Page 82 of Six Ways to Write a Love Letter

“I don’t get why the fuck they signed us if they’re not at all interested in hearing us in our music,” Val said one night, after they finished playing a local radio show. They were on their way back to a hotel, where they’d overorder room service as the most pathetic form of revenge they could access.

Remy shrugged. “I don’t know. Once we find a second song though, we’ll probably be able to do more of our own stuff, since they’ll believe we can do it.”

“Yeah,” Val said, but it wasn’t clear if he believed Remy. It wasn’t even clear if he’d heard Remy, not really, as he was in the last throes of the day’s high which, combined with Val’s tendency to slide in and out of attention, meant he was more often zoned out than zoned in. “What was that thing we were working on today even about?” he asked after a few long minutes spent staring out the limo window.

“When we started, or when we finished?” Remy asked. Val made a face, so Remy went on, “I think they were still trying to make it about falling in love with a girl’s ass when we left. They were into it.”

“Waste of a fucking day.”

“It’ll be a good song for someone.”

“Someone else. Can’t believe I gave them that opening set for it. Were they still using that?” Val asked.

“I think so. I made the hook decent too. Or it was, before they put the wordassetsin it like fifty times.”

“Fuck all this, man,” Val said, exhaling. “I knew it’d be hard work, but I didn’t think it’d be like this. I figured hard work would mean something, not that we’d bust our asses—”

“You meanassets,” Remy joked, but Val breezed on without pausing.

“—to write every other artist at the label a decent song.”

They’d written sixteen songs that the label liked, and every one had been handed off to another artist. Remy and Val were paid for the work, but it was beginning to grate on Val, watching something he once loved get chewed and mashed and bastardized before seeing it handed off to a sleeker, more polished star.

It was beginning to appeal to Remy. Which he would never say, of course, but there was something freeing about helping to poke and prod at a song then walk away. When songwriting with just Val, Remy was always aware of his limitations—how unpoetic and boring he felt by comparison. But when he was just coloring in someone else’s lines? He could do that. He could do that, and cash the check, and use the money to prove to himself and Val that there was no need to worry about going back to Florida. They could do this, they could make it, and Remy was enough just the unpoetic and boring way he was.

“They’re going to drop us,” Val muttered under his breath as they arrived at the hotel. “We either keep writing for them, or they’re going to drop us.”

“That’s not true,” Remy said.

Which was the first time he really, truly lied to his brother. He couldn’t tell his brother what he knew to be true: that they’d given the music industry their whole hearts, and now they had no choice but to stay in the relationship, for their own safety. You couldn’t just walk away from someone who held your heart, after all, no matter how dangerous they were.

“Yeah. Maybe you’re right,” Val said, nodding. Trying.

Failing, but trying.