I Have Lost My Way(21)

You. As if it only affected me.

“You know what you should do? You should post a song or something. Show him how amazing you are. What he’s lost.”

Sing what you can’t say, my father had said. That was what Billie and Nina and Josephine and Gigi did.

“Okay.”

“Let’s clean you up first.”

Sabrina mopped my face with a washcloth and carefully did my makeup. “Do you know what you want to sing?” she asked.

Yes. I wanted to sing “Tschay Hailu,” the lullaby my father had sung to me and that he would now be singing to his new son. I fetched an empty trash can for accompaniment, and Sabrina hit RECORD.

My intention had been to send a greeting to my new brother, a reminder to my father, but when I started singing, something else came out, something primal and aching and pure. I kept singing, drumming even harder, and my voice went places it had never been before.

When it was over, I felt better, just like the night when Sabrina first sang with me. I didn’t even want to post it. Singing the song was enough.

“Oh, we’re definitely posting it.” Sabrina uploaded the video onto her Facebook page.

“Huh,” Sabrina said the next day when we checked on the post. She’d tagged our father, so the video had shown on his page, but he must’ve untagged himself, because it was no longer there.

But on her own page, we saw that the video had been shared sixty-seven times. It had garnered more than a hundred comments, some from Sabrina’s friends but others from people I didn’t know. I was devastated that my father had untagged himself. Why would he do that? Was he embarrassed about us? Ashamed that he’d left us? Did he not like the video?

The only thing that eased my pain was all the comments. Later, when Mom came home and Sabrina was helping her with dinner, I read them all. Twice over. They were so nice. And they filled the hole my father’s silence had left.

I took a copy of the video and edited it down and posted it on Twitter.

By the next day, the video had hundreds of shares, thousands of likes, and so many more comments. I read them all. And read them again. They made me feel so good.

I showed Sabrina. “Why’d you post it again?” she asked. “Solomon probably doesn’t have Twitter, and he already saw it on Facebook.”

“Look at how many people shared it, though.”

Sabrina looked. She seemed unimpressed.

“Maybe we should show Mom?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll love that you sent our father a song.”

“But it’s weird that it got so many shares.” I tried to sound casual. “It kind of went viral. We should tell her before she finds out from someone else.”

Sabrina sighed. “Fine. I’ll show her.”



* * *



— — —

“Huh,” Mom said. “I’ve been reading about how the internet is creating a new kind of star. There’s potential for actual money.”

“How?” Sabrina asked.

“I’m not sure,” our mother said. “Let’s post another one. Why don’t you do it together this time? You girls sing so beautifully. What do you think, Sabrina?”

Even back then, there must have been a small acorn in my heart. Because I felt it, nubby and shriveled and shouting, What about me? when Mom said that. I was the one born singing. I was the one who’d gotten all those likes from my video. But no one asked me.

“Okay,” Sabrina said. “Why not?”



* * *



— — —

The first few videos were duds. But Mom, under the thrall of The Path, was convinced if she dreamed it hard enough, it would happen. She began reading up on what made successful videos. She determined that we needed a hook, a look, and a sound.

The sound was mostly dictated by covers. We hadn’t started writing our own material yet. The look was my doing: I wanted us to look like Billie and Josephine and Gigi. And the hook was that we were sisters who looked nothing like sisters.

“What should we call you?” Mom asked. “The Kebede Sisters?”

Sabrina wrinkled her nose. “The Sisters Kebede,” she tried. She shook her head. “Sounds weird.” She paused, tapping her fingers against her chin. “What about the Sisters K?”

“The Sisters K,” Mom said. “I like that.”



* * *



— — —

By the time we were summoned to Hayden Booth’s offices four years later, the Sisters K had a YouTube channel (220,000 subscribers), an Instagram feed (780,000 followers), a Twitter account (375,000 followers), an official Facebook page and several fan pages, and a SoundCloud channel with more than twenty original songs.

We also had a manager: Mom. She watched other people’s successful videos obsessively, trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. She mapped out weekly schedules, analyzed web traffic to determine when we should post. She stayed up late into the night, monitoring the comments and shares. When our videos earned the first bit of advertising money, she used it to hire a consultant to help us hone our look and leverage—or, as she said, “monetize”—our growing popularity.

“It’s interesting,” the publicist said, going through some of the comments. “They seem personally invested in Freya.”