Chapter 438 | The Red Eye of the Soap Bar

Chapter 438: 438 | The Red Eye of the Soap Bar

Eight fifteen on a Wednesday, and Unit 403 didn’t feel like her apartment anymore.

Chloe stood in the middle of what used to be her bedroom and counted the acoustic panels. Eight of them, two rows of four, the top left one still tilted a degree off because Jordan had installed it while Kumiko was staring at his hip bone instead of the level. The foam ate the sound. Her own breathing came back to her flat and close, like the room had been wrapped in a blanket and set down somewhere underground.

Her mattress was gone. The bed frame was there, stripped down to the slats, a bare skeleton pushed against the wall because Kumiko said they might need it for a "cozy reading girlfriend" stream concept she’d sketched out on page seventeen of the planning document. The closet still held her actual clothes—jeans, hoodies, the stuff she wore to class—but they’d been pushed to one side to make room for the wardrobe. Wigs on foam heads. Ring lights. Extension cords coiled in grocery bags. The only thing left that still belonged to her, the only thing that felt like hers at all, was the stool.

"Okay, okay, okay." Kumiko spun in the desk chair, cat-ear headphones pushed down around her neck, one pink ribbon already surrendered to gravity. "So I’ve got OBS locked at six thousand bitrate which is honestly overkill for an unlisted test but I want the audio file to be clean when we pull it for the promo clip, and I set the mic gain to negative twelve because you got loud at karaoke, Chloe-chan, you got so loud, and if you clip I will personally throw myself into the ocean."

"Nobody’s throwing themselves into the ocean."

"I would do it respectfully." Kumiko tapped something on the laptop screen. Three windows open at once. Charts. Graphs. A color-coded timeline that looked like it belonged to a space shuttle launch. "Also I made a document. It’s called TEST STREAM PROTOCOL and it’s four pages but three of them are just me promising not to type in all caps."

"That’s a real problem you have."

"It is a documented problem I have." She scrolled down the document and the text kept going. Bullet points. Sub-bullet points. A footnote referencing an appendix. "Jordan proofread it. He said it was good."

"I said it was thorough," Jordan said from the doorframe.

"Good and thorough are synonyms in this context."

Jordan stood there with his arms folded and one shoulder against the jamb, doing the thing where he pretended to be relaxed. The henley she’d picked out Monday. Bare feet. Hair still wet from the shower, darker than usual, combed back and already starting to dry into that messy sweep he never seemed to try for but got anyway. He looked like he’d wandered in to borrow sugar.

Except his jaw was tight. That specific way, the sideways clench, the one Kumiko had labeled Stress Response Number Four and put on page six with a diagram.

He was scared for her.

That was worse than the camera.

"You can leave," Chloe said.

"No."

"I’m serious. If you’re going to stand there radiating anxiety at me I’d rather do this alone."

"I’m not radiating anything."

"Your jaw is doing the thing."

Jordan’s hand went halfway to his own face before he caught himself and dropped it. "That’s not fair. You two built a whole file."

"Page six," said Kumiko helpfully. "There’s a drawing."

Chloe sat down on the stool. The seat was too high and her feet didn’t reach the floor, so she hooked one heel on the crossbar and let the other hang. Ridiculous. Eighteen years old with two hundred and eleven thousand dollars in an account nobody knew about and she couldn’t get her feet on the ground.

"Unlisted?" she said.

"Unlisted. Zero viewers. Local recording only, which I am storing on a physical drive because I do not trust the cloud with you." Kumiko pulled her headphones back up over her ears and gave a thumbs up with both hands, which required her to let go of the mouse. "Whenever you want. There’s no clock. There’s no anything. Just say go."

Chloe looked at the camera.

It was a Logitech C920, the standard one, the one every beginner used. A hundred and twelve dollars retail. She had picked it out herself off a spreadsheet of comparison specs. It was a piece of plastic the size of a bar of soap and it had no opinions about anything.

"Go," she said.

The red light came on.

Chloe pulled a breath from the bottom of her ribs, the way Karina had taught her, the way she did in a studio with lavender air and a woman at the piano who wanted her to be good.

She opened her mouth.

What came out was air.

Not nothing. A sound. Something thin sliding over the top of the note without ever getting under it, breathy and small, the vocal equivalent of standing sideways to make yourself narrower in a hallway.

She stopped after four words.

"Again."

Kumiko didn’t say anything. She just nodded and reset the take.

Second attempt. Chloe got further this time, most of the way through the opening, and it was technically singing. She hit the notes. Her support held for two lines before it collapsed into her throat. On the reach up her voice shook, a wobble she could hear happening in real time and could not stop, like watching your own hand drop a glass.

She stopped again.

The silence in the padded room was total. Not even a fridge hum. Kumiko had soundproofed the space so thoroughly there was nothing left to hide behind.

Chloe put her palms flat on her thighs and looked at the black plastic soap bar with its little red eye.

"I want to try something," Kumiko said.

"Don’t say it."

"I’m going to say it."

"Kumiko."

"Chloe-chan." Kumiko slid the headphones down again, and her voice lost the bright top layer, the one she wore for strangers and Instagram and everyone who had ever decided she was a lot. "You’re singing like you’re apologizing."

Chloe’s hands closed on her jeans. ℯ

"Like you’re sorry for taking up room," Kumiko went on, and she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, which put her entirely too close, which was her whole thing. "You’re pulling back on every note that matters. Right before it gets big, you flinch and you make it smaller. You did it three times in eleven seconds. I could see it on the waveform before I could hear it."

"Great. Thank you. Very helpful."

"It’s the most helpful thing anyone’s ever said to you and you’re going to be mean to me about it for six weeks."