Chapter 2: Carmen's manicured finger taps the library table between them—*'You don't realize what you have'*—and Briv feels the trap in her words as she leans in, her perfume bitter as coffee grounds, whispering *'Let me make you unforgettable'* with the precision of a scalpel.
The library study room hummed with a quiet so profound it had its own texture—a dense blanket of concentration punctuated by the occasional cough, the scratch of a pen, and the mechanical sigh of the heating vents. Briv had been staring at the same paragraph on sociological theory for twenty minutes. The words blurred into a gray mess. All he could see was Tuesday, and the looming, shapeless form of an audience that knew him.
A shadow fell across his textbook. He looked up.
Carmen stood there, a stack of fashion magazines tucked under her arm incongruous with the heavy academic tomes surrounding them. She smiled, not with warmth, but with precision. “Hiding?”
“Studying,” he said, though it was a weak defense.
“Mm. You look like you’re trying to translate ancient runes.” She pulled out the chair opposite him without asking, the legs scraping loudly on the linoleum. A few students glared. She ignored them, placing her magazines neatly on the table. “We need to talk about Tuesday.”
Briv’s stomach tightened. “What about it?”
She leaned forward, resting her chin on her interlaced fingers. The fluorescent light glinted off her pale skin, making her look like a marble sculpture in the sterile room. “I’ve been to the Garnet Vault four times. Not just last week. Four.”
The air left his lungs. Four times. She had been a ghost in the back of the room, observing, while he poured out his nervous, hopeful songs. He felt exposed, x-rayed.
“Why?” The word was a whisper.
“Because,” she said, her voice low and even, “it’s fascinating. You walk in like you’re apologizing for taking up space. You set up with your head down. You mumble to Mario. Then you start to play.” Her eyes locked onto his. “And you transform. Your shoulders go back. You look at the wall behind the crowd, but you’re seeing something else entirely. The hesitation vanishes. The voice that comes out isn’t the one you use to ask for extra ketchup in the canteen. It’s lower. It has… grain. Texture. You’re different on stage.”
He couldn’t look away. Her analysis was clinical, dispassionate, and more unnervingly accurate than any compliment. She wasn’t praising him; she was dissecting him.
“It’s just… getting into the song,” he managed.
“It’s a product,” she corrected gently. “A good one. A raw one. But it’s unpackaged. Unmarketed.” She opened the top magazine, flipping past glossy ads for perfume and handbags. “Look at this. This isn’t just a watch. It’s a story about success, about heritage you can buy. Your music is the watch. Right now, it’s in a plain glass case. I’m talking about giving it the story.”
A cold trickle of apprehension traced his spine. “What are you saying, Carmen?”
She closed the magazine. “I’m saying I can be your manager. Not a real one, not yet. But I can build this. I have ideas.” Her gaze was intense, almost hungry. “The clothes, for starters. You dress like you’re in witness protection. We can fix that. The hair. The posture when you’re not singing. Your online presence is non-existent. We can create a narrative. The shy student with the storm inside. It’s perfect.”
Briv felt the walls of the study room closing in. This was the invasion he’d feared, but it wasn’t crude or mocking like Radu. It was sophisticated, strategic. She wanted to curate him. “It’s not a character. It’s just me.”
“Exactly!” She smiled, a flash of triumph. “It is you. I’m just proposing we highlight the compelling parts and soften the… less compelling ones. You have something, Briv. But talent isn’t enough. You need strategy. You need an image people can latch onto before they even hear a note. I can give you that.”
He thought of Cami’s words in the rain. The packaging is all shy student. Carmen wanted to redesign the packaging. The idea was flattering. It was also terrifying. It felt like handing over the keys to his own identity.
“Why would you do this?” he asked.
She sat back, her expression shifting into something more opaque. “I’m bored. University is a checklist. This is interesting. And I’m good at it. I know what people want, even when they don’t know themselves.” She paused, her finger tracing the edge of the magazine. “Plus, when you’re big, I’ll have been the one who saw it first. That’s a different kind of capital.”
There it was. Not quite a gold-digger, but a social-climber, an experience-collector. She was investing in him like a stock.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking down at his textbook again. The words were still gibberish. “The music should be enough.”
“For you, maybe. Not for the world. The world is noisy. You need a megaphone. I can build you one.” She stood up, gathering her magazines. “You don’t have to decide now. Play on Tuesday. Let them all come—Radu, Silviu, Nicola, Cami. See what it feels like with an audience of people who know you. Then think about whether you want to do it alone, or with someone who can actually help you navigate it.”
She turned to leave, then glanced back. “And for the record? The song about the metro platform? The one with the line about the sparrow and the hawk? That’s the single. It’s already stuck in my head.”
She walked away, her heels tapping a quiet, deliberate rhythm that faded into the library’s silence.
Briv didn’t move. The quiet of the room was now oppressive, ringing with her proposition. He looked at his hands, ordinary hands that made what she called a “product.” He thought of Cami’s unprompted defense in the metro, her natural, unfiltered belief. That felt like shelter. This felt like a launchpad.
Both were offers of help. One felt like a conversation. The other felt like a business plan.
He packed his bag slowly, the sociological theory abandoned. As he pushed through the heavy library doors into the bright, noisy hallway, the echo of Carmen’s words morphed into a relentless, tempting question.
What if she was right?
-----
The question buzzed in his skull like a trapped fly as he walked, his sneakers squeaking on the polished hallway floor. Students flowed around him, a blur of backpacks and murmured conversations about parties and deadlines he couldn’t latch onto. His own thoughts were too loud.
He pushed through the university's main doors and the city’s damp breath hit him. The afternoon had dissolved into a gloomy, drizzling twilight, the kind that seeped into your bones. He pulled his thin jacket tighter, the one Carmen would undoubtedly condemn.
His feet carried him on autopilot toward the metro, following the same route he often walked with Cami. The memory of her tugging his sleeve, her laughter cutting through the rain, was a concrete thing. It felt more real than Carmen’s boardroom pitch in the silent library.
The platform was less crowded this time, just a handful of people silhouetted against the damp tiles. And there she was, leaning against a pillar, headphones on, sketching in a small notebook. Cami. Her short hair was darkened by the mist, a few strands sticking to her forehead. She was entirely in her own world, one of lines and shadows.
He hesitated, the impulse to walk up warring with a sudden nervousness. Carmen’s voice intruded: ‘The shy student with the storm inside.’ Was that just packaging? He felt like a cliché standing there, watching her.
He must have moved, or she sensed a presence, because she looked up. Her pencil stilled. She pulled one headphone down, letting it rest around her neck where a faint, old ink line of a tattoo peeked from her collar. “Hey. Running late too?”
“Yeah. Got stuck in my head in the library.” He moved to stand beside her, not too close. The rumble of an approaching train vibrated up through the soles of his shoes. “What are you drawing?”
She snapped the notebook shut a little too quickly. “Nothing. Just stupid stuff.” A faint pink touched her cheeks. “So. Tuesday.”
“Yeah.” The word was a sigh. “The whole crew’s apparently coming. Radu’s probably going to shout requests for folk songs.”
Cami smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She looked down the dark tunnel. “I heard Carmen talking to Nicola about it. She was using words like ‘brand cohesion.’ It was weird.”
A cold knot formed in his stomach. “She cornered me today. In the library.”
Cami’s gaze snapped back to him, sharper now. “And?”
“And she offered to be my manager. Told me my clothes are wrong. My hair is wrong. That she can build a ‘narrative.’” He heard the bitterness edging his voice and tried to soften it. “She said the metro song should be the single.”
For a long moment, Cami was silent. The distant train lights appeared in the tunnel, painting the rails in twin ribbons of white. “Do you want a manager?”
“I don’t know. I just want to sing.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “But what if she’s not entirely wrong? What if I need the… the megaphone?”
Cami turned to face him fully, her brown eyes searching his face. “A megaphone distorts your voice. It makes it louder, but it changes it.” She tapped her chest. “The thing that got me in the rain that day? That was quiet. It was just you. No amplifier.”
The train roared into the station, a wall of noise and wind that whipped their hair and clothes. The doors slid open with a hydraulic sigh. They stepped into the half-empty car, the familiar, stale warm air enveloping them.
They found seats side-by-side as the train lurched forward. The reflection of their faces ghosted over the black window, superimposed on the rushing tunnel walls. “What would you do?” he asked, his voice barely above the rattle of the tracks.
She watched their reflections. “I’m not you. But I think… you start by trusting the thing that’s real. If you start building from Carmen’s blueprint, it’s her building. Not yours.” She glanced at him. “The song about the sparrow and the hawk. Which one are you in that?”
He hadn’t thought of it that way. He’d just written about the feeling of being small and watched in a big, cold city. “I don’t know. Both, maybe.”
“There you go.” She nudged his shoulder with hers, a quick, casual contact that sent a jolt through him. “That’s more interesting than any ‘shy student’ brand. You’re both. So be both.”
The simplicity of it, coming from her, felt like a key turning. The noise of Carmen’s proposition dimmed. Here, in the grumbling, graffiti-scarred belly of the city, it was just the two of them and a conversation that felt like unmasking.
“Can I… would you want to hear it? The whole thing, I mean. Before Tuesday.” The question was out before he could stop it, raw and terribly vulnerable.
Cami went very still. She looked at their reflections again, then down at her hands, smudged with graphite. A slow, real smile finally broke through. “Yeah,” she said, quietly. “I really would.”
He nodded, a wave of nervous exhilaration washing over him. The train sped on, carrying them toward their stop, toward the promise of his unfiltered voice in her quiet room. It felt, terrifyingly, like the beginning of something he actually owned.