In Twenty Years: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a Lindy Armstrong original—not because she’s not up on her game, not because her compositions aren’t the best they’ve ever been, but simply because to stay relevant, they need her to be younger. Sales on her fifth album dwindled, and that was all the label needed to intervene: first they insisted on a cowriter; now she’s been erased from the process entirely.
    “Hipper, you know, hotter, sexier. Like everyone still wants to fuck you even though you’re forty,” one of the assholes on a conference call said when they were discussing her new record.
    But she’s writing her own stuff anyway. Gonna lay down these tracks anyway. They’ll never make it on the album, and she won’t argue with that: Lindy knows that what sells, what gets radio play, is what matters, and at her age she’s lucky not to have been pushed into adult contemporary or the alt-lite station that semicool moms listen to in their carpool. She still gets Top 40 play, but mostly because she’s singing songs intended for twenty-three-year-olds.
    She flips her pencil across her desk and checks her phone. Of course Annie hasn’t texted her back. No wonder she can’t write a fucking word! No wonder she can’t conjure up a decent chord arrangement. All she’s thinking of is goddamn Annie Eisley, and also occasionally about Tatiana, and then sometimes about Napoleon (“Leon” for short, thank God), and how maybe she should tell Tatiana about Leon, but maybe Leon wasn’t worth mentioning, but that things are a little more complicated right now, and why the fuck hasn’t Annie replied?
    Napoleon! Who names their goddamn kid after a tyrant with size issues?
    Lindy slides open her desk drawer and retrieves another pencil, pressing the graphite to her sheet music. Everyone writes electronically these days, but not her. Shit, she really is a dinosaur; she’d almost laugh if it weren’t so goddamn depressing. All those fucking twenty-three-year-olds. Hell, the eighteen-year-olds too. With their taut bellies and baby-voiced singing. None of them have as much talent in their entire lithe bodies as Lindy does in her left pinky, but so what? Talent doesn’t rule; talent doesn’t even necessarily sell. This is what middle age looks like in the world of rock: assimilation or extinction.
    Lindy’s gonna be around long after the cockroaches. She laughs to herself at this. Her four framed platinum albums on the wall behind her seem to laugh too. She’ll do what she has to do, even if it means selling herself down the river while still writing the best goddamn music of her life.
    Welcome to forty.
    This new pencil offers no help. She throws it across the room, where it skitters next to the previous one. She reaches for her phone again.
    Nothing.
    How hard is it for Annie to check her mail and text back?
    Lindy had impulsively texted her when maybe she should have chosen one of the others. But it’s been, what? Thirteen years since the funeral? She can’t possibly still be mad.
    Of course she could still be mad. Which is probably why Lindy impulsively texted her in the first place. To test the waters. Lindy was always testing something.
    Lindy rises, cracks her neck, and debates the treadmill. Then she catches a glimpse of her reflection in the window. She didn’t sleep well last night, not after the FedEx, and she doesn’t bounce back like she used to. Also, she looks bloated, puffy from her eyes to her hips, and she’s expected to pour herself into a low-cut catsuit for the show tonight.
    A leather catsuit! Megan, her costumer, had picked it out, and the producers had approved it, and it was hung in her dressing room, all without as much as a consult with Lindy. Sure, they’d asked casually, but it was already understood: this is why they paid for her trainer; this is what keeps her relevant. Of course she was going to wear the catsuit. Even if she was forty, which she’d just turned last month. People.comhad devoted their top story to it—