But the moment passed, leaving me exhausted, and hungover with shame. I didn’t hate my father. I loved him and he loved me.
He had begun sobbing convulsively, like he’d heard my horrible thoughts. I knew if I didn’t calm him down, it would only get worse. So I told him what I’d already learned people wanted to hear: “It’s all good.”
“But you lost your eye,” he said.
“It couldn’t be saved,” the doctors had told me. So I saved the only thing I still could. Or I tried to.
“Maybe I had to lose the eye to gain sight,” I told him.
The look on his face, it was so hopeful it was painful. “Really? You really think so?”
I didn’t think so. I didn’t believe half of what my dad said anymore, but I couldn’t write him off completely. Because he was occasionally right. And because he was Dad. And we were a fellowship of two.
“Really,” I told him.
THE ORDER OF LOSS
PART V
FREYA
The first video really was an accident. People didn’t believe that. They thought it was part of the concocted narrative, but it was the one detail of all of this that Hayden didn’t invent. It just happened.
Sabrina had been right. Two years later, our father was still gone. The promises to come back, to have us visit him, turned out to be made of smoke. The weekly Skype calls had begun to dwindle, and on the phone he was vague about his life. He no longer asked if I wanted to visit. He no longer asked me if I sang.
But I did still sing—only with Sabrina now. Every day. After school, Sabrina made the snacks—grilled cheese sandwiches with sliced tomatoes—and helped me with my homework. She was a far better student than me, straight As across the board. When homework was finished, we listened to music together, picking apart songs we loved, seeing if we could sing them better.
Sometimes we went online, watched videos on YouTube. Other times, we went on Facebook, trying to get a glimpse of our father. Back when he lived here it had been his professional page, with videos of him playing gigs or offering music lessons after Mom had come up with the idea that he should teach to earn some money. These days the posts showed him at church, at family meals, smiling broadly, arms around aunts and uncles and cousins we’d never met. Did he miss us? I couldn’t tell. The status updates were usually in Amharic.
That day, we were scrolling through Facebook when we came upon a picture of a woman holding a baby bundled in a green blanket. The caption read: በመጨረሻ ወንድ ልጅ አለን.
“Let’s look it up,” Sabrina said, and we pasted the words into a translation program. I thought it would say something about a new nephew, a new cousin for me, but the translator spat out: Finally, we have a son. And suddenly I understood why the phone calls had dwindled.
I began to cry, something I did often, which irritated Sabrina, who never cried. But this time, she patted me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Her pity made me cry harder. She looked at the screen. “Solomon doesn’t deserve your tears.” Solomon, not Dad. “I mean, how could he forget you like this?”
You. As if it only affected me.
“You know what you should do? You should post a song or something. Show him how amazing you are. What he’s lost.”
Sing what you can’t say, my father had said. That was what Billie and Nina and Josephine and Gigi did.
“Okay.”
“Let’s clean you up first.”
Sabrina mopped my face with a washcloth and carefully did my makeup. “Do you know what you want to sing?” she asked.
Yes. I wanted to sing “Tschay Hailu,” the lullaby my father had sung to me and that he would now be singing to his new son. I fetched an empty trash can for accompaniment, and Sabrina hit RECORD.
My intention had been to send a greeting to my new brother, a reminder to my father, but when I started singing, something else came out, something primal and aching and pure. I kept singing, drumming even harder, and my voice went places it had never been before.
When it was over, I felt better, just like the night when Sabrina first sang with me. I didn’t even want to post it. Singing the song was enough.
“Oh, we’re definitely posting it.” Sabrina uploaded the video onto her Facebook page.
“Huh,” Sabrina said the next day when we checked on the post. She’d tagged our father, so the video had shown on his page, but he must’ve untagged himself, because it was no longer there.
But on her own page, we saw that the video had been shared sixty-seven times. It had garnered more than a hundred comments, some from Sabrina’s friends but others from people I didn’t know. I was devastated that my father had untagged himself. Why would he do that? Was he embarrassed about us? Ashamed that he’d left us? Did he not like the video?
The only thing that eased my pain was all the comments. Later, when Mom came home and Sabrina was helping her with dinner, I read them all. Twice over. They were so nice. And they filled the hole my father’s silence had left.
I took a copy of the video and edited it down and posted it on Twitter.
By the next day, the video had hundreds of shares, thousands of likes, and so many more comments. I read them all. And read them again. They made me feel so good.
I showed Sabrina. “Why’d you post it again?” she asked. “Solomon probably doesn’t have Twitter, and he already saw it on Facebook.”
“Look at how many people shared it, though.”
Sabrina looked. She seemed unimpressed.
“Maybe we should show Mom?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll love that you sent our father a song.”
“But it’s weird that it got so many shares.” I tried to sound casual. “It kind of went viral. We should tell her before she finds out from someone else.”
Sabrina sighed. “Fine. I’ll show her.”
* * *
— — —
“Huh,” Mom said. “I’ve been reading about how the internet is creating a new kind of star. There’s potential for actual money.”
“How?” Sabrina asked.
“I’m not sure,” our mother said. “Let’s post another one. Why don’t you do it together this time? You girls sing so beautifully. What do you think, Sabrina?”
Even back then, there must have been a small acorn in my heart. Because I felt it, nubby and shriveled and shouting, What about me? when Mom said that. I was the one born singing. I was the one who’d gotten all those likes from my video. But no one asked me.
“Okay,” Sabrina said. “Why not?”
* * *
— — —
The first few videos were duds. But Mom, under the thrall of The Path, was convinced if she dreamed it hard enough, it would happen. She began reading up on what made successful videos. She determined that we needed a hook, a look, and a sound.
The sound was mostly dictated by covers. We hadn’t started writing our own material yet. The look was my doing: I wanted us to look like Billie and Josephine and Gigi. And the hook was that we were sisters who looked nothing like sisters.
“What should we call you?” Mom asked. “The Kebede Sisters?”
Sabrina wrinkled her nose. “The Sisters Kebede,” she tried. She shook her head. “Sounds weird.” She paused, tapping her fingers against her chin. “What about the Sisters K?”
“The Sisters K,” Mom said. “I like that.”
* * *
— — —
By the time we were summoned to Hayden Booth’s offices four years later, the Sisters K had a YouTube channel (220,000 subscribers), an Instagram feed (780,000 followers), a Twitter account (375,000 followers), an official Facebook page and several fan pages, and a SoundCloud channel with more than twenty original songs.
We also had a manager: Mom. She watched other people’s successful v
ideos obsessively, trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. She mapped out weekly schedules, analyzed web traffic to determine when we should post. She stayed up late into the night, monitoring the comments and shares. When our videos earned the first bit of advertising money, she used it to hire a consultant to help us hone our look and leverage—or, as she said, “monetize”—our growing popularity.
“It’s interesting,” the publicist said, going through some of the comments. “They seem personally invested in Freya.”
“Probably because she responds to all of their comments,” Sabrina said dismissively. “Every. Single. One.”
I blushed and looked down, embarrassed and ashamed. Because Sabrina was right. I did read every comment and I responded, in the early days, to nearly all of them. It was the only thing that made me feel like I was part of this.
Though we called ourselves the Sisters K, it was really the Mom and Sabrina show. Sabrina and I might have sung together, and we sometimes wrote songs together, but she and Mom discussed every aspect of the business, and she went to Mom with every new song we wrote. They conspired. They plotted. And our family went back to being a three-legged chair.
The comments, however, were all mine. When I started replying to fans, they began addressing me directly. While Mom and Sabrina sat in front of one computer, analyzing engagements, talking about me, I could quietly open my phone and really engage, knowing someone would be there for me.
“Actually,” the publicist told us, “that’s a really smart strategy. It makes the fans feel like they’re a part of your success. Those kinds of superfans are the ones that’ll take you from a novelty act to the next level.”
“Wonderful!” Mom said. “Freya, keep doing what you’re doing. Sabrina and I will keep up on our end.”
* * *
— — —
We began to earn more advertising money from our videos. Mom went from full-time to part-time at her job as a hospital administrator. She read articles about the highest-paid internet celebrities. “Some of these people make millions!” She was convinced we could make some good money from this. Enough to get out of debt, pay for college, and—who knew?—maybe even get a little rich.
But Hayden Booth. Not even Mom, deep in the throes of dream it, be it, imagined Hayden Booth would come knocking.
When his office called to request a meeting, Mom was shaken. Almost scared. Like she’d been summoned by God.
When you read articles about Hayden Booth—which Mom did, obsessively, after he called—he was sometimes described as a music producer, other times a talent manager, other times a social media aggregator. “There wasn’t a word for what I did before I came along,” he bragged in one of those articles. “I just call myself a creator.”
His origin story had become a thing of myth. Ten years ago he’d been a scrappy club kid from London, broke and backpacking through Berlin, when he saw this girl busking on the U-Bahn. He’d listened to her sing and play guitar and seen her entire trajectory right away. It was like a vision. He didn’t know how, but he knew she could be huge, and he could be the one to get her there. When she finished singing, he approached her, not even knowing if she spoke English, and said, “I’m going to make you famous.”
And he did.
He told us a version of that story at our first meeting, when, after having us wait for two hours in the reception area, he finally invited us into his office and sat us down on a bench that felt like concrete while he sat in his throne, backlit by the bank of windows behind him.
When he finished telling us how he’d made Lulia, and then Mélange, then Rufus Q, he said he was always on the hunt for who was next. He looked at me, eyes open and unblinking. It was terrifying. I cast my gaze around his office, in search of a safe haven, looking out the window, at the wall, at his weird graffiti art print that read: Art is personal. Business is not—anywhere but at Hayden.
Finally he asked: “Do you know what it means to be famous?”
Mom started to answer, but Hayden held up his hand and she went quiet. “From them.”
There was a pause. Sabrina looked at me, her face uncharacteristically uncertain. “To be known for what you do?” Sabrina said at the same time I said, “To be loved.”
“My CPA is known for having creative ways of hiding money from the IRS. Is he famous?” he asked Sabrina.
Sabrina shook her head.
“And my granny was beloved. But I bet you’ve never heard of Pauline Howarth, have you?” he asked my mother.
She shook her head.
“Most people don’t know what fame is. They confuse fame with celebrity, celebrity with buzz. But I’m going to tell you how it works.” He said this like he was divulging a secret.
He stood up and stalked around the desk, leaning on the edge of it closest to Sabrina. “First, you’ve got buzz.” He cupped his left hand into the shape of a C. “You girls already have that. But buzz is cheap. It’s your fifteen minutes of fame. It’s what a daft woman in a Chewbacca suit gets. It comes and it goes. Unless . . .” Here he cupped his other hand into a C. “Buzz sustains enough to become celebrity. Which lasts a bit longer, but it’s still built on quicksand. Now, if celebrity can be translated into commodity, you’re onto something. You can dine out on that. Sports stars. B-list actors. Reality TV stars. Second-rate musicians get this far, an endless loop of buzz, celebrity, commodity.”
Here he joined his two hands together so they made a circle, the fingers not quite touching. “You can ride that train pretty far, make a living that way, but it’s still not fame.” He paused. His fingers began to flutter, like wings of a bird wanting to take flight. “Mum here has done a bang-up job getting you girls this far. You two might even make some good money for a while, get some decent endorsements and revenue, but I promise you this: it won’t last more than a few months or, if you’re really lucky, years. But sooner or later—probably sooner—people will be on to the next shiny thing, and it won’t be you. When that happens, your fans will forget you. Your numbers will drop. And you’ll go back to being like everyone else.”
“So how do we keep that from happening?” Mom asked.
“That brings us to fame,” Hayden said, ignoring her. “Sometimes, if you’re talented, if you have that something extra, and if you’re surrounded by the right people, you stand a shot at breaking out of that loop. Out of celebrity, which is ephemeral . . .” Here he exploded his hands wide open, his bird fingers soaring to the heavens. “And into fame, which is eternal.”
Hayden’s phone began to ring, rattling on the desk. The screen flashed Lulia, as if the universe wanted to confirm what Hayden had said.
“Fame,” Hayden continued. “That’s what I do. I create fame. But only under the right circumstances, with the right artists. Those who are talented enough. And hungry enough.” Here he stopped to look at me. “The question is: Are you hungry enough?”
I had no idea if I was hungry enough, what that even meant, what he was promising. But I had understood one thing. Your numbers will drop. Your fans will forget you. I knew what that meant.
“Are you hungry enough?” Hayden repeated.
Mom and Sabrina spoke as one, answering, as they always did, for me. “We are,” they said.
THE ORDER OF LOSS
PART VI
HARUN
I found James because of a dollar bill and lost him because of a fifty. Which is oversimplifying, but how else do you explain something as inexplicable as love?
“Yo. You drop this?” I looked up. There was James, holding up a crumpled dollar bill.
“I don’t think so,” I stammered. It was my first week at the community college, and though the campus was small and in the city where I’d spent all my life, I was lost. Clutching my schedule and map, I was trying to find the building my statistics class would be held in.
I looked up from my printed schedule an
d saw his face for the first time. Everything about him seemed to suggest warmth: the glow of his dark skin, the goatee that made him look like he wore a permanent smile, the brown eyes, twinkling, like he was in on the best joke.
“Where you need to be?” he asked me.
And I had the strangest thought: Right here is where I need to be.
James grabbed the schedule. “You’re at Newkirk. You need building G, on the other side of Bergen. Lemme show you,” he said, and took me by my elbow, which subsequently caught fire.
I paid no attention in statistics that day. I just rubbed my still-tingling elbow and thought of the boy with the laughing eyes whose name I did not even catch and whom I would likely never see again. So when I came out of the building and saw him leaning against the bike racks, my first thought was that it was a miracle. Then I remembered it couldn’t possibly be that. But when he asked me if I wanted to grab a coffee, it did seem like some sort of divine intervention.
We talked for two hours straight, pausing only to breathe. James told me he was in his second year of school, studying food management in hopes of becoming a chef. He watched cooking shows obsessively, and could take any five ingredients and turn them into something delicious. He was an only child, raised by his mom, until one weekend she dropped him off with his father and never came back. He’d recently moved out of his father’s house, and was now crashing with a cousin in the Heights while he figured things out.
I told James that I was studying business and accounting in hopes of one day taking over—or, if Ammi had anything to say about it, expanding—my parents’ auto supply business. I told him how Abu had gotten a green card from the lottery when he was nineteen, arriving at JFK with one suitcase. For ten years, he worked three jobs, sometimes twenty-hour days, sending money home each month and saving what he could until he had enough to buy a business. Only then did he go back home to find a wife.