller, hiccupping with static.
“。 . . waaaaaaaant tooooooooo thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaank . . .” young Alexis said, her voice warping, everything going black and silver. A thick band of static appeared, then disappeared, revealing a new image, something buried underneath. To make the Alexis video, someone had taped over an older video.
Now, that older video was playing.
“I-Is that—？”
Zig knew who it was, even through the static.
His dead daughter, Maggie. She was there, onscreen.
And she was sobbing.
25
It’s him, Nola thought.
“Talk to me!” Colonel Mint roared, immediately barking orders, his voice a robotic roar. “Who are you!? How’d you get here?”
Nola stumbled backward, crashing into the foldout desk. Back when she first moved into the trailer, it took months to adjust to the small space, her body eventually gaining the muscle memory to avoid bumping into everything. Now, she hit the desk hard, knocking over a canvas as pencils and paintbrushes rained down. The cat jumped at the sound, scurrying out of sight.
Onscreen, Mint’s face, his expressions . . . the digital image was perfect, right down to the small scar above his eyebrow, as if they’d scanned him in. They even had the gold medallion on his chest—the Soldier’s Medal—awarded for heroism outside of enemy combat, Nola now mentally replaying the story they forced Mint to tell her: of him leaving work and hearing screaming from an elevator.