Metaworld HopeCore

“—she is sixteen years old, she has a Grammy, which is one more than I have. Please welcome Euphemia Fontaine!”

The band took her out on eight bars of brassy jazz she did not recognise but could move to, because her [Clockwork Pulse] had it by the second bar, even as eleven hundred people made enough noise to fill an airport. Eppie came out of the dark into fourteen hundred watts in a white collar and kitten heels, unhurried as a house cat, closing the distance with her [Empty Space].

Kimball came round the desk to meet her. He was smaller than he looked on television, a few inches taller than Eppie, and that was with lifts, and he shook her hand with both of his, and they made outrageous faces at each other like old chums.

Bill Conway got up off the couch, which took a while, because a Bill Conway getting up off anything was a two-part operation.

“Oh, no,” said Kimball as the comedian dwarfed them both. “No, this is bad. This is—Bill, sit down. Sit down.”

“I’m being polite,” Bill said, his shaggy, mouse-brown hair going everywhere at once.

“You’re being enormous.” Kimball stepped back and framed the three of them with his hands, delighted, already working the laugh. “Look at this. Look at what booking’s done. This is a hostage situation. We have a man who is six foot four, we have me, and we have—how tall are you, darling?”

“Five-one,” Eppie answered shyly. The audience went awwwww.

“Five—one—” Kimball put his hands over his face. “We’re going to get letters from the FCC.”

“You should have booked a medium size one,” said Bill.

“We balance out.” Kimball stood between them. “The giant, the girl and the talk show host.”

“I am sixteen,” Eppie reminded him. “Do I look like a kid?”

“Sixteen! Of course, I apologise.” He returned behind his desk, his expression deadpan. “No drinking for five years, young lady! Can’t vote yet. Can sing, though. Granted, I might still ask to see your ID a decade from now…”

The crowd laughed again.

They did the gag for four minutes. Conway was quick, and Kimball played along like a pro. Every time she bantered back, Conway made it awkward, and Kimball played his consternation straight down the lens while she laughed, genuinely laughed—because they were both hilarious.

Finally, they sat, and the interview began.

Eppie sat with her ankles crossed and her hands on her thighs, her big blues blasting the audience with expert control of her [Facial Landscape].

Conway leaned forward on his elbows when the topic shifted to her songwriting. “Can I ask you a thing?”

“Anything for you.” Eppie acted as the smitten fan. After four minutes of flawless banter, her admiration was genuine.

“I’ma give it to you straight.” He turned to her, and his voice filled a Broadway house like Cooper’s. “You wrote ‘Better’.”

“I did.”

“My daughter is fourteen.” He said it flatly, to the audience. “That song has been played in my house four hundred times. I have opinions. STRONG opinions.”

The room chortled. Eppie laughed.

“What are those opinions?”

“Does the song really make things better?” said Conway. “My son clogs the toilet with wipes. He sings it to get out of trouble. My daughter clogs the drains with her hair. She tells me it’ll get better. I asked my plumber. He said it’s eighty an hour, plus eighty just to show up…”

The crowd roared.

“You know what I like about ‘Better’,” Kimball answered without missing a beat, tapping a card he was not reading. “It’s free. That’s insane to me. You wrote it—and now Lucia Lancet’s cut it, Kellie Noah’s cut it, there’s a version in Japanese—and you were what, fifteen? When did you write it?”

“Sixteen.”

“And you are the youngest person ever to win a Grammy for songwriting. For Umbrella.”

“Yes.”

“For songwriting,” Kimball said again, to the house. He struck his table for effect. “And you don’t see a dime.”

Eppie feigned a blush. “Lucia pays. Kellie pays. But it’s free if you’re not making money off it. That’s the promise.”

She winked at the audience, with her hands in her lap, her chin up and her face doing the kitty thing. The audience went awwwww.

Applause erupted. She half rose from the couch and gave them a bow, loosening a strand of strategic hair. Her choker caught the light, dazzling her viewers.

Kimball curved the conversation back into mutual flattery, then went to the part they had agreed on.

“Now—your people tell me you’re a reader.”

“I’m a massive nerd.”

“Are you… really?” Kimball scoffed. “Come on, with your face? With those talents?”

“I am a theatre kid,” said Eppie. “No, seriously. That’s my actual profession.”

Kimball stopped. “No!”

“YES!” Eppie answered. “I did the budget for Titus Andronicus back at LAPA. Costumes and props and set dressing and lighting and sound rental and crew wages and a contingency line. I organised the call sheets!” She counted them off. “I can run you the lines, right now. I am a literature nerd, through and through, loud and proud!”

“Bill. Bill, she’s not kidding; look at her face.”

“She really isn’t,” Conway agreed happily. “I know a nerd when I see one!”

So they teased her for a bit, Conway playing the jock and Kimball the lackey, and she was funny about it, then Kimball skilfully moved the conversation.

“Fine, tell me your favourite book,” Kimball said. “Not a play. Book. Who’s your favourite author? Is it Dusklight?”

“Moby-Dick.”

“Get out.” Kimball leaned back. “No!”

“It’s THE great American Novel! And everybody lies about having finished it.”

“I lied about having finished it.” Conway nodded. “Mrs Tuberman will be retroactively changing my grades from 1985 once this segment goes live. What’s it about again?”

The crowd roared.

She laughed behind her hand. “It’s about a whale that trolled a whaling captain so badly he made it his whole personality.”

Her nerding out got a bigger laugh than it had earned. It was cute, Eppie guessed, to see a tiny starlet in a Conti dress yammer about classic novels. Her segment was different, if nothing else.

“Which character’s your favourite?” Kimball asked. “Assume this is a test.”

Eppie let the laugh finish, looked at a point about four rows back, and said, a little sadly:

“Sometimes, I feel like it should be the whale.”

This time, only a part of the room laughed with her, and when they realised no one else was laughing, they stopped.

“…Is it…” Bill Conway went for broke. “Because you’re white?”

The crowd roared.

Eppie gave him a playful push, and Conway sold it like a man paid to fall, going off the couch and taking Kimball down with him.

“It’s because I am too young, and perhaps undeserving of the fame and attention,” Eppie said demurely, looking at the long lens with her chin dipped and her eyes fluttering. It was theatrical, excessive, but it was expected. No one expected a sixteen-year-old first-timer to play her part naturally. If she had been completely non-performative, that would have generated more questions than answers.

“An undeserving legend is a dangerous thing,” Eppie explained to Kimball, like he was her bestie from school. “It paints a target.” She turned her hand over in her lap. “I was a State Ward, so I needed a lot of help. I think the marketing’s gotten ahead of me. The real me.”

There was silence.

Then Bill said, “Jesus, you were a State Ward?”

“You’re an orphan?” Kimball took her hand. “I am very sorry.”

“I never had an address that wasn’t a school.” Eppie smiled sadly. “I am here today only because of very good, very kind people. People who did their best at their own expense, and never once looked at me and saw a payday.”

Bill Conway leaned over with both arms open. “May I?”

Eppie nodded.

The two hugged.

The crowd went awwwww.

When they separated, Eppie looked at the audience. “So, I’ve written a song for my bullies. For those people in the industry making light of the people who helped me when I was alone.”

She brightened as she spoke, the way a flower opens.

“For—” Kimball started. “Your bullies?”

“For my dear bullies, who have been baiting me for a while now, on the internet, and I’m not going to say who they are, because I honestly have no idea, or why they’re doing it. Clicks? Clout? Boredom?” She smoothed the front of the Conti. “So I’ve written them something to show them how my creative process works.”

“You wrote a song. For your bullies.”

“It’s a very nice song,” said Eppie. “It’s from my reading of Moby-Dick. It’s about bullies.”

Somebody on the balcony went, “Oh!”

“Now,” she said, holding up a finger. “I am going to nerd out again. I’m sorry, did you know, Bill, that bully has always meant two things?”

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“It has not!”

“It absolutely has. Shakespeare has a man call his friend bully Bottom, and it is affectionate. It means good lad. And in Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, Americans were already saying bully for you, which means well done. Teddy Roosevelt got his bully pulpit out of the same word.” She spread her hands. “The other meaning was right there the whole time. Same word. So when I sing my bully boys, I am not insulting anybody. They’re my excellent men. My darlings. My good brave boys.”

Kimball had begun, very slowly, to lean back. “So it’s a compliment?”

“You’re going to compliment your bullies?” asked Conway.

“My darlings,” Eppie insisted, winking at the audience. “Shall we hear it?”

“YES!” Bill punched the air. “Let’s hear it!”

“For the bullies!” Kimball clapped.

Eppie stood, all five-foot-one of her, mostly knee, then dress, then her flashing eyes.

“What’s it called?” Kimball was right on cue.

“‘O Blow, My Bully Boys, Blow’,” Eppie said to the camera, deadpan, completely serious.

And her audience stared.

And her host went over backwards.

For Eppie, it was a night of many firsts.

Her first late-night interview.

And her first Broadway stage.

They put a stool in the middle for her.

Eppie had asked for fewer lights, and what she got instead, when the stage came up, was water.

The lighting man had killed the skyline. The desk and the couch went into the dark and stayed there, and across the whole floor of that stage, from the apron back, something slow and rippling was moving: gobos on rotators, three or four of them, throwing a broken pattern that crawled and folded and never quite repeated. He had built her an ocean.

She didn’t just have an open mic. She was placed in open water.

And in the middle of it, on a stool that the light had made into a foam-washed rock, under a hard warm source, sat their golden-haired siren of the sea.

She sat down, and put the J-45 across her knee, and did not play it.

She turned it instead, rolled it over on her thigh so that the soundhole came round under the light, and for half a second she was looking down into the well of it.

The audience was understandably puzzled, because they could not see what she could see.

Exodus 31:3. Bezaleel. The man who built the Ark, whose cunning came from God.

Eppie afforded herself four exact beats, then put her palm flat on the wood.

And hit it.

Once, on the lower bout, where the spruce was thinnest and fifty-four years old. It came back as a low, woody thump that went out into the house and did not come back, and she did it again, and again, four to the bar, her [Clockwork Pulse] falling in with the beating of their hearts.

The shanty she had borrowed was a work song. The beat is what keeps the men rowing.

She let them have eight bars. Until their feet were tapping.

Then she sang.

There once was a ship that sailed the sea,

The name of the ship was the William of Tyre;

The winds blew high, the winds did blow,

O blow, my bully boys, blow!

She could feel her [Songstress] and her [Vocality] holding the house hostage. The former had the power of fascination; the latter cut through space and distance like it was not there.

She hit the guitar and went into the second verse and did not look up.

She had not sailed a week, a week,

Her bully boys and she,

When there she spied a great white whale—

O blow, my bully boys, blow!

The rhythm was too hypnotic to ignore. Hands moved of their own volition. Men and women out in the dark, Bill included, started marking the beat.

Come raise your hands, my bully boys,

And swear you’ll not flinch nor fear;

While there’s a spar to keep afloat,

O blow, my bully boys, blow!

And on the refrain, somewhere out in the dark, about forty people had a go.

O blow, my bully boys, blow!

She had not told them to. She had not needed to. That was the whole point of a shanty: they were a mighty crew now, on a ship of fools, sailing out into the wild unknown. They sang it wrong. They were half a beat behind, a third of them were on the wrong note, and one man near the front was singing bully in Texan. It did not matter in the slightest.

Eppie, the shantyman, kept her eyes down, hit the guitar, and gave them the chorus.

O blow, my bully boys, blow,

You’ll take my name where’er you go;

You’ll have the tale and not the hide—

O blow, my bully boys, blow.

That was the whole trick of the form.

Like gospel, it was call and answer. One voice puts a question out. Somebody else has to answer.

They were her bullies.

She was the whale, answering.