All Chapters of Love Me When I'm Nothing: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The tip jar had three dollars in it. Two of them were hers.Elena adjusted the microphone stand, her fingers stiff from eight hours of folding hotel laundry on Fifth. The stage at The Hollow wasn't really a stage. More like a corner someone had cleared by shoving two tables aside and throwing up a spotlight that buzzed like it was dying.Nine people in the audience. She'd counted."You're up, Cross." Tommy, the bartender, didn't look up from his phone. "Try to keep it under thirty minutes tonight. Karaoke starts at eleven.""Wouldn't want to get in the way of drunk guys murdering Bon Jovi."He almost smiled. Almost.She stepped into the light. The spotlight was too warm, too close, and sweat was already forming at her hairline before she'd even opened her mouth. Her feet were screaming inside her sneakers from the hotel shift. Her lower back had that feeling like someone had swapped her spine for a rusty hinge.Nine people. Three on their phones. Two making out in the corner booth. On

The hotel sheets smelled like bleach and other people's sleep.Elena had been folding since six because the morning shift paid fifty cents more an hour. Her fingers moved on autopilot, crease, fold, stack, crease, fold, stack, while her brain ran the math it had been running all night.Rent: $847 short. Due Friday.Diner shift: $67 after taxes if nobody stiffed her on tips.Tonight at The Hollow: Three dollars. Two of them hers.She was going to lose her apartment. The math didn't work. The math never worked. She just kept showing up and folding other people's sheets and pretending the numbers would rearrange themselves into something survivable.Her phone sat propped against a stack of pillowcases. Jasmine's name lighting up the screen every thirty seconds like a pulse.How was last night Did Tommy pay you yet He better pay you Elena ELENA I swear if you're ignoring meShe typed one-handed, folding with the other. Alive. Sang. Three dollars. New sound guy.Three dots appeared before

He stayed for an hour.Elena kept working. Refilled coffees. Cleared plates. Pretended her entire nervous system wasn't tracking Danny Miller's location in her peripheral vision like he was a threat she needed to monitor.Jasmine stayed too. Asking questions Elena wished she'd thought of. Where did he grow up. What kind of music did he listen to. Had he always been into sound engineering or was that new.Danny answered everything. Grew up on the East Coast. Listened to everything but had a weakness for old blues recordings, the kind where you could hear the room in the track. Fell in love with sound in college, took a detour into the family business, came back to what he actually cared about.All reasonable. All plausible. All delivered with that same calm patience that made Elena want to shake him until something real fell out.But then Jasmine asked about his family and something shifted."Parents still around?"Danny's hand paused on his coffee cup. Just for a second. A micro-hesit

The camera light was blinding.Elena stepped through the back door into the alley behind The Hollow, Jasmine right beside her, and immediately threw her hand up to block the glare. A woman stood next to a cameraman, microphone in hand, professional smile locked in place."Elena Cross?""Who's asking?""Miranda Chen, City Arts Weekly." The woman extended her hand. Elena didn't take it. "I'm doing a piece on undiscovered talent in local venues. Someone tipped us off about you."The words landed wrong. Tipped us off. Like Elena was a story instead of a person."Someone who?""Anonymous source. Said your voice was extraordinary and you deserved a wider audience." Miranda's smile didn't waver. "I listened to a recording. They weren't wrong."Jasmine stepped forward, positioning herself between Elena and the camera. "What recording? She doesn't have anything online.""Someone sent it to our tip line. Just a phone recording from one of your performances here." Miranda looked past Jasmine to

"Soon. Just that one word?" Jasmine held Elena's phone with two fingers, like it might bite her. "That's it. That's the whole message.""That's the whole message."Jasmine set it down on the kitchen counter. Stepped back from it. Looked at it the way you looked at something you didn't want to touch again.They were in her apartment, which was really one room pretending to be two. The kitchen was a corner. The bedroom was wherever the air mattress happened to be inflated. Jasmine's actual bed lived behind a curtain rod with a bedsheet hung over it, which was the most dignified thing either of them had agreed to pretend was a wall."So someone knows where you perform, has your number, and is counting down to something.""That's what I'm trying to figure out.""The tuition money. The reporter. Now this.""All connected. Probably."Jasmine pulled her hair into a knot on top of her head. She did that when she was thinking hard or panicking. Usually both at the same time."Who spends money