Dreamland(14)

When she grew quiet, I couldn’t help but imagine a young girl strapped into a back brace, wanting to be like everyone else, and how hard that must have been. She seemed to sense what I was thinking, because she looked at me with an almost forlorn expression.

“I’m sorry. I don’t usually share this kind of stuff with people I’m still getting to know.”

“I’m honored.”

“Still, I don’t want you to think I’m hoping for some kind of pity party, because I’m not. Everyone has challenges, and a lot of people have them worse than I ever did.”

I suspected she was speaking about the fact that I’d lost my mom, and I nodded. “So…singing?”

“Oh yeah,” she offered. “Long story short, my parents eventually put me in singing and piano lessons so that I had after-school activities like my friends did. I think they believed it would be a passing phase, but just like dancing, the more I practiced, the more important it became to me. I sang through high school, and I’ve had private vocal lessons for years. I tell myself that my experience at IU was just icing on the cake. My parents may not be thrilled with my choice of major, but then again, I didn’t give them a vote in that, either.”

“Why wouldn’t they be thrilled?”

“They’re doctors,” she said, as though that was all the explanation needed. When I didn’t respond, she finally went on. “My parents would prefer that I have more-traditional dreams.”

“So you’re serious about singing.”

“It’s what I’m meant to do,” she said, her eyes fixed on mine.

“What’s next, then? Since you’ve graduated, I mean?”

“I’m moving to Nashville in a couple of weeks. That’s another reason I wanted to graduate early. I’m only twenty-one, which still gives me time to break into the music world.”

“How are you going to pay your bills? Did you line up a job there?”

“I got some money from my grandparents for graduation. And, believe it or not, my parents have agreed to help with rent, too, so I should be okay for a while.”

“I’m kind of surprised that your parents would agree to that. Based on what you told me about them, I mean.”

“I am, too. But my dad was terrified about me living in a place that might be dangerous, so he talked my mom into it. I don’t know how long their help will last, but I’m definitely grateful for it. I know how hard it is to break into the music world, and I feel like the only way I’m going to have a chance is to give it a hundred percent effort. So that’s what I intend to do, and I’ll keep trying until it works. It’s my dream.”

I heard the determination in her tone and couldn’t help but be impressed, even as I admitted she had the kind of support and opportunities of which only a handful of people could boast. “Are your friends in music, too? Holly, Stacy, and Maria?”

“No, but we have a dance group together. That’s how we met. We all had accounts on TikTok where we posted videos of ourselves dancing, so we started dancing as a group, too.”

“Does anyone watch?”

She tilted her head. “They’re incredible dancers, better than I am. Maria, for instance, is a dance major, and she just scored an audition with Mark Morris’s dance company. You’ve also seen what they all look like. What do you think?”

“Can I see some of the videos?”

“I still don’t know you well enough for that.”

“But you let strangers see them.”

“It’s different if I know the person. Haven’t you ever felt that way? When you sing? That if there’s someone you know in the audience—and want to know better—you get nervous. It’s kind of like that.”

“You want to get to know me better?” I persisted, teasing.

“You’re missing the point.”

I held up my hands. “I get it. Do you have a lot of followers?”

“That’s a relative question,” she said. “What’s a lot? Some people have a couple hundred million followers, and there are lots of others between fifty and a hundred million. We’ve networked a lot, but we’re not in that league.”

“How many do you have?”

“Individually or as a group?”

“Both.”

“Almost two million for me, and over eight million for our group.”

I blinked, thinking about the 478 followers I had on all three of my social-media platforms combined. “You have over eight million followers on TikTok?”

“It’s crazy, right?”

“It’s hard to believe,” I said, not bothering to hide my disbelief. “How did you even get something like that off the ground?”

“A lot of work and even more luck. Stacy is a genius when it comes to building followers, and Holly is a video-editing goddess. We started by posting to one another’s accounts. Then we performed routines at campus events, and a lot of students followed us. After that, we found dance groups at other colleges that were doing the same thing that we were, and we linked up with those accounts, as well. And then, last November at a basketball game…” She hesitated. “You know basketball is really popular in Indiana, right? Anyway, the game was being broadcast nationally, and Stacy happened to know one of the camera guys. We were wearing T-shirts that had our TikTok account on the front, and the network went to one of those crowd shots during a time-out. The cameraman zoomed in on us as we performed one of our routines on the sidelines. And after that the camera kept returning to us during breaks, to the point that even the network announcers mentioned our TikTok name! Then a clip ended up on ESPN, a few influencers took note, and almost immediately our account began blowing up. Thousands of people, tens of thousands, hundreds…and it just kept snowballing from there.”