Chapter Text
Slap in the face or not, Mel’s poetic sensibilities force her to appreciate the beauty of irony. She says as much to Becca, on whom the sentiment is completely lost in favor of giddy squeals. “It’s so romantic!” her sister insists. “Maybe someone will read your writing and fall in love with you!”
She’d prefer a raise for taking point on the Valentine’s Day collection rather than some sort of secret admirer, but Becca would be too disappointed in her lack of enthusiasm for Mel to voice that. “Sure, maybe,” she shrugs instead, tapping her fingers along the steering wheel to the bass line of the song humming on the radio. It’s nothing complex but the rhythm is nice enough and, while lyricism comes first for Mel as a writer, she’s always appreciated a good beat. It’s for the best these days as her car radio goes tinny with age, leaving most things outside of thumping bass lines utterly indecipherable.
“You don’t think your cards are that good?” Becca questions.
“It’s good to be humble,” Mel says. She knows she’s a talented writer, but the corporate office of a greeting card company is where talent goes to die. These are all lovely, the head writer said of her first submissions, but let’s cool it with the SAT words. These should be accessible to the general public.
“But it’s also good to find a boyfriend. You need one,” Becca declares.
“Maybe I do,” she sighs. It’s a pleasant thought, not being alone, but it still makes her stomach twist up in knots the way it always has.
“You definitely do. You’re so sad now.”
Mel has no rebuttal for that. While Becca has grown to like her day center over the past year of living in Kansas City, Mel has found little redeeming about the place other than the cost of living. She’s found no friends, excepting the sympathy card writer one cubicle down from hers who always asks for her help with the daily crossword, and she feels more creatively stifled than she has in her life. Music publishing in Chicago lacked most of the creative expression she hoped for, but it was at least a job in the industry. Even when she had taken a writing fellowship, she was still creating something meaningful. She was even close to self-publishing a poetry collection that’s now turned to a jumble of words on a computer file, no longer feeling like her own. She’s only written greeting cards and emails for a year now.
Mel spends another week struggling with the collection in abject misery until she receives an email from her agent, one she hasn’t heard from since leaving her fellowship, subject: potential opportunity. Heart racing, Mel clicks on the notification.
Hey Mel,
I don’t know if you’re still interested in songwriting, but I thought you might be a good fit for a camp over Labor Day weekend. You would be well-compensated for any work they pick up and I’ve seen people get great opportunities out of similar programs. Someone like you could probably get signed to their publishing company as a topliner. I’ve got some time Wednesday at noon if you can take a meeting to discuss it.
Thanks,
Baran Al-Hashimi
Mel closes the email immediately, palms sweating at the thought of someone looking into her cubicle and accusing her of disloyalty. The tab’s closure, however, leaves her face to face with the uninspired drafts she’s failed to refine all morning. Having a steady paycheck is nice and the benefits here are enough to help pay for Becca’s care. For the briefest moment, though, the idea of being found out and fired is thrilling. Not that it’s plausible for it to happen that way, Mel knows. A writer’s retreat— a potential opportunity— is not disloyalty, but the idea of staying in this job much longer sets her teeth on edge. She pulls the email back up.
Wednesday at noon sounds great, she types. Thanks for thinking of me.
“Mel?” a voice calls. She closes the email again and whirls around, all previous wanting for adrenaline dissipating. “Strongly desires, eight letters. I’ve got blank-I-blank-O-S-blank-blank-blank.”
Mel exhales. “I haven’t looked at it yet, Theresa,” she admits, rolling back in her chair to look across the wall of her cubicle at the older woman. “I’m sure you’ll get it.”
“Maybe,” Theresa sighs. “I’ll ask you after lunch.” Mel admittedly hates when she asks for help this way, isolating a clue from the context of the crossword puzzle itself. Everything around it matters. If Mel can’t see the things around it, guessing off of three letters is entirely pointless. She had explained this to her once, months ago, and Theresa has all but forgotten it.
Still, Mel is a creature of habit. She takes her lunch break and devotes the usual five or ten minutes to the crossword before scrawling 40D pines for and intersecting it with 48A if ever on a sticky note for Theresa. Seven more minutes go to FaceTiming Becca at the center, listening intently as she talks about the cooking class she’s taking with her new best friend until an email notification flashes across the top of her phone. “Hey, Becca?” she asks. “I need to handle a work thing. Can we talk more tonight?” Becca’s face screws up in indignation before softening again.
“For the cards?” she asks.
“No, something else,” Mel admits, regretting it when her sister prickles. “But I am working on them. Promise.”
“Okay,” Becca mutters. “See you later.”
“Bye, Becs. Love you.” The call drops before Becca says it back, a surefire sign Mel has landed herself out of her good graces at least for the rest of the afternoon, but she goes digging into her email inbox and pushes the thought aside.
Great! I need you to DocuSign a Non-Disclosure Agreement before we can discuss further, Al-Hashimi has replied.
Unable to help her curiosity, she clicks the email link.
This Non-Disclosure Agreement (hereinafter referred to as the “Agreement”) is entered into by and between Pitt Records (hereinafter referred to as the “First Party”)…
Pitt Records, she types into her search engine, even though it’s a name she’s heard enough times to attribute plenty of significance to.
Pitt Records is an American record label owned by Universal Music Group. Originally based in Pittsburgh, it was founded by Michael “Robby” Robinavitch and Jack Abbot in 1996. Pitt was initially a subsidiary of Pittsburgh Talent Media Company prior to its acquisition by Universal Music Group in 2008.
Even if she couldn’t name a single song attributable to most of the artists on the current roster listed if her life depended on it, Mel knows enough to recognize them as important names. Serious artists— artists with a profile far higher than anything Mel could produce writing greeting cards. Still, the majority are major pop stars, which leaves her chewing her lip wondering what had ever convinced Al-Hashimi she could be a remotely appropriate fit to work with Pitt Records. She’s somewhat accomplished for a literary writer, but her songwriting credits are far less mainstream. The closest brush she’s had with notoriety had been when a track she helped with on a college friend’s thesis album went viral on TikTok. There were times when she used to play guitar and fill notebooks with songs, but she lacked her mother’s talents for singing and instrumentation, so she pivoted to poetry early and her songwriting since has reflected the choice. Mel has no doubt there are hundreds of actual pop music songwriters desperate for a slot in a program like this, but her curiosity wins out. She signs the NDA and on Wednesday’s lunch break, she sits in her car on a video call with her agent to tell her as much.
“Mel,” Al-Hashimi replies, “has anyone ever told you not to look a gift horse in the mouth?”
“Yes,” Mel nods. She’s always done it anyway. The quality of a horse is well-assessed by its mouth and, gift or not, she’s never found being prepared to be a bad thing. Looking is not a rejection of the gift itself, she reasons.
“They want more than just career songwriters,” she explains. “They’re enthusiastically open to people with literary backgrounds. Like a poet.”
“A poet,” Mel repeats, wondering when that had become the label to fit her best and when she had resigned herself to it. A few years ago, she would’ve leapt at a chance like this without question.
“Yes,” she emphasizes. Mel swallows, understanding that she’s begun to irritate Al-Hashimi when she’s offered her the best opportunity she’s received in months. “Now, can we move on to the actual meeting or do I need to consider someone else?”
“We can move on,” Mel says.
“Excellent. Now, I can help you pick out a body of work to send as a portfolio. Obviously we’ll pull from your Stegner manuscript,” Al-Hashimi begins, “but what about the collection you were working on?”
“No,” Mel says immediately. “It’s… It doesn’t quite feel like me anymore.”
“You had some wonderful pieces in it,” she pushes. “I think there’s a few of them that would bode well.” Mel cocks her head, thinking of the roster of artists she read off their Wikipedia page a few days ago.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “They sign a lot of pop stars and I don’t know if my writing lends itself well to pop stars.”
“Gift horse, Mel,” Al-Hashimi reminds her. Mel looks back to the compensation details of the contract she’s sent her and nods.
—
She’s never sent off her portfolio and had it go badly, so in retrospect Mel supposes it may have been naive of her to totally write off Pitt Records. Hindsight, for all its value, does nothing to quell the shock of seeing an email in her inbox three weeks later inviting her to spend Labor Day weekend in Los Angeles.
“For what?” Becca asks when Mel tries to explain. “Are you going on vacation? Oh, can I go?”
“It’s a work trip,” Mel says, wiping down the kitchen. Over the past month, Becca’s cooking class has emboldened her in a baking spree that runs Mel ragged between cleaning, grocery bills, and concerns about her own sugar intake. Tonight, it was peach cobbler. Try as Mel might, she can’t seem to get all of the flour off the surface of everything.
“Why do you need to go on a trip to write cards?”
“It’s a freelance job,” Mel explains. Becca blinks at her. “Remember when I had to write all of those grant proposals a few months ago even though I was already working at the card company? It’s like that.”
“So you’re getting a second job.” Mel nods, trying to suppress her disgust at the feeling of wet flour as she wipes down the countertop. “Are we going to move back to California? I like the center but there is a reason Missouri is basically ‘misery.’”
“I don’t love it here either,” Mel admits with a laugh, “but this is probably just going to be a weekend thing. We’ve done too much moving around lately anyway.” Between Becca having to come to Boston to live with her during the last few years of college, three years in Chicago, two in the Bay Area for a creative writing fellowship, and just over a year in Kansas City, she hasn’t been able to provide either of them with much stability. They’ve both adapted better since they were teenagers and their mother had to hop between apartments every year when the rent increased, but Mel still hates taking her out of facilities after she’s gotten used to them. She’s also wary of leaving her in them overnight, but the information in the email was clear— transportation and accommodations will be provided for the attendee only— and she’s not exactly in the financial place to take Becca on a Los Angeles vacation. That’s the whole point of the second job.
“I get to stay at the center, right?” Becca asks. “You’re not going to hire a nurse again.”
“No,” Mel promises, “I’m not. You’re okay with staying?”
“Yes,” she says. “They usually do something fun for Labor Day weekend.”
“Oh, well, that’s good, then,” Mel hums, not sure if she’s trying to convince Becca or herself. The longer she thinks about it, the worse she feels about the whole endeavor. She’s already said yes, though, so at the end of August, she goes from work to the airport and catches the first flight she’s ever taken.
—
She comes to Los Angeles under a completely cloudless sky, warm in the night as her Uber idles in traffic. It takes nearly an hour of stopping and starting in a sea of ruby-red brake lights before she gets from LAX to Santa Monica, but she’s immediately shown to a hotel suite overlooking the beach and the moonlit Pacific Ocean beyond it. If Becca were here, she’d use the extra two hours gained from traveling between time zones to explore. Mel, upon hearing the words complimentary room service, orders dinner and crawls into bed immediately.
Over the past few weeks of research, she’s learned about all matter of storied song camps: castles in the French countryside, retreats in Bali, villas in Santorini, vineyards in Milan. Pitt Records has never sponsored its own camp, but Mel can only assume some degree of similar grandiosity awaits. She can’t help the little spring of giddiness that wells up in her. When she accepted a place in the Stegner fellowship, she was prepared to give up on her old songwriting dreams. The era of the singer-songwriter has all but made people like her mother redundant and chasing in her footsteps has only led Mel on a clumsy stumble down an uneven road. Now, though, looking from her hotel bed to the ocean, she gets the feeling that she’s finally on the right track.
It’s a feeling that starts wavering twenty minutes into her time at Pitt Records’ office. The whole place lives and breathes in shapes and motions Mel is totally unfamiliar with. She was mostly doing copywriting in Chicago and that’s been three years ago now. The most relevant experience she’s had was in college, when she had missed out on most of the topliner internships and spent the summer learning to do licensing work for film and television. The experience isn’t negligible, but it’s as if she’s been painted with a scarlet letter, something to proclaim to everyone else that she isn’t one of them.
After the writers introduce themselves, the first exercise they do as a group gathers a handful of artists who have occupied the Billboard Charts for months now, at least one producer with each of them, and the couple dozen songwriters around a piano on a barely-raised stage in the middle of the office. Someone will call out a mood, someone will play a few notes, and someone will throw out a lyric. It’s fast, almost urgent. It makes Mel’s head spin. Whenever she contributes anything to the activity, she feels as though it lands slightly left-of-center. The ones she seems least sure about are the ones that get the best reception and whenever she suggests anything the least bit flowery, it seems to draw a frown out of all but two of the artists.
The first, Mel recognizes from the cover of one Becca’s recent favorite vinyls. Trinity Santos looks a little different in person, lacking the styled hair and bright, almost theatrical makeup that seems characteristic of her public persona, but Mel would know her from her enthusiasm alone. There’s something snappy and ambitious in her music she sees mirrored just the same in the way she approaches their songwriting exercises. Mel suspects it’s what’s catapulted her to fame so quickly after rising out of obscurity a year or two ago.
The second takes Mel longer to place, but he’s been made familiar to her courtesy of Becca once again— this time well over a decade ago, when she’d found herself on the other end of the blue-eyed stare that rakes across the room now by way of a glossy boy band poster. It had once hung above Becca’s desk in their childhood bedroom, taunting Mel, who aspired toward artistry from a young age and found Frank Langdon and all the members of Emergency Response incredibly juvenile. Becca found them all incredibly cute, a concession Mel could begrudge her sister as long as she wasn’t there to come collect. He’s certainly grown into a very handsome man, one who unexpectedly almost smiles at her suggestions.
She’s never had the desire to follow Frank Langdon’s music career but he’s maintained a staying power that has made an awareness of him inevitable. That awareness, for Mel, had always given her the impression that someone attractive and successful like him would have no inclination to be remotely kind to her. Now, though, she feels a little embarrassed of her snap judgment as they continue the exercises. Some of her suggestions feel right but others seem to land a little awkwardly again, namely when she’s asked to rework a melody she finds particularly difficult. “Let’s break,” a silver-haired producer suggests. “Langdon, you’re with me.” The room clears out around her as they break into small groups, but she hangs back for a second to get her bearings until a voice snaps her out of her thoughts.
“You okay?” Hovering in the doorway, Langdon peers at her with genuine curiosity.
“Yeah,” she nods, catching herself starting to ramble. “Um, yeah, I’m fine, one hundred percent.”
“Relax,” he eases. “You’re doing great.”
She finds it hard to agree as she’s pulled from room to room with different artists, never quite finding the right wavelength. Everyone except Mel seems to make natural friends and instant connections. It’s never come easily to her, but it’s never stopped her from trying. She thinks for a moment she might find a groove in Trinity Santos’s group where, after a year of struggling to put anything on the page, the breakneck pace is almost exhilarating. Trinity’s manager, a tall bearded man everyone calls Robby, pushes up from his seat and nods at the gaggle of them. “Sounds good,” he approves. “Nice work.” They finish demos so quickly that Mel can’t help throwing her hand up for a high-five after the second one.
“Awesome!” she says to dead air, thinking she might die where she stands until Trinity herself slaps her palm against hers.
“Hell yeah it’s awesome, Melodica!” Trinity cheers. Still, she can’t get that split-second of unignorably not belonging out of her head. It joins a collection of infinitesimal moments throughout the day, piling up into something shouting at the edge of her consciousness that she doesn’t belong. Every suggestion she gives takes some punching up before it finds its way into demos. She’s no songwriter. Any minute now, they’ll all turn and accost her for having the nerve to come here at all.
When everyone breaks for lunch, Mel flees. Breaths coming quick, she pulls open the door to an empty studio room and sinks down against the wall, scrambling to splay her palms out flat against the floor beneath her. The chill of tile is a familiar shock to her nervous system, a sensation that takes her out of her own mind as she squeezes her eyes shut to block out the fluorescent lights overhead and tries to focus her breaths. In for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four, she repeats to herself.
Over and over, like a mantra, hoping her pulse will settle again.
In for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four.
The door creaks open and Mel’s head snaps up.
Frank Langdon stands in the doorway, that same inquisitive look on his face that she’d seen earlier as he steps into the room. “Mind if I sit?” he asks, nodding to the floor. All of Mel’s efforts to soothe herself are rendered useless immediately. Maybe they’ve sent him to kick her out of the program— to tell her she’s been found out.
“No, of course,” she mumbles, trying to avoid his gaze.
“How you doing?” he asks. He splays his legs out in front of him just like her.
“Fine,” she says, resisting the urge to ask him to get it over with.
“Yeah?”
“Definitely.”
“Well, I couldn’t help noticing you’re missing lunch, and I’m not usually one for writers, but you’re growing on me,” he says. Mel looks up in surprise and he smiles. “So how are you?”
Mel takes another measured breath. “It’s all a little, um, overwhelming.”
“Feels like maybe you’re out of your depth?” he asks. Mel nods, thinking about leaving her head bowed to wait for the killing blow. Maybe it had been foolish to trust him. Langdon continues anyway, voice soft as he says, “This industry can be... overwhelming, sometimes.”
You don’t belong, she expects him to add.
Instead, he looks right at her and Mel feels unavoidably seen. “I’ve been where you are right now,” he assures. “A lot of the time, these major labels want music more than they want art, and it’s not right, but Mel— it’s pretty clear to me that you’re an artist. This is exactly where you should be. We need artists, badly.” The intensity of his eyes practically knocks the air out of her lungs as she tries to nod at him. “When you’re ready, you should get back out there, grab something to eat, because I need you. I’ve got this instrumental track I think you’d love.”
“Oh,” Mel breathes. “Okay, yeah, I’m right behind you.”
For the rest of the day, that’s where she finds herself: right behind Frank Langdon. It makes her feel a little like she’s living in some middle school girl’s fantasy, being picked by the handsome pop star and finding out he’s not as shallow as he looks. He listens. He hardly ever takes his eyes off of her, either, walking backwards into rooms despite Mel’s fears he’ll trip over his own feet. Langdon moves quickly. He’s almost erratic, stopping halfway through chord progressions and melodies to chase phantoms of new ideas and scribbling things down in a beat-up notebook with blinding speed.
All that frenetic energy disappears the moment Mel starts humming her way toward a lyric or asking him to play something again. Rather than rushing her, he meets her exactly where she is. It’s almost jarring. Excepting the first two years of college, Mel has always set her clock by other people’s time. As a child, life revolved around helping Becca identify her needs. As twins, Mel felt that outside of Becca herself, she was the most qualified to understand what her sister needed. After their father got sick, she moved at the pace of her jobs, staying late at babysitting gigs when parents inevitably extended their nights out and waiting around after school tutoring students who didn’t want help with standardized testing but whose parents had insisted.
For two brief, bittersweet but blissful years, time had been her own. She moved to Boston for college and enrolled in a proper songwriting program. She watched the movies and ate the meals she wanted. She dated, however fleeting and unsuccessful that venture had been. Then her mother died and time became Becca’s. As happy as Mel has always been to have her sister with her, she can’t get the taste of freedom out of her mouth. Working with Langdon brings that feeling back tenfold, so intense Mel has to wonder if she ever felt it at all before now, sitting in a recording studio trading lyrics and melodies like they’ve spent their whole lives working together.
Langdon shares Trinity’s manager, who listens to the three demos they record with an unreadable expression. “This is different for you, Langdon,” Robby comments. Mel frowns, though she agrees. Any time she’s heard music attached to Langdon in any way, it’s been bright but uninspired. What they’ve written together is more lyrical. Sincere, Mel would say, lacking all the artificial flash he complains about.
Once Robby has disappeared back into the fray, Langdon leans over and says, “It’s good stuff, Mel. He’s just a killjoy.”
“You think?” she asks.
“I know. Don’t let him get to you, you’re making a great first impression. You are on me, at least.”
Mel figures it’s just her luck that that first impression is the only one she gets to make. When they return to the studio the next morning, there’s an odd buzz around the attendees and Langdon is running late. Mel, lacking any other friends at the retreat, ends up sitting beside Trinity Santos in their morning rounds with a notebook tucked under her arm, filled with lyrics she’d stayed up all night writing. When Robby steps up to the raised platform and starts the same exercise they’d begun with the day before, Mel turns to Trinity. “Have you seen Langdon?” she asks. “I worked on some things I really wanted to show him.”
Something strained comes across Trinity’s face. “Yeah, uh. He went home,” she says.
Mel blinks like it’ll help the information register somehow. Maybe even change it. But no, when her eyes open again, Trinity is still looking at her almost sympathetically. “He didn’t say goodbye,” Mel mutters, a little dumbstruck.
“You can hang with me, Melonius Monk,” Trinity invites. Mel isn’t thrilled with the nickname, but it’s still an offer— a step above being alone.
She spends all of Saturday with Trinity Santos writing peppy thinly-veiled allusions to lesbian sex. Trinity operates on her own time, pulling Mel along whether she’s had a moment to catch her breath or not, enthusiastic like Langdon but with edges far too sharp for Mel’s liking. Still, Mel suspects there’s a bid for connection and she would be remiss if she turned that down. Trinity changes writers quickly and without remorse but Mel always remains on her little team for reasons she can’t identify. Maybe it’s pity. She can’t imagine she’s more knowledgeable about sleeping with women than some of the other topliners and it takes her at least half of the day to find her footing with pop music. As much as she likes music like Trinity’s, the ability to write it hardly comes naturally to her.
She goes back to the hotel Saturday night thinking maybe there’s more artistry to pop music than Langdon had given it credit for before tossing her notebook onto a desk and leaving it untouched. Sunday brings no change. As much as she looks to every opening door for Langdon, Mel doesn’t see him again. No one even talks about him. It’s as if he had been a figment of her imagination entirely, a conjuration meant to reassure her she had any business being in a place like this, chasing that old dream one last time.
Mel’s first winter in Chicago, Becca had begged to go see a new Christmas romcom at the movie theater down the street. Mel had been overwhelmed with work and failed to vet the film, which ended up being about a girl who hallucinated and fell in love with the man whose heart she received in a transplant surgery, a trick of her own mind. Sitting in the airport Monday afternoon, she can’t help but wonder if Langdon’s presence at the camp was something similar; something fabricated, meant to hold her over through her first day. Even though Trinity insisted Mel would probably end up with writing credits on at least a third of her next album, Mel boards the plane feeling like a chapter of her life is being firmly closed.
—
She goes back to Kansas City. After work, she picks Becca up from the center and tries her hardest to mask the clawing feeling of disappointment that’s taken hold in her. “What was it like?” Becca asks. “Did you work with famous people?”
“It was alright,” Mel says. “But I can’t tell you who I worked with.”
“They were totally famous.”
“If they pick up any of the songs I worked on, I’ll be able to tell you.”
“Do you think they will?”
She suspects her tracks with Langdon will go in a vault for the rest of time or, worse, be traded away to some other artist Mel has never met. The ones she wrote with Trinity, she can’t bring herself to feel that attached to.
“I don’t know. I think I’m done with songwriting.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Maybe I’ll be able to get an editing job here or go back to publishing sometime. I don’t think it’s in the cards for me.”
“Mom would be disappointed.” Becca states it in such a matter-of-fact way that Mel knows she didn’t mean any harm and she can’t be angry at her for it, but it doesn’t dull the sting. Mel turns on the radio just loud enough to make out a bass line, giving herself something to tap along to as they drive. She hardly notices where one song ends and another begins until Becca stops chewing her cuticles and sits upright in her seat. “Did you hear he went to rehab?” she asks.
“Who?” Mel asks.
“Ugh, never mind,” she groans. Becca has a proclivity for celebrity gossip that Mel has never shared, so Mel belatedly assumes she means the artist behind the barely-audible song. When her sister reaches for the dial to turn the volume up, her way of cutting off the conversation, the newly-audible voice is like a punch to the gut.
The pieces fall into place as Frank Langdon sings on the radio. “That’s sad,” Mel rasps, turning the dial back down and trying to ignore the rising bile in her throat. “Hopefully he’s getting the help he needs.”
“Yeah,” Becca agrees. “Rehab helped Dad.”
“Yeah,” Mel echoes, feeling a little hollow as they pull onto the highway toward home. “How was your cooking class?”
Becca takes the redirection eagerly. “It was so much fun. But I’m not good enough yet that we should stop getting pizza on Fridays.”
“Don’t worry,” Mel says, forcing a laugh. “Pizza is a tradition.”
In September, all her days all return to passing in a matter of tradition and stringent routines. She gets home from work, cooks dinner or picks it up somewhere on the way home, watches a movie with Becca, cleans the apartment, stares unproductively at her laptop or her journal until she gives up and drags herself into the shower, gets ready for bed, and sleeps fitfully. Then, with aching eyes and dragging feet, she makes breakfast, gets Becca and herself ready for the day, drives her to the center, drives herself to work, and tries to come up with something worth printing on the inside of the sort of sappy, too-cliche-to-be-romantic cards she’s never received.
All that’s changed are the nights, many of which Mel spends lying awake wondering about Frank Langdon. Was he high the day they met? Was that why he praised her work and why he was kind to her? If she listened to what they wrote together now, would it sound like the ramblings of an addict’s mania and an out-of-place fool euphoric from his attention? She learns he has a problem with opioids and most of the surface-level gossip insists he injured himself years ago and has likely had a problem ever since. Mel refuses to dig any deeper than that.
In the middle of the month, she gets an email from Pitt Records informing her that she will be credited on and compensated accordingly for three songs on Trinity Santos’s next album, scheduled for a release before the end of October. There’s no mention of her work with Frank Langdon.
In late October, true to the email, Trinity’s album drops. When one of the new songs comes on the radio on their way home from the center, Mel can’t bring herself to even tell Becca she came up with the chorus. She had thought hearing her own music on the radio would be one of the most rewarding experiences of her life. Her mother told her it would be. Instead, she finds it so grating that they only listen to Mel’s carefully-controlled playlists after the day of the album drop.
In November, a slew of articles find their way to her during her lunch break:
Frank Langdon Cancels All Remaining 2025 Appearances: What we Know About the Singer’s On-Going Battle With Addiction
Frank Langdon Re-Enters Rehab For Benzodiazepine Abuse
Exclusive | Frank Langdon returns to rehab on the heels of opioid abuse scandal
Frank Langdon’s Former Bandmates Speak Out About the Singer’s Addiction: “He Has Our Full Support”
Is The Era of Drug-Addled Pop Stars Back? What Frank Langdon’s Troubled Sobriety Journey Could Mean for the Music Landscape
Mel, helpless, keeps on living by routine.