Page 24 of With Stars in Her Eyes

No matter what my parents or my old agents said or that reviewer wrote, I always felt things. I felt everything. I just felt things so deeply that my feelings were an inconvenience to everyone around me.

“You okay, Courtney? You spaced out a little bit. I’m sorry if my question was too personal.”

I shook my head, partially to say no, but partially to rid my brain of the memories.

“I’m fine. All this reminds me that the first time I told Sam this story, she asked why I described my childhood like an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music, which I didn’t understand at the time because I had never seen it, obviously.

Not a channel I was ever allowed to watch.

So, I think your suggestion to tell it like a story in a book was a good one.

I shudder to think what a therapist would say about that.

” My eyes followed the ink lines along Thea’s arms. She had a tarot card tattoo on her forearm.

The Star . A shadowed silhouette of a woman with a night sky behind her.

I sucked the salt off the biggest of my chips before swallowing it.

“Maybe making it into a story makes it easier to work through it? I feel like all this reading has been therapeutic for me.” Thea flicked the cover of a mass-market paperback perched on the arm of the futon.

“Ohh… if it weren’t for books I probably would have stayed a much more sheltered person.”

“Really?”

“Not sure how embarrassing it is to reveal that I mostly learned about sex from the collection of romance books Sam brought to college.”

“Wow. I’m sure that was quite an education.” Thea laughed and patted my thigh. We both froze. The gesture was friendly and comforting, but as her touch lingered there… it felt like so much more. Thea held my gaze a fraction of a second longer than necessary.

An alarm went off on my phone, interrupting the moment and signaling that it was time for me to get back to the bookstore.

I cleaned up the trash from our lunch and headed out of the space and down the stairs with what I’d said to Thea still playing in my head.

I had grown up with some major identity issues.

No wonder I had bought Jeremiah’s bullshit when I met him.

I was fifteen when I got invited to be a guest performer on his band’s summer farewell tour around the Christian youth camp circuit. It was the first time I had been away from my parents’ control for more than a few days. I felt free.

He had long, flowing hair that I loved touching—yes, this should have been a sign of the lady gay things to come.

He made me laugh with off-color, risqué flirting that, in retrospect, was highly inappropriate given our age gap.

But I felt a million years old, and I was so damn sick of performing the stupid routines and tired childish dialogue as Dove.

We still had to be “clean,” but there was an edginess around playing with a group of guys with piercings who dropped the occasional h-word or d-word.

And Jeremiah called me Courtney when no one had for years.

I thought maybe someone “mature” like Jeremiah could understand the jagged version of me beneath the charade.

The memories flooded upward from my gut, a rush of hurricane storm surged against a levee in my throat.

I had been so desperate for someone to see me back then that I had given even more of myself away. It was ironic that after I left him, all I wanted was to disappear and never be seen again by anyone.

Of course he reappeared in my life at the worst possible moment.

Of course, the biggest mistake of my life was going to make it impossible for me to do what I loved again even if I figured out how to get back up onstage again.

A familiar panic built in my chest. I leaned against the brick wall around the corner from the bookstore door, pressing my shoulder blades into the rough surface in an effort to control my breathing.

As I scanned to see if anyone was watching me randomly lose it, a man walked out of the shadows near the pub.

I gasped and then relaxed, giving myself a mental shake.

I was so on edge thinking about Jeremiah, I had nearly screamed.

But of course, the man walking across the green space in front of the pub wasn’t my ex-husband.

It was just Marshall. My overactive imagination had pulled me back into the shock of seeing Jeremiah’s face in the crowd at the Troubadour.

I was stupid not to guess why he had come to my show that night. I was stupid not to expect the humiliation he had planned for me.

I grabbed my phone and typed in a message to Abbott about the case laws about blackmail and defamation before deleting it without sending.

If I stirred things up again, innocent people would get hurt.

Demetrius had believed in my music and career more than anyone, and I refused to put his reputation at risk because of ghosts from my past.

I needed to figure out if I could perform again, before I decided whether fighting for my career was worth it.

That evening, I sat behind my keyboard. It was the instrument that felt right tonight.

My fingers played through a few chords while I thought of Thea and how the world felt more magical when she was near me.

I needed some magic if I was going to try.

I opened a notebook with Thea’s question playing in my head.

What would I tell my childhood self if I could?

I ran my fingers over the keys until I found a melody that sounded right. I scribbled out words as they came to me. Plunked out notes. When I looked at the clock, it was three a.m.

The pages in front of me were full. I had written my first song in over a year.

The most surprising thing was that it wasn’t a sad song. It was a whimsical story about a silly little bird who kept looking for a magic spell that would let her fly because she didn’t realize she already had wings.