I Have Lost My Way(33)

“And asking you to sing. Do you even think there is a Sasha?” Harun continues. “I mean, you’re not some performing monkey, are you?” he adds, even though forty minutes ago, he had imagined James being in the diner and Freya singing one of her songs for him and James forgiving him. “That must get so tiresome. Sometimes you must wish for everyone to leave you alone.”



* * *



— — —

This is not what she wishes. It’s what she fears.

Your numbers will drop. Your fans will forget you.

And then what? Who’s left?

Freya looks down and begins to cry.



* * *



— — —

Nathaniel reaches out and brushes the tear from Freya’s cheek.

I see well enough

For the both of us.

And at that moment, Nathaniel hears well enough for the both of them.

“You can’t sing,” Nathaniel says.



* * *



— — —

Freya has been ordered not to tell anyone about her current issues. Hayden has warned her that it alters the narrative they’ve worked so hard to create for Freya. Freya is tough. Freya is unstoppable. Freya is destiny. “Don’t tell anyone. Not your fans or your friends,” Hayden warned.

What friends? Her fans are her friends.

She looks at Nathaniel and Harun, staring at her with a mix of terror and tenderness. Staring at her not like strangers but something like friends.

“I can’t sing,” she says.



* * *



— — —

“What do you mean you can’t sing?” Harun is distraught. If Freya can’t sing, everything falls apart. If she can’t sing, how will he get James back?

“I mean I can’t sing,” she says. “When I try, when I even think about trying, my voice gets all strangled.”

“Maybe you’re fatigued from being in the studio and recording your album.”

“I haven’t been in the studio for three weeks,” she replies.

“But the photos . . .” Not one week ago, he and James had seen photos of her accompanied by updates about how well everything was going.

“They were taken before,” she says. “Posted to keep up the facade. Until I got my voice back.”

“But you will get it back? And finish?”

She shakes her head. “Maybe not.”

Harun imagines James finding out about Freya and the incomplete album, and though he only just met her and clearly has nothing to do with it, it feels like his fault, somehow.

Tears spring to his eyes. As a child he wept so often that his older brothers teased him and Ammi scolded him. “Why do you cry so much? Not even your sister cries so much.” Without anyone telling him, he knew the tears carried his secret the way blood carries DNA. He learned not to cry. Even with James, he did not cry. Not even when James did and he thought it would kill him.

“Hey,” Freya says, wiping her own tears. She puts her hand on his, and Nathaniel puts his on top of Freya’s, and Harun savors the weight of it like he would a heavy blanket on a cold night. “It’s not your problem. You don’t have to worry about it.”

But she’s wrong. She might not be his solution, but this is his problem.

“But James loves you. He’s your biggest fan.”

Freya smiles sadly. Nathaniel finishes chewing the rest of his second grilled cheese sandwich.

“Who’s James?” Nathaniel asks.

“He’s my . . .” Harun begins.

What Harun should say is that James is his ex-boyfriend. Because as of last week (Get the fuck out my life), that’s what he is. But Harun has never once claimed James as his boyfriend. He’s never told anyone about this boy he has been in love with for the past eighteen months. Even when he’d told his cousin, he hadn’t said the word boyfriend. He’d never said James’s name. And it doesn’t seem fair to say he’s his ex-boyfriend when he never even got to claim him.

“My boyfriend,” Harun says. “And he’s totally obsessed with you. But not in a creepy way.”

“Oh yeah?” Freya sounds amused.

“Yeah.” And it’s like he’s been uncorked, and out flow all the things he has never been able to tell anyone about James. About how James believes in the best in everyone, and how he hates the cold, and how he claims he can take any five ingredients and cook them into something delicious (a feat Harun has never actually seen performed, though he has tasted the evidence of it, the plastic containers full of stews and pastas James has cooked for him). And how when he was young, their apartment came with a shower curtain that was a map of the world, and how he used up all the hot water memorizing all the countries, even ones that no longer existed (like Yugoslavia), and how even though he’s never left the tri-state area, he has the most powerful wanderlust. How on the cold days, he and Harun pretend they’re traveling to the faraway places.

And he tells Freya about James’s devotion to her, careful to temper his fandom the way James himself once had. “There’s something you should know about me,” he’d told Harun, and Harun had steeled himself for some kind of deal breaker (I have a boyfriend, I am a space alien), but instead James had confessed that he had a kind of strange obsession with a singer. He told Harun how he had come across the Sisters K covering “I Will Survive” the very day his father kicked him out of the house, and felt as though Freya were singing directly to him. And he wrote to her. And she replied.