Run Rose Run(69)

AnnieLee could hear scattered, distracted clapping. She glanced behind her, as if looking for invisible reinforcements. It felt as though someone’s hands were closing around her throat.

Then she reminded herself of the countless hours she’d spent preparing for this night—not over the past month, but for two whole decades of her life. The first rehearsals began back when she was six years old and got her first beat-up plastic-stringed guitar from a church rummage sale. And she’d been anticipating a night like this ever since she wrote her first song, a sweet little rhyming ditty about a bee who fell in love with a flower.

You belong here, she told herself. It doesn’t matter how you got here, and it doesn’t matter that you’re not the one they came to see. You belong.

She loosened her death grip on the guitar neck and gazed out at a crowd she couldn’t see on the other side of the spotlights’ glare. And then she started to play.

Is it easy?

No it ain’t

Can I fix it?

No I cain’t

But I sure ain’t gonna take it lyin’ down

As the song went on, she could sense the crowd’s attention turning toward her. People’s phones pivoted up to take pictures and record. AnnieLee could feel everyone’s new appreciation, and she didn’t want that energy to end. Hoping not to break the spell, she went straight into the next song without a pause, pulling the audience along with her. She played “Driven,” and then “Dark Night, Bright Future,” and as she moved into the first verse, she could see three teenage girls in the front row, loudly singing along. So she sang right to them, holding out the mic once in a while so their voices rang through the coliseum, too.

Everyone knows happiness

Everybody grieves

We all cry, we all smile

Everybody bleeds

Everybody has a past, things they want to hide

There’s give, take, love, hate in each and every life

Six thousand people were in the room that night, and her music called out to each person. She sang joyfully, and then fiercely, and she could feel the way her voice soared and keened. She was electrified in a whole new way, and she never wanted the show to end.

But obviously it had to, and for her final song, AnnieLee danced around the stage playing Ruthanna’s hit “Big Dreams and Faded Jeans.”

Put on my jeans, my favorite shirt

Pull up my boots and hit the dirt

Finally doin’ somethin’ I’ve dreamed of for years

The song was older than AnnieLee, but it seemed as though everyone in that giant room knew the words.

Then it was time to hand over the mic to the star, Kip Hart. But the applause for AnnieLee was thunderous. She took three, then four bows, and then she ran from the stage, triumphant.

A roadie held out a bottled water. “How d’ya feel now?” he asked.

AnnieLee took a long, grateful drink and then said, “Shoot, if I felt any better, I’d drop my harp plumb through the cloud!”

He laughed. “Think you might like to do it again sometime?”

AnnieLee looked straight at him, totally serious now. “Honey,” she said, “I’m only getting started.”





Chapter

59


Too thrilled and wired to sleep in a hotel room, AnnieLee drove back to Nashville that night. She fell into bed at 4 a.m. and didn’t wake until the afternoon. Even then, she didn’t get up, but stayed warm beneath her down comforter, still feeling the faint electric buzz of her performance.

She’d been good and she knew it. Hell, she’d been great. She wondered where Kip would ask her to play next. Virginia? North Carolina? She didn’t want to go back to Texas, but she’d certainly consider it.

Eventually she sat up and checked her phone. There were voicemails from Ethan, Jack, and Ruthanna, which she decided to listen to after she’d had her coffee. Then she checked the Instagram account that ACD had insisted Eileen set up for her.

AnnieLee didn’t do the posting, but she had agreed to regularly text her publicist pictures, and Eileen had already put the ones from last night into her feed. There were a handful of backstage photos, plus a few shots that the stagehands had taken from the wings. These were blurry and slightly underexposed, but AnnieLee had told Eileen that she wanted her Instagram pictures to have the feel of casual snapshots. She didn’t want anything filtered or Photoshopped or Facetuned, or whatever it was people did to make everything look better than it really was.

“I want to post the truth,” she’d said, “or as near as I can get to it.”

And though Eileen had hoped for a more carefully curated and slick-looking feed, she’d clearly decided to take what she could get.

AnnieLee scanned through the comments to the one semi-selfie she’d taken right before going onstage. It was a shot of half of her face, taken in the mirror, with a streak of light falling across her shoulder.

Ur so pretty, said one commenter.

OMG I wanna be you when I grow up, said another.

There were star emojis and handclap emojis, and people begging her to tour through their tiny midwestern towns. AnnieLee hearted all the comments and then got up to make herself breakfast.

She was in such a good mood that she didn’t understand what Jack was saying in his message when she finally listened to it. She had to play it over and over again, in disbelief.