HIS FOR KEEPS EXCERPT

“Cool. Let’s meet up at my house around eight. Parents will be gone.”

That was the text that started it all. It was from Mike Lancer. My boyfriend. Well, sort of, but not really. We’d been hooking up all summer, and he only ever invited me over when his parents were out. But his parents were out a lot, so we’d settled into a routine: I was the girl he called when his parents weren’t around. And if I wasn’t due to perform with my mother that night, I was the girl who went over to his place.

He’d called me his “secret girlfriend” a few times while we were making out, before he stuck it in me. So I guess that made us… something.

This was his first text message though, because I’d just gotten a new phone the day before. My first cell phone, an early birthday present from my mom, bought because she was feeling optimistic.

She’d finally landed a gig for the following weekend at The Rusty Roof, one of Birmingham, Alabama’s oldest and most legendary country music venues, and she’d just gotten a call from the club’s manager that Lee Street, from Big Hill Records, was coming all the way down from Nashville to see her perform. Really, he was coming to see the band of twenty-year-olds slated to go on right before her—the club manager told her that straight up. But Valerie Goode had always been on the crazy side of confident about her career prospects.

She didn’t care who Lee Straight was really coming to see. He’d be in the room. And for a magical thinker like Valerie, that had been enough to make her buy the daughter she called her “right-hand guitar,” her first cell phone. Of course she did it with money she didn’t have, because she was banking on Lee Straight making her a big star after he saw her perform on stage—and/or in bed if need be. In Valerie’s mind, she was always just a performance and one really good fuck away from becoming the world’s first black female country music star.

As far as she was concerned, the only reason she hadn’t made it to fame and fortune before the age of thirty-five was because she’d gotten pregnant with me in her prime contract-signing years. According to her, my birth ruined everything: her relationship with my father, her ability to get the gigs she needed in order to be seen by the right people. Everything Valerie deserved but had never gotten was because of me.